Taking some Advice March 17, 2007
Posted by Colin in HIST471.trackback
Finding primary sources is a huge obstacle to doing research on the Catholic Church. I’m wondering something: is anybody else discovering that their projects would be a whole lot easier if they could read Mandarin? Does anybody have stories? I was just going through my sources that I’ve checked out from the library and came across this annotated bibliography I had forgotten about. Professor Fernsebner recommended that I should take a closer look at it. The chapter on Christianity was largely Protestant, but it still had 4 or 5 decent sources that I have now ILLed.
Included was a collection of Papal documents related specifically to the CPCA, which may prove to be an extremely useful primary source. I was poking around on the web and kept coming across all these audio recordings, but of course I don’t speak Chinese, so I’ll take any English source I can find.
My problem with sources is not so much that they are in Mandarin, but that they are not any. And that surprises me. Something as seemingly simple as “chinese culture” produces no results. I ILLed a copy of “The Handbook of Chinese Popular Cultre” and it does have chapters about tea drinking and what not, but there nothing in it really for me. I think that is the whole problem with any class that looks to culture for historical analysis – this area of research is still too new to really be taken up by authors. So is this the new path of historians and are we the generation to pick it up?