Assignments

Weekly Responses

Each week students will write a very brief (at most 2 paragraphs but could be just bullet points) response to the readings. These might offer comparisons between readings, a summary of the main arguments as you understand them, a series of questions the reading left you with, or if warranted the occasional rant about a particular reading.

The weekly responses will be worth 25% of the final grade.

Book Review Assignments

The first two writing assignments for this course are to select two of the books we are reading in class and complete a 3–4 page review of them. If there is another book you wish to review, this is fine as long as you seek permission in advance. Such a review should accomplish three things:

It should summarize the author’s main argument.
It should place the work in question in its broader historiographical context.
It should provide a critical assessment of the suitability of the employed methodology to advance the author’s argument.

One excellent way to learn how to write a strong review is to read a variety of book reviews in the relevant historical journals. This is also a good way to develop a broad sense of a literature at the same time that you become more familiar with the genre.

Sample book reviews by Professor Anne McCants:

Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650 by Oscar Gelderblom.

The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe by Laurence Fontaine.

The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (PDF) by Francesco Boldizzoni.

Shaping Medieval Markets: The Organization of Commodity Markets in Holland, C. 1200 – C. 1450 by Jessica Dijkman.

The book reviews will be worth 30% of the final grade.

Historiographical Essay

For the historiographical essay, you may select your own topic (and within that a framing question) from among those considered in the course. Undergraduate students should write an 8–10 page paper (graduate students should aim for 20). All students should also develop a useful bibliography on the topic. The expectation is that you will encompass a major literature while demonstrating the ability to think critically about the theories and methods engaged by other historians to answer the question you have posed. You should organize the paper around this question, giving careful consideration to why different historians sometimes answer important questions in such different ways.

An excellent guide for writing an annotated bibliography is available from the Williams College Libraries.

The essay will be worth 30% of the final grade.