Reflective Journal

After my initial failure to find enough credible (primary and) secondary sources for the project I initially wanted to do: Viking trade routes to Byzantium, or alternatively something relating to the Varangian Guard, it seemed natural for me to arrive at a source relating to the Crusades, as it is one of my primary interests in History – particularly within Medieval History. The research process was a fairly long and arduous one, as my relative inexperience with libraries gave me a distinct disadvantage when it came to finding books. This can be seen fairly easily in my Bibliography for this project, as there are a lot of general books, with generic titles such as “The Crusades”. In the start of the research-process (around a month before Christmas), I deemed my topic relatively obscure, and had a hard time finding more specialised literature about it, so I had to cope with what I could find, and extract whatever information I could from a few paragraphs in each book. Upon the realisation that the library is by no means perfect (for my purposes, in any case), and one often has to go through different sections of it to find relevant works, and especially look through index after index to find usable work. I managed to find more relevant books on the topic – although I am afraid that the ones that provided the most help for me, are also the oldest ones (Especially Coulton and Barker were of significant help). I understand using older books is something to be avoided if a more recent addition is at all available, if for nothing else than pursuing the most recent scholarly debate – but to this I say that there has not, to my knowledge, been any recent developments in thoughts around this topic, and certainly not available evidence from the Council.

Until a few weeks into the second term, my research project went according to plan; until I found out in the wiki-tutorial that the project is not simply a 3000 word source commentary, but a 1500 word one, with the remaining 1500 words being the reflective journal, as well as bibliography, footnotes et cetera. Obviously, this led to a few problems for me, considering up until that point, my research was quite broad, and I planned to go further into things than I am now able to do with half the essay-length. I think this shows clearly in my source commentary, it is quite rough in some spots, and a lot of points could clearly have been elaborated upon more than they were. Having questioned fellow students, this seems to be a common theme, but for all I know we may all have missed that crucial part of information we were given in the autumn. To further add to this, I was, for nearly two weeks knocked out due to illness, dangerously close to this deadline, so the source commentary turned out to be more rushed than I had initially anticipated.

As for the source commentary itself, my preconceived ideas were quite naïve, as my initial thoughts were that I could somehow get a clearer idea of what Pope Urban II. actually said. Ridiculous. I eventually arrived at that very conclusion, because not only have we got five churchmen, which we can safely assume are fairly biased, none of them wrote any of the events down less than five years after the speech. For anyone who knows anything about how the human memory works, these are not ideal circumstances. To add to that, when I found more relevant books, especially in the Theology-section of the library, I realised other people had thought of the same thing, and were, as I was, led to the conclusion that such an idea is impossible unless new evidence gets discovered. The research itself went surprisingly well, other than the previously mentioned, I feel that I have gotten a reasonably deep understanding of the matter, and the scholarly debate around it. I do feel, however, that my source commentary does not quite reflect the amount of research I have done. Specifically, I did not have enough space to include more comparisons with the other Chroniclers, which do not think flatters the commentary as a whole at all, nor did I get enough space to deal with more of the scholarly debate around the issue. This can easily be blamed on my lack of planning, which I would partly agree with, however, especially the misunderstanding about source commentary-length, and illness did put me at a disadvantage when it comes to time, I also think my initial planning for a commentary double the length made me elaborate too much on some things, then when realising I did not have enough space to do other things, omit them.

In short, I was very excited when I realised what I could do with this essay, but due to several circumstances I do feel that I let myself down in one way or another, and did not reach the potential I thought I had for this particular task. All in all, this has been a splendid learning experience nonetheless, the negatives more than anything else forced me to learn from my mistakes, which will no doubt come into good use later on in my historical career.

- As an afterthought, my endeavors into the world of blogging did not go perfectly smoothly - it seems I am too much of a novice to add pictures to this. It would just have been an aesthetic thing, but a shame nonetheless.