Michele Lodone's I segni della fine: Storia di un predicatore nell'Italia del Rinascimento is a useful study for scholars exploring the roles and action of preachers in Renaissance Italy, opening an intriguing avenue of research toward the rediscovery of the Conventual Franciscan friar Francesco da Montepulciano (d. 1513) and his multifaceted role as preacher.
To scholars of Renaissance religious history, Francesco da Montepulciano is known for his apocalyptic sermon delivered in Florence on 18 December 1513 from the pulpit of Santa Croce, shortly before his death. Lodone highlights how the Franciscan was much more than an apocalyptic friar preaching in the wake of the best-known Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola. He was, at the same time, a great promoter of peace among the rival families of Renaissance Italy—such as in Assisi—as well as a reformer of his own religious conventual Franciscan order during a time when the Observant movement was becoming a majority.
The volume comprises three parts. In the first, the author highlights the importance of voices: first and foremost, those of the audience, who, like the preacher, participated in that “great collective performance” (21)—that is, the sermon. It is through analysis of the preacher's performance that one can reconstruct that “pastoral of fear,” or, perhaps better, “of emotions” (21) that is captured in the reactions of the audience and witnesses, and that allows Lodone to analyze Francesco's sermon not as a text but as an event. From Niccolò Machiavelli, who learned of the Franciscan's sermon and spoke of it in a sarcastic tone to his friend Francesco Vettori, to the “stunned” reactions of the Florentines, who were affected by that preaching “for better or for worse” (45), to the Medici, with their concern for “the subversive potential of prophets and apocalyptic prophecies” (57), Francesco's sermon is characterized as a strongly emotional call to penance.
Moving from voices to readings, the second part of Lodone's book is dedicated to the text of the sermon, in both its manuscript and printing traditions, and to Francesco's sources and models, whose careful scrutiny allows Lodone to counter a traditional interpretation as overly simplified, according to which “the Romites and itinerant preachers of the early sixteenth century followed and referred to the Savonarola model” (66). According to the author, the text of Francesco's sermon must rather be put in relation to the Franciscan tradition, which on the apocalyptic side had its highest representatives in Angelo Clareno, Giovanni di Rupescissa, and Telesforo da Cosenza. Lodone emphasizes how Francesco's commentary on Christ's eschatological discourse on the Mount of Olives (as reported in Matthew 24) is emblematic from this point of view, as it blends eschatological, ecclesiological, and practical visions that would lead “back to nonconformist tendencies within the Franciscan order” (129). The third part of the book delves into the traces of the life of the preacher and how his figure has been seen and measured differently through time. Lodone illuminates particular aspects of his life, from prophet and forerunner of the Capuchins to ancestor of Marcellus II, pope in 1555 for only twenty days, to even becoming blessed in 1766 with the name Francesco Cervini, the pope's surname. The volume is accompanied by a useful appendix with the details of the tradition of the text, which consists of six printed editions and fifteen manuscripts; a note to the text and edition criteria; and the text of Francesco's sermon.
Michele Lodone's book is a very well-written and rich study at the crossroads of preaching and sermon studies, religious and cultural history, as well as Franciscan studies and the history of emotions in the Renaissance. It juggles different traditions and sources with extreme agility, and succeeds in placing prophetic traditions and the figure of Francesco da Montepulciano—a preacher who has been waiting too long to be studied carefully and seriously in a monographic yet contextualized manner—at the center of a beautifully constructed narrative. Lodone's volume will certainly benefit a rich cohort of scholars, as well as, I imagine, a wider audience interested in the religious and social history of the Italian Renaissance.
