Savonarola’s Middlemen: The Buonomini di San Martino in the Florentine Religious Revival of the 1490s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his program for reforming Florence Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola not only staged his famous “Bonfires of the Vanities,” but also directed his congregations to increase their alms giving, specifically for the “shamefaced poor,” respectable families in need but ashamed to beg. Not allowed by his order to administer such funds directly, Savonarola instructed that they be deposited with the Buonomini di San Martino, a confraternity specifically devoted to relieving the “shamefaced poor.” With these responsible middlemen in place, Savonarola would thus avoid any charges of financial impropriety. The alms collectors during Carnival seasons 1496 to 1498 were Savonarola’s fanciulli, youths reformed of their Carnival hijinks. The ceremonial depositing of alms at the oratory in Piazza San Martino would achieve a secondary goal for Savonarola, the sanctification of a profane performance space, the piazza being a prime venue for “bench singers” and other popular entertainers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".