HISTORY 2155 -- Early Modern
This paper will be due on March 2. It is worth 25% of
your course grade.
The paper should be 8-10 pages in length (assuming double-spaced printing). It must be properly footnoted and have a bibliography. For other requirements, see the handout Policies Regarding Essays.
Your paper will discuss a text or texts from one of the
following four books:
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in
Nabil Matar, ed. and trans., In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic
Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century
The Portable Machiavelli
Mary Wollstonecraft and
William Godwin, A Short Residence in
Your assignment is to describe for your reader the most important features of your chosen text or texts and then explain what it or they tell us about the society that produced the work. Your paper should be structured as a formal essay with a clear and identifiable thesis.
The Machiavelli volume has more than one work by Machiavelli; the Matar book has Arabic-language texts from different authors, the Wollstonecraft and Godwin book combines a book by Wollstonecraft with one about her. In these cases you may end up choosing to focus on one or two texts and say very little about the remainder. This is legitimate; however, it is up to you not to neglect relevant material about, say, Machiavelli or Wollstonecraft if it would aid the reader’s understanding of your chosen material. It is important, for instance, that Machiavelli wrote both a book about republics and a book about princes.
Whichever work or works you choose, there are a number of possible approaches, many of them equally valuable. I encourage you to think long and hard about questions of authorship and audience. You may or may not be fascinated by the author, or interested in reconstructing the author’s audience in great detail, but do not ignore the fact that a certain text was written by a certain author at a certain time for a more-or-less certain audience. You must understand these aspects of the problem even if you are focusing on something else.
You are certainly free and encouraged to read other books and
academic articles. However, don’t rely
on other people’s summaries, and be sure you cite all quotations and borrowed
insights properly.