In the mid-nineteenth century, the "New Piagnoni" found inspiration in the friar's writings and sermons for the Italian national awakening known as the Risorgimento. By emphasising his political activism over his puritanism and cultural conservatism they restored Savonarola's voice for radical political change. The venerable pre-Reformation icon ceded to the fiery Renaissance reformer. This somewhat anachronistic image, fortified by much new scholarship, informed the major new biography by Pasquale Villari, who regarded Savonarola's preaching against Medici despotism as the model for the Italian struggle for liberty and national unification.Pasquale Villari, The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola trans. by Linda Villari 2 vols (New York, 1890). In Germany, the Catholic theologian and church historian Joseph Schnitzer edited and published contemporary sources which illuminated Savonarola's career. In 1924 he crowned his vast research with a comprehensive study of Savonarola's life and times in which he presented the friar as the last best hope of the Catholic Church before the catastrophe of the Protestant Reformation.Joseph Schnitzer, Savonarola Ein Kulturbild aus der Zeit der Renaissance 2 vols (Munich, 1924); Italian translation Savonarola trans. Ernesto Rutili 2 vols (Milan, 1931). No English translation. In the Italian People's Party founded by Don Luigi Sturzo in 1919, Savonarola was revered as a champion of social justice, and after 1945 he was held up as a model of reformed Catholicism by leaders of the Christian Democratic Party. From this milieu, in 1952, came the third of the major Savonarola biographies, the Vita di Girolamo Savonarola by Roberto Ridolfi.Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola 6th ed. with additional notes by Armando F. Verde O.P. (Florence, 1981.) For the next half century Ridolfi was the guardian of the friar's saintly memory as well as the dean of Savonarola research which he helped grow into a scholarly industry. Today, with most of Savonarola's treatises and sermons and many of the contemporary sources (chronicles, diaries, government documents and literary works) available in critical editions, scholars can provide fresh, better informed assessments of his character and his place in the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern European history. The present-day Church has considered his beatification.Innocenzo Venchi, O.P. "Iniziative dell'Ordine Domenicano per promuovere la causa di beatificazione del Ven. fra Girolamo Savonarola O.P.," Studi Savonaroliani Verso il V centenario ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence, 1996) pp. 93–97
