Description 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). 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 intellectual engagement with a public beyond the walls of our own specialties, and even beyond the walls of the academy, was long a commonplace and significant part of our work as professors and writers in the humanities. In reconceptualizing our place 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 our work to that sphere of public intellectual conversations of which it was once a part.              Maria Rosa Menocal received her Ph.D. in Romance Philology in 1979 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught before joining the faculty at Yale University. She is the author of a number of books on a range of comparative medieval literary and cultural topics, and the editor of the recent Literature of Al-Andalus volume in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series. Currently she is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of Special Programs in the Humanities at Yale, and her most recent work, A First-Rate Place, is in press with Little, Brown, a non-academic book on the cultural history of medieval Spain.