Bernardo Lecture Series – serie

Examines the preservation of the integrity of humanity through literature in the hells described by Dante in his Inferno and by Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz."Songs Beyond Mankind: Poetry and the Lager from Dante to Primo Levi" is the eighteenth in a series of publications occasioned by the annual Bernardo Lecture at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University. This series offers public lectures that have been given by distinguished medieval and Renaissance scholars on topics and figures representative of these two important historical, religious, and intellectual periods.Professor Pertile's lecture, "Songs Beyond Mankind," asks whether there is a degree of suffering and degradation beyond which a man or woman ceases to be a human being, a point beyond which our soul dies and what survives is pure physiology. And, if yes, to what extent may literature be capable of preserving our humanity in the face of unspeakable pain? These are some of the issues that this lecture addresses by considering two systems of suffering, the hells described by Dante in his Inferno and Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz.

Examines the interplay between reading and writing in the works of Petrarch and Dante.Building upon his 2008 book Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, Albert Russell Ascoli here reflects on the extent to which Petrarch's addresses to and figurations of his relationship to his readers intersect with the oft-asserted "modernity" of his authorial stances. In particular, Ascoli argues that following in the wake of Dante's double staging of himself as reader of his own works (especially in the Vita Nuova), Petrarch shows a keen and probing awareness of how the process of poetic signification involves a continual interchange between author and reader, as well as a strong desire to control the nature of that interchange as much as he can. Ascoli asserts that between Dante and Petrarch two primary-and contradictory-features of literary modernity can be identified: the affirmation of the preeminence of authorial intention and the foregrounding of readerly freedom of interpretation.The Aldo S. Bernardo Lecture Series in the Humanities honors Professor Emeritus Aldo S. Bernardo, his scholarship in medieval Italian literature, and his service to Binghamton University as Professor of Romance Languages and University Distinguished Service Professor. The Bernardo Lecture Series is endowed by the Bernardo Fund and administered by Binghamton University's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS), which Professor Bernardo cofounded and codirected with Professor Bernard Huppé from 1966 to 1973. The series offers annual lectures by distinguished scholars on topics related to Professor Bernardo's primary fields of interest-medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, with a particular focus on Dante Studies, and intellectual history.

Dante as protector and purifier of the Church.Readers of the Commedia are familiar with Dante's severe judgment of contemporary popes. The attacks are explicable as part of Dante's strategy of defending the Church itself, which the poet saw as imperiled by papal avarice and political ambition. From the reference to the biblical punishment of Uzzah for touching the Ark of the Covenant in Epistola XI, urging Italian cardinals at the 1314 conclave to elect a Pope favorable to Rome, we know that Dante anticipated accusations of meddling in Church affairs. And meddle he did: the representations in the poem of the Church, in guises both historical and typological (Ark of the Covenant, Temple, Bride of Christ, etc.) comprise an ambitious program by which Dante identifies with the role of protector and purifier of the Church, modeled chiefly on scriptural episodes of Christ cleansing the Temple, long used within the Church itself in order to spur anti-simoniacal reform. A series of passages in the second half of Paradiso (Cantos 15-16, 18, 22, 27) elaborate Dante's investment in this role, one that is repeatedly linked to the poet's condition as an exile.

Explores the nature and significance of Petrarch's indebtedness to Dante in the Rime sparse.Dante and Petrarch: The Earthly Paradise Revisited is the seventh 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.The nature and significance of Petrarch's indebtedness to Dante in the Rime sparse, Sara Sturm-Maddox argues, is revealed not only in the many individual poems or isolated echoes disclosed by recent studies. Here it is explored in a strategically placed sequence of poems, the well-known canzoni 125-127. In each of them we find the reinscription of elements drawn from the scene of Dante's encounter with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. Read together, these poems constitute a rewriting of the episode in the Purgatorio that affords insight into the nature of Petrarch's rivalry with his unacknowledged master. The contrasts that emerge between the scenes as written by Dante and by Petrarch, moreover, have far-reaching implications from the reading of the poet's story in the Rime sparse as a whole.

Argues that critical comments appended to early printed editions of Petrarch's Rime sparse inflected the reception and understanding of Petrarch's vernacular poetry in Renaissance Europe.Totems for Defense and Illustration of Taboo: Sites of Petrarchism in Renaissance Europe is the eighth 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.Critical comments appended to early printed editions of Petrarch's Rime sparse, Kennedy argues, inflected the reception and understanding of Petrarch's vernacular poetry in Renaissance Europe. Through their critical intervention one particular focus of the poetry-the author's expression of his specifically Italian social, cultural, and political identity-came to acquire a protonationalist value for his later readership. Consequently the Petrarchan sonnet, the most widespread vernacular literacy mode in elite circles of sixteenth century Europe, became a site for early expressions of national sentiment and convictions about the formation of national cultures. This paper explores how Du Bellay and the Pleiade poets in France, and Philip Sindey and his niece Mary Wroth in England expressed conflicts between their wishes to project a broad vision of emergent national identities on the one hand and their compulsions to protect the specific interests of their own social classes on the other.

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.

Addresses the implications of a document found in the Archivio di Stato di Siena which affirms a connection between Farinata degli Uberti, a Florentine conspicuously encountered by Dante the pilgrim in Inferno 10, and the Sienese Ghibellines with whom he and his fellow Florentine Ghibellines joined, in an alliance which produced the Sienese victory at the battle of Montaperti in 1260.Dante From Two Perspectives: The Sienese Connection is the 15th 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.In Dante From Two Perspectives, Cook and Herzman start from the perspective provided by several decades of collaboration in which they have combined the two disciplines of History and Literature in their teaching and writing about Dante, and the perspective that several decades of living, studying, and teaching in Siena have given to their understanding of Dante and the Commedia. They attempt to deal in a formal way with the implications of a document found in the Archivio di Stato di Siena which affirms a connection between Farinata degli Uberti, a Florentine conspicuously encountered by Dante the pilgrim in Inferno 10, and the Sienese Ghibellines with whom he and his fellow Florentine Ghibellines joined, in an alliance which produced the Sienese victory at the battle of Montaperti in 1260.

In Boccacio's Decameron, Cervigni sees a parodic echo of the circles of Dante's Divine Comedy, and asks whether Bocaccio envisions the voyage of the brigata as similar to Dante the Pilgrim's journey toward the center, first the abysmal center of Lucifer, then towards the highest center, God.From Divine to Human is the sixteenth 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.