Structure and writing

I read the intro to Davis’ article, “Religious Riot in Sixteenth Century France” to explore how  she went about setting up and introducing her research. She began by quoting two religious figures in the 1560s to provide an example for her analysis to follow. It’s important that she uses primary sources right away, and this is only one style of beginning an analytical research article. In her introduction she lays out the focus of her paper, religious riots in 16th century France, their significance and who participated in them. She provides a comparison to other rioters at the time, such as food riots. In differentiating religious riots, she gives a preliminary definition of the issue and explores the characteristics of mob violence further. She creates her own “niche” by saying that although much research has paid attention to “….” and a lot of study has been done on these sorts of riots and mob violence, religious riots havent received much “analytical attention”. So she introduces and contextualizes the issue she will explore later on in the paper. Still within the introduction she explores the problem of religious rioting, what other scholars have missed, and she asks a number of questions and then in the next paragraph explains the structure of her paper and her methods in going about answering these questions. She uses short quotes often, but integrates them well into her narrative and uses long explicatory footnotes.