First Paper 

Due: Wednesday, January 9, at 5:00 p.m., either in my office p.o. (located in Holland 507) or by e-mail. 

For this first week, you have read sections of Wiesner and King, and have had an opportunity to study documents relating to marriage in Renaissance Florence, and Alberti’s Book of the Family, Book III.  What I’d like you to do in your essay is review these sources and discuss your understanding of marriage in the Renaissance period.  First, explain the picture you get from each secondary source, Wiesner and King.  Next, evaluate the primary sources.  Finally, what is your evaluation of women’s roles and experiences in marriage?  Keep several things in mind:

1. Alberti’s book is a work of theory.  It describes an ideal rather than documents actual experiences in marriage.  This does not mean that it is irrelevant, but you may look for clues in that text for ways in which theory and practice might diverge. 
2. The documents from Renaissance Florence are records of actual individual experiences.  These records cannot be taken as facts that require no interpretation, however.  The discussion of Dati’s diary is a case in point. 
3. One framework that will help is to think about the question of women’s oppression vs. women’s empowerment.  What examples do you find in the sources of either or both?  How do King and Wiesner handle the balance between these two poles?

The papers should be about 1000 words in length, double-spaced, with 1" margins. Please use internal citations (author's last name, page #) in identifying sources according to the following format: "Good men, truly, are in every respect useful to everyone" (Erasmus, 89-90). I would like to see all of you draw on the texts in your work, with material directly cited from the sources.

An A paper

• addresses all aspects of the question
• carefully works through the sources
• tells a coherent story
• arrives at carefully weighed conclusions
• is well-written, with few or no errors

A B paper

• addresses most of the question
• has good things to say about the sources
• draws out important insights, but may be one-sided or incomplete
• achieves some integration
• is reasonably well-written, with some errors

A C paper

• addresses the question in general, but leaves out important aspects
• refers to the sources, but either stays on the surface or misreads them
• lacks true coherence
• arrives at conclusions that are either obvious or not consistent with the evidence
• is sloppily or porrly written, with many errors

Laurel Carrington carringt@stolaf.edu
Most recent update: January 7, 2008

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