Professor Robert Edwards, an American Visitor in 1997, describes Professor Boyde’s Public Lectures on Florentine Narrative Art to his colleagues in the University of Pennsylvania

Patrick Boyde, who holds the professorship in Italian literature at Cambridge, offers a series of lectures every Michaelmas term. Last year his topic was Siena; this time it’s Florence. For a Dantista to talk about Florence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is hardly surprising, I admit. And it’s only slightly less surprising that he should organize his remarks around Italian art from those periods. Two items do, however, make an impression on an Institute Director on leave and therefore simultaneously at liberty and on the job as a part-time cultural tourist.

First of all, there is an element of sheer virtuosity in Boyde’s project. His introductory lecture ranged from the factional logic written into the Florentine constitution to domestic life to the intricate balance of leisure, arrogance, and industry that produced civic high culture. The second lecture used the images of Giotto’s art to trace the tensions between visionary reform and managerial acumen in Francis of Assisi.

What especially fascinates me, though, is the quality of public event, performance, and civic ritual in Boyde’s lectures. “Get there by four-thirty,” advised a colleague at Clare Hall, where I am spending the year as a Visiting Fellow. “The place fills up quickly, and people will be sitting in the aisles.” It did—and they were, fire codes being somewhat more elastic in a country that severely limits recourse to civil litigation. The place in question is the Babbage Theatre, already filled with 500 people a quarter hour before Boyde’s 5 p.m. starting time. (He is impeccably punctual—on stage at 5 p.m., heading out the door and to a neighboring pub on the stroke of 6.)

Students are not the clear majority in the audience. Instead, it’s a blend of ages and occupations—a demographic mix to be found only in the dreams of public television executives and the social visionaries of cyberspace. Why, exactly, are they here, I wonder, while Boyde shows a miniature of the walled city: two groups of armed men menace each other with swords across a dwarf version of the Baptistry, the symbols of spiritual and temporal power, in an icon of factional politics.

Surely, the construction of the lectures, set out in carefully apportioned six to ten-minute sections, gives a shape and rhythm to the performance. Boyde has a confident rapport with his audience, reassuring them that everyone can indeed puzzle out the passages from Dante and Bruni that he throws on the screen as a kind of punctuation for the images. It is masterful teaching.

After the lecture, over beer in a pub beside the river, I put the question to Boyde. He is still charged with the energy of his performance and glad to have some conversation while winding down. The lectures grew out of department talks and took on a life of their own. Cambridge is full of Italophiles, he explains, but it’s not just that Florence is a glorious topic; it is a topic that continues to matter because of what comes out of it—great art and poetry, compelling ideas, civic identity, the dynamics of social change.

My own answer is a bit different from his. Boyde has a various yet savvy audience; they already know the master narrative of Renaissance humanism, and value and challenge it. I think they come out of a curiosity that is also a form of respect. They want to know how will he do it, how will one of their best scholars put the pieces together, not in the study but on stage, in the agon of spectacle?

On the way back to Clare Hall, past the shadows of the colleges in my new, temporary, Victorian neighborhood, I decide my query is wrong-headed after all. The question I really want to raise is directed to myself. What does this event mean? What can it tell us about the ways we pursue creative and intellectual work in the university?