Regola del governo di cura familiare (Rule for Family Care)
Catalogue updated 2026-06-08
Full Sub Rosa translationRead the full translationOpen reader →Open the chapter reader with the full English translation, source text, notes, and scripture echoes.What is Regola del governo di cura familiare (Rule for Family Care)?
Giovanni Dominici's vernacular manual for the Christian family, written in Florence between 1400 and 1405, outlines how to raise children in faith through exposure to devotional images, scripture, and the Psalter from infancy. Dominici was a Florentine Dominican (c.
Abbi dipinture in casa di santi fanciulli o di vergini giovani, nelle quali il tuo bambino ancora in fascie si diletti.
Our renderingHave paintings in the house of holy little boys or young virgins, in which your child, still in swaddling clothes, may delight.
What it is
Giovanni Dominici's vernacular manual for the Christian family, written in Florence between 1400 and 1405, outlines how to raise children in faith through exposure to devotional images, scripture, and the Psalter from infancy. Dominici was a Florentine Dominican (c. 1356–1419/20) working in the orbit of the same religious houses patronized by the early Medici, and Renaissance scholarship associates the text with Medici-era childrearing practices, particularly in the context of Clarice Orsini's insistence on traditional religious instruction for the young Giovanni de' Medici. The connection to the Medici household is circumstantial rather than directly documented: no primary source confirms that the Medici read or owned this specific text, though it circulated among devout Florentine households of the period. Its scope is practical and pastoral rather than speculative.
Why it still matters
Its practical chapters on using sacred images, stories, and prayers to form young children translate naturally into modern family devotion — particularly its advice to make the home a visual and narrative environment of faith from the earliest age.
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Kept alongside
The Imitation of Christ
De Imitatione Christi
Written by Thomas à Kempis in the Netherlands in the circle of the Brethren of the Common Life — the same Devotio Moderna movement that directly shaped Margaret of York's documented devotional practice and the piety of Isabella of Portugal at the Burgundian court — the Imitation became the most copied vernacular religious text in 15th-century Europe, circulating in thousands of manuscripts and hundreds of early printed editions. Its four books move from the vanity of worldly learning through conformity to Christ, inward consolation, and finally the sacrament of the Eucharist, forming a complete program of interior conversion. No specific ducal inventory copy has been identified linking this text to Valois-Burgundy by name, but its presence in court circles of this era and region is established through movement history rather than document. It remains the second most widely read Christian book after the Bible.
Prison Meditations on Psalms 51 and 31
Savonarola composed these meditations on Psalm 51 (Miserere, known as 'Infelix ego') and Psalm 31 (In te, Domine, speravi) in Latin while imprisoned in the Palazzo della Signoria in 1498 awaiting trial and execution, his right hand temporarily spared from further torture so he could sign his confession. Approximately 15 Italian editions appeared by 1500, making them among the most rapidly disseminated devotional texts of the early print era and ensuring pan-European reach within a decade. Savonarola had preached at San Marco — the monastery Cosimo de' Medici built and patronized — from 1482 and was the friar summoned to Lorenzo de' Medici's deathbed in 1492, giving these works an indirect but real connection to the Medici devotional world. The Miserere meditation (Infelix ego) became one of the most reprinted Latin spiritual texts of the sixteenth century.
Infelix ego (Meditation on Psalm 51 / Miserere)
Infelix ego, omnium auxilio destitutus
A profound Latin meditation on Psalm 51 (Miserere) composed in his Florentine prison cell by the Dominican friar Savonarola shortly before his execution on 23 May 1498. Despite being the Medici's principal political opponent, his text circulated in fifteen Italian editions by 1500 in the very city where Giovanni de' Medici (future Leo X) and Giulio de' Medici (future Clement VII) were formed; Martin Luther endorsed it in 1523. Josquin des Prez, Cipriano de Rore, and William Byrd set versions to polyphony, securing its place across a century of European devotional music. Its connection to Medici piety is environmental rather than by commission or documented use.