Introduction: Honor and Savonarolan Reform

Well after the death of savonarola, lorenzo polizzotto has shown, Savonarolan piety continued to influence lay devotion and lay religious organization until Grand Duke Cosimo's “dissolution” of the monastery at San Marco in 1545. Savonarolan reformers knit together a system of charitable institutions that by 1530 already suggested that care of vulnerable females – young girls, adolescent girls, and widows, especially – was to be the major focus of charitable concern. Even as early as the 1490s, Savonarola and his followers had put before the government of Florence a proposal for the reform of women. This chapter examines the proliferation of charitable institutions for girls and women and the origins of this concern in terms of family strategy, inheritance practice, and “preventive” approaches to the problems of prostitution. In addition to abundant evidence from the Ospedale degli Innocenti, this chapter also examines the statutes, admission records, and disposition records of the girls’ homes of Santa Maria e San Niccolò del Ceppo, the Pietà, Santa Caterina della Ruota, and the widow's asylum of Orbatello as a means to understand sixteenth-century Florentine perceptions of marginalization as well as the material realities of a group of women who, although marginalized, represented a problematic that drove straight to the heart of the central values and gender constructs of premodern Mediterranean systems of honor and shame.