Finalist Secondary Literature Quiz

This quiz is designed to reiterate some of the key points about selecting and using high-quality secondary literature in your essays. These skills will be particularly useful for your dissertation. We are testing some trickier ideas here about what we are doing as historians and how we respond to feedback. You are also welcome, and indeed encouraged, to take the previous year quiz if you would like a refresher, and you can take the quiz as many times as you like!

1. Where could we look in a monograph or edited volume to understand the historiography relevant to the book’s overarching research questions?

The introductory chapter

The middle chapter

The concluding chapter

2. How might we identify a scholar’s historiographical approach or perspective, when they do not explicitly state what it is? (Select all that apply.)

Look at who they are criticising, and on what grounds: e.g. if they criticise past scholars for ignoring the importance of gender, this suggests they are taking a feminist approach.

Assess their language: if they make heavy use of certain words and phrases e.g. “capitalism”, they must be taking a certain historiographical approach.

Look up the scholar online: are they associated with a particular historiographical perspective or political movement? Can we identify characteristics of this influence in their work now that we know?

Look at their bibliography: it will be dominated by the historians whose work they agree with.

3. When you receive feedback saying you need to “establish the field of study” or “engage with the historiography” what does your marker mean?

Explain all the things you read in detail without clearly explaining how its relevant to the current question(s).

Identify what historians have said about this topic in the past, and how that’s relevant to what you are arguing.

That you need to pick a particular historiographical approach to your primary sources and explain what this is in your introduction.

You need to be more critical of your primary sources and analyse their limitations.

4. What are you trying to do in the introduction to your dissertation? (Select all that apply.)

Identify the current scholarship relevant to your question.

Establish why we want to interrogate these particular research questions – how does it add nuance to, or challenge, what historians have already said?

Keep your reader guessing: you don’t want to give away the answer straight away, you need to build up the mystery!

Get straight into a detailed analysis of the primary sources – how do they add nuance to, or challenge, what historians have said, what context do we need to know to understand them?

Establish the broad topic with sweeping generalisations and the wider historical context.

Identify how examining these sources, using these methods, will add nuance to, or challenge, what historians have already said.

5. Why is it important to establish the field of study/engage with the historiography? (Select all that apply.)

To make it clear that no one has ever written about your topic before.

To make it clearer how your arguments fit into, or build on, the scholarship.

To make your essay longer and more impressive.

To avoid taking credit for work that has already been done.

To clearly establish the parameters of your argument.

6. What could happen if we only consult the footnotes of our reading to find more readings?

We could save time by focusing only on the most relevant scholarship, and be sure that these works are accurate, because the historian will have checked them.

We could miss more recent discussion and approaches historians have taken, because we only have the history of the argument up to that date.

We will miss all the historians which the author disagrees with, because they won’t discuss work that doesn’t support their own perspective.

7. What tools can we use to create a secondary reading list for a research project? (Select all that apply.)

Consult the material provided on relevant modules: relevant lectures and seminars, reading lists, etc.

Searching the library catalogue for the topic and related subject areas.

Looking up the publications list of an academic who has worked on relevant topics to see if there’s work speaking to your questions.

Searching Google Scholar, but making sure these are peer-reviewed and not unpublished academic material (e.g. MA Thesis).

Looking for relevant and recent works in the citations and further reading lists on relevant Wikipedia pages.

Searching the bibliographies and further reading lists in study guides aimed at university level e.g. Beat Kumin (ed.), The European World 1500-1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (Routledge: Abingdon, 4th ed. 2023).

8. Which of these are more likely to give you a broad overview of the state of the field for their topic area? Feel free to look them up in the library if you are not sure. (Select all that apply.)

Christopher Haigh, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation’, in C. Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 19-33.

P. Withington, ‘Two Renaissances: urban political culture in post-Reformation England reconsidered: historiographical review’, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 239-267.

Robert S. Miola, ‘Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England, London: Continuum, 2011. xix + 244 pp. + 12 color plates. $120. ISBN: 978-1-44115134-6’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65 (2012), 609-610.

Ulinka Rublack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford, 2015).

Naomi Pullin, ‘The Quaker Reception of John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Debate over Women’s Preaching’, English Historical Review, 139 (2024), pp. 426-454.

9. Which of these is less likely to give you an understanding of how John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (London, 1975) was received by scholars? Feel free to look them up in the library if you are not sure.

Eamon Duffy, ‘The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. By John Bossy. Pp. xvi + 446. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975. £12.’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), pp. 447-450.

Alexandra Walsham, ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), pp. 288-310.

Christopher Haigh, ‘Catholicism in Early Modern England: Bossy and Beyond’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 481-94.

John Bossy, ‘Recusant history and after’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), pp. 271-279.

10. How do we want to use the historiography in our introduction?

To give a detailed explanation of what each historian said, how they relate to each other, and how valid their argument is, before explaining our own argument.

To identify what was most important about what historians have said for our project and how they have influenced us to: take this particular approach, ask these particular questions, and make this particular argument.

To make it sound like every historian was focused on our particular questions, but explain that their argument or approach was wrong.

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(Karl Marx, 1875, John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Poster from 1920 displaying the slogan 'Priests help capital and hinder the workers. Out of the way!', Dmitry Moor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

(The Quakers Meeting, c. 1656, Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Illustration of persecution of English Catholics in an edition of the 'Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis' ,1588, British Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Department of History

Finalist Secondary Literature Quiz

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