If you are new to conducting research:
Consider reviewing the Starting Your Research tutorial to learn the phases and processes of doing research
Start your research in the history of The Middle Ages and The Renaissance with these key resources:
Your professor may require you to find scholarly sources popular sources, secondary sources or primary sources on your topic. Here's a very basic guide if you need more details:
Primary Sources: Primary sources are the raw stuff of history. Examples of primary sources:
Some Primary Sources are also known as popular sources.
Secondary or Scholarly Sources:
These are the peer reviewed articles and scholarly books that historians write after they have worked with the primary sources -- and consulted other secondary articles or books.
Historiography Historiography is the study of how historians have interpreted historical events throughout time. The student of the historiography of the Crusades for example, might want to compare how historians saw this event during the Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century and the present. One way of doing this comparative interpretation, is by looking for bibliographies on a subject or using the keyword "historiography" combined with keywords from the subject of your research (such as "revolution" in our Library Search or an scholarly database such as The International Medieval Bibliography, ITER (Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance), or Academic Search Premier.
