RN 605/TH 815
The Bible in the Medieval World
Final paper guidelines
Fifteen- to twenty-page paper on a topic within the broadly defined area of
Bible in the Medieval World
The final paper will emerge in three stages:
I. A one page proposal, due Thursday, October 11
II. An annotated bibliography of works you plan to use, due Thursday, November 15
III. A fifteen- to twenty-page paper, due Friday, December 14 by 1:00 P.M.
The proposal should be no more than one page in length and should include a description of your proposed project, a brief statement about why the subject appeals to you, and your ideas about the approach you might take and how you will go about the work.
The purpose of this bibliography is to get you to consider available resources early enough to make any special arrangements you might find necessary. You may not be able to find all of the sources you need at Mugar or STH libraries, as their medieval collections are still fairly limited. Don't worry, just arrange for a consortium card and take the B train out to the Boston College O'Neill library, where you will almost certainly find all you'll need. (Ask me if you need more information on getting a library consortium card.) As you consider the works that are available to you, you should be looking at how various authors approach the subject, what kinds of arguments they make, the methodology and sources they employ, trends in scholarly thought and how all this fits together to create a scholarly discourse on the subject. If you'd like to see some sample bibliography entries, click here.
Please follow an established Bibliography format, as described in The Chicago Manual of Style, Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers or some similar guide. Remember to include page numbers on your finished bibliography.
As a guide, you should think about using around eight independent sources in your research; at least two should be journal articles or essays. Remember that while encyclopedias of all kinds can be invaluable jumping off points, they are essentially summaries of existing scholarship, and you need to seek out that scholarship directly [ergo, they cannot count as one of your sources]. Does the Internet have a place here? Certainly for locating bibliography, occasionally for accessing journal articles through JSTOR, Project MUSE, or the Humanities Full Text Index, only very very rarely for direct information on the subject at hand. If you have any questions about the use of web sources, please feel free to speak with me about it. For more on web bibliographies and so on, check out my medieval web links page.
Your paper should be between fifteen and twenty pages, double-spaced with the usual margins (1" at top and bottom, 1.25" left and right.) Please remember to include page numbers. You must cite in a footnote or endnote all sources which you quote or paraphrase, as well as works to which you refer or from which you have culled information. Please follow proper format as described in The Chicago Manual of Style, Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers, or the MLA guidelines, available on line through the Mugar web site. Citations in parentheses within the text are not acceptable. In addition to footnotes, your paper should also contain a bibliography of not only those works you use directly, but also everything else you read in the course of your work. Again, please follow an established format. There are proper ways of citing electronic source material; you should consult and use the MLA guidelines available through the library's web pages.
Please note that this should be a well-edited fifteen to twenty pages. More is not necessarily better. If you find you are coming up short on length, do not try to fluff out what is already there! Come see me, and I will undoubtedly be able to help you direct your attention to any number of issues in need of further examination.
Please remember also that a good paper should ultimately contain some sort of thesis. If you are working with an open mind, the thesis may not emerge until pretty far down the pike, so don't worry about it too much at first. I strongly encourage you to look at the following very helpful guides to writing papers, one put together by the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder and another written by Caroline Schriber of Rhodes College on how to forge an argument.
Spelling, grammar and writing quality count as well as content.
Because the final papers are not due until the end of Study Period (Friday, December 14, 1::00 PM), extensions will be granted only in cases of extreme necessity.
Papers that are late without an approved extension will lose one letter grade for each day they are late.
I f you need to contact me about your paper, you can call me at 358-0186 or e-mail me at dklepper@bu.edu .
If you feel like you are getting stuck or are overwhelmed, please call me sooner rather than later! I will be happy to help you get on track.