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Girolamo Savonarola

Girolamo Savonarola, OP (,,  ; 21 September 1452 – 23 May 1498) or Jerome Savonarola was an ascetic  Dominican friar from Ferrara and a preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He became known for his prophecies of civic glory, his advocacy of the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule, and the exploitation of the poor.

In September 1494, when King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and threatened Florence, Savonarola's prophecies seemed on the verge of fulfillment. While the friar intervened with the French king, the Florentines expelled the ruling Medicis and, at Savonarola's urging, established a "well received" republic, effectively under Savonarola's control. Declaring that Florence would be the New Jerusalem, the world centre of Christianity and "richer, more powerful, more glorious than ever", he instituted an extreme moralistic campaign, enlisting the active help of Florentine youth.

In 1495, when Florence refused to join Pope Alexander VI's Holy League against the French, the Vatican summoned Savonarola to Rome. He disobeyed, and further defied the pope by preaching under a ban, highlighting his campaign for reform with processions, bonfires of the vanities, and pious theatricals. In retaliation, Pope Alexander excommunicated Savonarola in May 1497 and threatened to place Florence under an interdict. A trial by fire proposed by a rival Florentine preacher in April 1498 to test Savonarola's divine mandate turned into a fiasco, and popular opinion turned against him. Savonarola and two of his supporting friars were imprisoned. On 23 May 1498, Church and civil authorities condemned, hanged, and burned the bodies of the three friars in the main square of Florence.

Savonarola's devotees, the Piagnoni, kept his cause of republican freedom and religious reform alive well into the following century. Pope Julius II (in office: 1503–1513) allegedly considered his canonization. However, the Medici—restored to power in Florence in 1512 with the help of the papacy—eventually weakened the Piagnoni movement. Some early Protestants, including Martin Luther himself, have regarded Savonarola as a vital precursor to the Protestant Reformation. The cause for his canonization is currently being studied by the Holy See, which has accorded him the title of Servant of God.

Early years
Savonarola was born on 21 September 1452 in Ferrara to Niccolò di Michele and Elena. His father, Niccolò, was born in Ferrara to a family originally from Padua; his mother, Elena, claimed a lineage from the Bonacossi family of Mantua. She and Niccolò had seven children, of whom Girolamo was third. His grandfather, Michele Savonarola, a noted and successful physician and polymath, oversaw Girolamo's education. The family amassed a great deal of wealth from Michele's medical practice.

After his grandfather's death in 1468 Savonarola may have attended the public school run by Battista Guarino, son of Guarino da Verona, where he would have received his introduction to the classics as well as to the poetry and writings of Petrarch, father of Renaissance humanism. Earning an arts degree at the University of Ferrara, he prepared to enter medical school, following in his grandfather's footsteps. At some point, however, he abandoned his career intentions.

In his early poems he expresses his preoccupation with the state of the Church and of the world. He began to write poetry of an apocalyptic bent, notably "On the Ruin of the World" (1472) and "On the Ruin of the Church" (1475), in which he singled out the papal court at Rome for special obloquy. About the same time he seems to have been thinking about a life in religion. As he later told his biographer, a sermon he heard by a preacher in Faenza persuaded him to abandon the world. Most of his biographers reject or ignore the account of his younger brother and follower, Maurelio (later fra Mauro), that in his youth Girolamo had been spurned by a neighbour, Laudomia Strozzi, to whom he had proposed marriage. True or not, in a letter he wrote to his father when he left home to join the Dominican Order he hints at being troubled by desires of the flesh. There is also a story that on the eve of his departure he dreamed that he was cleansed of such thoughts by a shower of icy water, which prepared him for the ascetic life. In the unfinished treatise he left behind, later called "De contemptu Mundi" or "On Contempt for the World", he calls upon readers to fly from this world of adultery, sodomy, murder and envy.

Savonarola studied Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. He also studied the scriptures and memorized parts.

On 25 April 1475 Girolamo Savonarola went to Bologna, where he knocked on the door of the Friary of San Domenico, of the Order of Friars Preacher, and asked to be admitted. As he told his father in his farewell letter, he wanted to become a knight of Christ.

Friar
In the convent, Savonarola took the vow of obedience proper to his order, and after a year was ordained to the priesthood. He studied Scripture, logic, Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology in the Dominican studium, practised preaching to his fellow friars, and engaged in disputations. He then matriculated in the theological faculty to prepare for an advanced degree. Even as he continued to write devotional works and to deepen his spiritual life, he was openly critical of what he perceived as the decline in convent austerity. In 1478 his studies were interrupted when he was sent to the Dominican priory of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Ferrara as assistant master of novices. The assignment might have been a normal, temporary break from the academic routine, but in Savonarola's case, it was a turning point. One explanation is that he had alienated certain of his superiors, particularly fra Vincenzo Bandelli, or Bandello, a professor at the studium and future master general of the Dominicans, who resented the young friar's opposition to modifying the Order's rules against the ownership of property. In 1482, instead of returning to Bologna to resume his studies, Savonarola was assigned as lector, or teacher, in the Convent of San Marco in Florence. In San Marco, fra Girolamo (Savonarola) taught logic to the novices, wrote instructional manuals on ethics, logic, philosophy and government, composed devotional works, and prepared his sermons for local congregations. As he recorded in his notes, his preaching was not altogether successful. Florentines were put off by his foreign-sounding Ferrarese speech, his strident voice and (especially to those who valued humanist rhetoric) his inelegant style.

While waiting for a friend in the Convent of San Giorgio, he was studying Scripture when he suddenly conceived "about seven reasons" why the Church was about to be scourged and renewed. He broached these apocalyptic themes in San Gimignano, where he went as Lenten preacher in 1485 and again in 1486, but a year later, when he left San Marco for a new assignment, he had said nothing of his "San Giorgio revelations" in Florence.

Preacher
For the next several years Savonarola lived as an itinerant preacher with a message of repentance and reform in the cities and convents of north Italy. As his letters to his mother and his writings show, his confidence and sense of mission grew along with his widening reputation. In 1490, he was reassigned to San Marco. It seems that this was due to the initiative of the humanist philosopher-prince, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who had heard Savonarola in a formal disputation in Reggio Emilia and been impressed with his learning and piety. Pico was in trouble with the Church for some of his unorthodox philosophical ideas (the famous "900 theses") and was living under the protection of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici de facto ruler of Florence. To have Savonarola beside him as a spiritual counsellor, he persuaded Lorenzo that the friar would bring prestige to the convent of San Marco and its Medici patrons. After some delay, apparently due to the interference of his former professor fra Vincenzo Bandelli, now Vicar General of the Order, Lorenzo succeeded in bringing Savonarola back to Florence, where he arrived in May or June of that year.

Prophet
Savonarola preached on the First Epistle of John and on the Book of Revelation, drawing such large crowds that he eventually moved to the cathedral. Without mentioning names, he made pointed allusions to tyrants who usurped the freedom of the people, and he excoriated their allies, the rich and powerful who neglected and exploited the poor. Complaining of the evil lives of a corrupt clergy, he now called for repentance and renewal before the arrival of a divine scourge. Scoffers dismissed him as an over-excited zealot and "preacher of the desperate" and sneered at his growing band of followers as Piagnoni—"Weepers" or "Wailers", an epithet they adopted. In 1492 Savonarola warned of "the Sword of the Lord over the earth quickly and soon" and envisioned terrible tribulations to Rome. Around 1493 (these sermons have not survived) he began to prophesy that a New Cyrus was coming over the mountains to begin the renewal of the Church.

In September 1494 King Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps with a formidable army, throwing Italy into political chaos. Many viewed the arrival of King Charles as proof of Savonarola's gift of prophecy. Charles advanced on Florence, sacking Tuscan strongholds and threatening to punish the city for refusing to support his expedition. As the populace took to the streets to expel Piero the Unfortunate, Lorenzo de' Medici's son and successor, Savonarola led a delegation to the camp of the French king in mid-November 1494. He pressed Charles to spare Florence and enjoined him to take up his divinely appointed role as the reformer of the Church. After a short, tense occupation of the city, and another intervention by fra Girolamo (as well as the promise of a huge subsidy), the French resumed their journey southward on 28 November 1494. Savonarola now declared that by answering his call to penitence, the Florentines had begun to build a new Ark of Noah which had saved them from the waters of the divine flood. Even more sensational was the message in his sermon of 10 December:

I announce this good news to the city, that Florence will be more glorious, richer, more powerful than she has ever been; First, glorious in the sight of God as well as of men: and you, O Florence will be the reformation of all Italy, and from here the renewal will begin and spread everywhere, because this is the navel of Italy. Your counsels will reform all by the light and grace that God will give you. Second, O Florence, you will have innumerable riches, and God will multiply all things for you. Third, you will spread your empire, and thus you will have power temporal and spiritual.

This astounding guarantee may have been an allusion to the traditional patriotic myth of Florence as the new Rome, which Savonarola would have encountered in his readings in Florentine history. In any case, it encompassed both temporal power and spiritual leadership.

Reformer
With Savonarola's advice and support (as a non-citizen and cleric he was ineligible to hold office), a Savonarolan political "party", dubbed "the Frateschi", took shape and steered the friar's program through the councils. The oligarchs most compromised by their service to the Medici were barred from office. A new constitution enfranchised the artisan class, opened minor civic offices to selection by lot, and granted every citizen in good standing the right to a vote in a new parliament, the Consiglio Maggiore, or Great Council. At Savonarola's urging, the Frateschi government, after months of debate, passed a "Law of Appeal" to limit the longtime practice of using exile and capital punishment as factional weapons. Savonarola declared a new era of "universal peace". On 13 January 1495 he preached his great Renovation Sermon to a huge audience in the cathedral, recalling that he had begun prophesying in Florence four years earlier, although the divine light had come to him "more than fifteen, maybe twenty years ago". He now claimed that he had predicted the deaths of Lorenzo de' Medici and of Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 and the coming of the sword to Italy—the invasion of King Charles of France. As he had foreseen, God had chosen Florence, "the navel of Italy", as his favourite and he repeated: if the city continued to do penance and began the work of renewal it would have riches, glory and power.

If the Florentines had any doubt that the promise of worldly power and glory had heavenly sanction, Savonarola emphasised this in a sermon of 1 April 1495, in which he described his mystical journey to the Virgin Mary in heaven. At the celestial throne Savonarola presents the Holy Mother a crown made by the Florentine people and presses her to reveal their future. Mary warns that the way will be hard both for the city and for him, but she assures him that God will fulfil his promises: Florence will be "more glorious, more powerful and richer than ever, extending its wings farther than anyone can imagine". She and her heavenly minions will protect the city against its enemies and support its alliance with the French. In the New Jerusalem that is Florence peace and unity will reign. Based on such visions, Savonarola promoted theocracy, and declared Christ the king of Florence. He saw sacred art as a tool to promote this worldview, and he was therefore only opposed to secular art, which he saw as worthless and potentially damaging.

Buoyed by liberation and prophetic promise, the Florentines embraced Savonarola's campaign to rid the city of "vice". At his repeated insistence, new laws were passed against "sodomy" (which included male and female same-sex relations), adultery, public drunkenness, and other moral transgressions, while his lieutenant Fra Silvestro Maruffi organised boys and young men to patrol the streets to curb immodest dress and behaviour. For a time, Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503) tolerated friar Girolamo's strictures against the Church, but he was moved to anger when Florence declined to join his new Holy League against the French invader, and blamed it on Savonarola's pernicious influence. An exchange of letters between the pope and the friar ended in an impasse which Savonarola tried to break by sending the pope "a little book" recounting his prophetic career and describing some of his more dramatic visions. This was the Compendium of Revelations, a self-dramatization which was one of the farthest-reaching and most popular of his writings.

The pope was not mollified. He summoned the friar to appear before him in Rome, and when Savonarola refused, pleading ill health and confessing that he was afraid of being attacked on the journey, Alexander banned him from further preaching. For some months Savonarola obeyed, but when he saw his influence slipping he defied the pope and resumed his sermons, which became more violent in tone. He not only attacked secret enemies at home whom he rightly suspected of being in league with the papal Curia, he condemned the conventional, or "tepid", Christians who were slow to respond to his calls. He dramatised his moral campaign with special Masses for the youth, processions, bonfires of the vanities and religious theatre in San Marco. He and his close friend, the humanist poet Girolamo Benivieni, composed lauds and other devotional songs for the Carnival processions of 1496, 1497 and 1498, replacing the bawdy Carnival songs of the era of Lorenzo de' Medici. These continued to be copied and performed after his death, along with songs composed by Piagnoni in his memory. A number of them have survived.

Proto-Protestant
Savonarola, like the later reformers, desired a return to the "early apostolic simplicity". Many Protestants view Savonarola as a precursor to the Protestant Reformation with respect to his views on "the doctrine of justification, his emphasis on individual faith, his emphasis on the authority of scripture and compassion for the poor". The writings of Savonarola spread widely to Germany and Switzerland, and due to Savonarola's life and death, many people started to see the papacy as corrupted and sought a new reform of the church. Many people saw him as a martyr, including Martin Luther, who was influenced by Savonarola's writings. Savonarola's beliefs on the doctrine of justification are similar in some respects to Martin Luther’s teachings, stating that humans are not justified by themselves. Savonarola may have influenced John Calvin, but this is a matter of historical debate.

Savonarola never abandoned the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church; for example, Savonarola held to a belief in seven sacraments and that the Church of Rome is "the mother of all other churches and the pope its head." However his protests against papal corruption, reliance on the bible as the main guide link Savonarola with the later reformation. Savonarola himself held scripture as a very high authority, he himself stated: "I preach the regeneration of the Church, taking the Scriptures as my sole guide." "It is untrue that God’s grace is obtained by pre-existing works of merit as though works and deserts were the cause of predestination. On the contrary, these are the result of predestination. (The original text can be found in Prato, sermoni e prediche, predica 8)""Tell me, Peter; tell me, O Magdalene, wherefore are ye in paradise?... Confess that not by your own merits have ye obtained salvation, but by the goodness of God. (id., predica 9)"

Other quotes from Savonarola such as "Not by their own deservings, O Lord, or by their own works have they been saved, lest any man should be able to boast, but because it seemed good in Thy sight." made Martin Luther say that even though the theology of Savonarola wasn't perfect, it was still an example of true Christian theology. Martin Luther later stated about Savonarola: "Christ canonizes Savonarola through us even though popes and papists burst to pieces over it — Martin Luther"Savonarola while revering the office of the papacy, nevertheless criticized the pope Alexander VI and his papal court. Savonarola even prophecied that Rome will come under judgement from God. the Pope may command me to do something that contravenes the law of Christian love or the Gospel. But, if he did so command, I would say to him, thou art no shepherd. Not the Roman Church, but thou errest

Who are the fat kine of Bashan on the mountains of Samaria? I say they are the courtesans of Italy and Rome. Or, are there none? A thousand are too few for Rome, 10,000, 12,000, 14,000 are too few for Rome. Prepare thyself, O Rome, for great will be thy punishments - Girolamo Savonarola Catholic sources, however, criticize the inclusion of Savonarola as a Protestant forerunner, because much of his theology still aligned with Rome. Despite inspiring some Protestant reformers, Savonarola also influenced some leaders of the Counter-Reformation.

Excommunication and death
On 12 May 1497, Pope Alexander VI excommunicated Savonarola and threatened the Florentines with an interdict if they persisted in harbouring him. After describing the Church as a whore, Savonarola was excommunicated for heresy and sedition.

On 18 March 1498, after much debate and steady pressure from a worried government, Savonarola withdrew from public preaching. Under the stress of excommunication, he composed his spiritual masterpiece, the Triumph of the Cross, a celebration of the victory of the Cross over sin and death and an exploration of what it means to be a Christian. This he summed up in the theological virtue of caritas, or love. In loving their neighbours, Christians return the love which they have received from their Creator and Savior. Savonarola hinted at performing miracles to prove his divine mission, but when a rival Franciscan preacher proposed to test that mission by walking through fire, he lost control of public discourse. Without consulting him, his confidant Fra Domenico da Pescia offered himself as his surrogate and Savonarola felt he could not afford to refuse. The first trial by fire in Florence in over four hundred years was set for 7 April. A crowd filled the central square, eager to see if God would intervene, and if so, on which side. The nervous contestants and their delegations delayed the start of the contest for hours. A sudden rain drenched the spectators and government officials cancelled the proceedings. The crowd disbanded angrily; the burden of proof had been on Savonarola, and he was blamed for the fiasco. A mob assaulted the convent of San Marco.

Fra Girolamo, Fra Domenico, and Fra Silvestro Maruffi were arrested and imprisoned. Under torture Savonarola confessed to having invented his prophecies and visions, then recanted, then confessed again. In his prison cell in the tower of the government palace he composed meditations on Psalms 51 (Infelix ego) and 31 (Tristitia obsedit me). On the morning of 23 May 1498, the three friars were led out into the main square where, before a tribunal of high clerics and government officials, they were condemned as heretics and schismatics, and sentenced to die forthwith. Stripped of their Dominican garments in ritual degradation, they mounted the scaffold in their thin white shirts. Each on separate gallows, they were hanged, while fires were ignited below them to consume their bodies. To prevent devotees from searching for relics, their ashes were carted away and scattered in the Arno.

Aftermath
Resisting censorship and exile, the friars of San Marco fostered a cult of "the three martyrs" and venerated Savonarola as a saint. They encouraged women in local convents and surrounding towns to find mystical inspiration in his example, and, by preserving many of his sermons and writings, they helped keep his political as well as his religious ideas alive. The return of the Medici in 1512 ended the Savonarola-inspired republic and intensified pressure against the movement, although both were briefly revived in 1527 when the Medici were once again forced out. In 1530 Pope Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici), with the help of soldiers of the Holy Roman Emperor, restored Medici rule, and Florence became a hereditary dukedom.

Savonarola's contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli discusses the friar in Chapter VI of his book The Prince, writing: "If Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus had been unarmed they could not have enforced their constitutions for long—as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer, and he had no means of keeping steadfast those who believed or of making the unbelievers to believe."

Savonarolan religious ideas found a reception elsewhere. In Germany and Switzerland the early Protestant reformers, most notably Martin Luther himself, read some of the friar's writings and praised him as a martyr and forerunner whose ideas on faith and grace anticipated Luther's own doctrine of justification by faith alone. In France many of his works were translated and published and Savonarola came to be regarded as a precursor of evangelical, or Huguenot, reform though Savonarola himself had remained a believer in the dogmas of the Catholic church and even in his last major work had defended the institution of the papacy. Within the Dominican Order Savonarola was seen as a devotional figure ("the evolving image of a Counter-Reformation saintly prelate" ), and in this benevolent guise his memory lived on. Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorians, a Florentine who had been educated by the San Marco Dominicans, also defended Savonarola's memory. In Wittenberg, the hometown of Martin Luther, a statue of Girolamo Savonarola was erected to honour him.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Savonarola's writings
Almost thirty volumes of Savonarola's sermons and writings have so far been published in the Edizione nazionale delle Opere di Girolamo Savonarola (Rome, Angelo Belardetti, 1953 to the present). For editions of the 15th and 16th centuries see Catalogo delle edizioni di Girolamo Savonarola (secc. xv–xvi) ed. P. Scapecchi (Florence, 1998, ISBN 978-888702722-8).
 * Prison Meditations on Psalms 51 and 31 ed. John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. (ISBN 978-0-87462700-8)
 * The Compendium of Revelations in Bernard McGinn ed. Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (New York, 1979, ISBN 978-0-80912242-4)
 * Savonarola A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003, ISBN 978-0-77272020-7)
 * Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola Religion and Politics, 1490–1498 ed. Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-030012904-5)

Music

 * William Byrd used the text of Savonarola's Infelix ego in his work of the same name as part of the Cantiones Sacrae 1591 xxiv–xvi.
 * Charles Villiers Stanford wrote an opera titled Savonarola, which had its premiere in Hamburg on 18 April 1884.
 * Luigi Dallapiccola used text from Savonarola's Meditation on the Psalm My hope is in Thee, O Lord in his 1938 choral work Canti di prigionia.

Fiction

 * Lenau, Nikolaus, Savonarola (poem, 1837)
 * Eliot, George, Romola (novel, 1863)
 * Mann, Thomas, Fiorenza (play, 1909)
 * Herrmann, Bernhard, Savonarola im Feuer (1909)
 * The 1917 story, "'Savonarola' Brown," by Max Beerbohm (published in Seven Men), concerns an aspiring playwright, author of an unfinished, unintentionally absurd retelling of the life of Savonarola. (His four-act play took him nine years to write, is eighteen pages long, and features a romance between Savonarola and Lucrezia Borgia, and also cameos by Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, and St. Francis of Assisi.)
 * Van Wyck, William, Savonarola: A Biography in Dramatic Episodes (1926)
 * Hines and King, Fire of Vanity (play, 1930)
 * Salacrou, Armand, Le terre est ronde (1938)
 * The novel Kámen a bolest ("suffering and the stone") (1942), Karel Schulz's historical novel about the life of Michelangelo, features Savonarola as an important character.
 * Bacon, Wallace A., Savonarola: A Play in Nine Scenes (1950)
 * The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), Irving Stone's novelisation of Michelangelo's life, depicts the events in Florence from the Medici's point of view.
 * The fourth segment of Walerian Borowczyk's 1974 anthology film, Immoral Tales, is set during the reign of Pope Alexander VI. A character called "Friar Hyeronimus Savonarola", played by Philippe Desboeuf, holds a sermon in which he publicly condemns the corruption of the church and the sexual depravity of the papacy. Borowczyk juxtaposes Savonarola's sermon with the Pope enjoying a threesome with his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, and his son, Cesare Borgia. Savonarola is arrested and publicly burned to death.
 * In the 1976 film Network, the network programming executive played by Faye Dunaway refers to crusading reporter Howard Beale as "a magnificent messianic figure, inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times, a strip Savonarola, Monday through Friday".
 * In her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977), Angela Carter describes the preaching leader of an army of god-fearing child soldiers as a "precocious Savonarola".
 * The novel The Palace (1978) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro features Savonarola as the main antagonist of the vampire Saint Germain.
 * The historical fantasy novel The Dragon Waiting (1984) by John M. Ford has Savonarola as one of the antagonists in chapter 3, set in the Medici court.
 * The novel Sabbath's Theater (1995) by Philip Roth makes reference to Savonarola.
 * The novel The Birth of Venus (2003 ) by Sarah Dunant makes extensive references to Savonarola.
 * In episode 7 (2003) of the manga-anime series Gunslinger Girl, two of the protagonists, Jean and Rico, visit Florence. There Savonarola is mentioned among other famous people who lived in the city, while he shares his surname with one of the series antagonists.
 * The novel The Rule of Four (2004) by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason makes extensive references to Savonarola.
 * In the novel I, Mona Lisa (2006) (UK title Painting Mona Lisa) by Jeanne Kalogridis, he is given a negative slant, as the Medicis are portrayed as sympathetic and noble.
 * The novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008) by Salman Rushdie
 * The young adult novel The Smile (2008) by Donna Jo Napoli shows Savonarola as he was observed by a young Mona Lisa.
 * In the novel Wolf Hall (2009) by Hilary Mantel, the Bonfire of the Vanities is brought up in a story by the protagonist, Thomas Cromwell.
 * Savonarola appears as a main assassination target in the videogame Assassin's Creed II (2009).
 * In the novel, The Poet Prince (2010), Kathleen McGowan portrays him as an enemy of the Tuscan people in their pursuit of artistic fame during his reign.
 * Savonarola's life story is explored in the novel Fanatics (2011) by William Bell and his ghost plays an important role in the story.
 * In Showtime's The Borgias, Savonarola is a recurring character in the two first seasons and is portrayed by Steven Berkoff. His burning takes place in the episode The Confession.
 * In the Netflix series Borgia, Savonarola is portrayed by Iain Glen in season 2 (2013).
 * Savonarola is a character in Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill's 2016 play Botticelli in the Fire.
 * In the Rai Fiction series Medici, Savonarola is portrayed by Francesco Montanari in season 2 (2018).
 * The historical fantasy and alternate history novel Lent (2019) by Jo Walton is a retelling of Savonarola's life.

title: Girolamo Savonarola


text:
Wikipedia:Writing better articles/Pay attention to spelling

Supporters of this rule include: Larry Sanger, Mike Dill, drj (articles with good spelling and proper grammar will encourage further contributions of good content), tbc (ditto) (Sloppiness in one aspect of writing can lead to sloppiness in others. Always do your best.), Josh Grosse (spelling would be easily amended by others, but incorrect page names quickly get copied all over the place, making it difficult), AxelBoldt, Koyaanis Qatsi JHK, 24, Eclecticology (perhaps futilely),

Opponents include: GWO (good content is king, other wikipedians easily amend bad spelling), Larry Sanger :-) (I agree with that too), Taw (if mozilla had a spell checker then maybe)

For what it's worth, good spelling is not a simple matter and sometimes the correct spelling can be in doubt. That's related to why Spell Checking programs are next to useless if their results are not checked by a human who knows homonyms. (I just happened to stumble on this page.) deisenbe (talk) 15:19, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Counter-argument: Good content is king, bad spelling is easily amended by other wikipedians. For some people, proper spelling is difficult, and it is a big deal. They shouldn't be scorned by others.

I'm with Josh--within the text of the page, don't obsess about it. But page titles should be checked and doublechecked before saving. -- Lee Daniel Crocker

I would add the words "and grammar" to the title of this page. The whole thing is completely unenforceable, but it's good to remind writers that consistently poor spelling and grammar compromises the credibility of what they write. Eclecticology

There should be automatic support for spell-checking just before saving (or previewing) an article. Can we get an extra "Check spelling" button next to the "Save Page" and "Show preview" buttons please? feature request

Proposal to consolidate advice on writing better articles
At present there are many articles in the Wikipedia namespace that seek to give guidance on how to write better articles. I propose consolidating these into a much smaller number. On User:Jongarrettuk/Better writing guide I propose how these could be consolidated. The proposal is not to change advice, just to consolidate it. If I have inadvertently moved what you consider to be good advice that is currently in the Wikipedia namespace, please re-add it. I'm hope that the proposal to merge all these articles, in principle, will be welcomed. Of course, it may be preferred to have 2, 3 or 4 inter-connected articles than just one and would welcome advice on how this could be done. (In particular, perhaps all the guidance on layout should be spun off into one consolidated article on layout.) I'm also aware that putting lots of different bits of advice together may throw up anomalies or bits that people now disagree with (including bits that I myself disagree with:) ). I ask for support for the consolidation. Once the consolidation has happened, the advice can be changed in the normal way. Please feel free to improve on the current draft consolidation, but don't remove or add advice that is not currently on the Wikipedia namespace. If all goes well, I'll add a new Guide to writing better articles page on the 19th, though maybe some bits of the new article will need to be phased in over a longer period. I'll also take care to preserve all the archived discussion in one place. jguk 19:53, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Wikipedia talk:Do not include the full text of lengthy primary sources

Distinction between short and lengthy
I suggest that there must be numeral limit to say that this quotation is too lengthy. Please discuss. Otherwise some editors say some quotation as long and some of same length as short. Smatrah (talk) 16:17, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Okay.. um...
"Do not include copies of primary sources (specifically: text, maps, artworks and other useful images) in Wikipedia. If it is a large source, consider placing it in Wikisource. Wikibooks Annotated works and Project Gutenberg are other alternatives for pursuing primary source documentation."

Is this seriously saying that, say, an article on Beer Street should not include the artwork being discussed? I'm going to substantially rewrite this to try and get rid of the obvious stupidity =) Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 02:15, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Rework done. Nothing controversial, I trust. Anyway, one last thing left to do: a quick move to a more accurate title:

Move requested
editprotected Actually, I'd like a move - the title seems inappropriate: We can and do quote from primary sources, and very short primary sources, e.g. Jack Sprat can reasonably be quoted in full. It's also misleading, because, with thumbnail software, we can easily include primary source images, and I don't think anyone would want to argue we shouldn't. A better name would be Do not include the full text of lengthy primary sources —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shoemaker's Holiday (talk • contribs) 02:31, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Page is not fully protected. Please note that  is for making a request to EDIT a fully protected page. Requested page moves should be requested at Requested moves. --Lightsup55 ( T | C ) 03:36, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

proposal: exception for law articles?
there are thousands of supreme court cases, and almost every one of them is going to have an article which is going to cite the body textr somewhere off-site, even if that means to Wikisource. However, Wikisource will be inferior to a source like Altlaw, which contains its own version of wikilinks. What I'd really like is for every article on a law case to have an accompanying article containing the opinion text (e.g. at Roe v. Wade/opinion), with the body text full of automatically-generated wikilinks to the cases cited therein. That way, if I'm in the article on "Roe v. Wade", I can 1) transclude individual paragraphs of text (to avoid people from making changes when I want an excerpt in the article) and 2) see "what links here" in the form of other cases. Agradman appreciates civility/makes occasional mistakes 22:15, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

MoS naming style
There is currently an ongoing discussion about the future of this and others MoS naming style. Please consider the issues raised in the discussion and vote if you wish GnevinAWB (talk) 20:51, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

National anthems
I disagree with the part about the national anthems. I believe that the only parts of a national anthem that should be displayed on Wikipedia without question are the ones still commonly recited at public events; i.e., the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner, the standard version of God Save the Queen. Other verses should only be included when the context makes it such that the value of inclusion is greater than the risk of breaking the flow of the article; i.e., in, we quote the standard version off to the side, quote the infamous "rebellious Scots to crush" verse in the article, and the official peace version, and possibly Hickson's version linked to with. Sceptre (talk) 19:27, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Paragraph: Examples of combining Wikipedia and Wikisource
The following examples of specific repositories have been deleted so presumably the section of the paragraph should be deleted too? Are there any "specific repositories" left in Wikisource? Hugo999 (talk) 11:10, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikisource has specific repositories for certain types of primary source texts, such as, for example, constitutions (Wikisource:Wikisource:Constitutional documents) and national anthems (Wikisource:Wikisource:National anthems), which can contain translations of the source text into multiple languages (including translations of the source text from its original language into English).

Question
Is there a corresponding guideline that suggests not copying material from other Wikipedia articles? We have a bunch of election articles for 50 states that copy material from the parent article into the state article, much of which is not necessarily germane for that state. It seems to me that the parent article for the nation should suffice; that the additional comments to actual voting in the state article should confine itself to events actually occurring in that state. e.g. visit from a candidate; fundraising by a candidate; commercials focused on a special interest group in that state (farmers? Union workers?). Anyway, not a mere repeat of the national article. Student7 (talk) 16:28, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Related conversation
There is a conversation at Village Pump (policy) about this policy, Sadads (talk) 12:57, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Should this be a guideline?
This page seems like more of an explanatory supplement to Summary style than a guideline in its own right. Should we change its designation? {{u| Sdkb  }}  talk 22:08, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Ready
open order Bo vcs Vid prvt content private  120.188.93.9 (talk) 20:06, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

 * Open Bo vcs video pribadi content private 120.188.93.9 (talk) 20:08, 10 July 2024 (UTC)


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User:Fccoelho

Flávio Codeço Coelho

I was born in 1969 in the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In 1992, I graduated in Biology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

In 1994, I married Claudia Torres Codeço;

In 1995, I got an MSc degree from the same University (UFRJ) in Biomedical Engineering.

In 1998, Marcos Torres Codeço Coelho, our son, was born.

In 1999, I got a PhD degree in Comparative Animal Physiology from the University of Texas at Arlington, USA

In 2001, I got a job as Associate Professor of Pysiology in Rio de Janeiro State University.

In 2003, I decided to leave the State University for a full time Research Job in Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in the Scientific Computing Program

title: User:Fccoelho


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Wikipedia:Do not include the full text of lengthy primary sources

Wikipedia is not a mirror of public domain or other primary source material. In Wikipedia articles, quotes of any original texts being discussed should be relevant to the discussion (or illustrative of style) and should be kept to an appropriate length.

 * If out of copyright, shorter texts – such as short speeches (the Gettysburg Address), short poems ("Ozymandias"), and short songs (most national anthems) – are usually included in their article. Longer texts are best summarised with the full text placed on Wikisource, or given as an external link.
 * If the work is in copyright, then be careful to limit the amount quoted, do not place it on Wikisource, and only link to websites containing it if they have a right to do so. For instance, a band's official site may contain lyrics or videos for one of their songs; these could be linked to, but we must not link to an unauthorized copy of their video on YouTube, or to a site infringing the copyright on their lyrics.

Fair use of copyrighted primary sources
Fair use allows us to quote short sections from copyrighted primary sources, if relevant to explaining the topic of an article. For instance, we can quote a sentence or two from a movie review in an article on the movie, or quote a small portion of a modern poem in order to illustrate its style. In all such cases, be sure to properly attribute the work to its original author, and state where it was published. When writing an article at Wikipedia about a copyrighted primary source, please follow Wikipedia's Non-free content policy carefully before including quotes from the copyrighted source.

Transwiki to Wikisource: License and copyright
If moving text from Wikipedia to Wikisource, make sure that the work is free of copyright, or appropriately licensed.

For example, older lyrics of "The Internationale" have entered the public domain, but the modern version by Billy Bragg is still copyrighted, so quotes from it would need to be short, relevant, properly credited to Billy Bragg, and could not be used on Wikisource except as part of an appropriately licensed primary text on Bragg. Per Wikisource's inclusion policy, the text discussing Billy Bragg would also have needed to pass through editorial oversight or peer review.


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Economic surplus

In mainstream economics, economic surplus, also known as total welfare or total social welfare or Marshallian surplus (after Alfred Marshall), is either of two related quantities: The sum of consumer and producer surplus is sometimes known as social surplus or total surplus; a decrease in that total from inefficiencies is called deadweight loss.
 * Consumer surplus, or consumers' surplus, is the monetary gain obtained by consumers because they are able to purchase a product for a price that is less than the highest price that they would be willing to pay.
 * Producer surplus, or producers' surplus, is the amount that producers benefit by selling at a market price that is higher than the least that they would be willing to sell for; this is roughly equal to profit (since producers are not normally willing to sell at a loss and are normally indifferent to selling at a break-even price).

Overview
In the mid-19th century, engineer Jules Dupuit first propounded the concept of economic surplus, but it was the economist Alfred Marshall who gave the concept its fame in the field of economics.

On a standard supply and demand diagram, consumer surplus is the area (triangular if the supply and demand curves are linear) above the equilibrium price of the good and below the demand curve. This reflects the fact that consumers would have been willing to buy a single unit of the good at a price higher than the equilibrium price, a second unit at a price below that but still above the equilibrium price, etc., yet they in fact pay just the equilibrium price for each unit they buy.

Likewise, in the supply-demand diagram, producer surplus is the area below the equilibrium price but above the supply curve. This reflects the fact that producers would have been willing to supply the first unit at a price lower than the equilibrium price, the second unit at a price above that but still below the equilibrium price, etc., yet they in fact receive the equilibrium price for all the units they sell.

History
Early writers of economic issues used surplus as a means to draw conclusions about the relationship between production and necessities. In the agricultural sector surplus was an important concept because this sector has the responsibility to feed everyone plus itself. Food is notable because people only need a specific amount of food and can only consume a limited amount. This means that excess food production must overflow to other people, and will not be rationally hoarded. The non-agricultural sector is therefore limited by the agricultural sector equaling the output of food subtracting the amount consumed by the agricultural sector.

William Petty used a broad definition of necessities, leading him to focus on employment issues surrounding surplus. Petty explains a hypothetical example in which there is a territory of 1000 men and 100 of those men are capable of producing enough food for all 1000 men. The question becomes, what will the rest of the men do if only 100 are needed to provide necessities? He thereby suggests a variety of employments with some remaining unemployed.

David Hume approached the agricultural surplus concept from another direction. Hume recognized that agriculture may feed more than those who cultivate it, but questioned why farmers would work to produce more than they need. Forceful production, which may occur under a feudal system, would be unlikely to generate a notable surplus in his opinion. Yet, if they could purchase luxuries and other goods beyond their necessities, they would become incentivized to produce and sell a surplus. Hume did not see this concept as abstract theory, he stated it as a fact when discussing how England developed after the introduction of foreign luxuries in his History of England.

Adam Smith's thoughts on surplus drew on Hume. Smith noted that the desire for luxuries is infinite compared to the finite capacity of hunger. Smith saw the development in Europe as originating from landlords placing more importance on luxury spending rather than political power.

Consumer surplus
Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer is willing to pay more for a unit of a good than the current asking price, they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they would if the price was their maximum willingness to pay. They are receiving the same benefit, the obtainment of the good, at a lesser cost. An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus. The utility of the first few liters of drinking water is very high (as it prevents death), so the first few liters would likely have more consumer surplus than subsequent quantities.

The maximum amount a consumer would be willing to pay for a given quantity of a good is the sum of the maximum price they would pay for the first unit, the (lower) maximum price they would be willing to pay for the second unit, etc. Typically these prices are decreasing; they are given by the individual demand curve, which must be generated by a rational consumer who maximizes utility subject to a budget constraint. Because the demand curve is downward sloping, there is diminishing marginal utility. Diminishing marginal utility means a person receives less additional utility from an additional unit. However, the price of a product is constant for every unit at the equilibrium price. The extra money someone would be willing to pay for the number units of a product less than the equilibrium quantity and at a higher price than the equilibrium price for each of these quantities is the benefit they receive from purchasing these quantities. For a given price the consumer buys the amount for which the consumer surplus is highest. The consumer's surplus is highest at the largest number of units for which, even for the last unit, the maximum willingness to pay is not below the market price.

Consumer surplus can be used as a measurement of social welfare, shown by Robert Willig. For a single price change, consumer surplus can provide an approximation of changes in welfare. With multiple price and/or income changes, however, consumer surplus cannot be used to approximate economic welfare because it is not single-valued anymore. More modern methods are developed later to estimate the welfare effect of price changes using consumer surplus.

The aggregate consumers' surplus is the sum of the consumer's surplus for all individual consumers. This aggregation can be represented graphically, as shown in the above graph of the market demand and supply curves. The aggregate consumers' surplus can also be said to be the maxim of satisfaction a consumer derives from particular goods and services.

Calculation from supply and demand
The consumer surplus (individual or aggregated) is the area under the (individual or aggregated) demand curve and above a horizontal line at the actual price (in the aggregated case, the equilibrium price). If the demand curve is a straight line, the consumer surplus is the area of a triangle:

 * $$CS = \frac{1}{2} Q_{\mathrm{mkt}} \left( P_{\max} - P_{\mathrm{mkt}} \right),$$

where Pmkt is the equilibrium price (where supply equals demand), Qmkt is the total quantity purchased at the equilibrium price, and Pmax is the price at which the quantity purchased would fall to 0 (that is, where the demand curve intercepts the price axis). For more general demand and supply functions, these areas are not triangles but can still be found using integral calculus. Consumer surplus is thus the definite integral of the demand function with respect to price, from the market price to the maximum reservation price (i.e., the price-intercept of the demand function):

 * $$CS = \int^{P_{\max}}_{P_{\mathrm{mkt}}} D(P)\, dP, $$

where $$D(P_{\max}) = 0. $$ This shows that if we see a rise in the equilibrium price and a fall in the equilibrium quantity, then consumer surplus falls.

Calculation of a change in consumer surplus
The change in consumer surplus is used to measure the changes in prices and income. The demand function used to represent an individual's demand for a certain product is essential in determining the effects of a price change. An individual's demand function is a function of the individual's income, the demographic characteristics of the individual, and the vector of commodity prices. When the price of a product changes, the change in consumer surplus is measured as the negative value of the integral from the original actual price (P0) and the new actual price (P1) of the demand for product by the individual. If the change in consumer surplus is positive, the price change is said to have increased the individuals welfare. If the price change in consumer surplus is negative, the price change is said to have decreased the individual's welfare.

Distribution of benefits when price falls
When supply of a good expands, the price falls (assuming the demand curve is downward sloping) and consumer surplus increases. This benefits two groups of people: consumers who were already willing to buy at the initial price benefit from a price reduction, and they may buy more and receive even more consumer surplus; and additional consumers who were unwilling to buy at the initial price will buy at the new price and also receive some consumer surplus.

Consider an example of linear supply and demand curves. For an initial supply curve S0, consumer surplus is the triangle above the line formed by price P0 to the demand line (bounded on the left by the price axis and on the top by the demand line). If supply expands from S0 to S1, the consumers' surplus expands to the triangle above P1 and below the demand line (still bounded by the price axis). The change in consumer's surplus is difference in area between the two triangles, and that is the consumer welfare associated with expansion of supply.

Some people were willing to pay the higher price P0. When the price is reduced, their benefit is the area in the rectangle formed on the top by P0, on the bottom by P1, on the left by the price axis and on the right by line extending vertically upwards from Q0.

The second set of beneficiaries are consumers who buy more, and new consumers, those who will pay the new lower price (P1) but not the higher price (P0). Their additional consumption makes up the difference between Q1 and Q0. Their consumer surplus is the triangle bounded on the left by the line extending vertically upwards from Q0, on the right and top by the demand line, and on the bottom by the line extending horizontally to the right from P1.

Rule of one-half
The rule of one-half estimates the change in consumer surplus for small changes in supply with a constant demand curve. Note that in the special case where the consumer demand curve is linear, consumer surplus is the area of the triangle bounded by the vertical line Q = 0, the horizontal line $$P = P_\mathrm{mkt}$$ and the linear demand curve. Hence, the change in consumer surplus is the area of the trapezoid with i) height equal to the change in price and ii) mid-segment length equal to the average of the ex-post and ex-ante equilibrium quantities. Following the figure above,

 * $$\Delta CS = \frac{1}{2} (Q_1 + Q_0)(P_0 - P_1),$$

where:
 * CS = consumers' surplus;
 * Q0 and Q1 are, respectively, the quantity demanded before and after a change in supply;
 * P0 and P1 are, respectively, the prices before and after a change in supply.

Producer surplus
Producer surplus is the additional benefit that the owners of production factors and product providers bring to producers due to the differences between production, the supply price of the product, and the current market price. The difference between the amount actually obtained in a market transaction and the minimum amount it is willing to accept with the production factors or the products provided.

Calculation of producer surplus
Producer surplus is usually expressed by the area below the market price line and above the supply curve. In Figure 1, the shaded areas below the price line and above the supply curve between production zero and maximum output Q1 indicate producer surplus. Among them, OP1EQ1 below the price line. This indicates that the total revenue is the minimum total payment actually accepted by the manufacturer. The area OPMEQ1 below the S curve is the minimum total revenue that the manufacturer is willing to accept. In Figure 1, the area enclosed by the market price line, the manufacturer's supply line, and the coordinate axis is the producer surplus. Because the rectangle OP1EQ1 is the total revenue actually obtained by the manufacturer, that is, A + B, and the trapezoid OPMEQ. The minimum total profit that the manufacturer is willing to accept, that is, B, so A is the producer surplus.

Obviously, the manufacturer produces and sells a certain quantity of Q1 goods at the market price P1. The manufacturer has reduced the quantity of goods for Q1, which means that the manufacturer has increased the production factors or production costs equivalent to the amount of AVC·Q1. However, at the same time, the manufacturer actually obtains a total income equivalent to the total market price P1·Q1. Since AVC is always smaller than P1, from the production and sales of goods in Q1, manufacturers not only get sales revenue equivalent to variable costs, but also get additional revenue. This part of the excess income reflects the increase in the benefits obtained by the manufacturers through market exchange. Therefore, in economics, producer surplus is usually used to measure producer welfare and is an important part of social welfare.

Producer surplus is usually used to measure the economic welfare obtained by the manufacturer in the market supply. When the supply price is constant, the producer welfare depends on the market price. If the manufacturer can sell the product at the highest price, the welfare is the greatest. As part of social welfare, the size of the producer surplus depends on many factors. Generally speaking, when other factors remain constant, an increase in market price will increase producer surplus, and a decrease in supply price or marginal cost will also increase producer surplus. If there is a surplus of goods, that is, people can only sell part of the goods at market prices, and producer surplus will decrease.

Obviously, the sum of the producer surplus of all manufacturers in the market constitutes the producer surplus of the entire market. Graphically, it should be expressed as the area enclosed by the market supply curve, the market price line and the coordinate axis.

title: Economic surplus


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Longitude rewards

The longitude rewards were the system of inducement prizes offered by the British government for a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship's longitude at sea. The prizes, established through an Act of Parliament (the Longitude Act) in 1714, were administered by the Board of Longitude.

This was by no means the first reward to be offered to solve this problem. Philip II of Spain offered one in 1567, Philip III in 1598 offered 6,000 ducats and a pension, whilst the States General of the Netherlands offered 10,000 florins shortly after. In 1675 Robert Hooke wanted to apply for a £1,000 reward in England for his invention of a spring-regulated watch. However, these large sums were never won, though several people were awarded smaller amounts for significant achievements.

Background: the longitude problem
The measurement of longitude was a problem that came into sharp focus as people began making transoceanic voyages. Determining latitude was relatively easy in that it could be found from the altitude of the sun at noon with the aid of a table giving the sun's declination for the day. For longitude, early ocean navigators had to rely on dead reckoning, based on calculations of the vessel's heading and speed for a given time (much of which was based on intuition on the part of the master and/or navigator). This was inaccurate on long voyages out of sight of land, and these voyages sometimes ended in tragedy. An accurate determination of longitude was also necessary to determine the proper "magnetic declination", that is, the difference between indicated magnetic north and true north, which can differ by up to 10 degrees in the important trade latitudes of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Finding an adequate solution to determining longitude at sea was therefore of paramount importance.

The Longitude Act only addressed the determination of longitude at sea. Determining longitude reasonably accurately on land was possible, from the 17th century onwards, using the Galilean moons of Jupiter as an astronomical 'clock'. The moons were easily observable on land, but numerous attempts to reliably observe them from the deck of a ship resulted in failure.

The need for better navigational accuracy for increasingly longer oceanic voyages had been an issue explored by many European nations for centuries before the passing of the Longitude Act in England in 1714. Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands offered financial incentives for solutions to the problem of longitude as early as 1598.

Addressing the problem of longitude fell, primarily, into three categories: terrestrial, celestial, and mechanical. This included detailed atlases, lunar charts, and timekeeping mechanisms at sea. It is postulated by scholars that the economic gains and political power to be had in oceanic exploration, and not scientific and technological curiosity, is what resulted in the swift passing of the Longitude Act of 1714 and the largest and most famous reward, the Longitude Prize being offered.

Establishing the prizes
In the early 1700s, a series of maritime disasters occurred, including the wrecking of a squadron of naval vessels on the Isles of Scilly in 1707. Around the same time, mathematician Thomas Axe decreed in his will that a £1,000 prize be awarded for promising research into finding "true longitude" and that annual sums be paid to scholars involved in making corrected world maps.

In 1713, when the longitude proposal of William Whiston and Humphrey Ditton was presented at the opening of the session of Parliament, a general understanding of the longitude problem prompted the formation of a parliamentary committee and the swift passing of the Longitude Act on July 8, 1714. Within this act are detailed three prizes based on levels of accuracy, which are the same accuracy requirements used for the Axe prize, set by Whiston and Ditton in their petition, and recommended by Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley to the parliamentary committee.

In addition, rewards were on offer for those who could produce a method that worked within 80 geographical miles of the coast (where ships would be in most danger), and for those with promising ideas who needed financial help to bring them to trial.
 * £10,000 (equivalent to £ in 2020) for a method that could determine longitude within 1 degree (equivalent to 60 nmi at the equator).
 * £15,000 (equivalent to £ in 2020) for a method that could determine longitude within 40 minutes.
 * £20,000 (equivalent to £ in 2020) for a method that could determine longitude within 30 minutes.

Proposed methods would be tested by sailing through the ocean, from Britain to any port in West Indies (about six weeks) without losing its longitude beyond the limits listed above. Also, the contender would be required to demonstrate the accuracy of their method by determining the longitude of a specific land-based feature whose longitude was already accurately known. The parliamentary committee also established the Board of Longitude. This panel of adjudicators would review proposed solutions and were also given authority to grant up to £2,000 in advances for promising projects that did not entirely fulfill the terms of the prize levels, but that were still found worthy of encouragement. The exact terms of the requirements for the prizes would later be contended by several recipients, including John Harrison. Ultimately, the £20,000 reward was not awarded to anyone in a lump sum, although John Harrison did receive a series of payments totaling £23,065. The Board of Longitude remained in existence for more than 100 years. When it was officially disbanded in 1828, an excess of £100,000 had been disbursed.

Notable recipients
The Longitude Act offered a very large incentive for solutions to the longitude problem. Some later recipients of rewards, such as Euler and Mayer, made clear publicly that the money was not the incentive, but instead the important improvements to navigation and cartography. Other recipients, such as Kendall and Harrison had to appeal to the Board of Longitude and other governmental officials for adequate compensation for their work. Still others submitted radical and impractical theories, some of which can be seen in a collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Schemes and ideas for improvements to instruments and astronomy, both practical and impractical, can be seen among the digitised archives of the Board of Longitude.

Though the Board of Longitude did not award £20,000 at one time, they did offer sums to various individuals in recognition of their work for improvements in instrumentation or in published atlases and star charts.

List of awardees by amount

 * John Harrison – £23,065 awarded overall after many years of contention with the Board.
 * Thomas Mudge – £500 advance in 1777 for developing his marine timekeeper and a £3,000 award approved by a special committee in 1793 in recognition for his accomplishments.
 * Tobias Mayer – £3,000 awarded to his widow for lunar distance tables, which were published in The National Almanac in 1766 and used by James Cook in his voyages.
 * Thomas Earnshaw – £3,000 awarded for years of design and improvements made to chronometers.
 * Charles Mason – £1,317 awarded for various contributions and improvements on Mayer’s lunar tables.
 * Larcum Kendall – £800 total for his copy of and improvements and simplifications of Harrison’s sea watch (£500 for K1 – Kendall’s copy of Harrison’s H4, £200 for modified K2, and £100 for last modification model K3).
 * Jesse Ramsden – £615 awarded for his engine-divided sextant with the requirement that he share his methods and the design with other instrument makers.
 * John Arnold – £300 awarded in increments to improve his timekeeping design and experiments, though the accuracy required for the prize was never met.
 * Leonhard Euler – £300 awarded for contributions to the lunar distance method in aid of Mayer.
 * Nathaniel Davies – £300 awarded for the design of a lunar telescope for Mayer.

A full list of prizes made by the Commissioners and Board of Longitude was drawn up by Derek Howse, in an Appendix to his article on the finances of the Board of Longitude.

Other submissions
Only two women are known to have submitted proposals to the Longitude Commissioners, Elizabeth Johnson and Jane Squire. Incoming submissions can be found among the correspondence of the digitised papers of the Board of Longitude.

John Harrison's contested reward
The winner of the most reward money under the Longitude Act is John Harrison for sea timekeepers, including his H4 sea watch. Harrison was 21 years old when the Longitude Act was passed. He spent the next 45 years perfecting the design of his timekeepers. He first received a reward from the Commissioners of Longitude in 1737 and did not receive his final payment until he was 80.

Harrison was first awarded £250 in 1737, in order to improve on his promising H1 sea clock, leading to the construction of H2. £2,000 was rewarded over the span of 1741–1755 for continued construction and completion of H2 and H3. From 1760 to 1765, Harrison received £2,865 for various expenses related to the construction, ocean trials, and eventual award for the performance of his sea watch H4. Despite the performance of the H4 exceeding the accuracy requirement of the highest reward possible in the original Longitude Act, Harrison was rewarded £7,500 (that is, £10,000 minus payments he had received in 1762 and 1764) once he had revealed the method of making his device, and was told that he must show that his single machine could be replicated before the final £10,000 could be paid.

Harrison made one rather than the requested two further copies of H4, and he and his family members eventually appealed to King George III after petitions for further rewards were not answered by the Board of Longitude. A reward of £8,750 was granted by Parliament in 1773 for a total payment of £23,065 spanning thirty-six years.

In popular culture

 * Rupert T. Gould's 1923 The Marine Chronometer (ISBN 0907462057) is a thorough reference work on the marine chronometer. It covers the chronometer's history from the earliest attempts to measure longitude, while including detailed discussions and illustrations of the various mechanisms and their inventors.
 * Dava Sobel's 1996 bestseller Longitude (ISBN 0-14-025879-5) recounts Harrison's story. A film adaptation of Longitude was released by Granada Productions and A&E in 2000, starring Michael Gambon as Harrison and Jeremy Irons as Rupert Gould.
 * The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco.
 * Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift.

title: Longitude rewards


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Talk:Longitude rewards

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Untitled
''He used very accurate clocks and measurements of the height of the sun. However, the Longitude Board set up to administer the prize refused to beleive that longitude could be determined without astronomical measures.''
 * How are "measurements of the height of the sun" not "astronomical measures"? (Furthermore, how does that help when you're in fog and can't measure the sun?) Brion VIBBER
 * Maybe because measuring the height of the sun was everyday work on a ship while measuring the positions of the moon and various stars, the unsuccessful longitude method, was normally only done in observatories. About the fog, though? Perhaps fog isn't normal at noon at sea when the measurement was made. And having an accurate measurement every few days would be better than never having one until you reached land.--rmhermen
 * I was under the impression that measurements of the positions of fixed stars was already the standard method for determining latitude, so would be a quite normal shipboard activity. Would anyone have bothered to measure the height of the sun on a ship prior to finding it useful in determining longitude? Nonetheless, the crux of the matter is that as far as I know the sun is an astronomical object, and I'm confused by the apparent distinction between "measurements of the... sun" and "astronomical measurements". If the sun doesn't count, what does "astronomical measurements" mean? The moon? The planets? Just fixed stars?

 * As far as fog; the article is unclear on whether there was no way at all to measure longitude prior to this particular invention, or no way to do so when encountering fog; the problem is introduced couched in terms of fog reducing visibility, which would obviously also reduce the ability to take "astronomical measures". I would have expected e.g. the rising times of fixed stars at a known latitude to be an obvious way to measure longitude, once you get clocks involved, though of course this wouldn't be doable with fog blocking the stars. Is that the point? Brion VIBBER

- The National Maritime Museum/Royal Observatory at Greenwich website refers to the Longitude Prize, with to capital letters like the Nobel Prize. Is this normal? Why did we move it to Longitude prize? --rmhermen

I could go either way, I suppose. It was a unique event, and therefore is something like a title. The operative question is this: will it be used in running text without capitalizing? In other words, would one prefer to write "When Harrison won the longitude prize in..." or would one write "When Harrison won the Longitude Prize in...". If the latter, then it's OK to leave the title capitalized. I think the former reads a little better though. -- Lee Daniel Crocker

Galileo first observed the moons of Jupiter 1610, see "Great Physicists:The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking by William Cropper". It would seem then that "16th Century" should be changed to 17th century AppealToReason (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

History info removed - new history of longitude article used.
I've removed a lot of stuff on the history, since it was not consistent with the redundant history info on similar pages. A new article, History of longitude is an amalgam of the various other articles' history sections with some cleanup.

This article should concentrate on the specifics of the prize. --Michael Daly 17:40, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Prize value. New competition
How much are the total prize amount and individual awards worth in today's (or some date's money? How does the £1 million prize in David Cameron's new | "Longitude" challenge compare? 78.149.25.6 (talk) 13:42, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Prize, reward or rewards
If one looks back at the 18th century bills they do indeed refer to a reward rather than a prize. The habit of calling it a prize may date from the enormous popularity of Dava Sobel's book which almost always uses the word prize rather than reward. So I'm happy with changing the name of the article. Having done that, I think one can stop using the word "anachronism" or redundant phrases like "inducement prize awards". The words are very close in meaning. One advantage of the Move procedure is that all of the above phrases now point to this article. Chris55 (talk) 08:40, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

 * For the record, this is the recently-added sentence that Chris55 has principally removed (diff), per the above:
 * "(The term Longitude prize is anachronistic: the rewards were never described as a 'prize' in the 18th century, and the Act in fact offered a range of sums depending on the accuracy achieved.)"

 * Use of the term "Longitude prize" was one of the things the curators at the National Maritime Museum particularly highlighted their discomfort with, when we went along for an expert-review editathon session on Wednesday. Yes the article does now consistently use the word "rewards" rather than "prize".  But given the entrenchment of the phrase "Longitude prize" in the consciousness, I do think there is a case for explaining at least somewhere in the article (either in the main text, or in a footnote) why the article is instead talking about "rewards" rather than a prize.  ( ?)  But having offered the change, I am happy to let others make the final call.  Jheald (talk) 06:55, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

 * ah, I wondered about the flurry of activity.:) I'm happy about restoring a reference to Rebekah's blog if you want. The acts use the singular not plural but I'm easy on that. I was looking at some of the other issues in the article. e.g. She points out that the total was about about £52,000 not £100,000 as stated and we should probably nuance the statement that the award wasn't awarded. Most of the discussion is in the History of longitude article so doesn't need to be repeated here. Chris55 (talk) 08:00, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

title: Talk:Longitude rewards