Historia Scotarum Index | Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography of
Scottish Pre-Modern Women's History

Contributor's Guide

Last updated 26 Jan 2006 b

New contributors are welcome! You may participate by just suggesting works to be included in the bibliography, or by annotating entries. This project is still developing, so the exact method of doing either is as yet quite flexible. Please contact Sharon L. Krossa with any contributions or questions about the project.

The basic format for each bibliography entry is as follows:

• Author, A. Fictive. "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Pre-Modern Scottish Women But Were Afraid to Ask." The Very Prestigious Scottish History Journal 63, no. 11 (1998): 101-3. Order from Amazon.com Order from Amazon.co.uk
  A comprehensive analysis of every aspect of pre-modern Scottish women's lives. Every question ever asked by Scottish historians regarding women is answered here. [SLK]
  Topics: Church, Gaelic, Highlands, Law, Lowlands, Marriage, Towns
  Centuries: (437-1789) 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th

Contributors do not need to provide every part of an entry. Nomination of a book, topics, centuries, and annotations may all be suggested independently.

The basic reference style is according to the Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition). This will be done automatically with software (Endnote), so contributors needn't worry about it. Contributors may use any reference style that includes full bibliographic information. (However, suitable export files from bibliography software or databases would be particularly welcome!) If an ISBN/ISSN number is known (or Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk ASIN), that would also be helpful.

The "Topics:" section should include basic subject categories that would help someone doing an electronic search of the bibliography to find entries of interest. "Women", "Scotland", and similar topics are not included -- they would be somewhat redundant!

The "Centuries:" section should include the specific year range covered by the work (if such a range can reasonably be determined) as well as a listing of the centuries covered. The reason for mentioning each century separately is to assist anyone doing an electronic search.

The annotation should be a paragraph describing the nature, contents, and quality (if appropriate) of the work as it relates to the study of women. The purpose is to give students and researchers some idea of the usefulness of the work for women's history. Quality, in its different senses, is especially important to indicate for both primary sources and secondary works of questionable or particularly outdated scholarship. For secondary works of sound scholarship, quality need not be explicitly addressed. For secondary works that include women but are not specifically about women, the quantity and quality of the information about women should be made clear. If appropriate, the specific chapters, sections, or pages where women are addressed should be indicted.

The annotation is followed by the initials of the annotation author in square brackets. This is linked to the author's short biography on the Members page. All members of Historia Scotarum may submit a biography; it is not limited to annotators. However, all members who contribute to the bibliography, in whatever fashion, will be marked as contributors in their biographies.

A work may have more than one annotation included in the bibliography, each by a different contributor, or contributors may collaborate on a combined annotation.

The bibliography is currently divided into several sections. The number and composition of these sections will likely change as the bibliography grows. The current sections are:

Secondary Works	Specifically about Women
	Women Included
	Mary Queen of Scots
	Biographies
	Marriage
	Historiography
Primary Sources	Manuscript
	Published

The purpose of including primary sources is to encourage scholars to share their knowledge of them as sources for researching women. It is hoped that as people use various sources in their own research, they will pass on their impressions of those sources usefulness for inclusion in the bibliography.

Where possible, a link to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk will be included for works still in print for the convenience of those using the bibliography. Income generated from the association with Amazon, if any, will be used to defray the expenses of the MedievalScotland.org web site, which hosts the Historia Scotarum web pages and mailing list. (A financial statement is available.)

At the moment the bibliography is only being published on the world wide web, it is hoped that at some stage it will also be traditionally published.

Please contact Sharon L. Krossa if you have further questions about the project.

Historia Scotarum Index | Bibliography

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