Girolamo Savonarola - Early Years

Early Years

Girolamo Maria Francesco Matteo Savonarola was born on September 21, 1452 in Ferrara. His grandfather, Michele Savonarola, was a noted physician and polymath. Savonarola's mother Elena claimed a lineage from the Bonacossi family of Mantua. She and her husband Niccolo had seven children, of whom Girolamo was third. His grandfather and his father, a struggling businessman, oversaw his education.

After his grandfather's death in 1468, Savonarola may have attended the public school run by Battista Guarino, son of Guarino da Verona, where he would have received his introduction to the classics as well as to the poetry and writings of Petrarch, father of Renaissance humanism. Earning an arts degree at the University of Ferrara, he prepared to enter medical school, following in his grandfather's footsteps. At some point, however, he abandoned his career intentions. In his early poems he expresses his preoccupation with the state of the Church and of the world. He began to write poetry of an apocalyptic bent, notably "On the Ruin of the World" (1472) and "On the Ruin of the Church" (1475) in which he singled out the papal court at Rome for special obloquy. About the same time he seems to have been thinking about a life in religion. As he later told his biographer, a sermon he heard by a preacher in Faenza persuaded him to abandon the world. Most of his biographers reject or ignore the account of his younger brother and follower, Maurelio (later fra Mauro), that in his youth Girolamo had been spurned by a neighbor, Laudomia Strozzi, to whom he proposed marriage. True or not, in a letter he wrote to his father when he left home to join the Dominican order he hints at being troubled by desires of the flesh. There is also a story that on the eve of his departure he dreamed that he was cleansed of such thoughts by a shower of icy water which prepared him for the ascetic life. In the unfinished treatise he left behind, later called "De contemptu mundi," or On Contempt for the World, he calls upon readers to fly from this world of adultery, sodomy, murder and envy. On April 25, 1475, he went to Bologna where he knocked on the door of the Convent of San Domenico, of the Order of Friars Preachers, and asked to be admitted. As he told his father in his farewell letter, he wanted to become a knight of Christ.