I'm currently in my second and final year in the MI program concentrating in ARM and LIS. Rather than thinking of a research question related to libraries or the program in general, I've decided to use the topic I will be presenting on at the Book History and Print Culture Colloquium: Lollard texts during the English Reformation. In fifteen minutes I came up with:
- What is the influence of books and literature on Lollard practices?
- How did Lollards affect and/or influence the book trade during the height of their notoriety as well as during the English Reformation?
- What was the influence of Lollard ideology on later reform movements?
- How were Lollards able to produce and transmit manuscripts throughout such a large geographical area without the printing press?
- Were Lollard texts printed during the Reformation?
- Were Lollards involved in the introduction of the printing press to England?
- What was the influence of Lollard texts on Reformers and their texts?
- How did the Lollards emphasis on communal practices, such as communal study of faith and group ownership of books affect the Reformer's use of texts?
I too, created a word cloud using my above questions and actually found it extremely helpful when writing my research question. Just looking at it to see what the common topics are in my questions gave me a new perspective on my topic, and made me glad I gave my colloquium presentation a very long and broad title. (It also generated in this super cool and totally relevant font!)
Based on my above questions and word cloud, I believe my research question is:
How did Lollard ideology on literature and their reading practices influence the textual transmission of dissenting ideologies in the Reformation?
I've actually never studied anything about the Lollard movement before, so this topic is very new to me. That said, it looks really interesting! I tend to enjoy historical research questions, and reading through yours definitely has me interested in seeing where your work takes you.
ReplyDeleteI'm seeing one or two similar themes in our research interests, even though the topics are quite different. Between transmission of texts, a bit of printing technology, and understanding cultural influences and effects, it seems like we're both looking at aspects of a kind of communications circuit (Darnton or otherwise).
I'm working on sorting out what aspects of culture I want to look at in my own work, and the questions you asked here are making me think of different aspects of culture that hadn't occurred to me before.
That said, do you have any particular methods in mind for your work? Historical methods don't really seem to tie in naturally with social science research at first glance...