Jerry Brotton
Fundamentalist Friar
Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy
By Lauro Martines
Jonathan Cape 334pp £20
Following hard on the heels of April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici (2004), Lauro Martines’s Scourge and Fire sees the author taking his story of the Florentine Renaissance on to its next bloody historical episode. Moving from history into biography, Martines takes as his subject the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98) and his unprecedented rise to religious and political influence in Florence over four heady years following the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Martines’s main aim is to rescue the poor friar from five centuries of predominantly bad press, often written from the perspective of the Medici. These accounts portrayed Savonarola as everything from a religious fanatic fanning the flames of the bonfires of the vanities, to an atheistic hermaphrodite who reduced the glorious centre of the Italian Renaissance to a Year Zero policy of religious fundamentalism.
Martines, a retired academic renowned for a series of scholarly books on Italian Renaissance humanism, knows his primary sources too well to fall into such traps. His interest is in the religious and rhetorical power of a man whose sermons seduced the likes of Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk