Description Desire and Death, or Francesca and Guido Cavalcanti: Inferno 5 in its Lyric Context is the ninth in a series of publications occasioned by the annual Bernardo Lecture at the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (CEMERS). 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 this essay Barolini explores the lyric context of Inferno 5, paying particular attention to how Italian lyric poets like Giacomo da Lentini, Guido delle Colonne, Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante himself had framed the issue of desire insufficiently controlled by reason. Pointing to Cavalcanti’s “che la ‘ntenzione per ragione vale” (from “Donna me prega”) as the intertext of Dante’s “che la region sommettono al talento” (Inferno 5.39), Barolini reads “Inferno” 5 as a response to Cavalcanti. Moreover, by looking at the views of love evidenced in Dante’s own lyrics (e.g. “Lo doloroso amor,” the “rime petrose,” “Io sono stato con Amore insieme,” “Amor, d ache convien pur ch’ io mi doglia,” and “Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire”), the essay reconstructs the complex and arduous ideological pathway that Dante traversed the reach Inferno 5.               Teodolinda Barolini is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian and Chair of the Department of Italian at Columbia University. Currently President of the Dante Society of America, she is the author of Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton, 1984) and The Undivine ‘Comedy’: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton 1992), to be published in Italy by Feltrinelli. Her interests include time and language (see “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’”, MLN 104 [1989]: 1-38), and issues of gender, see ‘”Le parole son donne e I fatti son maschi’: Toward a sexual Poetics of the Decameron” (Studi sul Boccaccio 21 [1993]: 175-197) and the essay that is in many ways the counterpart of the Bernardo lecture, “Dante and Francesca de Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender” (Speculum 116 [2000]: 1-28). Barolini is currently working on an edition and commentary of Dante’s Rimi Sparse for the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli.