Early Life of Girolamo Savonarola - notes from Lauro Martines

Ferrara 

Michele Savonarola had been court physician to the d' Este lords of Ferrara since 1440. He apparently had a favored grandson born in 1452 named Girolamo. That one had intelligence, vigour and an aptitude for studies. He must have learned latin there and Cicero, Ovid and Quintilian and then Jerome and St Augustine and later Aquinas, Gratian and St Bernard. The death of his grandfather and the consequent fall for the entire Savonarola family from their accustomed prominent place at the court of Ferrara in 1468, meant that life became more difficult to Giro and his family. But he finished his studies there at the University in Ferrara. [pp 9-10]

As a young man, by the age of twenty he already had an antithetical view of Rome and considered the body and its needs as despicable. For him the two were really one and the same. One fed the other.

Bologna

"Bologna was the site of Italy's premiere university; it continued to attract students from all over Europe, notably for the study of civil and canon law... Foreign speech was common there, and students from distant shores sometimes appeared as characters in the fiction (tales) of the period." [p.15]

 Here there were two or three masters that helped him in his studies and after a year he took his vows. After four years at San Domenico in 1479 he was transferred to Santa Maria degli Angeli back in Ferrara.

Florence and Her Reception

"Florence was still a republic in name .... Lorenzo de'Medici was the supreme political boss ... skilled at getting his own way, but he also had to put up with - and try to manipulate - a tangle of executive and legislative councils; and he had to win friends and influence people, to bully and threaten them.... the city ranked as an international centre of trade, finance and industry; and its citizens famously were looked upon as fast talkers - shrewd, spirited, superb keepers of accounts; not courtiers, not haughty noblemen, not soldiers, and not mere landowners who lived solely from rural income. Verbal expression was their forte....".

He was offered to deliver the Lenten sermons of 1484 'at the splendid parish curch of the de'Medici' where a decade later he would regret his performance.Martines tells us "... he was not ready for seasoned or sceptical listeners, and especially in Florence, where the populace looked for a performance and citizens were ready to compare preachers, to criticise, or to go to another church for their seasonal homilies." [pp.16-17 ]

Savonarola would then go to neighboring San Gimignano off and on and then called back to Bologna again to teach by 1487. He would teach again in Ferrara and return to Florence again by 1490, now in his late thirties.

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notes and pagination from Martines, Lauro: Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence ; Oxford University Press, New York 2006