Tamar Herzig (born 1975) is an Israeli historian of Early Modern Europe who specializes in religious, social, minorities, and gender history, with a focus on Renaissance Italy.
She wrote extensively on the Italian Renaissance, the Roman Inquisition, Catholic reform movements, heresy, monastic life, religious conversion, witchcraft, mysticism, and the history of sexuality.
The research traces how the role that women played in the spread of Savonarola’s ideology and the initial formation of his cult was erased from the histories of the Savonarolan movement after the Council of Trent and the rise of new ideals of female religiosity.
In her second book “Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman” (2013),[14][15] Herzig investigates the fascination expressed by Alsatian Dominican witch-hunter Heinrich Kramer (Institoris), a highly misogynistic inquisitor, for the somatic spirituality of Lucia Brocadelli da Narni and several other Italian ‘living saints’.
The book reveals the connection between the characterization of diabolic witchcraft as a feminine practice and the spread of the fame of sanctity of pious Italian women mystics to other parts of Europe.
Herzig argues that the connection was closely related to severe concerns regarding dissenting religious groups led by heterodox male thinkers, such as the Hussite sub-sects that proliferated in Bohemia and Moravia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as to the growing fear of the rival religions, namely Judaism and Islam.
[18] “A Convert's Tale” is a Microhistoric study of the life of Salomone da Sesso/Ercole de’ Fedeli, one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance, who in 1491 was compelled to accept baptism.
The book explores questions of religious identity, the policing of sexuality, social mobility, and their interplay with artistic patronage, aesthetic creativity, and the material culture that became a hallmark of Italian courts during the High Renaissance.