When Saints Fall Out: Women and the Savonarolan Reform in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence
REFORMERS AND REFORM MOVEMENTS can be hard on their adherents. For a variety of reasons-dissent over doctrine, differences over organization, tactics and objectives, even incompatibility between personalities-disagreements arise and with disagreement recrimination, bitterness, and fragmentation. All these elements were present in the quarrel that erupted in I5o6 among followers of Savonarola and tore apart the movement of reform he had initiated. On this occasion, however, the additional disruptive and embittering component of gender played a prominent part in the quarrel. There are no villains in the story, only victims, both active and passive, of a traditional system of religious values. Any attempt to alter this system was construed as harmful to the cause by the male leaders of the Savonarolan movement and resisted accordingly. It had not always been so. For a fleeting moment, while Savonarola was alive and on his recommendation, it seemed that women were to be assigned an unprecedented role in religious affairs and the rigid ecclesiastical system which had obtained for centuries and relegated them to inferior, dependent positions in the Church would be undermined and even overthrown. Savonarola's proposal aroused great expectations but also commensurate alarm, not least among women. In these reactions as well as in Savonarola's response to them, one can detect the origins of the quarrel of 1506 and the intransigence that its main participants displayed. Savonarola's proposal for the reform of women was made in the sermon of I8 March I496. Though the text of the sermon as we now have it makes no reference to the proposal, its purport can be gleaned from a letter written that same day by one of Savonarola's followers, Iacopo Bongianni, to another devout follower, Fra Santi