Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy by Tamar Herzig (review)

REVIEWS 278 tion, between his own poetic endeavor and the poet’s admiration for and dependence on “the art and ancient Italian valor.” Helgerson’s claim reaches beyond the realm of Spanish letters to encompass the western European poetry of the sixteenth century. There is no doubt that Boscán and Garcilaso have enjoyed a privileged position in Spanish literary history as the makers of a new poetic sensibility. Helgerson’s study places their contributions in a wider context, reclaiming them as predecessors of the most influential poets of the sixteenth century. Ronsard and du Bellay in France, Sidney and Spenser in England, and Camões in Portugal, preceded by Boscán and Garcilaso in Spain, invented the modern poetry in western Europe. Garcilaso ’s sonnet from Carthage stands out as a paradigmatic piece that in its concision “speaks at once of ancient and modern empire, of a renewed ItaloRoman art, of the specificity of place and its claims, of the self-annihilating demands of love, of the emotionally fraught friendships and collaborations from which the new poetry arose” (66). Beyond the insights that fill Helgerson ’s book, stands the challenge to early modern scholars to draw in the actual connections across Europe, and perhaps more significantly, to note any anomalies that would enrich the whole project. A Sonnet from Carthage constitutes the last book before his death by a scholar who dedicated his intellectual life to the study of Renaissance literature and culture. CLAUDIA MESA, Foreign Languages, Moravian College Tamar Herzig, Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2008) xiv + 333 pp., ill., map. Following the hanging and burning of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola in 1498, followers of his religious and civic reforms went underground. Despite his excommunication by Pope Alexander VI and his condemnation by the leadership of the Dominican Order, the Florentine prophet continued to inspire a following in Florence and throughout the Italian peninsula. While much scholarship has considered the fate of Savonarola and remnant of his Florentine followers, the Piagnoni, less attention has been given to his devotees outside of Florence. This is especially true, argues Tamar Herzig, for the role that female mystics and visionaries played in perpetuating Savonarola’s cult up through the late sixteenth century. This study aims at reconstructing the scope of such participation by women in northern Italy, which has been virtually unknown until now. Historiographically, this work fits within recent scholarship that emphasizes the utilitarian function of prophets and visionaries in the late medieval and early modern periods. Rather than highlight the limitations that confessors and clergy placed upon visionaries, Herzig shows how religious and political leaders used visions of Savonarola to support his dwindling cult and their own prestige. Herzig begins with a story of intrigue. Why is it that the visionary activity of women in northern Savonarolan circles was erased from later vitae and pious stories associated with Savonarola? The answer is rather straightforward—the actions of such women were often associated with Savonarola’s criticisms of the papacy and the controversial nature of his prophesies. The memory of such material was purged, along with those associated with it, by the later caretakers of his cult in the hope that these reworked texts would be used for his canoni- REVIEWS 279 zation. In this sense the erasure seems to have less to do with gender than content . However, following Ann Schutte, Herzig also argues that by the mid-sixteenth century such visionary behavior no longer fit the ideal of post-Tridentine models of holy women, the so-called “heroic virtue” model of female sanctity. Thus devotees of the Savonarola’s cult sought to associate him with more demure female mystics, such as Caterina de’ Ricci. Like his devotees after him, Savonarola consciously modeled his identity as a visionary and reformer on an accepted mystic of his day. He cited Florence’s most famous mystic, St. Catherine of Siena, in his sermons as an orthodox precedent for his criticisms of the moral laxity of the papacy and his right to meddle in Florentine political affairs. Indeed, the thrust of Savonarola’s religious reforms as a whole fit within the larger...