A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, No. 10)

On 23 May 1498 Girolamo Savonarola, one of the most spell-binding figures of the Italian Renaissance, was publicly burned at the stake on the main piazza of Florence on trumped-up charges of heresy and sedition. Thus ended the friar's meteoric rise to power and his unprecedented influence over Florentine society. Though his ashes were unceremoniously dumped into the River Arno the moment the cinders had died away, the fire of his teachings could not be extinguished, nor could Florentines forget the riveting preacher from Ferrara who, in four short years, had turned their city upside down. Neither could Italians nor, more generally, European reformers, for they soon turned Savonarola into a prophet of renewal and into a symbol of the struggle against corruption. Whether he was one or the other or neither, is still very much under debate. This collection of texts from Savonarola's extensive body of works seeks to provide the English reader with a variety of entry points into this controv