The Pope’s Greatest Adversary: Girolamo Savonarola
The Pope’s Greatest Adversary: Girolamo Savonarola
by Samantha Morris
Pen & Sword Books, 2021
160 pages.
A much needed “set-the-record-straight” book about one of Florence most infamous figures.
While names like John Calvin or Martin Luther are present in the minds of most people today and have a mostly favorable impression of them, Savonarola’s name is one that has eluded popularity and is instead viewed as one of many religious fanatics prior to Renaissance Europe. Like many before and after him, Savonarola’s utopia was one in which Catholicism had very little power, since he viewed it as corrupt and that it didn’t adhere to its own precepts faithfully. He wanted to reform the Church and the government’s relation to it, and he was successful in some manner, but for a very short time. Author Morris contextualizes his life in Florence when it was dominated by the Medici and later influenced by the Borgia family. While the author tries to convince us that Savonarola was not a crazy zealot, some of his actions do seem tyrannical and are not very different from the rule of the Pope when it comes to pagans or heretics. Savonarola wanted to recreate a ‘City of God’ in which vice was eliminated, and only good virtues remained, and if that entailed hanging people and burning ‘pagan art’, so be it. The reader should be aware that he will not get much of a study on Savonarola’s writings or preaching, for this work is mainly focused on his life as a man. The passages leading to his trial are written compellingly and are very engaging, yet the author can’t avoid making modern comparisons with a certain President of the United States. This only affects the ‘objective’ writing of a historian, for they should not take modern sensibilities to the text.
Regardless of its shortcomings, it fills a vacuum within Savonarola’s studies that could be linked to later Reformation-themed history books in that some of its tenets were once voiced by Savonarola himself who, because of them, met a tragic end. ~
