My friend, mentor and colleague Donald Weinstein, who has died aged 89, was an influential historian of the Italian Renaissance. Among other things, he was responsible for a masterly book, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (1970), which is still a must-read for scholars and students in the field. The book looked at the life of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and shed new light on the relationship between religion, politics and civic engagement.
Son of Harris Weinstein, a tailor, and Rose (nee Shaywitz), who had also worked in the garment trade, Donald was born in Rochester, New York, and went to Benjamin Franklin high school there. Aged 18, he fought in Europe during the second world war, winning a bronze star for “heroic achievement”. Afterwards he studied at the University of Chicago, and in 1957 he obtained a PhD on Savonarola from the University of Iowa.
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