Girolamo Savonarola (Bitesize Biographies)

Girolamo Savonarola was born in Ferrara, Italy, in 1452. It was the year Leonardo daVinci was born. Across Europe, it was a time of development and change: Gutenburg s Bible came off the press two years later, Luther would be born when Savonarola was 31. Botticelli was at work, a Medici ruled Florence and as Columbus reached the New World Savonarola began to preach. His congregations would later number up to 12,000 as people came to hear expository preaching not in Latin but in the Florentine Italian current in Tuscany. His message was more like that of the Hebrew prophets: a declaration of the holiness of God,a decrying of rebellion against God s will and ways, the promise of judgment at the hands of an angry God, concluding with an earnest appeal to repentance. Savonarola was a Roman Catholic monk: how does his biography earn a place in this series? The authors explain: [Here is] Savonarola s description of saving love: This love is likewise a gift of the Lord; it is a fire that kind