Prison Meditations on Psalms 51 and 31.

Armed with a good guidebook, and perhaps a copy of George Eliot's Romola, the modern traveller can quite successfully track down the Florence of Girolamo Savonarola. From his monastic cell in San Marco, to his prison cell in the Palazzo Vecchio's Alberghettino to the spot in the piazza far below where he breathed his last, there is still much in the city that is connected with his fascinating career. With the quincentenary of Savonarola's death right around the corner, we should be seeing a spate of commemorative interest and material, ranging from the banal to the brilliant, from t-shirts to scholarly symposia and studies. And there certainly is room for good modern scholarship on the Unarmed Prophet.

Marquette University Press has decided to launch its new series "Reformation Texts with Translations" with the last of Savonarola's writings, his meditations on Psalms 51 and 31. As with all works in the series, the original Latin text has on the facing pages an English translation, in this case by one of the series' advisors, John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. Prison Meditations is volume one in the sub-series "Biblical Studies," which is edited by Franz Posset. The other two sub-series are "Women in the Reformation" and the "Late Reformation," edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Robert Kolb respectively. General editor Kenneth Hagen has written that the original languages will include Latin and German, French and Spanish, and later Greek and Hebrew, and that new series will be added as the enterprise expands. He does not explain, however, why Italian texts are being ignored. The goal of the series is to provide reliable translations of important texts that are not otherwise or easily available to the American student and scholar. The complexity of the original is also a factor, and Hagen states that the early works will be those done in "manageable Latin," to facilitate language as well as textual study.

Savonarola's meditations provide a fine starting place. He wrote them while housed in the tiny tower room of the Palazzo Vecchio awaiting death, and they were translated and disseminated immediately. Donnelly's translations capture the simple forcefulness of the originals, in a prose that expressed the range of Savonarola's own emotions as they were conveyed to his audience. The first short work is on Psalm 50 (51), the Miserere. The disheartened but not despairing friar lays out each line and develops from there the basis for his hope in and reliance on the "God of my salvation." He stands abashed and worthy of the misery visited on him by a just God. Though cynics might initially dismiss this as Christian mendicant rhetoric - considering the situation of the writer and the full history of the individual - they should develop an appreciation for the poignancy and immediacy of the text. The mature Martin Luther himself was drawn to the work's power and oversaw two editions of the work (1523 and 1538). The denigration of pious works and the power of faith on which Savonarola relied at this point in his life rang with truth for the Reformer.

The second work is unfinished, Savonarola having run out of paper on which to write. This meditation on Psalm 30 (31), "In te, Domine, speravi," is a kind of Boethian dialogue, in which the writer is beset by Sadness with her army. Hope and Consolation rescue him, depart him and return. A mere smile of Hope fortifies Savonarola for his struggle. The dramatic dialectic frames his struggle with despair in the face of personal doom, and makes a nice counterpoint to the slightly cooler exegetical treatment of Psalm 51.

JOSEPH BYRNE West Georgia College