The events surrounding the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola da Ferrara crystallised many of the characteristics and contradictions of popular preaching during the Italian Renaissance. The political significance was also accentuated by the particular situation of the Florentine Republic in the last years of the fifteenth century. Savonarola had received an entirely traditional theological and doctrinal training within the curriculum of studies prescribed by his Order, and had dedicated himself to a pastoral ministry. Prompted by the wars on Italy by Charles VIII of France's armies, Savonarola developed a personal prophetic consciousness, which allowed him to use the pulpit as a platform
From which the Florentine people were urged to accept a new theocratic Regime.
Savonarola's activities were fully congruous with contemporary practices of official preaching, which we have already discussed. The displays which accompanied the friar's controversial regime exhibited a marked theatricality, ranging from processions of devoted 'boys' in the streets to the 'bonfires of the vanities' in the piazzas. Printing technology was used to circulate his programme of reform, and facilitated its success. This continued the widespread use which he had made of print in previous years for circulation of his own Latin sermons and some vernacular theological and devotional works. From Lent 1494 onwards, Savonarola's sermons were immediately printed and circulated by his followers. He himself edited the text to ensure the accuracy of the report of his preached words, since this was an essential tool in the affirmation of his charismatic power as an alternative power-base to the republican institutions.930 The tragic conclusion to the affair, brought about by his excommunication by Pope Alexander VI, which in turn led to his death at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498, was prompted by political reasons. As a result of the increasingly powerful effect of his sermons, fate inevitably overtook him as he lost the support of the traditional power elites.
Savonarola's tragic end should be seen as occurring in a rather different context to that of the itinerant penitential preachers. The presence of the latter group is documented in many city chronicles, both before him in the 1470s, and after him in his wake. They continued to operate until repressive measures were taken against them first by a decree of the Fifth Lateran Council in 1516, and then by the Florentine provincial synod in 1517, the result of the authorities' concern to avoid a political revival of Savonarolism. The itinerant preachers tended to travel alone, moving from one place to the next, particularly in central Italy, announcing the imminence of divine punishment and inciting the faithful to expiate their sins before the Last Judgement. They did not preach in churches but in the streets and the piazzas, and they sought to make their message credible not so much by simple prophecies - as did the hermit, Bernardino da Parenzo in Venice in the early decades of the sixteenth century - as by assuming the long-haired appearance of St John the Baptist, covered in animal furs and holding a large cross.931
World History
