[9] As to the education of the Florentine common people in the fourteenth century cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203–204; Symonds, Age of the Despots, p. 202. [↑]
[10] Cp. Armstrong, as cited, pp. 150–51. [↑]
[11] McCrie, Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 28–30, 41. [↑]
[13] Id. p. 45, citing Reynald’s Annales, ad. ann. 1530; Trechsel, Lelio Sozzini und die Anti-trinitarier seiner Zeit, 1844, pp. 19–35. [↑]
[14] McCrie reasons otherwise, from the fact that the sack of Rome was by many Catholics regarded as a divine judgment on the papacy; but he omits to mention the pestilence which followed and destroyed the bulk of the conquering army (Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 390). [↑]
[18] Id. pp. 89, 98, 215. McCrie thinks it useful to suggest (p. 95) that anti-trinitarianism seems to have begun at Siena, “whose inhabitants were proverbial among their countrymen for levity and inconstancy of mind”—citing Dante, Inferno, canto xxix, 121–23. Thus does theology illumine sociology. In a note on the same page the historian cites the testimony of Melanchthon (Epist. coll. 852, 941) as to the commonness of “Platonic and skeptical theories” among his Italian correspondents in general; and quotes further the words of Calvin, who for once rises above invective to explain as to heresy (Opera, viii, 510) that “In Italis, propter rarum acumen, magis eminet.” The historian omits, further, to trace German Unitarianism to the levity of a particular community in Germany. [↑]