"He craved it with a hungry and connubial ardor"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part II

Savonarola, known for raging against clerical excess, recruited to preach in Florence by the effete intellectual Pico del Mirandola, who seeks a form of revenge against the church hierarchy for its cracking down on his Humanist intellectual projects.

Preaching to a large crowd of Florentines: "With the voice of the whirlwind he launched his prediction of the imminent scourging of the church . . . The words poured from him like a rhetorical haemorrage, anguish galvanized all his powers, and in a rush of invective, expostilation, threats, and appeals, he pressed and kneaded the multitude until the sluggish mass began to quicken and stir.

As Savonarola's crowds grow, he becomes addicted to oratory: "he craved it with a hungry and connubial ardor."

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