HST 355U, Late Medieval Europe, 1100-1450
Portland State University
Winter 2024
(c) John S. Ott

General guidelines - Please read carefully

The reading responses (you are required to do two of them, one in each half of the term) are designed to present you with a writing format that will stimulate you to think about and reflect on the primary sources as you read them. Our primary sources are the documents written in the Middle Ages, by medieval reporters and witnesses, such as Guibert, the abbot of Nogent.  Note that you are welcome to consult and incorporate the textbook by William Chester Jordan (Europe in the High Middle Ages) and to refer to other secondary readings (for example, Park and Daston, Freeman, etc.), but the bulk of your analysis should focus on the primary sources.

Your responses need to be submitted in the due date windows indicated above. In other words, you MUST submit response #1 no later than May 7, though you are welcome to submit it as early as April 4. If you miss this deadline, you may submit response #1 as a late paper, but only until May 14 (see below for late paper guidelines). The same guidelines apply to Response #2, which may be submitted no later than June 12 (it is due on or before June 4). Because this is an open, rolling assignment rather than one with a fixed deadline, only cases of severe, prolonged emergency will be consider valid for not submitting the response on time.

The responses must address readings assigned on the syllabus during the 'windows' above. In other words, and for example, you should not submit a response to the readings we are doing in Weeks 1 and 2 during Week 9. The idea here is for you to work with texts from different periods covered by the course.

You may not submit reponses before the window for each opens. For example, you cannot submit response #2 before May 7.

Responses should be about 3-4 pp., typed, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins. Please make sure that your name, the date, and page numbers appear on each response. A title is strongly encouraged.

Each response must address a minimum of 2 primary sources/readings from the weeks that fall within the due dates; you are welcome to incorporate more as you like.

Make sure to include references to the texts you are reading and citing (page numbers, put in parentheses and embedded in the text, are all you need). You do not need to submit a bibliography, and you may use simple, parenthetical references when citing/paraphrasing the texts. So: (Monodies, 27).

Responses will be assigned their grade based on the following factors: (1) the evident effort put into them, as determined by the extent to which they engage the ideas in the texts in a manner that is cogent, lucidly argued, and intellectually productive; (2) the accuracy and care with which they represent the authors' ideas or source themes, to which you are responding; (3) their use of evidence from the texts; (4) their quality of writing, including grammar, syntax, and spelling, all of which goes to the essay's analytical clarity.

Responses should not incorporate outside source materials.

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Due dates, late papers and other considerations

I will accept late responses, but they will be penalized -10 points (-10%) per day late, and must be submitted within 7 days of the end due date. On the seventh day, with the standard deduction of -10 points per day, the response could not earn more than a 30/100.

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What is a reponse paper? Assignment guidelines

For the responses, read closely the assigned texts and consider the significance of their historical subject matter, themes, ideas, figures or characters, arguments, imagery, or other relevant aspects of the work. The reading guide questions can help you with this, as can discussion board exchanges.

For starters, you may wish to examine the details and nature of the source itself: What is the source about? Who wrote it, why, and for what audience (popular, learned, lay, clerical, men, women, elites, common folk)? What were the author's basic assumptions (historical, religious, philosophical, political), interests, beliefs, convictions, ideas? What was the author's agenda or purpose in writing? How do you know? What is the work's structure or organization? Is the source a work of history, biography, hagiography, a sermon, a dialogue, a treatise, a letter? How might the genre of the writing affect its historical reliability, purpose, and reception? How do we know what IS reliable about our source information? Is the author trying to convince/persuade, convert, educate, polemicize, preach, curry favor, titillate?

This is a lot of questions: you do NOT have to answer them all in a given response! They are here instead to serve as prompts as you think about what to write.

You are encouraged to reflect on the details in the readings that most interest you. There are no "right answers" here, exactly, but the venturing of "opinion" or speculation without demonstration from the texts is discouraged. I am looking for you to analyze an issue or question that intrigues you, in a thoughtful and lucid essay, using documentary support from the texts. You do not need to be comprehensive in your coverage of the text(s), but do not simply summarize the work's contents. Think carefully about an aspect or aspects of the author's ideas or argument, and engage those ideas with supported analysis of your own.

Finally: it may help to think of the reading responses as mini-essays or thought pieces: develop a thesis or point of argument, ponder or debate the ideas in the works, adding evidence as necessary, and write a brief conclusion about your findings. Each response is weighted 100 points, or 10% of the final grade.