Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #774497 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.47 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 380 pages

From Amazon.com
In the age before Gutenberg's printing press, preaching was the most important means of mass communication and persuasion in Europe. Dominicans and Franciscans, the major preaching orders of the period, served as the influential information disseminators, opinion makers, and power wielders. Franco Mormando's The Preacher's Demons takes a fascinating look at an enormously popular public figure of early-15th-century Italy, Franciscan friar Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444), and his response to three of the most critical social issues of his time: witchcraft, sodomy, and Judaism.

Mormando, an assistant professor of Italian at Boston College, consciously directs his study to both scholars and the educated public by including introductory information that helps the reader make sense of what Bernardino is saying and doing within the larger realm of the historical period and the theoretical issues in question. As a result, The Preacher's Demons presents not only an insightful portrayal of Bernardino and his 40 years of public speaking, but also of the marked upsurge in the demonization and persecution of three groups that challenged the moral sensibilities of early-15th-century Italian society. A competent translator, Mormando includes numerous excerpts from Bernardino's sermons and contemporary illustrations depicting Bernardino at work. Though his prose is tediously academic at times, Mormando nevertheless uses this biography of a flamboyant preacher to present a thoroughly researched and insightful examination of the people and events of the quattrocento. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack

From Booklist
Bernardino of Siena was a Franciscan friar whose inflammatory, demagogic tirades regularly enthralled crowds (as high as 40,000, according to one contemporary source) in the public square of early-fifteenth-century Siena. With the manipulative skills that would do Hitler justice, Bernardino would raise his listeners to a fevered pitch as he railed against sodomites, Jews, witches, and heretics. As Mormando's riveting and deeply unsettling examination of Bernardino's career shows, the glitter of the Renaissance was often a thin veneer; underneath was a postmedieval world in unstable transition, characterized by seething anger against new forces and against those individuals and groups who were supposedly behind those forces. Mormando is clearly repulsed by the intolerance of Bernardino, yet he eloquently explains his appeal by painting a broad portrait of the society that produced and then supported him. Readers who lack familiarity with Renaissance history will probably find this work daunting. However, those with familiarity will find it instructive and absorbing. Jay Freeman

From Kirkus Reviews
Mormando's (Italian/Boston Coll.) survey of the 40-year preaching career of the Franciscan friar and Catholic saint Bernardino of Siena (13801444) is one of only a few book-length studies on this mouthpiece of medieval obscurantism. This book further dismantles the view of the early Italian Renaissance as an enlightened period, exposing the fundamental fears and insecurities of the Quattrocento (feminine magical power, paganism, the body and sexuality, and Christianity's inherent limitations) through the prism of Bernardino's sermons dealing with witchcraft, sodomites, and Jews. The friar's passionate call to denounce witches and burn them at the stake rests upon folklore beliefs that attribute to witches a number of grave sins, including infanticide, blood-sucking, and even fornication with the Devil. Bernardino was just as adamant about eradicating sodomy, by which he understood any sexual activity not leading to procreation. Passing on to Bernardino's third scapegoat, the Jews, Mormando runs into a problem. While he seeks to downplay somewhat the saint's notorious anti-Semitism, he advances unconvincing evidence. Indeed, the friar emerges here as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, who repeatedly referred to the Jews as the chief enemies of Christianity and proscribed any social or business contact between them and his followers. He also spoke in favor of isolating the Jews and ordering them to wear distinguishing badges. As for Bernardino's occasional adjurations to ``love the Jew with a general love,'' this was no more than lip service to an abstract principle of brotherly love and cannot attenuate his responsibility for spreading hostility toward Jews. Unfortunately, Mormando paints his picture of the Quattrocento exclusively though this preacher's eyes, without presenting the popular reaction to his message. Contrary to the book's professed goal, we learn more about the anxieties of Bernardino's tormented psyche and the intolerant streak in Catholicism than about the social underworld of early Renaissance Italy. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.