or this assignment I want you to think of reader responses or book reports. You can go two routes with this assignment. Option 1: Choose either a passage from a text or an ongoing theme from a whole work, something to which your author devotes more than a paragraph and use that as the basis of your report. Explore the topic through the lens of what you know about the writer, their patron, and the genre of their work.
Then dissect the text. Tell me what it speaks about, who/what/where it mentions, who they were, what they did, a bit of their story. Tell me about the time the author lived in, tell me about the period the subject lived in, are they the same? Try to get at the core of what is being written, why it is being written that way, and what impact this has on our use of it as a source. Option 2: Choose an event/person/place/institution/anything interesting mentioned in multiple texts and see how the backgrounds and motives of your authors change how they record the event. You need to look at the same things as in option 1 but with more emphasis on the authors and their agendas. For both, I am looking for a written piece of 4-5 pages, complete with footnotes and bibliography.
Feel free to write more than references in your footnotes if you have a relevant side argument that does not fit into the main text. However, do not feel pressured to find interesting bonus material, footnotes containing just references are fine. As ever, make sure that you footnote references and bibliography contain all of the relevant publication information for your sources and that you are consistent throughout your work. As to texts use anything. You have access to poetry, histories, laws, monastic foundation documents, all the compendia, acts of councils, anything in the Byzantium section of the Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
