Hello everyone! David’s new book, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook, launches today! Here’s an excerpt, focusing on my modern medieval origin story, the day that 13th-century Italy suddenly had a news cycle.

I woke up to the news [the Pope Benedict was retiring] on Monday morning in Chicago, a few hours after the revelation in Rome earlier that day. I made coffee and breakfast for my kids and sat at the table with them—Nico (then six) eating Honey Nut Cheerios and Eli (three) eating, I think, Frosted Mini-Wheats—to read the news. I started scrolling first on my phone, then grabbed my laptop and read the initial stories a little more closely. Suddenly, I got a specific kind of “academic mad.” Someone was wrong on the internet!

This type of anger is the response for a lot of us whenever a news story is related to our subject expertise and the re-porting is just not quite right. In this case, reporters at major news outlets, caught off guard, had quickly grabbed a few historical facts to contextualize the resignation, each citing Gregory XII (1406–1415) as the most recent previous pope to resign. Yes, he was; but as every medievalist knew, his resignation was not a comparable event to the current one because Gregory reigned at a moment when there were three popes, and his resignation was part of a negotiated settlement intended to end the schism and restore unity to the church. The much better analogy was Pope St. Celestine V, an old hermit more or less forced into the papacy, who re-signed in 1294 in hopes of going back to his mountaintop. (He didn’t get to go home. That’s a different and, honestly, sad story.) As an expert in thirteenth-century Italy, I was genuinely irritated to see the fifteenth century getting all the media coverage.

On Facebook, the historian George Ferzoco, who had literally written the book on Celestine, started posting about the two resignations. Another historian, Louisa Burnham, shared a news story from 2010 about Benedict’s two visits to Celestine’s tomb. I joined in with my own unhinged ranting, then posted the relevant canon law, written by Celestine’s chief lawyer and future successor (and jailor), outlining the legal right of the pope to retire. My “friends” in the thread urged me to pitch an op-ed about it. Ridiculous, I thought. No one but medievalists cared that the thirteenth-century precedent was superior to the fifteenth-century precedent.

On the Facebook thread, I wrote, “If I were a more energetic man, I’d already have an 800-word draft of the history of papal resignations off to CNN. But instead I’m trying to get pants on my daughter.” Nevertheless, encouraged by friends from graduate school, colleagues at Dominican University (a Catholic university all abuzz with the resignation of Pope Benedict), and even a former professor or two from Minnesota, I sent a halfhearted pitch.

I sent the email at 7:58 a.m. At 8:02 a.m., CNN had ac-cepted my pitch and wanted my draft as fast as possible. By then, both my children were wearing pants.

Move Fast

Let’s back up and look at Benedict’s retirement from the perspective of the media, thinking about how news works, who the gatekeepers are (for better and for worse), and the nature of the attention economy into which writers pour their words. The papal retirement was both:

1. Undeniably worldwide news. Every outlet had to cover it.

2. Unexpected. Nobody knew this was coming.

Benedict had announced his resignation without fanfare or leaks on February 11, taking a few moments at the end of a boring meeting—a routine gathering to schedule the timing of some upcoming canonizations—to read a quick statement to his colleagues, in Latin. Only Giovanna Chirri, the Vatican correspondent for the ANSA News Agency, who had studied spoken Latin in the 1970s (this detail pleased medievalists like me), realized what was happening and broke the worldwide scoop.4 Everyone was caught off guard, with reporters not even knowing at first whom to ask for expert commentary. They needed to call medievalists, but somehow breaking-news reporters tend not to have us flagged in their contacts. Instead, I suspect, most looked up “papal resignations” on Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias, all of which touted Gregory’s resignation.

Contextualized or not, expert commentary at the ready or not, the resignation was news. Headlines on the resignation scrolled across news channel chyrons and the tops of major media websites. Imagine an opinion editor watching that happening. The story was, for the moment, the most important one in their business.

Journalists can quickly file factual statements that crib off wire service reports and hold the space, then fill in as more information permits. Early on that Monday morning, print pieces wouldn’t have to be filed for hours, and those, too, could be simply factual about what was known at the time. But opinion pages need arguments, commentary, storytelling. All of those take time and context.

And yet, news cycles move quickly. We were firmly in the breaking-news window on that Monday morning as millions of people rushed to major outlets to find out what was going on in Rome. That rush would continue for only a day or two and then ebb. In that breaking-news window, the opinion editor knows that their job is to get some commentary up to ex-plain to readers what’s happening. And to be honest, they also want some piece of that rush of clicks. There’s no shame in both doing the information part of the job by commissioning commentary and also paying attention to site traffic. The editor’s job ultimately depends on traffic. In a high-traffic moment, how do they get some of those readers to their page?

On that Monday morning, opinion editors’ inboxes were doubtless flooded with people sending in pitches about the pope’s resignation. This sounds like a solution to the problem, but at a big outlet, the volume of pitches is over-whelming, and most are not credible. Some display a lack of knowledge; some are from people just trying to promote themselves (which is fine, if relevant), or even from a set of cranks who pitch every day; and then some are from people who might genuinely know something about the topic of the day but present themselves as available to comment on that topic rather than offering an argument.

In that deluge of email, however, a snappy pitch from a medievalist was able to break through the noise. Of course, whether Benedict’s predecessor in resigning from the pa-pacy was a thirteenth-century pope or a fifteenth-century one was in fact not a huge story; but it was an interesting enough one, it was based on my expert knowledge of medieval Italian history, and if it was published fast enough, the editor hoped, it would get people to click.

I wrote quickly, and by the end of the day, CNN had published my essay on historical memory. More specifically, I talked about how we remember Celestine (Dante stuck him in Hell) and what that says about how we might remember Benedict. I didn’t know it, but that decision to send a quick pitch before taking my kids to school changed my life. More important for our purposes here, it illustrates the first lesson of public writing: When your subfield enters the news, especially unexpectedly, editors are actually eager to hear from you. But you have to move fast.

Excerpted from The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook by David M. Perry. Copyright 2026. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.