From the last decades of the fourteenth century to the first part of the sixteenth, preaching acquired a central role within the religious, social and political life of Western Europe. Both chronicles and regulatory documents attest that from the first decades of the fourteenth century onwards there was a growing and deliberate intervention by the Observant friars in the mechanisms of reform of city statutes. The displays which accompanied the friar's controversial regime exhibited a marked theatricality, ranging from processions of devoted 'boys' in the streets to the 'bonfires of the vanities' in the piazzas. The events surrounding the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola da Ferrara crystallised many of the characteristics and contradictions of popular preaching during the Italian Renaissance. The preaching phenomenon had particular characteristics within the Italian peninsula, due to the close ties between the Christian renewal of society and the establishment of papal power in its territories.