No one in Renaissance Florence could resist Girolamo Savonarola’s voice. An austere, forbidding Dominican friar, he had come to dominate city life long before the Medici were swept from power. Huge crowds attended his sermons. When there was no more space in the Convent of San Marco, he had to move to the cathedral. At the peak of his popularity, fifteen thousand people at a time flocked to hear him. He wasn’t a particularly polished orator, to be sure. He used none of the rhetorical flourishes that contemporary humanists loved. But he had what Milton later called a ‘resistless eloquence’ – a way of speaking so powerful that people could hardly tear themselves away. As Machiavelli later recalled, ‘the people of Florence were persuaded that he spoke with God.’ Even years later – after Savonarola had been burned at the stake for heresy –
Michelangelo claimed he could still hear the friar’s voice ringing in his ears. 

What was it that gave Savonarola’s sermons such power? How did an ungainly cleric from Ferrara seem able to hold an entire city in the palm of his hand, armed with nothing more than a few homilies? 

For the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, this was no idle question. It was the question. As Edward Wilson-Lee argues in this stylish, erudite biography, it went to the very heart of Pico’s philosophical project. He believed that, beneath the confusing, contradictory mess of our daily lives, there lurks