La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de' suoi tempi, volume 2 (of 2)

📝 简介

"La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de' suoi tempi, volume 2 (of 2)" by Villari is a historical account written in the mid-19th century. It investigates the life, sermons, and political-religious influence of the Dominican reformer Girolamo Savonarola in late fifteenth‑century Florence and across Italy. The study blends biography with critical historiography and documentary research to reassess his teachings, his struggle with Rome, and the upheavals surrounding the Florentine republic. The opening of the work presents a long preface surveying earlier writings on Savonarola—from Enlightenment dismissals to 19th‑century German, French, and Italian revivals—evaluating their strengths and flaws, and then laying out the author’s method: strict reliance on primary sources, medieval and early modern biographies (Burlamacchi, Pico), trial records and examinations, letters, marginalia in Savonarola’s own books, and Florentine political records (Provvisioni and Pratiche). This is followed by the start of the narrative for 1497–1498: Savonarola’s Lenten sermons on Ezekiel stress that, while the Church may hold property, riches now harm it; charity and conscience are supreme; and Rome’s corruption demands reform. Amid famine and pestilence, Medici partisans scheme; Piero de’ Medici, living dissolutely in Rome, mounts a failed bid to reenter Florence—foretold by Savonarola—and flees. Afterward the Arrabbiati and Compagnacci move against him; the tense Ascension Day sermon erupts into a staged tumult, and the friar is escorted back to San Marco, then addresses the faithful by letters. A papal brief of excommunication arrives (framed as disobedience over monastic governance), and Savonarola replies in writing that an unjust censure is null and hints at appeal to a council—setting the stage for the conflict that drives the rest of the volume. (This is an automatically generated summary.)