For the final essay, write a literature review on a topic of your choice in Earl

For the final essay, write a literature review on a topic of your choice in Early Modern Europe. The following conditions must be satisfied:
– The paper must be AT LEAST FIVE FULL PAGES. It must be properly formatted and use Chicago style citations.
– You must have at least FOUR sources. These must be academic, peer-reviewed sources; that is, articles from established academic journals (as you would find via JSTOR) or monographs from academic presses (university or trade). This paper calls for no primary sources.
– ONE of those sources must be one assigned in class. You may have more than one from class, but it must be at least one.
– With the exception of works assigned in the class, all sources must be published AFTER 1980.
– Your topic must be primarily within the time frame of 1500 to 1800.
– Your topic must be at least connected to Europe, conventionally defined. Russia and the Ottoman Empire are fine, as is a topic of regional, transnational, or global significance, as long as that topic has a clear connection to Europe.
To write this paper, I recommend the following process:
1. Identify the reading—book or article—you must enjoyed or were most interested in. Then, identify the time, place, people, and process(es) described in that piece (the four elements of the topic we always identify up front). These might include things like labor, family structure and life, religious conflict, or trade, in places like Venice, France, or the Holy Roman Empire. Any of those elements can serve as a core topic; however, they may be quite broad on their own and you may want to use two of them to help you narrow your search and find meaningful results. So, for example, you might find trade in France as a more manageable topic than just “trade” in the early modern Europe.
2. Use JSTOR (best bet) or Google Scholar (not the worst) to search for more research on that topic. Limit your search to “Articles” and perhaps “Books,” but a major advantage of JSTOR is that you can eliminate book reviews, which are—for our purposes—false positives. They are not useful for this particular assignment; we need original research.
3. Once you have identified four to six articles or books that deal with the same topic—broadly defined—then begin reading them. You will probably find that some of them are simply too different from the others to be really useful, or that they don’t deal with the topic that they first appeared to. It’s unlikely that the first four or five you find will fit your needs, so don’t be afraid to discard ones that are boring, irrelevant, or too difficult. The well of research is practically infinite, and there’s no reason to waste your time with work that’s not useful for your current purpose.
4. Once you have four sources on the same topic and have read them all, treat each of them as a piece of evidence about research on that topic. Your overall task in a literature review is to describe the research on a given topic. So, look through them for patterns with respect to their arguments, methods, and sources. Ask questions like the following to guide your inquiry:
– Do the scholars seem to be asking the same research questions?
– Do they seem to be finding the same answers?
– Do they seem to be using the same methods?
– Do they seem to be using the same sources?
Any or all of these questions can form the basis for the ultimate thesis of the paper, which should be some kind of affirmative, descriptive, and possibly explanatory statement about the research on a particular topic. Something like “The research on [topic] has consistently found that…” or “Scholars on [topic] have continued to fall into two camps, one arguing [X] and the other contending [the opposite of X].” You might also find something like “Until recently, research on [topic] largely focused on [Y], but the application of new methods/incorporation of new sources has shifted the focus to [something not Y].”
Arguments that look like these rough claims are possible for virtually any topic you can imagine; once you begin to assert one of these interpretations or something like it, the evidence in support of this claim will be the articles themselves.
The paper should NOT simply be a summary of different research, but a review and interpretation of it—and that interpretation will appear in the form of patterns that emerge from the previous guiding questions.
A last piece of advice: avoid commenting on the quality of the research, as you don’t really have the basis on which to make such judgments. Keep this paper descriptive unless you uncover scholarship that really strongly lends itself to evaluation relative to other work.