The third paper is intended to be very much like the first and second. The one difference is that you need not restrict yourself to discussion of as narrow a portion of the text as I required in the first paper (though I would still strongly recommend it). On the first paper, I was trying to oblige you to engage in close reading of the text by trying to restrict you to discussion of a single sentence or paragraph. Although I still want you to be engaged in extensive close discussion of the text, you may range over as much of the text as is necessary, though I would still strongly encourage you to examine as small a segment of the text as you can and you must be engaged in close reading of the primary text. You may want to compare and contrast more than one text since this is what you will be doing on the essay portion of the final exam (just as you did on the midterm essay).
Your paper should consider one or more texts on the syllabus (generally from the same period). You may discuss any of the medieval texts on the syllabus from Gregory of Tours until Abelard. Although your knowledge of the period and your thinking about the text may be influenced by what you have read in the textbook or by what you have heard during class itself, simply repeating what you have learned there adds little or nothing and is not the most productive use of your time and efforts. The paper is not intended as a research paper, and repeating what books in the library (or, even worse, webpages of dubious merit) have had to say about the texts you are discussing is of little value. Let me repeat this instruction since many of you ignored it on the first and second papers: Do not go off and do research; I want the paper to be about the medieval text you are discussing. I am interested in seeing how you go about closely reading primary sources and constructing an argument about them on the basis of evidence from the texts themselves while remaining attentive to the particularities of the time and place where the work was written. The material that you have from a primary text (that is, an ancient source), from your textbook and the material covered in class is more than enough to do this. The only outside source that you may need is a reference work to provide dates for any individuals such as the author of the text you are discussing (and you need to cite the source of your date: parenthetical citation and bibliographic entry). Do not simply copy dates from the syllabus or Course Packet; instead, look them up in a reference work. Using Wikipedia is fine for dates; another suggested reference: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (library). Your focus should be on reading primary sources (that is, medieval texts) closely, seeing what you can glean from them about the questions you are asking. For texts from which you have read only brief extracts, you may want to read more of the text, and the URLs on the syllabus can, in most instances, direct you to the full work.
Every paper needs to begin with a thesis, which you are trying to explore or prove. A thesis is an argument, a controversial position with which your reader might disagree and that you seek to explore, refine, qualify and elaborate on the basis of a discussion of relevant textual evidence. If you have no clear and pointed thesis-statement at the end of your first paragraph or there is no argument made consistently throughout the paper with which a reader might potentially disagree, then you are simply meandering or writing a paper so innocuous as to be uninteresting. If you are unable to devise a brief title that indicates something about the nature of the argument of the paper (and use of the title of the work under discussion as your own title does not fulfill this function), then it is likely that your paper has no argument. In the first and second papers, a great many of you failed to articulate a clear thesis. To counter this problem, you may find it useful to have the word problem or question somewhere in your first paragraph to help draw attention—both your reader’s and your own—to the argument you are making. If something you say does not help explore, prove or complicate your argument, then you are digressing. General introductory material is irrelevant unless it directly contributes to exploring and proving your argument and should, in any case, be kept brief (if your introduction goes beyond half a page, you are taking valuable time away from your discussion of evidence). Within your first three or so sentences, you need to state your thesis, give the author and title of the work you are discussing, the dates for the author and the work and the source for these dates.
Your essay should be 750 words long (give the word-count on the first page), double-spaced, with one-inch margins. Please re-read my comments on your earlier papers and the Paper Checklist for further remarks about formatting and to make sure that your paper takes into account the comments I have given you—I hate having to repeat myself and am not especially sympathetic toward papers that fail to take into account the comments I have already made to help you improve your work (this is especially the case with comments about the mechanics of your paper, like citing material properly, providing an informative title, giving dates for individuals and citing the source of your dates, and so on). Please look again at the online Paper Example (> Papers), for the instructions given there also apply here. Your paper must have an informative title, something that gives an indication about your thesis (not simply the title of the work you’re writing about: not “Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks,” but “The Relationship between the Bishops and Merovingian Kings in Gregory of Tours”).
Every time you borrow the facts, words or ideas of someone else, you must acknowledge your intellectual indebtedness in a note, precisely specifying where the information comes from so your reader can trace your indebtedness and discern what material is yours from what is not. For instance, the first time you mention an individual, a work or an event, give the date for it and give a brief parenthetical note crediting the source of that date. If you quote or even paraphrase something that happens in a work, give a reference for it (generally by section number in the CP): You are in a much better position than your reader to track your indebtedness and help your reader find the material you are discussing. Re-read the section on the syllabus about academic integrity, along with the links given there and the information on citation given in the online Paper Example: You do not want to find yourself in the predicament of the recent president of Hungary (see http://tinyurl.com/7ms566x/) or the defense minister of Germany (see http://tinyurl.com /72f7pzx/), both of whom were obliged to resign because of acts of plagiarism committed years before. In noting your indebtedness, you must follow Chicago format. Details for how to annotate in Chicago format may be found at the following URLs:
https://library.sacredheart.edu/styleguides
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/turabian/turabian _citationguide.html
http://library.ship.edu/c.php?g=21703&p=127118
http://myrin.ursinus.edu/help/resrch_guides/cit_style_chicago.htm
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/1/ —this is the easiest to use but frequently (and alarmingly) gets the citation style wrong.
If the work you are writing about has section numbers of some kind, or book and chapter numbers, use them rather than page numbers to cite the work: Such numbers are standard across all editions and make it much easier to find the precise passage you mean. Since you are discussing a text, your paper will need at least one bibliographic note indicating the edition you are using. Materials cited from the Course Packet still need a full citation, which means that you must specify that they came from the Course Packet rather than directly from the web or other printed source (see the explanation in the online Paper Example for details or, more handily, on the second page of the Table of Contents in the Course Packet—there really is no excuse for getting this wrong, if you actually read these instructions carefully (and look at any corrections I have given to your references in your previous papers! Those of you who still get this wrong are simply disgracefully inattentive). Proofread your paper before submitting it; don’t rely on spell-check alone.
Some further miscellaneous cautions. Although you may be interested in how the argument you make is related to the modern world, historians are, in the first instance, interested in investigating and understanding earlier periods, reconstructing what happened, why these things happened, how they were understood by their contemporaries, what repercussions these things had. In other words, the focus of your paper should not be on recommending what we ought to do but what past peoples did and why. Seek to understand, not to condemn. Again, the paper is not about us but about them. Keep your focus on trying to understand a particular medieval author, text, place, period. If you have any confusion about this, please re-read Lynn Hunt’s “Against Presentism” (which was assigned for the first session of the class). Also, beware of sounding like you are crediting the pagan gods, demons or the Christian God with agency: not “the devil tormented Antony,” but “Athanasius says the devil tormented Antony” or “Athanasius believes that Antony suffered from torments by the devil.” Historians tend to look to human causes to explain human actions, not to supernatural causes.
You must fill out and submit a copy of the Paper Checklist (Blackboard > Syllabus & Vital Documents) along with your paper. Make sure that comply with its stipulations.
Again, do not do research. I want to see how you go about reading primary sources and using them as evidence to make an argument of historical interest. I am not interested in seeing how you go about summarizing the work of others. In addition, if you aren’t reading the work of others, you won’t run the risk of plagiarizing from them, a problem that has afflicted a number of papers that have disregarded my ‘no research’ rule.
Some possible topics include the following:
1. What does Bede say about the kind of structure Gregory the Great envisions for the Church in England? How is it related to the Church in France? What kind of a Church is Gregory trying to build?
2. According to Gregory of Tours, what kind of power does Chilperic exercise over the Church in France? How are disputes between Church and state resolved?
3. What does Gregory of Tours’ account of Vulfilaic suggest about the vitality of paganism in France at this time?
4. What does the story of Vulfilaic tell us about how monasticism in France has changed from what we were looking at in Syria with Simeon Stylites or in Egypt with Antony?
5. Frankish kings typically divided their kingdom among their sons, as though it were just like any other form of personal property. What happens with the Frankish kingdom after the death of Pepin the Short? Is the account of Einhard (a strong partisan of Charlemagne) entirely credible? How would you explain the motives of the various sides?
6. Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne is relatively brief. You might want to go online and look at any of the chapters that aren’t in your Course Packet and write about them. A comparison between how Chilperic treats his bishops (Gregory of Tours) and how Charlemagne treats his (look especially at the material about his demand for preaching) might be an interesting topic.
7. The letters of Gregory VII and Henry IV have a strongly public character to them. How do they work as propaganda? How do they try to rally others to their side during the Investiture Controversy? What do their letters say about the strengths and weaknesses of each side? You will probably have scope to discuss only one or, at most, two of the letters (not all of them) since you need to discuss their rhetorical strategies in detail.
8. How does Abelard defend himself against the charge of heresy at the Council of Soissons (1121)? What are the difficulties his opponents have in prosecuting him?