The aim of the Primary Source Review is to focus your attention on primary sources and allow you to seriously engage with them. There is a wide range of sources for you to choose from, including: autobiographies; biographies; chronicles; dialogues; fairy tales; letters; orations; plays; poems; short stories (novelle); treatises; and travel writings. NB Suggested primary sources are listed here.

The key question you are trying to answer with the review is: How can we use this source (or these sources) to illuminate the history of Venice or the Venetian empire or the northern princely courts between 1350 and 1650? NB Sources need to have been produced in the period c. 1350-c.1650. NB As such you should choose a source, not a topic, and that source should drive the content of the review. (In this sense, this is different from what you are asked to do in a normal research essay)

Choose a sizeable source(s) eg. a book, or a comparable quantity of written sources NB Suggested primary sources are listed here. NB Please choose your source(s) in consultation with the module tutor. By the Friday of Week 5 of Term 1 at the latest you should let your tutor know which source(s) you have chosen.

NB The sources in Venice: A Documentary History 1450-1630, ed. David Chambers, and Brian Pullan (1992; rept. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) are NOT appropriate for the Primary Source Review.

Having chosen the source, read it carefully, BEFORE you do too much secondary reading. Go back and read it again after you have read more about its context.

The Review should include discussion of:

• what kind of source is it? Its form, author, purpose, language, audience, context. For the different forms of primary sources, there is a bibliography here.
• what can the source tell us about the history of Venice or the Venetian empire or the northern princely courts?
• what are the advantages and disadvantages of the source for an understanding of the history of Venice or the Venetian empire or the northern princely courts?

Above all, your Review should engage closely with your source and there should be frequent quotation from it. Secondary sources are to be used for context but they should not be the focus of your argument. For the different forms of primary sources, there is a bibliography here.