Girolamo Savonarola (1452 1498), the religious reformer, preacher, and Florentine civic leader, was burned at the stake as a false prophet by the order of Pope Alexander VI. Tamar Herzig here explores the networks of Savonarola s female followers that proliferated in the two generations following his death. Drawing on sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many never before studied, transcribed, or contextualized in Savonarolan scholarship and religious history, Herzig shows how powerful public figures and clerics continued to ally themselves with these holy women long after the...

The interplay between knowledge and religion forms a pivotal component of how early modern individuals and societies understood themselves and their surroundings. Knowledge of the self in pursuit of salvation, humanistic knowledge within a confessional education, as well as inherently subversive knowledge acquired about religion(s) offer instructive instances of this interplay. To these are added essays on medical knowledge in its religious and social contexts, the changing role of imagination in scientific thought, the philosophical and political problems of representation, and attempts to...