BOOK: Aldus Manutius, "The Greek Classics"

Aldus Manutius: The Greek Classics. Edited and translated by N. G. Wilson. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 70. Harvard University Press, 2016. 9780674088672. xvii + 395 pp.

Aldus Manutius was a famous printer who was active in Venice in the late 15th and early 16th century. I probably first heard of him indirectly because a company named after him were the makers of one of the early desktop publishing programs, Aldus PageMaker. Anyway, the original Aldus published the first printed editions of numerous works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as some contemporary works.

Many of these books included a short preface by Aldus himself, and the present volume includes about 50 of these prefaces from his editions of Greek authors. In 2017 they also published a similar volume containing his prefaces to books by Latin authors, and according to a note by Prof. Hankins (p. ix in the present volume), they are also planning a similar book with prefaces by Sweynheym and Pannartz, the German printers who had been the first to bring printing technology to Italy.

I found Aldus's prefaces to be more interesting than I had expected. For Aldus — like for many publishers, especially before that whole industry had been consolidated into a handful of gigantic faceless media conglomerates in the late 20th century — publishing was not just a business and a way to make money. He had had a humanist education and had worked as a tutor before going into the printing business (p. xiv), and throughout his prefaces you can see how keenly aware he was of the fact that he and his fellow humanists were involved in a grand effort to revive and restore the study of classical languages and literature. Aldus's publishing of Greek works, many of which had previously been extant in manuscript form only and had not been widely available, was an important part of that and he approached it with tremendous enthusiasm.

It was a huge project, and in his prefaces Aldus often comes across as an extraordinarily busy man who dedicates all his waking hours to furiously collecting, editing and printing yet more of his beloved classical authors (p. 215). He compares his labours to those of Hecules (p. 53) and Sisyphus (pp. 241, 257). He often emphasizes how he is doing this for the benefit of his readers, people who wish to learn the Greek language and then profit from the study of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, etc. (pp. 45, 47). As the translator's introduction points out (p. xiii), in Aldus's time there was still a great shortage of textbooks and the like from which one could learn Greek (which I guess is why the presence of native speakers of Greek who had fled from the collapsing Byzantine Empire gave such a boost to the study of Greek in Italy); several of his books were specifically meant to address that, and he often points out in his prefaces how this or that work would be useful to someone learning Greek, or how he included a Latin translation for the benefit of those whose Greek wasn't good enough yet (pp. 85, 87; sometimes the translation is by Aldus himself).

The fact that printing was making books widely available clearly meant a great deal to him, and occasionally he rants against “buriers of books” (bibliotaphs) who hoard manuscripts in their private libraries and don't let anyone else read them (p. 101: “I have no doubt that they will soon die of jealousy since everything worth reading will be published” :))). I completely sympathize with that, especially since nowadays the internet can be the next step in making books more easily accessible than ever before. I have had a keen interest in that ever since I got on the internet in the mid-90s. A lot has already been done in that direction, and a lot more could be done if it wasn't for those pesky copyright laws.

In a 1495 preface Aldus reports that the interest in Greek had recently grown so much that even many old men learn it, not just young ones (p. 13). Still, he says in 1497 that “Greek and Latin studies, though a little better off than for many years in the past, are still depressed” (p. 55).

He has some interesting remarks about the variety of ancient Greek dialects and the degree of freedom that this afforded to their poets, unlike e.g. in Latin (p. 31). It's tempting to think how much more variegated literature could be if everyone wrote in his own dialect (like the Greeks did before the Hellenistic period) instead of having just one standard form of each language as is usually the case nowadays.

To some extent his prefaces were of course meant as advertisements, and we should probably regard some of his enthusiastic claims as “sales patter typical of publishers” (translator's note 482, p. 360). But you cannot help admiring his honesty when he writes things like “I had hoped [. . .] to read in Philostratus' books [. . .] a great many important things worth knowing, but it really turned out quite otherwise. I cannot recall ever reading anything worse or less deserving attention; [. . .] it was tasteless and very stupid.” (P. 131.) Can you imagine a publisher putting *that* on their back cover nowadays? :)

Many of his prefaces are in the form of letters addressed to specific notable individuals, but as he himself says, they are really meant for the public at large (p. 205).

Occasionally his efforts to describe how busy he was end up being very funny: “take pity on your friend Aldus, since he often does not have time to eat or to relieve himself. Sometimes [. . .] it is not even possible to wipe our nose. What a hard profession it is!” (P. 215.)

Sometimes he gives useful advice to students, e.g. recommending them to copy some texts by hand in order to get used to the spelling and especially the accents of Greek (p. 221). The translator adds (p. 357, n. 428) a hilarious remark from a 19th-century book: “concerning that man who misplaces them [i.e. Greek accents], or, worse still, altogether omits them, damaging inferences will certainly be drawn, and in most instances with justice.” (You can see the original on archive.org; be sure to also look at the previous page for a fine rant about the Kids These Days™. :))

Aldus on his perfectionism: “I have never yet produced a book with which I felt satisfied. My love of literature is such that I want the books which I put into the hands of the educate to be very accurate and very beautiful.” (P. 241.)

As an appendix, the book includes a few letters from other people to Aldus. There's a letter from William Grocyn, an Englishman who had studied in Italy around 1490, with this delightful opinion about Aristotle and Plato: “the difference between these two greatest of philosophers is simply — forgive me, everyone — the difference between a polymath and a ‘polymyth’.” (P. 285.) From what I've seen of Plato and his enthusiasm for inventing wild tales and inserting them in his philosophical dialogues, the term “polymyth” strikes me as very appropriate.

Aldus established something he called the “New Academy”, and often refers to it in his prefaces as if the books were being issued by this academy. But from the statutes of the academy, included here on pp. 289–93, it seems to have been mostly a sort of social club for Aldus and his friends, who wanted to practice speaking Greek to each other. Anyone caught using another language was to pay a fine, and when enough funds had been accumulated they were to be used by Aldus to throw a party for the members. Sounds fun :) It reminded me a little of an anecdote in Tolstoy's War and Peace. When Russia was at war with Napoleon's France, a group of Russian aristocrats grew a bit embarrassed by the abundance of French in their everyday conversation, and agreed that anyone caught speaking French would pay a small sum of money as a contribution to the war effort. One of them, on being fined thusly, complained: “But how am I supposed to express that in Russian?” :))

Aldus's enthusiasm for Greek was so great that sometimes he even wrote his prefaces in it (though judging by the translator's notes, Aldus and many other renaissance humanists made a lot more errors in Greek than when writing Latin; n. 26 on p. 326). As an appendix there is also a 200-line poem (pp. 303–17) by Marcus Musurus, a Greek who had edited several volumes for Aldus, including Plato's works (pp. 243, 257; “an exceptionally gifted textual critic”, n. 516 on p. 362). This is probably the first book in the ITRL series where we have such extensive amounts of Greek. I was surprised to see how much leading they used for Greek in this volume; perhaps the idea is that it's useful because Greek has so many accent-marks, and yet people normally manage to print Greek just fine without such an excessive amount of leading. As a result this book fits much less text on a page when the text is Greek than when it is in Latin.

A notable innovation by Aldus was to print smaller, pocket-sized books (p. xv and n. 228 on p. 344) rather than just the bulky folios that probably predominated earlier. There's an interesting letter from Scipione Forteguerri, a member of Aldus's circle, praising one of these small books: “The charm of its contents wil not contribute as much as its handiness [. . .] lest readers should be distracted from the contents of the text by the weight of the volumes being handled.” (Pp. 297–9.)

There are some interesting remarks on Aldus's Greek typeface, which tried to imitate various abbreviations and ligatures that the scribes had used in their handwritten books to save time on frequently occurring suffixes and the like. The translator clearly dislikes this: “Aldus' influence was so great that these annoying and aesthetically unpleasing conventions remained in use until the nineteenth century” (p. 325, n. 11). But he admits that Aldus probably had good reasons to imitate handwritten books because some of his potential buyers were still distrustful of the printed book (p. xiv).

This was a very interesting book and I definitely look forward to reading the second volume of Aldus's prefaces, hopefully in the not too distant future.

BOOK: Ugolino Verino, "Fiammetta. Paradise"

Ugolino Verino: Fiammetta. Paradise. Edited and translated by Allan M. Wilson. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 69. Harvard University Press, 2016. 9780674088627. xxiv + 471 pp.

Ugolino Verino was a 15th-century poet from Florence. He seems to have been something of a disciple of Cristoforo Landino, a volume of whose poems we've seen in the I Tatti Renaissance Library some years ago (see my post from back then). The present volume contains Verino's Fiammetta, a collection of lyrical poems in two books, and Paradise, which is a longer narrative poem. The translator's introduction mentions that he also wrote numerous other works, including an epic poem, the Carliad, about Charlemagne and his “exploits [. . .] in Italy and the Holy Land” (p. xviii). You can't help admiring the poet's boldness; the usual medieval legends mostly don't have Charlemagne travelling around at all, he remains in the background and all the action is done by his paladins, and even these stay more or less entirely within the boundaries of France. What a fascinating premiss it is; at the time he lived, the Holy Land had been under Arab rule for less than two centuries — what a different timeline of history we might have had if Charlemagne had organised a crusade and liberated the Levant!

As often in the ITRL series, I was impressed by the thoroughness of the translator's notes at the end of the book. Like other neo-Latin poets, Verino often borrowed phrases and sometimes entire lines from ancient Roman poets, and occasionally from his older colleague Landino, all of which is pointed out in the notes. The translator often also remarks what case some word is in, or where a syllable is the wrong length, which caught my attention as we don't usually get much of that in the notes in the ITRL series (see note to ll. 89–90 on p. 331 for a fine example); but in any case, as I don't know any Latin these things weren't really of much use to me directly. I should also commend the translator for making his translation in verse and not in prose as is all too often the case in the ITRL series.

Fiammetta

As the title suggests, many of the poems in this collection chronicle the poet's relationship with a girl named Fiammetta. You get no points for guessing how it turned out — being unhappily in love is probably a common enough human experience anyway, but for poets of a certain type it seems to have been pretty much a requirement. I can imagine that you would get kicked out of the poets' guild for being *happily* in love, and that perhaps nowadays there could be a dating site for poets along the lines of ‘we guarantee you won't end up in a happy relationship, or your money back!’

Anyway, the story of Verino and Fiammetta doesn't start too inauspiciously; they are both young, of similar age and both single. They see each other, very chastely, for a while, and at one point she even promises him that she would be his; but it turns out that she wasn't really in a position to make such a promise, and her parents make her marry another man. Verino is perhaps a little more upset by this than he should be, in my opinion, and says some not very nice things about her (1.27, 1.30); surely he must have known that, as he hadn't made any arrangements with Fiammetta's father yet, he shouldn't have made any assumptions that she would actually be able to marry him. Her husband, Bruno, seems to have been a much older and very ugly man (and a “decrepit adulterer” :)), 1.28.3), but I guess we can expect that Verino's jealousy makes him a little older and uglier than he really was.

This unhappy change takes place towards the end of book 1; eventually he falls in love with another girl, but she dies young, of the plague it seems (2.50 and the note on p. 393). Thus book 2 consists largely of occasional poems about miscellaneous subjects, most of which didn't strike me as particularly memorable. It ends with a poetic address to Venus and Cupid, telling them that he's giving up on writing love-poetry (2.55).

He seems to have been a keen supporter of the Medici family, whose rule he believed had brought a golden age to Florence (2.45.109–19); we find dedications to Lorenzo (1.1, 2.1), an address to his father Piero (1.19), two poems in praise of the latter (1.20, 2.45), a poem to Lorenzo's mistress Lucrezia Donati (2.43), and several poems occasioned by the death of Cosimo (Piero's father; 2.51–4). Verino's loyalty to the Medici also features prominently in his Paradise, as we'll see below.

An interesting recurring subject is that of poetry; in particular, Verino is aware of his status as a minor poet and is content with it, avoiding grand epic themes and staying on the familiar ground of shorter, lighter love-poetry (1.2, 1.12, 1.15, 2.17, 2.24). He is in any case happy to be a poet (2.48) and is convinced that poetry can bring lasting memory and fame to those it sings about (2.45.9–60).

The name “Fiammetta” is related to fiamma = flame, leading him to occasionally refer to her as “Flame Maiden”, which sounds like a character from a high-fantasy story :)

There is a good deal of ranting against sodomites (2.10, 2.28.3–4, 2.32.7–9, 2.38), more than I remember seeing in other volumes of poetry in the ITRL series. It's probably a useful reminder that homosexuality wasn't quite as tolerated in Renaissance Florence as we might sometimes think.

I liked this epigram “Against the slanderer Filippo” (2.16): “Many a time you ask me, ‘What do you know?’ when trying to carp at me./ One thing I do know is that you, Filippo, know nothing.”

Another nice epigram: “ ‘It is no wonder,’ said the Cynic, ‘that gold is pale,/ for all have scheming designs to lay hands on it.’ ” (2.30)

There are a few short invectives, my favourite of which is one that pokes fun at the unfortunate Lurcus and his bad breath: “That breath of yours could not only lay humankind low/ but pollute the heavens too and kill birds./ I do not wonder that plague is now rampant in the city” etc. (2.39.5–7).

A nice pair of lines from his eulogy on the death of Cosimo: “Anyone can begin a war, but not everyone can put an end to one,/ not, that is, unless he emerges the victor.” (2.51.155–6) This is either very profound or completely trivial, I'm just not quite sure which :) (In any case he forgot that one could also end a war by surrendering to one's enemy. But perhaps in the chaos of Renaissance Italy this wouldn't guarantee an end to the war? :])

The translator's note on p. 333 tells us that “[s]nowballing could be flirtatious”. Honi soit qui mal y pense :)

I was surprised to read about the use of spelt in cosmetics: “Not white lead, not spelt, not all the juice there is in herbs,/ can cover up your sallow complexion, Galla” (1.17.11–12). The translator's note (p. 344) says it must refer to flour “presumably to make a binder, like pulped barley in a paste for the face”.

Paradise

This is a poem of about 1100 lines about Verino's visit to heaven in his dreams. One naturally wishes to compare it to Dante's visit in his Divine Comedy, but it's been so long since I read the latter that I'm not really in a good position to be making such a comparison. Obviously Dante's Paradise is much longer and he meets more people there, but as far as I remember it, a more important difference might be that Dante focuses more on the religious aspects of heaven and from reading his work you get a better idea of just how grand and sublime an experience such a visit would be. In Verino, this aspect comes across in a shallower way and he spends more time on less substantial matters.

For example, a recurring subject is the turbulent condition of Florence and indeed of Italy in general. The poet contemplates these things even before his visit (ll. 44–75), and once he enters the palace of heaven his guide is none other than the late ruler of Florence, Cosimo de' Medici (ll. 206–23), who makes a long speech prophecying a favourable future for Florence (ll. 225–76). Later Verino also meets Cosimo's son Giovanni and they have a conversation about Cosimo's grandsons, who are still alive (ll. 700–33). But I guess I shouldn't complain too much, as we get a lot of contemporary Italian politics in Dante as well.

As for heaven itself, we are treated to a longish description (ll. 89–114) of the splendid entrance to the “marvelous palace of the eternal King” (l. 94); choirs of angels (ll. 324–50, with the usual nine-level hierarchy); singing of hymns about various notable stories from christian mythology (ll. 380–498); there's the story of how god rescued the souls of certain virtuous people from Limbo (ll. 499–517, briefly also mentioned by Dante, I think); descriptions of what life is like in heaven (everyone is fit and healthy and looks about 30 years old; wears a white robe; they don't eat or drink; ll. 605–63). This is the sort of thing I meant when I said that Verino likes to focus on shallower things; this would do fine for a fairy-tale or a speculative fiction story, but it doesn't exactly convey a sense of sublimity that one might expect from a visit to heaven.

Most of the rest of Verino's visit is then spent in a pleasant woodland area that is reserved for virtuous people who were unaware of christianity and thus can't enter the main part of heaven (ll. 736–95). He encounters numerous ancient Greek and Roman statesmen, generals, orators, lawgivers, poets, playwrights, philosophers, etc. (ll. 796–1012), notably Plato himself, who recounts his studies since his death, says he is impressed with christianity and alludes to the recent revival of neo-Platonic studies in Florence (ll. 1013–71). After that Cosimo informs Verino that it's time to go and Verino promptly wakes up, which ends the poem. Thus the pagan figures, whom Dante briefly mentioned in perhaps one canto of his Inferno, here take up almost one-third of Verino's visit to heaven itself!

Something that slightly surprised me is how much pagan terminology he uses in this poem; he often refers to heaven as Olympus and to god as Jove or the Thunderer.

An interesting factoid from the translator's notes (p. 385): during the Peloponnesian War, “Athenian prisoners [on Sicily] who could recite passages of Euripides received better treatment, even release.” Wow! Nowadays it's almost hard to imagine that poetry could ever have had such power.

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Overall this was a pleasant if not terribly memorable book; I think my favourite part was the Paradise rather than the shorter poems in Fiammetta. I wish I could read his poem about Charlemagne as well, but I don't think it has been translated into English yet; who knows, perhaps we'll get it in the ITRL some day.

BOOK: Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Yann Martel: Life of Pi. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003. 184195392X. xvi + 319 pp.

This novel made quite a splash when it was first published, in 2001 or so. I'm not sure where I first heard of it myself; probably it was on the website of its British publisher, Canongate. At the time this was a small Scottish publishing company and I was mostly interested in their Canongate Classics series, which included a number of works of older Scottish literature. I bought several of them and visited the publisher's website regularly. Later they began to focus more on publishing modern fiction and I gradually lost interest in them. The Life of Pi, which seems to have been a great success for them, was perhaps an early step in this transition. I bought it soon after it came out in paperback, but only got around to reading it now.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and was overall pleasantly surprised. The author clearly has a rich and vivid imagination, and there's something new and unexpected on almost every page. I suspect that people who like literary fiction would not turn up their noses at this novel, but it was also able to entertain someone like me, who am more interested in excitement and storytelling.

In the first part of the novel, we learn about the protagonist's childhood in 1970s India. Pi's father, Mr. Patel, runs a zoo in Pondicherry. Pi's full name is in fact Piscine Molitor Patel, after a swimming pool in Paris which an older friend of the family had frequented while a student there in the 1930s (p. 11; that's what I meant by rich imagination — how do people come up with something as bizarre as this? :)); but our protagonist reinvented himself as Pi after being tired of people mispronouncing Piscine as Pissing (pp. 22–3).

There are many interesting remarks about zookeeping, which is often portrayed in a vaguely negative light nowadays, so it was nice to see Pi describing it in a more positive way. He points out that a wild animal normally maintains a territory large enough to contain the resources it needs — food, water, shelter etc. — and that in a zoo it is provided with all these things in a much smaller area, so it is content to think of that as its territory and does not feel unhappy there. Pi compares this to the way that a modern person is content, indeed happy, to live in a house and does not miss having to roam for miles to reach food or water the way our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors might have done (pp. 16–19).

An odd feature of Pi, which I didn't quite know what to do with, is his religious bent. His parents are vaguely Hindu but in practice almost completely secular; but he becomes an ardent believer in, and practitioner of, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, all three at the same time (pp. 47–62)! There is a very funny scene where the priests of all three religions finally realize that he has been visiting all three of them at once (pp. 65–9).

Due to political and economic uncertainties, Pi's parents decide to close the zoo, sell off the animals and move the whole family to Canada. They embark on a Japanese cargo ship with a sullen Taiwanese crew, and with the Patels (and their animals) as the only passengers. Not too far into the Pacific, the ship has an unexplained accident and sinks quickly, with Pi as the only survivor. And this is where the main part of the story begins.

<spoiler warning>

Technically, Pi is not the only survivor: besides him, his lifeboat hosts a hyena, a badly injured zebra, an orangutan and, worst of all, a tiger with the implausibly human name of Richard Parker (due to an old bureaucratic mixup; pp. 132–3). Over the next few days, the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and is then itself killed by the tiger.

The middle part of the novel is a great story of survival at sea, as Pi has to exert all his mental and physical energies to stay alive and prevent the tiger from attacking him. He puts his zookeeping skills to good use and sort of tames the tiger much the way a circus trainer might do (pp. 43–4, 164–5, 203–7). Using the various supplies stored on the lifeboat, he makes an improvised raft so he can keep some distance from the tiger if necessary; he deploys solar stills and raincatchers to obtain fresh water; he catches fish, turtles and even the occasional shark, knowing that he must keep providing the tiger with food if he wants to have any chance of staying alive.

The story takes on a somewhat picaresque character as various incidents happen in a seemingly random order; storms, sharks, whales, a close encounter with a large tanker (which unfortunately doesn't notice Pi's lifeboat; pp. 233–4), sailing through what seems to be the great Pacific garbage patch (pp. 237–8), etc. But things grow more and more fantastic and bizarre as the story progresses, in a way which perhaps reflects the gradual breakdown of Pi's own mind. (This reminded me a little of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym.)

Over the course of several months, it becomes clear that despite all his efforts, the overall lack of food and the exposure to the elements are slowly weakening both Pi and the tiger. At some point they both go blind due to weakness (p. 241), and in that condition they even meet another equally blind survivor, who tries to board Pi's boat, apparently with a view to cannibalizing him, but is then killed and eaten by the tiger (pp. 254–5). But did this really happen or was Pi just hallucinating at that point? (A few pages ago he reported a conversation with the tiger, so he was definitely halucinating then; 243–5.)

Eventually they reach a large floating island composed of algae, and the story takes leave of all sanity. The algae apparently filter salt out of the freshwater, so eating them provides Pi (and the tiger) with both food and drink, and they gradually recover their strength. Venturing deeper into the island, Pi finds freshwater pools, enormous colonies of meerkats (p. 266), forests of trees that seem to grow out of the algae (p. 271) and the meerkats sleep in their branches (pp. 275–6; in the real world, of course, meerkats sleep in underground burrows). Finally Pi finds a tree bearing some very peculiar-looking fruit; each of these, as it turns out, after unwrapping countless layers of leaves, contains a human tooth at its core (pp. 270–80). Pi realizes that the whole island is practically a gigantic predatory organism; the algae on the ground emit some sort of acid at night, which is why the meerkats sleep in the treetops; the acid is mostly intended to kill the fish that happen to swim into their freshwater ponds, but it seems that at some point some other human castaway fell victim to the island as well (pp. 281–3).

Horrified by this discovery, Pi boards his lifeboat (along with the tiger) and sets off again, eventually reaching the coast of Mexico with no further incidents. The tiger promptly disappears into the jungle. The story ends with one last surprise as two Japanese officials come talk to Pi in the hospital, hoping to learn more about what had happened to their ship. They find his story of surviving in the boat with a tiger hard to believe, so he comes up with another, even grislier story; this time, instead of animals, there are several other human survivors: Pi, his mother, an injured sailor, and the ship's cook, who happens to be a brutish Frenchman. The cook kills the injured sailor and then Pi's mother, but is eventually himself killed by Pi. The Japanese officials cannot help noticing that this story corresponds closely to the original one, with Pi's mother standing for the orangutan, the cook for the hyena, the sailor for the zebra, and Pi for the tiger. They decide they that they liked the animal version better after all.

</spoiler warning>

I don't pretend to have any clear idea of what to make of any of these things. Is Pi's second story the true one, while the first one (with the tiger and all the other animals) was just a big hallucination? Or a deliberate lie? Pi, at the end of the book, doesn't seem to care very much about which story is true; they are both simply stories to him. I suppose this is very postmodern and all, and will no doubt meet with much approval from certain circles, but it feels very frustrating for a simple-minded reader like myself.

I was also not sure what to make of the bizarre meerkat-infested island of acid-secreting algae. There is a fine line between ‘rich imagination’ and ‘throwing out one damn random thing after another’, and I couldn't help feeling that the author oversteps it a little from time to time. And of course you can't help noticing the religious aspect of the whole thing; surely the island, with its abundance of food and water provided by the algae, and its lack of any predators, is meant to resemble the earthly paradise of christian mythology, with Pi as a modern-day Adam who eventually has to flee from it after plucking that grisly tooth-bearing fruit from a tree. But why would that whole thing have to be there, at that point in this story? How does it fit into anything else? Why does Mr. Adirubasamy at the start of the novel say that this story would “make you believe in God” (p. xii)?

Clearly, religion is meant to have a certain presence in this novel, but I don't really understand what we're supposed to make of it. The author isn't exactly preaching at us, and I find it hard to imagine that reading this novel would convert anyone to anything. Any why, if he wanted us to become interested in religion, would he always take such care to provide (just barely) rational explanations for everything that happens in the novel?

But I shouldn't complain too much; overall this book was a very pleasant read, I enjoyed the earlier and middle parts of it a great deal, and the things that remain unexplained (to me at least) do not really get too much in the way of a good story of survival at sea, told by a storyteller with a delightful, sparkling imagination.

BOOK: Girolamo Savonarola, "Apologetic Writings"

Girolamo Savonarola: Apologetic Writings. Edited and translated by M. Michèle Mulchahey. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 68. Harvard University Press, 2015. 9780674054981. xliv + 413 pp.

Savonarola was a Dominican friar who was active in Florence towards the end of the 15th century. I had heard of him before reading this book, but had only a very vague idea of his activities. I thought of him as one of those annoying religious zealots who are terribly afraid that someone, someone is having fun. This book didn't really change my opinion about him in this regard, but it does make him come across as a somewhat more sympathetic character than what I previously thought of him as.

My favourite part of the book was the translator's introduction, which is a bit longer than is usually the case in the I Tatti Renaissance Library. It contains an interesting overview of Savonarola's career, the political circumstances in Florence and the rest of Italy, and the events that led to his excommunication and execution. He first gained renown and influence as a preacher, and got into the habit of making prophecies; he then used this influence over the public to make recommendations regarding both internal affairs of Florence (e.g. the conflicts between the pro-Medici faction and their opponents, who now succeeded in reforming the constitution on a more democratic basis) and foreign affairs (much of Italy was at war, and the French also intervened in it). But to a considerable extent his preoccupations seemed to be basically religious, telling people to repent and abandon their worldly ways, their luxuries and their decadence.

What kind of asshole rolls into Renaissance Florence and starts telling people something that esentially amounts to ‘never mind all this beauty and splendour that you're surrounded by, you should seek to be more miserable’? And more importantly, what kind of idiots fall for this sort of message? But I guess I shouldn't be surprised; there's always a large segment of the population that responds well to authoritarian figures telling them to endure something unpleasant. (As an equally perplexing recent example, there's all the people who seem to enjoy hearing Jordan Peterson tell them to clean up their rooms...)

Anyway, whatever the reasons, it is clear that Savonarola had plenty of supporters. The monks in his convent elected him as their head, he made various changes to their rules to make them stricter and the monks' life less pleasant, and it was probably not despite this but because of this, that a number of new members joined their community under his leadership. The Florentine laity listened to his sermons and followed his advice, and throngs of zealous little boys went from door to door at his behest, pestering people to abandon their vanities (p. xiii).

Eventually it was his meddling in politics that was the cause of his downfall, especially when he became too inconvenient to the pope (p. xiv); and it probably didn't help that the pope at the time was Rodrigo Borgia, who is surely the very archetype of a corrupt and decadent Renaissance pope. And this sets the stage for the last few years of Savonarola's life, from which all the writings in this book are taken. We can see him get increasingly desperate in his efforts to defend himself in view of the the increasingly serious steps that the pope was taking against him. A minor downside is that we have only Savonarola's writings from this period, but not those he was replying to; but the translator's introduction is very good at providing the context and summarizing the parts of the story that cannot be seen directly from Savonarola's writings.

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The book starts with a letter replying to the pope's invitation that Savonarola should come to Rome to talk to him. Savonarola tries to politely refuse this without appearing too openly disobedient, and makes excuses of ill health, political instability in Florence, and fear that he might get killed en route to Rome.

The pope reacted by forbidding Savonarola from preaching until the situation is investigated and cleared up. Savonarola replied with a longer letter protesting his innocence of the various errors and heresies that he had been accused of.

Another way that Savonarola's enemies tried to weaken him was through organizational changes affecting his monastery. The main result of these would be to scatter Savonarola's monks amongst other Dominican communities in Tuscany, ostensibly so they could help reform those as well but in practice to dilute their influence and prevent them from accomplishing any meaningful reform. Savonarola argues against these changes in one of the letters (pp. 31–3) and a short treatise (pp. 39–83). I didn't care too much about the organizatonal details behind his arguments, but I could easily agree with his main idea, namely that this is an effort to defang his reforms rather than help them spread further. Another interesting argument he had was to point out that under canon law, a monk cannot be forced to switch from a stricter rule to a laxer one (which is what the proposed reform would force him and his confraternity to do; p. 31).

Eventually the pope excommunicated Savonarola, but the Florentine authorities supported him and it took a few more months and angry letters from the pope to get them to arrest and execute him (p. xxviii). Meanwhile he wrote a few last desperate letters arguing that his excommunication is unjustified and thus void, and that nobody should be paying any attention to the pope's briefs on this matter. He points out that not every command from the pope should automatically be obeyed, since some of them could be unjust and this would be open to abuse (p. 95). He wrote a short, touching letter to the pope in the tone of a repentant sinner seeking forgiveness (p. 101), but after the pope ordered his arrest, Savonarola responded with a more strongly worded letter in which he suggests that god will punish the pope for his injustice towards Savonarola: “Most Blessed Father, do not delay to take thought for your own salvation.” (P. 107.)

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In this last period of his life he also wrote a Dialogue on the Truth of Prophecy, which is by far the longest work in this book (probably taking up some two-thirds of the volume). Savonarola's interlocutors in the dialogue are the “seven gifts of the holy spirit”, which appear as a group of travellers with suitably bizarre Old-Testament-style names.

This dialogue was not an uninteresting read, but I didn't find Savonarola's arguments in favour of prophecy to be very convincing. When asked why he thinks his prophecies are true, he explains it by an analogy (pp. 123, 127): when you see a lily and you see that it is white, you couldn't really say how or why you see this [nowadays with our modern knowledge of medicine and physics we could say a little bit more], but it is clear to you that it is indeed white. Similarly, to him and his interlocutors as devout christians, it is clear that their religion is true, even though they couldn't exactly say why (p. 137). And it is the same with his prophecies; he sees them clearly in his mind, so to speak. I'm perfectly willing to believe that he really experienced his prophecies this way, but he was obviously underestimating the mind's ability to deceive itself...

Savonarola also points out that prophecies are in a sense nothing terribly unusual — there's plenty of them in the bible, for example — and that his prophecies didn't lead him to predict or advocate anything that would be contrary to reason or to the teachings of the church (pp. 131, 307), that they had a good influence upon other people (pp. 217, 333–9), that his visions strengthened his own faith and understanding of religion (p. 195) and even of unrelated fields such as economics and politics (p. 193), and that his preaching has improved in that period (p. 243–5), so it's unlikely that all this is coming from the devil trying to deceive him or anything like that.

He speaks a little about the subject of his prophecies; these seem to be mostly of the traditional ‘repent, sinners, the end is nigh’ type. He argues that the corruption and immorality that are so pervasive everywhere in his time are good evidence that this end is coming sooner rather than later (pp. 237–5). He even takes the opportunity to throw some barbs at the pope (after describing the church hiearachy, he says: “whenever God is angered, and prepares to punish the peoples' crimes in the near future, He takes away the good leaders, and allows evil leaders to rule them”; p. 269). He has a fine rant against the churchmen of his day: “Do these men not sin more gravely than those who perished in the inundation of the Flood for their fornication? Do they not exceed the unbridled lust of the Sodomites, and also the perfidy of the Jews and the Greeks, all of whom have already been swallowed up and destroyed?” (P. 285.) :)))

Replying to those who doubted the truth of his prophecies, he says that god will sooner or later prove whether his predictions were true or not, as the events unfold, and thus passing judgment before that is reckless and premature (p. 307). This strikes me as the typical excuse of every self-proclaimed prophet, no doubt to be followed in due course by the usual prevarications when his predictions inevitably fail to come to pass. (He does say elsewhere that his predictions are falsifiable, unambigous and have all been committed to writing (p. 241), so at least we have to admit that he did not lack self-confidence.)

He also includes a section on why his sentence of excommunication and the demands to break up his monastic community should be ignored (pp. 311—19), similar to what he said in the earlier letters on this subject.

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I didn't find anything in this book terribly remarkable, but it was a relatively interesting read anyway. I still don't like Savonarola's zealotry, but at least he seems to have been sincere in it, and paid a terrible price for it, for which I sympathize with him. The publisher's text on the front flap of the dust jacked puts it well where it says that the book provides “a fascinating window on to the mind of a religious fanatic”.