Primary sources are materials that were produced during the time period you are studying. They can be written documents, physical artifacts, artistic works, buildings… anything that comes for that particular time period.

DON’T DESPAIR IF YOU’RE CONFUSED or if the documents don’t make sense or if you can’t understand them. Reading historical primary sources is hard!! Remember, they were not written for us, so figuring out their meaning and understanding what is going on is hard… this is especially true for cultures  with which we are less familiar .

Even for students who have experience reading historical sources, studying them from the perspective of women’s history is somewhat different. We’ll talk about why in our first week.

ASK QUESTIONS: you can post questions about the sources in the questions thread.

When reading historical sources, there are a number of questions that you should think about that can help guide your interpretation of these documents and what they can tell us about medieval Spanish history.

  1. Who wrote this document? (think about who this person was in terms of their background, social status, employment)
  2. When was it written?
  3. Where was it written?

For the above three questions, there are two places you can look for answers. First is the introduction to each document that is often provided by the editor for the book or website where this document is originally located. It will give you some information to answer those questions. Secondly, look at the internal clues in the document that can help us answer these questions without the information from the editor. How do we know the person was from xyz? What about the text tells us that? What in the text can point us towards thinking the person was a xyz?

What language was it written in? Does the fact that it is translated matter?

Again, this information might not be there but guess. One point to think about regarding language is that meaning can change with translation.

These three questions are helpful in allowing us to understand the perspective the author is coming from. That perspective can help us understand why the author may have written about a particular event in a certain way. 

  1. Who might have read it? Are you one of the intended readers? Think about audience for these documents. There are no right or wrong answers here as for some of these documents, we really don’t know. 

Determining the intended audience can sometimes be hard, but think about the various possibilities. 

  1. Why was it written? What purpose does it serve? Was it written for reading pleasure? For official records? For personal records? In some cases, we’re guessing but think about why this stuff was written down. Sometimes we can think about the intended audience to help us understand the potential reasons why a document was written.

  1. What is it about? Brief summary of the contents. What is actually going on in your document?

A note about bias:

In your high school social studies classes, or elsewhere, you may have heard about the idea of “bias” and historical sources. That authors of certain historical documents are biased and therefore what they write is untrustworthy. 

All historical documents are biased because they are all written by human beings and we each have an individual way of looking at the world. Highlighting bias is therefore not very useful in thinking about these sources.

I prefer to use the term PERSPECTIVE because each document provides us with a window into the perspective of the person or people who created it. That can help us understand and reconstruct the world from which they came (which is really important for historians). 

SO… don’t use bias, think about PERSPECTIVE instead.