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Argues that academics' intellectual engagement with a public beyond the walls of their own specialties, and even beyond the walls of the academy, was long a commonplace and significant part of the work of professors and writers in the humanities.Writing Without Footnotes: The Role of the Medievalist in Contemporary Intellectual Life is the tenth in a series of publications occasioned by the annual Bernardo Lecture at the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University. This series offers public lectures which have been given by distinguished medieval and Renaissance scholars on topics and figures representative of these two important historical, religious, and intellectual periods.Writing Without Footnotes argues that academics' intellectual engagement with a public beyond the walls of their own specialties, and even beyond the walls of the academy, was long a commonplace and significant part of the work of professors and writers in the humanities. In reconceptualizing the place of professors in the academy, a task called for by the variety of crises that threaten to make of literary studies a small and insular corner of that academy, it seems imperative to consider the principally negative effect of specializations that have followed the contours of national aspirations and national languages, as well as to critical language which excludes all but fellow specialists. Medievalists, in particular, with so much material that echoes so richly with contemporary concerns, have a special opportunity to lead the way in returning the work to that sphere of public intellectual conversations of which it was once a part.

Explores Dante's love of books.Victoria Kirkham's Dante the Book Glutton, or, Food for Thought from Italian Poets is the twelfth in a series of publications occasioned by the annual Bernardo Lecture at the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University. This series offers public lectures which have been given by distinguished medieval and Renaissance scholars on topics and figures representative of these two important historical, religious, and intellectual periods.Boccaccio's Little Treatise in Praise of Dante (ca. 1350) documents his subject's love of learning with a story about how he went to Siena to see a book, then sat reading it all day with such absorption outside a shop on the piazza that he failed to notice the noise from Palio festivities going on all around him. In mid-fifteenth century, the humanist Manetti repeats this anecdote in his Vita of Dante, adding that like Cicero's Cato, the poet could be called "a book glutton" ("helluo libri"). The image of Dante as a book gobbler belongs to a rich western tradition that runs from Ezechiel, St. John on Patmos, and Plato's Symposium via Augustine, Macrobius, Petrarch, and Dante himself, down into modern Italian fiction by Umberto Eco. The idea has visual counterparts in the typology of the author portrait, which depicts writers with their books from late antique models to medieval Gospels and secular Renaissance manuscripts. Most literary speak only of reading and "digesting" without pushing the metaphor to its logical conclusion. Martianus Capella (5th c.), however, imagines Lady Philology vomiting up books before her apotheosis as Mercury's bride. Commemorative statuary of a type known humorously in Italian as the "caccalibri" [book pooper] completes the intellectual food cycle in another way, showing books streaming from behind Niccoló Tommaseo in Piazza Santo Stefano at Venice, and Benjamin Franklin on College Green at the University of Pennsylvania. John Crowe Ransome's amusing poem, "Survey of Literature," caps this illustrated history of literature as food for thought.

Addresses Jacoff's own discomfort with Dante's reiteration of the deicide charge against the Jews in Paradiso 7 and elsewhere.Rachel Jacoff's Dante and the Jewish Question is the thirteenth in a series of publications occasioned by the annual Bernardo Lecture at the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University. This series offers public lectures which have been given by distinguished medieval and Renaissance scholars on topics and figures representative of these two important historical, religious, and intellectual periods.Dante and the Jewish Question begins with recent expressions of discomfort that two distinguished medievalists have noted in their relationship to texts that are at once beloved but also pernicious in their propagation of misogynistic and anti-Semitic clichés. This essay addresses Jacoff's own discomfort with Dante's reiteration of the deicide charge against the Jews in Paradiso 7 and elsewhere. It explores Dante's divergence from his major source, St. Anselm's own complex relationship of the medieval Church to the Jews in the thirteenth century and some of the theories that have been proposed by historians for the increasing sense of danger the Church manifests in this period. It concludes with a discussion of the issues at state in teaching such issues and their pertinence to our own historical moment.