As Frances E. Hammitt puts it in the article The Burning of Books, “The use of fire as a weapon against books is a reasonable transfer from the custom of burning objects or persons who inspired abhorrence or fear, since books, like men, are vehicles for the communication of thought.” (Hammitt, 301). The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg generated a lot of attention from all over Europe, spreading to 110 different places however especially in Italy, where it quickly became the early center of printing with 151 locations by the 1500s (Febvre and Martin, 58). The printing press gave a lot of power and recognition to writers as well as created the role of the editor that only increased in popularity from this time on (Richardson, “Print Culture in Renaissance Italy” x). Easily by the 1500s, printed books were more popular and available than manuscripts (Richardson, “Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy” 116). The printing press was not only a great invention for the spread of humanist writings, but it was also influential in the increase of literacy amongst Italian urban culture (Black, 366). However with the increase of the published book, there was also an increase in accessibility of ideas that were not always the accepted opinion of the general public. With religions like Calvinism and Lutheranism building popularity, the printing press made religious texts more easily distributed inspiring the first public book burning in England by Henry VIII, in which Martin Luther’s book were destroyed (Cressy, 362).
Book burning was used as a form of censorship by destroying all of the offensive books, however with the popularity of printed texts it was almost impossible to guarantee that all were destroyed. In Renaissance Europe, there were two distinct kinds of book burning, those that were the casualties of war and those that were a more specified vendetta towards certain books, which was typically destructive or symbolic in their purposes (Hammitt, 302). The latter was seen as an extreme form of censorship, generally carried out by churches or those in political power.
Girolama Savonarola was a Dominican friar born in 1452 in Ferrara, Italy (Johnstone, 179). In 1482 he relocated to Florence, and by 1494 when Florence lost its Medici ruler, Savonarola became the leader as well as the priest of Florence (Weinstein, 64). Lorenzo de Medici had been a patron of Renaissance artists however, when Savonarola came into power, this was no longer the case in Florence. In his sermons, Savonarola made it known of his distaste for poets such as Virgil in his sermons saying such things as, “As the devil teaches these poems to encourage worship of himself and superstition in mankind, so in them he also leaves proud vanity and an intolerable stench of empty glory,” (Kallendorf, 129). This distaste for so-called ‘devil worship’ and superficial vanities inspired Savonarola to call the Bonfire of the Vanities. He was not the first in this ritual; fra Bernardino de Siena had brought a similar act to Florence for the destruction of sin 75 years prior. However what did set Savonarola apart was his location of not in front of the church but instead in the Piazza della Signoria, the center of temporal government, truly demonstrating his mixing of politics and piety (Weinstein 218).
The Bonfire of the Vanities itself took place on February 7th, 1497. A large pyramid was erected with tiers of shelves was filled with ‘vanities’ that were collected by Savonarola’s followers from people’s homes (Seward, 167). The vanities ranged from mirrors, artwork, musical instruments, cosmetics, wigs and of course famous books that were said to be obscene. Some works that were sought out were every copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron as well as works by Petrarch and Luigi Pulci (Seward, 168).
The full extent of the loss during the Bonfire of the Vanities much like many other acts of book burning throughout history will never truly be known, however the loss of this act was not as substantial due to the shining beacon of hope that was the expansion of the printing press and therefore expanded distribution of texts.
Works Cited
Black, Robert. Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
Cressy, David. “Burning in Tudor and Stuart England.” The Sixteenth Century Journal. 36.2 (2005): 359-374. Web. 3 Feb. 2012
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: the Impact of Printing 1450-1800. London: NLB. 1979.
Hammitt, Frances. “The Burning of Books.” The Library Quarterly. 15.4 (1945): 300-312. Web. 3 Feb. 2012.
Johnstone, Mary. Life in Florence in the Fifteenth Century. Firenze: L.S. Olschki. 1968.
Kallendorf, Craig. Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in Italian Renaissance. Oxford: Claredon Press. 1999.
Richardson, Brian. Print Culture in Renaissance Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994.
Richardson, Brian. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
Seward, Desmond. The Burning of the Vanities: Savonarola and the Borgia Pope. Stroud: Sutton. 2006.
Weinstein, Donald. Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2011.