A reminder that our week 6 tutorial will take place in the Mattheson library in the ground floor Training Room 1 (a library floor plan is here). It's compulsory to attend this class and complete a worksheet based on what you learn. The aim is to give you the skills you will need to research your essay and reference it properly using the expected footnote style. It's a very important week for setting you up to study history in general as well as specifically to prepare for your essay in this unit. To get ready for next week, first use Monash's Search system to try and identify any book about Charlemagne that was published in the last 10 years and is available in the Mattheson library. Then try to find a journal article about Carolingian law written in the same period. Write down all the publication details you can find for these two items. Try to articulate what strategies you used to find the two items, and any difficulties you encountered. Come prepared with your results and any post any questions or problems that want solving below. In addition...
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| Love and Devotion is on at the State Library of Victoria |
- reference
- citation
- primary source
- footnote
- plagiarism
- secondary source
- bibliography
if none of this is new to you: Think about your experience of researching and writing an essay. What are your top tips for finding relevant books and other sources? What problems have you encountered when referencing essays? What useful feedback from tutors have you gained? Be ready to share your expertise with the rest.
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And since there is no required reading, here are some links you might want to peruse to keep you thinking medieval!
- For those of you fascinated by the difference between the East and West in the medieval period, you might want to look at the exhibition currently showing at the State Library of Victoria, Love and Devotion, which is a lavish display of Persian manuscripts from the 11th century onwards. It looks at Eastern literature on its own terms, and in relationship to contemporary and modern Western society. It's free and it's on until the 1st of July.
- For those interested in the weird and wonderful world of religious relics, you might be interested in this review of Treasures of Heaven, a recent exhibition of reliquaries (i.e. containers for relics) that was held at the British Museum in 2011.
You can watch the official introduction to the Treasures of Heaven exhibition here:
4 comments:
Just a quick question i thought that i would put up here incase anybody else is having trouble with the same thing...in our assignment when refering to the Latin West, West, East or any Empire, should we be using capital letters all the time? Or does it depend on the circumstance? Or is it just a matter of being consistant?
A rule of thumb is if you are using any of these words as proper nouns, then capitalise.
In this task, this is likely to be exactly what you're doing, since you're talking about an entity called the 'West' as opposed to an entity called the 'East', etc. Similarly, if you were writing about the concept of an empire, it would be different from discussing the Byzantine Empire, which is a specific example. Does that make sense?
Whilst reading the article about the British Museums display of saints' relics from the Middle Ages I was struck by the "dust and stone" relics that Jarrrett mentions. It was something that I had never really thought of before, thinking more about the showier pieces like those predominately on display in the exhibition. Though it does make sense as they are far easier to transport and certainly in plentiful. Certainly they wouldn't have been as beautiful as the golden statues depicting Christ but to some they would have held just as high of an importance.
I'm glad you found the link interesting, Adie! There's a lot of fascinating work on relics happening at the moment. For example, even though reliquaries are often shaped like a particular body part - suggesting that is what is inside - when they have been opened, some surprising stuff has been found, including collections of dust, rocks, leaves, and even metal scraps. It's not always clear exactly why these things were considered powerful and holy, but they must have been. I'm guessing when Jonathan talks about dust and stones in his review, this is what he meant - that what's inside the beautiful and elaborate containers would be equally fascinating, even if it isn't golden or bejewelled. I've got the catalogue of this exhibition, so I'll try to remember to bring it in for you to look at...
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