Before his death and for fifty years after, the adherents of Girolamo Savonarola included a high proportion of women, Tamar Herzig has delved into this neglected matter, using new archival material to study several charismatic women of all social classes, nuns, laywomen, aristocrats and maidservants, Colomba Guadagnoli, Lucia Brocadelli, Colomba Truccazani, Osanna Andreasi and others – some well known for their visions and prophecies. Herzig demonstrates that ‘Savonarola's women’ had complicated histories. Within Italy generally, excepting the Veneto, ecclesiastical and political authorities were hostile to Savonarola's cult, so that all sympathisers, male and female, and including Ercole i d'Este and senior Dominicans, maintained a kind of ‘Savonarolan Nicodemism’, forced to communicate by oblique references to his teaching. Nevertheless, for fifty years after 1498, his influence extended far beyond Florence, into northern towns and elsewhere along the peninsula. His female followers venerated him as a holy martyr for reform and a symbol of spiritual regeneration: they circulated his works widely in nunneries and they supported each other. Outside Florence they were more than silent followers: while some were ecstatic visionaries, others were practical reformers in their own right, founding and regulating religious houses in accordance with his practices, for example securing monastic dowries for impoverished young women. Some issued forthright denunciations of clerical laxity, which carried considerable weight with clerical reformers and with the public. Indeed, many friars and noble laymen in northern Italy supported these women as their way of engaging in pro-Savonarolan activity. In northern Italy, other, more sober devotees of Savonarola treated ecstatic visionaries, both male and female with suspicion, but the visionaries claimed that they were following traditional spiritual paths, or that their ecstasies were in conformity with orthodox cloistral life, or that Girolamo himself gave them direct instructions during these episodes. Herzig argues that, despite opposition, the demographic, political and economic crises that accompanied the Italian wars enabled many Savonarolan women to assume prominent social and political roles. In Tuscany, however, male Piagnoni rigorously dismissed female visions as unreliable hysteria – Savonarola himself was distrustful of womanly visions – and they edged the women out of the movement's social fabric and its historiography. Eventually, by the middle of the 1500s, half a century of crisis was followed by peace and reconciliation: Dominican Piagnoni were no longer persecuted politically in Florence nor harassed by ecclesiastical authorities elsewhere. When this happened the Savonarolan women began to lose their spiritual prominence. Further studies of these women will be difficult because their memory was deliberately obscured in historiographical accounts. Moreover, since any such study will encompass women who hungered and wept for both internal reform – an emotional divine union, the ‘righteousness' of intense, glowing love and intimacy with the Lord – and the moral regeneration of Christendom, three difficult, perhaps unanswerable, questions need to be asked. Why did Savonarola's spirituality resonate with so many women? Why did their blazing bonfire of inner regeneration include the moral regeneration of society? How did Savonarola himself perceive female spirituality?