Death in Florence
My first encounter with Girolamo Savonarola's attempt to scourge Florence of religious corruption was George Eliot's historical novel Romola, which I read in tiny bites as a distraction from historical history during my first year of graduate school. It was lush, dramatic, and exactly what I needed as I struggled with semiotics, deconstructionism, post-colonial theory, and the Bengali alphabet. I didn't feel any inclination to read more about Savonarola until Paul Strathern's Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City turned up in my books to review for Shelf Awareness for Readers. It was lush, dramatic, and filled in some major holes in my understanding of Renaissance Florence.
In the late 15th century, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola led a frenzied and occasionally violent campaign to return the city of Florence--and the Roman Catholic Church as a whole--to the principles of early Christianity. For three years, the self-proclaimed prophet ruled as the city's moral dictator. His career reached its highpoint in 1497 with the Bonfire of the Vanities: the public burning of playing cards, masks, mirrors, "indecent" books and pictures, and other items the puritanical monk deemed morally questionable.
Savonarola's brief reign is often treated as an interlude of religious fanaticism within the enlightened secularism of the Renaissance.* In Death in Florence, Strathern (author of several books dealing with Rennaisance Italy, including The Artist, The Philosopher and the Warrior) paints a more complicated picture, placing Savonarola within a broader context. He considers Medici political aspirations and financial machinations, papal corruption, the shifting political allegiances of Renaissance Italy, medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism and the physiology of prophetic visions.
Perhaps most interesting is Strathern's depiction of the relationship between Savonarola and Lorenzo de Medici, a complex tangle of admiration on the part of the prince for the monk's scholarship and piety, patronage relationships, power struggles for control of the Dominican order and secret death bed negotiations. Death in Florence is ultimately an account of two competing visions of Florentine glory--one political and one religious, both of which would help shape Europe in the coming century.
Almost enough to make me re-read Romola.
*Okay, so I know a little more than I let on. What can I say, stuff crosses my path.
And we have a winner!
As usual, a book drawing here on the Margins brought out interesting answers, including memories of earlier trips to Iceland and an introduction to the breathtaking photography of Jamie Young, which makes my efforts look like a toddler's scribbles.* As usual, I'm glad we pick a winner in a totally random way.
And our totally random winner is--Karen Holden.
Thanks for playing, thanks for reading. More historical adventures are on the way.
*Not that I even claimed any skill at photography.
Independence Lost:
Those of you who've been hanging out in the Margins for a while now know there are some types of history books that can be counted on to make me say "I want to read this":
- Books that tell a story we think we know from a radically different persepctive
- Books that deal with people outside the mainstream of history
- Books that tell a story I didn't even know existed
- Books--oh, well, you get the idea.
In Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, historian Kathleen DuVal, author of The Native Ground, reminds us that the American Revolution was part of a larger global conflict involving France and Spain, and that Britain had 13 other colonies in North America and the Caribbean that were also affected by the war.
West Florida, which included much of what is now Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, had only recently become a British colony--part of the redistribution of imperial territories at the end of the Seven Years War-- when the Continental Congress declared war on Britain. Located on the border between the British and Spanish empires, and a distant frontier for both, it was home to former French and Spanish citizens, British loyalists fleeing the disruptions of the revolution and well-organized Indian nations with their own agendas. The possibility of a Spanish invasion was real, and at least some of the colonists thought Spain was a better choice than Britain or France if push came to colonial shove.
DuVal considers how eight very different colonists--a second-generation African slave, a young Cajun with a deep-seated hatred of the British, leaders of the Creek and Chickasaw tribes and two British couples who chose different sides in the conflict--responded to the dangers and opportunities that the revolution brought to their doorsteps and the impact of those choices. While each of these characters stands in for a larger population, the complicated calculus of self-identity, self-interest and personal history that they use to make decisions about the world around them makes it clear that revolution and politics were always personal.
A big part of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.