John O’Malley, Georgetown University, author of Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome, The First Jesuits, and Trent: What Happened at the Council (from the dustjacket) The book, a fascinating and important contribution to our understanding of an historical epoch, is also a cautionary tale for our own, increasingly self-righteous times.” Franco Mormando’s conclusions rest on incontrovertible evidence, which he is the first scholar to examine in comprehensive fashion. “This major study of a major but neglected figure from Renaissance Italy reveals the fanatical recklessness of Bernardino’s rhetoric especially about witches and sodomites. 27 ( Perspectives is the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association).

Ben Lowe ( professor of early modern European history, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton), “Including Sexuality as a ‘Useful Category of Analysis’ in College History Courses,” Perspectives on History, January 2013, p. Mormando’s splendid framing of these issues always proves to be a great launching pad for extended class discussions about language and the construction of sexual categories, how people with ill-informed prejudices in earlier times viewed difference, and how fear and ignorance can produce similar misunderstandings today.” Laws were passed, people were rounded up and executed, and an overall hysteria was instilled local populations. “In my Renaissance class, I have students read Franco Mormando’s excellent, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy because it demonstrates how the ‘persecuting society’ that developed during the fifteenth century - demonizing witches, Jews, and sodomites - had a real historical impact. Sano di Pietro, Bernardino and his IHS Monogram Tablet

Franco mormando