The preaching, prophecy and devotional prose of Florence’s reforming friar
A Corpus Made of Sermons, Tracts and Songs
The collected sermons and writings of Girolamo Savonarola are the textual side of a reforming campaign waged from the pulpit in Renaissance Florence. A Dominican friar from Ferrara, Savonarola taught logic to the novices at the convent of San Marco and, while based there, produced instructional manuals on ethics, logic, philosophy and government alongside devotional works and the sermons he prepared for local congregations. What survives under his name is not a single unified book but a body of material in several forms: preached sermons, prophetic self-accounts, moral tracts, devotional expositions, hymns and prison meditations. Much of it was composed in Italian, as the titles of works such as his treatise against the astrologers indicate, and its themes were shaped by his reading of Scripture, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
Prophecy as the Engine of Everything
The organising idea running through Savonarola’s writing is that the Church stood on the edge of a divine chastisement and a subsequent renewal, and that he had been given insight into both. He described the origin of this conviction as a moment of study in the convent of San Giorgio, when he suddenly worked out what he called about seven reasons why the Church was about to be scourged and then reformed. He aired these apocalyptic themes at San Gimignano, where he preached in Lent, and later in Florence he preached on the First Epistle of John and on the Book of Revelation, drawing crowds so large that he eventually moved to the cathedral. His sermons of the early 1490s warned of the sword of the Lord hanging over the earth and over Rome, and he began to announce that a “New Cyrus” would come over the mountains to set the renewal of the Church in motion. When Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps in September 1494 with a large army and threw Italy into disorder, many took the king’s arrival as confirmation that the friar’s predictions were genuine.
Florence as the New Jerusalem
Savonarola’s preaching gave the city a central role in this scheme. In a sermon in December 1494 he told the Florentines that their city would be more glorious, richer and more powerful than it had ever been; that Florence would be the starting point of a reform that would spread through the whole of Italy, since he regarded it as the navel of the country; and that its counsels would reform others by the light and grace given to it. Riches would multiply, and the city would extend its empire, gaining power both temporal and spiritual. In his Renovation Sermon of January 1495 he recalled that he had begun prophesying in Florence four years earlier and claimed to have foretold the deaths of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Innocent VIII, both in 1492, as well as the coming of the French army. He pressed the same promise again: if the city did penance and began the work of renewal, it would receive riches, glory and power.
The heavenly warrant for this promise was supplied by a vision he described in a sermon of April 1495. He recounted a mystical journey to the throne of the Virgin Mary, where he presented a crown made by the Florentine people and pressed her to reveal their future; she warned that the road would be hard for the city and for him, but assured him that God would keep his promises and that Florence would be protected and would extend its reach further than anyone could imagine. On the strength of such visions Savonarola promoted a theocracy in Florence and declared Christ its king. His attitude to art followed from the same premise: he valued sacred art as an instrument of this worldview and opposed secular art, which he judged worthless and potentially harmful.
The Compendium of Revelations
When Pope Alexander VI and the friar reached an impasse over Florence’s refusal to join the Holy League against the French, Savonarola tried to break it by sending the pope a small book recounting his prophetic career and describing some of his more dramatic visions. This was the Compendium of Revelations, characterised as a self-dramatisation and one of the most popular and furthest-reaching of all his writings. Its purpose was thus defensive as much as devotional: an attempt to explain and justify his claims to prophetic authority before the head of the Church he was criticising.
Sermons of Moral Discipline
Alongside prophecy, Savonarola’s preaching pursued a programme of moral legislation. At his repeated insistence Florence passed laws against sodomy, adultery, public drunkenness and other transgressions, and his lieutenant Fra Silvestro Maruffi organised boys and young men to patrol the streets against immodest dress and behaviour. In a sermon preached in the winter of 1494 he demanded that the Signory legislate against sodomy, which he said had made Florence infamous throughout Italy, and asked for a law without mercy; he also called for the removal of poems, games, taverns and immodest women’s fashion from the city, insisting that everything harmful to the health of the soul be thrown out. After he defied the papal ban on his preaching, his sermons grew more violent in tone: he attacked hidden enemies at home whom he suspected of colluding with the papal Curia, and condemned ordinary or “tepid” Christians who were slow to answer his calls.
Devotional Songs for a Reformed Carnival
The campaign was also enacted in music and ritual. Savonarola dramatised it with special Masses for the young, processions, bonfires of the vanities and religious theatre at San Marco. With his close friend, the humanist poet Girolamo Benivieni, he composed lauds and other devotional songs for the Carnival processions of 1496, 1497 and 1498, intended to replace the bawdy Carnival songs of the Lorenzo de’ Medici era. These pieces continued to be copied and performed after his death, alongside songs written by his followers in his memory, and a number of them have survived.
The Triumph of the Cross and the Prison Meditations
Under the pressure of excommunication Savonarola wrote what is described as his spiritual masterpiece, The Triumph of the Cross. It is a celebration of the victory of the Cross over sin and death and an examination of what it means to be a Christian, which he summed up in the theological virtue of caritas, or love: in loving their neighbours, Christians return the love they have received from their Creator and Saviour. Confined in a cell in the tower of the government palace, he also composed meditations on Psalm 51, known as Infelix ego, and on Psalm 31, known as Tristitia obsedit me.
Shorter Treatises and Devotional Works
Other writings show the range of his concerns. An unfinished treatise, later called De contemptu mundi, or On Contempt for the World, urges readers to flee a world of adultery, sodomy, murder and envy. In his Esposizione sopra l’Ave Maria he is credited with writing or popularising the second half of the modern Hail Mary. He also wrote a polemic against the astrologers, Contra gli astrologi, in Italian. His early poems, composed before his entry into religious life, express his preoccupation with the state of the Church and of the world, and include apocalyptic pieces such as On the Ruin of the World and On the Ruin of the Church, the latter singling out the papal court in Rome for particular condemnation.
Voice, Setting and Manner
Savonarola’s written output cannot be separated from the way it was delivered. When he first taught and preached in Florence his preaching was not especially successful: Florentines were put off by his Ferrarese accent, his strident voice and, for those who valued humanist rhetoric, his inelegant style. His reputation grew instead through itinerant preaching in the cities and convents of northern Italy, and only later, back in Florence, did his sermons on the epistles and on Revelation fill the cathedral. His prose retains the marks of that oral setting: exhortation, denunciation, first-person accounts of visions, and appeals addressed directly to the city and its magistrates.
From Florence to the Reformation
The writings travelled well beyond Tuscany. They spread widely to Germany and Switzerland, and the circumstances of Savonarola’s life and death led many to see the papacy as corrupt and to look for a new reform of the Church. Martin Luther, who was influenced by the friar’s writings, regarded him as a martyr and forerunner, and Savonarola’s teaching that human beings are not justified by themselves has been compared in some respects to Luther’s doctrine of justification. In France many of his works were translated and published, and he came to be regarded as a precursor of evangelical, or Huguenot, reform. Catholic critics have objected to casting him as a Protestant forerunner, since his theology remained Catholic — he held to the seven sacraments, called Rome the mother of all churches and the pope its head, and his final major work defended the institution of the papacy. Within the Dominican Order he was remembered as a devotional figure, and the friars of San Marco, resisting censorship and exile, preserved many of his sermons and writings and so kept both his religious and his political ideas alive. In the nineteenth century the “New Piagnoni” drew on his writings and sermons for the Italian national awakening, emphasising his political activism over his puritanism and cultural conservatism. Most of his treatises and sermons are now available in critical editions.
