The book Giovanni and Lusanna Essay

First Paper Assignment (200 points; 20% of course grade) History 260
The subject of your first Early Modern Europe essay is the book Giovanni and Lusanna, as directed by

The book Giovanni and Lusanna Essay
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the prompt below. The length of your paper should be 6 full pages minimum (longer papers OK). The
essay should be typed and double-spaced with a clear introduction, main argument, conclusion, and
proper footnotes (see below for format). Be careful not to simply recount or summarize the story of
Giovanni and Lusanna, but work to answer the question given below using specific evidence from the
assigned reading. Please refer to the Manuscript Submission Checklist (next page) for required
elements.
Due date: Friday, March 18 on Sakai by 11:55 p.m. PDT. Late papers will be assigned a penalty of
3 points for each day late (out of 200 points possible). Please use the Assignments tab on our Sakai
site for your submission.
Question:
In 1455, a Florentine woman named Lusanna sued her lover Giovanni for
violating their marriage agreement and planning to marry another woman. The
case was heard in the Archbishops court, and allows us a close look at the
intriguing world of Renaissance marriage, politics, and law. Discuss the details
of this case and the social position of the two lovers brought before the court.
What clues does it give us about the position of women in Florentine society?
How did the courts involved make their final decision?
Footnotes (the hallmark of a good History paper)
1. All quotations and summaries related to your sources must be footnoted. A sample citation is
Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 11.
Note: Many of you will have a more recent reprint/edition of this book with a different publication
date; thats fine, just indicate that date.
2. If you are quoting the Introduction, place translators introduction before the page number. If you are quoting a line from the poem itself, place the line number(s) in parentheses after the page
number.
3. After your first footnote, use Ibid. (short for ibidem) meaning in the same place to identify additional footnotes from the same book or article:
Ibid. [if the same page in the book is used]
or
Ibid., 25. [if a different page was used]
or
Ibid., 26-27. [when more than one page is cited]
4. Block quotations of three lines or more should be indented in text one tab stop (0.5) for each margin and single spaced, without indenting the first line and without using quotation marks.
Manuscript Submission Checklist Halvorson
For your first essay assignment, you will be assessed according to the following manuscript
submission checklist which verifies that your essay is in the proper format for a PLU History Paper.
You do not need to include the checklist with your submission, but you should use this as a way of
checking your work before turning it in.
The Manuscript Checklist is also a grading rubric for your paper, and it is related to our course
learning objectives. Including the requested elements will raise your grade on this assignment;
omitting one or more items will lower your grade.
Beyond the checklist, the Brucker assignment you are working on asks you to offer evidence of the
values of Florentine Renaissance society in your paper. I have a pretty comprehensive list of these
values that I will compare to your paper; some are obvious (and crucial for you to mention) and some
are more subtle (the hallmarks of truly excellent papers). You should look to offer evidence from
throughout the book, and not just the first half of the book
Historic content
Does you essay include a date and location (country or city) in the first paragraph to provide a
historic context for the topic you are discussing?
Does your essay include a specific thesis statement at the bottom of the first paragraph? (In
this essay, I will)
Does your essay use the past tense throughout to emphasize your historic distance from the
topic at hand?
Have you avoided presentism in your essay, i.e. interpreting the past primarily through
modern-day institutions and experiences?
Do you ground each idea or statement with an example from a primary or secondary source?
Do you analyze sources, texts, characters and events from multiple perspectives?
Style
Is your essay free of personal statements or vague comparisons to the 21st century?
Have you followed in-text quotations with an explanation of the quote in your own words?
Have you identified each new person, term, or place with a parenthetical statement explaining
the significance of the item?
Have you used a variety of sentence structures, i.e. simple sentences and longer sentences
broken up by commas, semicolons, and/or dashes?
Footnotes (Chicago Manual of Style, Footnote and Bibliography Citations)
Are footnote characters used to identify sources in the body of your text (are there superscript
footnote characters in your paper after a source is used)?
Are the footnotes listed at the bottom of your pages in the correct format? (Check carefully
for punctuation, italic, and so on.)
Are block footnotes indented 0.5 on both sides? Is the spacing correct above and below the
footnote?
Have you used Ibid. properly?
Formatting
Are all book titles in italic? Journal articles in quotes?
Is your paper formatted with 1 to 1.5 left and right margins and 1 top and bottom margins?
Are you using an 11-12 point font? (Times Roman preferred)
Is there a running page number at the bottom?
Is there a name, class, and date listed on the first page?