Topic description:
[Your topic description should be single spaced and 200-250 words. It should explain your topic and research question, and discuss the major primary and secondary sources that will allow you to answer that question. The sample bibliography that follows was for a former student project on medieval chivalry.
The topic description stated that the paper would first analyze scholarly debates about the existence and nature of any chivalric “codes” in medieval Europe through an examination of the writings of historians Barthélemy, Kaeuper, and Keen.
Then, the topic description stated that the paper would closely analyze four particular stories from the Lais of Marie de France, a collection of twelfth-century tales, in order to answer the question: can we see ideals of what constituted medieval chivalry in the Lais of Marie de France? If so, what precisely were those ideals and how exactly are they evidenced in this primary source?]
