http://www.web.pdx.edu/~ott/hst407Lords/research/index.html

John S. Ott
Portland State University
Summer 2010
(c) John S. Ott, Portland State University

ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES:
CRITICAL SOURCE ANALYSIS/RESEARCH PAPER

(Due Friday, August 13)

General guidelines – grads and undergrads

Please follow these guidelines when preparing your papers.

Papers should be about 12-15 typed, double-spaced pages, with 1-inch margins, and should have a title (title page optional). Your bibliography, headed as “References” or “Works Cited,” should appear last and should be paginated. You must use 12-point font.

You must follow an accepted citation format (e.g., Modern Language Association or Chicago; I have no preference, other than that you be consistent). Footnotes and bibliographical references must conform to accepted styles of academic use. On-line guidelines to APA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian may be found here. I highly recommend to everyone Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed. (Univ. of Chicago Press, many reprints), which is widely available and condenses the Chicago Manual of Style, now in its 15th edition (Chicago University Press, 2003). Another useful little tome is William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style (New York: Macmillan, many eds. and reprints), a short and inexpensive guide to writing.

Expectations on use and number of sources cited for the paper.

1.

Undergraduates will use and/or cite a minimum of 10 sources, exclusive of sources read in class (grads about twice that number).

2.

As little original research is conducted without the use of primary sources—meaning, generally, contemporary sources originating in the Middle Ages—I expect all papers will revolve around a minimum of two primary sources (including that used in your source analysis paper), of any medieval genre. Ideally, your research paper will hinge upon the evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of these primary sources. I will furnish “research primers” throughout the term with lists of available primary sources and subjects covering the course material, which will hopefully be useful guides for you.

3.

All papers must incorporate a minimum of three journal articles

, found either in available full-text databases (see list below at PSU) or taken directly from bound periodicals. These should ideally derive from peer-reviewed, academic journals.

4. All papers must use at least one source from an academic encyclopedia (see a list at bottom of this page).

Your paper must (as any serious history paper should) have a thesis. What this paper should not be is a subject report, in which you simply lay out evidence or the ideas of other people and let it all stand as interesting in its own right. Based on your reading both for the class and for the paper, you should be able to formulate a broader argument about your subject and historical interpretations of it. You should be able to argue your way around a particular critical or historiographical issue and defend your argument with evidence drawn from and supported by your readings and your own analysis of the primary source you use.

Late papers

Papers received after 5:00 p.m. Friday, August 13, will be deducted one full grade step automatically (e.g., from A to B+, or from B+ to C+). I cannot accept papers after 5:00 Monday, August 16, and under normal circumstances I will not give an “Incomplete” grade. Please consider yourselves forewarned!

Assignment - please read

During a regular academic term, I would normally assign a full-scale research paper for HST 407/507. However, in the four weeks of summer term it makes little sense to expect a satisfying research paper from students. So, I don't ask for one. Therefore, students will do a limited source analysis paper with critical historiography. I expect undergraduates to use at least 10 sources in writing their essays. These non-primary sources may be monographs, periodical articles, and/or articles from scholarly encyclopedias (see below for selected PSU resources) in addition to the primary sources. Using these combined sources, students should prepare and write a critical source analysis with annotation and commentary from secondary sources.

How to go about doing this assignment

Your first task will be to select a central primary source, or group of sources, to work on. This could be a contemporary chronicle, a letter or series of letters, a saint's life, a liturgical text, a charter or group of charters, a royal biography, or any other kind of narrative (in some cases I may permit pictoral sources). It should be substantial enough, or of substantial enough interest, to sustain 10-20 pages of written commentary from you. Your job, then, will be to make this text your intellectual home base for the next four weeks--pick it apart, pick apart its arguments, tone, rhetoric, form, audience (or intended audience), and historical significance. In two weeks' time, you will turn in a 3-5 pp. analysis of the source, focusing on the source alone. In this assignment, you should basically provide a thorough assessment of your source's contents, message, relationship to other texts, and audience. For example, you might ask and analyze the following questions/issues: Who wrote the text? Was there one author or multiple authors? When was the text composed (at one go, over a period of time)? What is the text primarily concerned with? How are the contents conveyed (tone, rhetoric, contents, etc.)? Who is the intended audience, and how can you be sure of it? And so on. Once done (and having submitted the source analysis on August 3), you should then assemble a group of secondary sources (articles, encyclopedia entries, monographs, and the like) that deal with the text you've chosen either directly or indirectly. For help identifying appropriate secondary sources that deal with your document, ITER and the IMB (see below) will be invaluable tools, as will scholarly encyclopedias. Using those secondary sources, you should assess how modern authors have used the primary source you have chosen: how have they argued about it, what conclusions have they drawn from it (and how do those conclusions differ). In the end, you will assemble a commentary of others' views on the source you've used, add your own perspective as a critical commentator, and submit the finished product. This is a lot like doing a "normal" research project, but intended to make you focus on a single source.

You cannot, and should not try to be, comprehensive--you are not building a historiographical "wall," but supplying one brick, in the form of critical source analysis, within that wall. In the end, after reviewing and critiquing individual articles and monographs (usually starting with the earliest published and working your way to the most recent), you should be able to pronounce more effectively on the role, place, audience, and message of your primary text(s).

We will go over this assignment more thoroughly in class.

Resources for medieval research at PSU

Internet resources

I have links to sites of interest from my personal web page (http://www.web.pdx.edu/~ott). A basic starting point is the ORB (On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, at http://www.the-orb.net/) site, where all materials on the web pertaining to medieval history are collected. Two good sites for primary sources and links are The Labyrinth (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/) and the Internet Medieval Sourcebook maintained by Paul Halsall (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html). For a clearing house of different medieval studies links (all disciplines), as well as many images and texts, see NetSerf (http://www.netserf.org/).

There are separate sites for the study of women and gender in the Middle Ages (e.g., Feminae, with an excellent bibliography, and Epistolae, a collection of medieval women's letters in English translation), as well as web sites devoted to aspects of monastic history like Monastic Matrix. You may use these for sources and articles, but please note: There is also a lot of misleading and just plain inaccurate information in cyberspace. The web should be used only as a supplement to research, not as its central component. I will check all web sites cited in your bibliographies when I read your final drafts. If you have questions or concerns, do not hesitate to ask.

On-line reference works and full text databases at PSU

ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (http://www.itergateway.org/)
International Medieval Bibliography (1967- ) (http://www.brepolis.net/) [Click “Enter Databases”]
JStor (Journal Storage, a full text database) (http://www.jstor.org/cgi-bin/jstor/gensearch)
Project Muse: Scholarly Journals On-line (a full text database) (http://muse.jhu.edu/)
Blackwell-Synergy (a full text journal database) (http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/)
ATLA – Religion Database (references to articles on religious studies, 1949- ) (http://ca2.csa.com/ids70/advanced_search.php?SID=2a841d4fb48f45a6fda2bb3696a9b0a4)

Bound reference works, journals, and bibliographies at PSU (highly abridged)

The New Cambridge Medieval History, 7 vols. (Cambridge UP, 1995-2005). Excellent essays covering the entire medieval period from leading experts.
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., ed. J. Strayer (1982-1989). For use when dealing with technical terms or particular events and people, or for orientating oneself to a subject. [D114 D5 Gen. Ref. on 2d floor]
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, 4 vols. [DS35.53 .O95 1995]
Encyclopedia of Islam (1913) [DS37.E5] Old but still useful.
Encyclopedia of the Crusades, ed. Alfred J. Andrea (Greenwood Press, 2003) [D155 A6 Gen Ref. on 2d floor]
Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2 vols., ed. Andre Vauchez, et al. (Chicago, 2000) [D114 E53 Gen. Ref. on 2d floor]
Encyclopedia of Medieval Church Art, ed. Edward Tasker (London, 1993) [N7943 A1 T37]
Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, ed. Richard Landes (Routledge, 2000) [BT891 E53]
Index Islamicus. Quarterly bibliography of publications on Islam. [Z7835 M6].
International Medieval Bibliography. An annual compilation, of which we have a limited run of volumes (Jan. 1985-1992). Fully indexed. [Z6203 I63]. Also on-line!
Lexikon des Mittelalters, 9 vols. + index. In German. [2d floor Gen. Ref.]
Medieval England: An Encyclopedia, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, et al. (New York: Garland, 1998) [DA129 M43]
Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. W. W. Kibler, et al. (1995) [DC33.2.M44]
Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Jeep (2000) [DD157 M43]
Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography (1960-1979), ed. Carl T. Berkhout and Jeffrey B. Russell (Toronto: PIMS, 1981)
Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Michael Gerli (Routledge, 2003) [DP99 M33]
Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Christopher Kleinenz, 2 vols. (Routledge, 2004) [DG443 M43] Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Norman Roth (Routledge, 2003) [DS124 M386]
Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano, et al. (New York: Garland, 1993) [DL30 M43]
The Crusades: An Encyclopedia, ed. Alan V. Murray, 4 vols. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2006) [D155 C78, Gen. Ref. 2d floor]
The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 17 vols. (1967-1996) [BX841 N44]
The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, ed. J.N.D. Kelly (Oxford, 1996) [Electronic resource]
The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philippe Levillain, 3 vols. (New York, 2002)
Religion Index One, 35 vols. (1949- ). American Theological Library Association. Some missing volumes. [Z7753 A5]

Selected Periodicals available at PSU, either on-line or in print

American Historical Review (1895- ) [E171. A57]. Most issues feature one article on the Middle Ages and/or Renaissance; many reviews as well.
Cahiers de civilisation médiévale (1971-pres.) [CB3 C3]. In French.
Church History (v. 42-72, 1973-present). [BR140 A45]. One or more articles per volume on medieval ecclesiastical history.
Crusades (2001-present)
Deutsches Archiv fur Erforschung des Mittelalters
Early Medieval Europe (1997-pres.) [E-resource]
Exemplaria. A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies [PN661 E9] (1989-pres.)
Hagiographica. Journal of Hagiography and Biography (v. 1-10, 1994-2003) [BX 4655.2 H34]
Islamic Quarterly (1961-pres.)
Journal of Ecclesiastical History. One or more articles per volume on medieval ecclesiastical history; oriented toward British Isles
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (1971-pres.) [CB3 J58]
Mediaeval Studies (1974-pres.) [D11 M44] Primarily devoted to medieval literature and textual studies; published by the Medieval Institute at the Univ. of Toronto.
Medieval Prosopography (1993-pres.) [D115 M4]
Medievalia et Humanistica (1970-pres.) [D111 M5]
Past and Present (1952-pres.) Every issue contains at least one article on the Middle Ages.
Speculum (1926-present). The flagship journal of the Medieval Academy of America. A complete index was compiled in 1988 of issues appearing to that point.
Studi medievali, 3rd series [PN661.S83] In Italian, with some articles in English
Studies in Church History [BR141 S84]. We have selected volumes only. Most contain several articles on medieval history.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (1964-pres.)
Traditio (1943-1991, 2001-). Some missing back issues. [D111 T7]
Viator (1970-1992, 2002- ). Annual journal published by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. Some missing back issues. [CB4.V5]