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History 223: Early Modern Europe (Summer 2009)

Research Assignment = 20%

Instructor | Course Home Page | Course Description | Course Requirements | Schedule of Weekly Readings and Questions

Developing sound and sophisticated research skills is vital for all undergraduates, no matter what courses they take, no matter what their major is. If you take upper-division courses in History, you may be required to write research papers. Once you graduate from university you will probably need to find various types of information for all sorts of reasons. This assignment is due in class on Monday, 6 July, but you may submit it earlier. It requires you to construct an annotated bibliography in answer to a research question. Your job is not to answer the question but to find scholarly literature that will help you answer the question if you were to write an essay on the relevant topic. The research questions are listed on p. 10 of the syllabus.

Your bibliography will consist of ten titles according to the following guidelines.

All titles must be secondary sources and written in Western European languages that you can read. The best sources are those that deal specifically, and even exclusively, with your topic. Thus, if you were constructing a bibliography for a research paper on the military history of the Battle of Waterloo, you would choose titles that dealt with this subject, e.g. books or articles on Napoleon's strategy at Waterloo, the Prussian involvement in the battle. You would not choose books or articles that, for example, discussed how the Battle of Waterloo was depicted in paintings or that merely supplied some information about how the Battle of Waterloo influenced military strategy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Your sources must have been published as recently as possible. Do not supply sources that were published a long time ago, e.g. 1950, 1905, 1863, unless you give a good reason in your annotation.

Your sources must be scholarly. Avoid citing articles in popular journals, e.g. History Today.

You must use proper bibliographic form. Follow the guidelines here.

Monographs (2 to 4): You must supply references to at least two but no more than four monographs. You may not include survey textbooks, e.g. Western Civilization textbooks or synthetic treatments of early modern Europe or of a larger period within early modern Europe, e.g. Europe in the Seventeenth Century. You may include a reference to only one general work relevant to the topic, e.g. a book on Poland in the early modern period or in the eighteenth century for a topic on the partition of Poland in 1795, but you are not obliged to supply such a reference.

Book reviews (2): You must supply references to two book reviews in scholarly journals on one (and the same) monograph that deals specifically with your topic.

Articles (4 to 6): You must supply references to at least four but no more than six scholarly articles of at least ten pages in length. If you wish, you may refer to no more than two articles found in edited collections of essays. You must refer to at least two articles in scholarly journals. For example, if you cite only two monographs and no articles in edited collections of essays, you must cite six journal articles. Keep in mind that not every periodical is a scholarly journal. References to articles that are not in scholarly journals will not be accepted.

Annotations: You must annotate each bibliographical entry. Each annotation should be no more than two sentences long. You must write in complete sentences. Place the annotation after each bibliographical entry. The annotation should justify the inclusion of the title in the bibliography and/or summarize the argument of the book or article that you have chosen. When annotating the references to the book reviews, summarize the evaluation of the authors of the reviews.

Your annotations should be free of the slightest hint of plagiarism. Do not copy from abstracts or summaries of books or articles published in books, along with articles, on the World Wide Web, or in any other place. Do not copy from book reviews. Reproducing a text by slightly altering sentence structure also counts as plagiarism. You can depend on me to detect instances of plagiarism.

You may not cite the assigned readings for History 223 in your bibliography.

Work through your sources as expeditiously as possible out of consideration for classmates who are working on the same research question. If you check out any books, return them as soon as possible.

You will need to distinguish a monograph from other types of books and scholarly journals from other periodicals. We will go over this in class.

You will cite titles exclusively as printed sources. Do not provide any electronic data, e.g. web site addresses.

A number of resources are at your disposal to complete this assignment. They include bibliographies printed in monographs; historical handbooks, research guides, dictionaries, and encyclopedias; and online library catalogues and databases such as Historical Abstracts, the Humanities and Social Sciences Index, ATLA, and Iter. Yet you will need to do more than find references to secondary sources. You will need to take a brief but comprehensive look at these sources in order to complete this assignment. Wherever possible, use sources available to you at SFU, either in the stacks or through the online catalogues. In some cases, you may need to make a trip to UBC or to make an Interlibrary Loan request.

I strongly recommend that you begin work on this assignment as soon as possible. This is not an assignment that you can successfully complete one or two days before it is due. You will need to devote some time to understanding your topic and to investigating potential sources while your classmates look for the same or similar sources. Your assignment will be evaluated in terms of how closely it fulfills the above requirements, including proper bibliographic form.

Research Questions

1. Did Renaissance humanism have anything to do with the Protestant Reformation?

2. Should Anabaptism occupy a peripheral or central place in the history of the European Reformation?

3. Did Calvinism contribute to the rise of capitalism in the early modern period?

4. Why did iconoclastic violence occur during the Reformation era?

5. How did print contribute to the spread of Protestantism?

6. How did Protestantism expand and diminish women's opportunities and religious experiences?

7. How effective were the measures of poor relief which were introduced in early modern Europe in dealing with the problem of widespread poverty?

8. What role did the reorganization of labour away from small independent craft production to larger systems and concentrations of work play in early modern Europe's transition to capitalism?

9. Why did early modern states exhibit a seemingly unusual readiness to resort to armed conflict?

10. To what extent was the Thirty Years War a religious war?

11. Why did urban and rural violent protest occur in pre-revolutionary France (1600-1788)?