I'm very excited today. I'm excited because I got cast in the play for which I auditioned. It's a comedy and it's in the black box, and directed by the same professor as Phedre, and based on last night's call, it should be a lot of fun to work with the rest of the cast on this piece. There's a lot of other reasons I'm excited today, too, but I'll only discuss in depth the one that might be of relevance to the Desk.
Dr. Mollenaur, my HST 290 professor, approved my thesis for my research paper for the class. Let me tell you why this matters. 290 is the essential history class that is a requisite for all history majors, besides the Western Civ, US, and Global survey courses. After this class is completed, my core requirements for my major will be fulfilled, and then I just have to take a given number hours out of whatever I want within the department. The name of the course is "Methods and Practice of History," which basically means it's a course on how to be a history major - how to do research, how to write a paper, how to cite, things of this nature. Discussions of source analysis and research tools are pretty simple and boring, so the professor of each section designates a theme for their course. Ours is all about crime and punishment throughout history, and how we can look at the concept of criminality and justice, and the documents related to it, in order to get a picture of life in a particular historical context as well as a perspective on the origins of our own justice system. This theme gives us the opportunity to look at specific cases and documents in our discussions, rather than just talking about how you would analyze something when it comes along. This area of history is especially relevent when talking about the flaws of first-hand sources and the approaches to circumventing them because when using trial records as a research source, you have to take into account the inevitability of perjury. People will lie under oath to get themselves out of trouble, or the scribe may not have written every bit word for word, or the prosecutors may have purposefully tampered with the written testimonial evidence, or there's always the potential problems of translation and interpretation in any source. But more than the guilt or innocence of any particular case, we use these these sources to determine the contemporary notions of crime and justice, and by their very nature, the flaws in the evidence may themselves be peices of evidence to the historian. It hurts the case, but if a person in a position of power changes or omits part of the record somewhere down the line, we can look at that act for its own historical merit.
Anyway, I got my thesis approved for my paper, which is very nice. What is my thesis, you ask? Why, it is in regards to the effectiveness of excommunication as less a legitimate form of justice than a political tool for the papacy during the 16th century, of course. Now, you may be thinking, "Why is he so excited about writing that monstrosity?" Well, when I have to write a 20-page research paper that has prospects of taking up a great deal of my time, I'd much rather choose my own topic than have to scrape the barrel for something I may or may not be able to scratch out a paper on. The only parameters she gave us were that it had to be relevant to the crime and punishment theme, deal with a time frame between 1500 and 2000, in the West, and then some specifics about the number of sources and our research methods and citation and such that doesn't matter to you. Not that any of this matters to you. Some of the other theses students proposed were independent justice in the Reconstuction era South (lynch mobs), the questionable legality regarding the rise of the IRA, the causes and consequences of urban riots in the 1960's, and one hole shtichk about Sacco and Vanzetti, among others.
I chose this topic because I knew from the top I wanted to something regarding religion. So I got to thinking about where religion played a primary role in the decision and execution of the law. The time frame for this course is too recent to hit papal supremacy or medeival herecy square on the head there in the 12th century, but the Reformation fell right inside it. So basically with this paper, I want to explore the use of papal power to gain political and economic ends, and whether anybody could do anything about it. I will examine early modern religious law, and the role it played in inciting the Reformation, with particular respect to the exploitation of that law. My focus will be on the Church's attempts to control the spread of Protestant ideas by exerting their legal and political power, even inventing laws, and what happened to the people who broke those laws. In my mind, the most prominent and most interesting aspect of papal justice was the practice of excommunication. Only the Church could perform this rite, unlike torture, branding, or any of the other forms of justice, as it had particular meaning to a person's religious life, which in turn had effects on their whole situation. In accordance with academic integrity and the rules for the paper, I'll use and cite a sufficient number of primary sources as well as current articles on the subject. It is for this reason that I had to choose a topic broad enough and popular enough that there would be sufficient sources to be found. But by the same token, I will probably narrow down my discussion to a particular region or other variable depending on the flow of information available and the length of discourse I can provide on it. My paper will especially have to include specific cases of the excommunication of particularly influential people, why and how the Church dealt with the person in this manner, and what effects it had on the politics of the time. The excommunication of a king, for example, was both common and useful to the Church, but they often had to invent some false offense as an excuse to reach their ends. But above all, I shall answer the question in my thesis by displaying whether or not the Church's judicial flexing was actually effective in slowing the Reformation or just made passion-inspiring martyrs out of their outspoken enemies. This is going to be a big one and I want to be able to knock it out of the park. So between the play and this paper, you get some idea of where I'm going to be this semester. Should be fun.
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