HST 491/591
Medieval Church and Reform
Winter 2017
Portland State University

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

35% (350 points) of final grade.  Due Wednesday, March 22, by 5:00 in my office

Guidelines
  • Paper should be 10-12 pp., double-spaced (graduate students: around 15 pp.), inclusive of bibliography.  Please number your pages and supply a title for the paper.
  • You must follow an accepted citation format (e.g., MLA, APA, or Chicago; I have no preference, other than that you be consistent).  A quick guide to Chicago Style may be found here.  MLA and APA abbreviated guidelines are also available here. Footnotes and all end references must conform to accepted styles of academic use.
  • Hard copies must be in my office by 5:00 on March 22.  You are responsible for making sure it gets into my hands, so if you have any question that it has not, please e-mail me to confirm.
  • Undergraduates must annotate a minimum of 8 extra-class sources (graduate students: 12-15).  These may be a combination of monographs and journal articles, or, in appropriate instances, encyclopedia or reference materials.  You may include the article that you used in your review assignment, if you anticipate that your research paper will be on the same subject.

Late paper policy
  • I will accept late papers until Thursday, March 23 -- but no later.
  • For each day the paper is late, I will deduct 10% from the final grade (measured in points, thus 35 points per day).
  • I will not consider Incompletes or extensions unless there are genuine, documented special circumstances, and ONLY IF the extension is requested in advance of Sunday, March 19.

Assignment

By the end of this term, you should have settled, at least preliminarily, on a research topic for HST 492/592.  This assignment represents, in effect, a "staged" part of the final research paper that you will submit in the Spring. For this assignment, you should identify at least 8 (or 12-15, for grad students) scholarly/critical sources on the subject you have chosen.  They should be secondary or tertiary, rather than primary sources.  Collectively, they should offer an overview and historiographical survey of your chosen research topic or field covering a period of some years or decades.

Historiographical essays constitute a form of writing that examines the intellectual development of a field or subject of historical study.  These fields can be very broad (e.g., "the Investiture Controversy"; "the history of clerical participation in warfare") or quite narrow.  The purpose of this essay is to examine the development over time of scholarly arguments about the research subject you have chosen, and to present in your paper a consideration of the "state of the field." (Several of the articles we've read this term, for example Howe, "The Medieval Nobility's Reform of the Church," have done this as part of their approach.)

There are different ways to organize your sources within the paper.  You may group them around recurring themes in the scholarship, or discuss them chronologically, from oldest to most recently published.  You should survey the arguments of each author, discuss their theses and evidence (much as you did in the periodical review, and as we have repeatedly done in class), and explain/describe how scholarly approaches to the field have changed over time, all while assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each author's appoach(es). For example, How has the author approached his/her subject matter?  Does s/he use a particular kind of source, or sources, on which to base his argument?  What is the author's thesis, or what question(s) in the field is s/he addressing?  Is there a particular theoretical or methodological orientation to the work?  If so, what is it, and how do the author's intellectual or political commitments shape the work as a whole?  You might think of the historiographical essay as a collection of mini-reviews of the existing scholarship, but organized in such a way as to give an educated general reader a sense of how scholarly perspectives have evolved on the subject over the years. Be critical and careful about the sources you select. Peer-reviewed material is best; avoid Internet sources.

Your annotated bibliography will consist of your sources, given in full citation, followed by a 6-10 line description of the source's contents or short summary of its argument. The annotated bibliography will appear separately from the historiographical essay, at the end of your paper, but may be included in the paper's total page length.

I will be happy to meet with you individually to discuss your chosen topic and its feasibility.  Please e-mail me--the earlier, the better--to set up a time.  While this is not mandatory, it is highly recommended.