Exploration, science, and Enlightenment all fundamentally change the way Europeans understood their world. In this essay, I’d like you to engage Voltaire, Erauso, and whatever other primary sources you find helpful in order to tell the story of new perspectives. Using secondary sources is also a good idea. Use only what you’ve read for this class, not extra research.
Of course these two sources are different in many ways, and so your treatment of each should reflect those differences. Erauso was real; Candide was fictional. Lieutenant Nun was a memoir; Candide was a novel. Erauso lived during the Age of Exploration; Voltaire lived during the Age of Enlightenment in a separate century.
Erauso and Candide both travel the world. While Lieutenant Nun and Candide, as books, are very different, the fact that they are both travel narratives (while also other things) is significant. The world has opened up to early modern people — geographically because of exploration and within the realm of ideas and possibility because of Enlightenment. While Erauso is not as critical of that world as Voltaire is, she is transient and searching as Voltaire’s character Candide is. I suspect that as you think about these two tales of adventure, you will come up with many fruitful comparisons.
The historical thinking skill you are practicing as you do this is context. In this case, you are using specific texts to furnish the context around them. Book-length sources can do this for us: they show us a world full of people, ideas, and events. Use our authors as guides into the contexts of their eras and arrive at something to say about the significance of exploration and Enlightenment in the European experience.
You might decide to organize your paper into two sections, one on each source, or to organize it thematically and engage the sources where they fit the themes. Either is fine. Just be sure to write a cohesive paper where all of the paragraphs belong together, adding up to a unified topic.
Process:
– Identify one or two topics that you think are well represented in these two books. Examples include themes expressed above a well as: women’s struggles, new versions of masculinity, relativism, religion, nationalism, etc.
– Use context (secondary sources) to thoroughly explain those topics.
– Craft a unifying thesis statement that explains how Erauso and Voltaire contribute to our understanding of those topics.
– Push your analysis to add layers. Consider why these authors raised those topics, or whether it’s useful to discuss the two of them together, or if you witness change over time in the years that pass between the two books’ writing, or other probing questions.
– It should be 5 pages double-spaced
– Cite as well as you can. You should have enough bibliographical information to write pretty complete citations.
– No outside research or outside sources (including pages that were not assigned from Erauso or others) should be incorporated. Doing so will result in a zero. Remember this is your final assignment for Unit 2, so it should demonstrate you have done the assigned reading in this unit.
– You might think that I am assigning a very specific genre, a compare/contrast essay, complete with its formatting constraints. That is not my intention. Please analyze these sources in order to craft a historical argument. The organization of such a paper could take many forms.
Must use, Voltaire, Erauso, and whatever other primary sources you find helpful in order to tell the story of new perspectives.
NO OUTSIDE SOURCES only ones I provide you with.