Second Paper

Due: Wednesday, January 23, at 5:00 p.m., either in my office p.o. (located in Holland 507) or by e-mail. 

Did love and marriage ever coincide in the early modern period? Did some people during that time at least think they ought to be able to? In this paper, you will extend on the work you did in the first paper, which studied marriage from the vantage point of King, Wiesner, Alberti, and a number of documents from an anthology. This time you will consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the third book to Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Erasmus's The Wooer and the Maiden, and The Return of Martin Guerre, and you can use as well our sources concerning women and work, which deal with the practical value of a woman to a man. What evidence do we have in these sources that people either married for love, or that the idea of such a marriage was something that people of the time supported? You are encouraged to refer back to the sources you used in your earlier paper to develop your conclusions. Also, keep in mind that we are looking at The Return of Martin Guerre through the lens of Natalie Davis's interpretation.

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 18, 2008

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