For example, since we have already mentioned St. Thomas’s aesthetic thought, let us note that a number of recent texts that discuss this topic assume that St. Thomas said the following: “pulchrum est id quod visum placet.” Since I wrote my own thesis on this topic, I consulted the original texts and noticed that St. Thomas had never said that. Instead, he said, “pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent,” and I will not go into the details of why the two formulations can lead to very different interpretations. What had happened? Many years ago the philosopher Jacques Maritain had proposed the first formulation, thinking he was faithfully summarizing St. Thomas’s thought. Since then, other scholars have referred to Maritain’s formulation (which Maritain had drawn from an indirect source), without bothering to check the original.1
The same issue arises in regard to bibliographical entries. In a rush, you may decide to include in your bibliography sources you have not read; you may discuss these works in footnotes, or what’s worse, in the body of the text, all along drawing from information that you gathered indirectly. For example, you may find yourself writing a thesis on the baroque; having read Luciano Anceschi’s article “Bacone tra Rinascimento e Barocco” (Bacon between the Renaissance and baroque), in Da Bacone a Kant (From Bacon to Kant) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), you cite this article in a note and then, to make a good impression, you add the following comment: “For other acute and stimulating observations on the same topic see Id., ‘L’estetica di Bacone’ (Bacon’s aesthetics), in L’estetica dell’empirismo inglese (The aesthetic of English empiricism) (Bologna: Alfa, 1959).” However, since you have not actually read “L’estetica di Bacone,” and you are simply mentioning a text that you saw referenced in a note, you will make a terrible impression when a professor points out that the two articles are one and the same, “L’estetica di Bacone” having been published 13 years before “Bacone tra Rinascimento e Barocco” in a more limited edition.
These observations are also valid if the object of your thesis is a current event rather than a series of texts. If I want to address the reactions of farmers from Romagna to a particular set of TV news programs, a primary source will be the survey I conduct in the field, interviewing a reliable and adequate sample of farmers according to defined rules. If not this, I should at least use as my primary source a recent analogous survey published by a reliable source. Clearly I would be at fault if I relied on ten-year-old research, if nothing else because both the farmers and the TV news programs have changed significantly over the past decade. However, this research might be appropriate for a thesis titled “Studies on the Relationship between the Audience and Television in the Sixties.”
3.2 Bibliographical Research
3.2.1 How to Use the Library
How should a student conduct preliminary research in the library? If he already has a reliable bibliography, he can obviously search the author catalog to discover what a particular library has to offer. If the library lacks some of the titles in his bibliography, he can search another library, and so on. But this method assumes that he already has a bibliography, and that he is able to access a series of libraries, maybe one in Rome and another in London. But as we have previously discussed, readers of this book may not have such opportunities. Nor do many professional scholars. Furthermore, although we sometimes go to the library to find a book that we already know exists, we often go to the library to find out if a book exists, or to discover books about which we have no previous knowledge. In other words, we often go to the library to compile a bibliography, and this means searching for sources that we do not yet know exist. A good researcher can enter a library without having the faintest idea about scholarship on a particular topic, and exit knowing more about it, if only a little more.
The catalog The library offers some resources that allow us to find relevant sources about which we have no previous knowledge. Naturally, the first is called the subject catalog. Of course there is also an alphabetically arranged author catalog that is useful to those who already know what they want, but the subject catalog is for those who do not yet know. Here, a good library tells me everything that I can find in its stacks, for example, on the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
But querying the subject catalog requires some skill. Clearly we cannot find the entry “Fall of the Roman Empire” under the letter “F,” unless we are dealing with a library with a very sophisticated indexing system. We will have to look under “Roman Empire,” and then under “Rome,” and then under “(Roman) History.” And if we have retained some preliminary knowledge from primary school, we will have the foresight to consult “Romulus Augustulus” or “Augustulus (Romulus),” “Orestes,” “Odoacer,” “Barbarians,” and “Roman-barbarian (regna).”
Our problems do not end there. In many libraries there are two author catalogs and two subject catalogs: old ones that stop at a certain date, and the new ones that are works in progress and that will absorb the old ones only at some future date. And we will not necessarily find information on the fall of the Roman Empire in the old catalog simply because that event took place centuries ago. In fact there could be recent books on the subject that are only indexed in the new catalog. Also, in certain libraries there are separate catalogs for different collections. In other libraries, subjects and authors are indexed together. There also may be separate catalogs for books and journals, divided by subject and author; and we may even encounter a library that stores books on the first floor and journals on the second. Consequently, we must study the system used by the library in which we are working, and make our decisions accordingly. Also, some intuition is usually necessary. For example, if the older of the two catalogs is very old, and I am researching the Greek region of Laconia, I should also search for the obsolete spelling “Lacedaemonia,” because an overly diligent librarian may have indexed this entry separately.
Also note that the author catalog is always more reliable than the subject catalog because the act of compiling it does not depend on the librarian’s interpretation, as is the case with the subject catalog. In fact, if the library has a book by John Smith, you will invariably find “Smith, John” under “S” in the author catalog. But if John Smith has written an article on “The Role of Odoacer in the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Advent of the Roman-Barbarian Regna,” the librarian may have recorded it under the subject “(Roman) History” or “Odoacer,” but not necessarily under the entry “Western Roman Empire” where you are currently looking.
Finally, the author and subject catalogs simply may not provide the information you require, and in this case you must settle for a more elementary approach. In every library there is a reference section (or an entire room) that contains a collection of encyclopedias, general histories, and bibliographical indexes. If you are looking for works on the Western Roman Empire, you can search the subject of Roman history, compile a basic bibliography starting from the reference works you find, and then search for the authors in the author catalog.
Bibliographical indexes These are the safest resources for a student who already has clearly defined ideas about a topic. For some disciplines there are famous manuals where the student can find all the necessary bibliographical information. For other disciplines there are periodical indexes that contain updates in each issue, and even journals dedicated solely to a subject’s bibliography. For others still, there are journals that include an appendix in every issue that documents the most recent publications in the field. Bibliographical indexes are essential supplements to catalog research, as long as they are updated. In fact, some libraries may have an extensive collection of the oldest publications, but little or no updated work. Or they may offer histories or manuals of the discipline in question that were published in 1960, and that provide useful bibliographical information, but will not tell you if an interesting work was published in 1975. (The library may actually contain these recent works, but may have indexed them under a subject that you have not thought of.) An updated bibliographical index gives you exactly this kind of information on the latest contributions to a particular field.
The most
