Girolamo Savonarola

[ndrosen]

On Thursday, I gave a Toastmasters speech. Only one speaker had signed up to give a speech, so I figured I should step up. I chose to speak about Savonarola, the supposed mad monk of late fifteenth century Florence, responsible for the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which priceless art may have been destroyed, together with various luxuries and items of frivolity. I had read a bit about him, first in a children’s book, Tales of the Renaissance, and then in a history of Florence and some writings of Machiavelli. More recently, I read Jo Walton’s novel Lent, which makes an unlikely protagonist of Savonarola.

This led me to do a little more reading, and so I talked about the man, and made the point that while most of us today would not be comfortable with Savonarola, he was, for example, a friend of the scholar, humanist, and unorthodox religious thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and a more complicated man than one might think. He probably did have real sympathy and good intentions for the poor of Florence, for example.