My favorite sources are what are called primary sources - that is, stuff actually written in the Middle Ages. Chivalric literature, legal codes, necromancer's handbooks, histories written in the period - it's all good. Thing is, it's all good for different purposes. Period fiction is great, but we can't just say that that's how life was. I mean, how many people do you know that look and live like the folks on Friends or Seinfeld? Fiction can give us an idea about what sort of ideals, conventions, and stereotypes the people who wrote the fiction had, but we can't say it's necessarily an accurate depiction of real life.
After the primary sources come the secondary sources. You know those books you have to buy for Medieval History 202 with titles like "Problems of Class and Power in Burgandy, 1400-1450"? That's a secondary source. It'll refer to a lot of primary sources and, if it's a good secondary source, will have lots of footnotes so you know where the authors are getting this stuff. Secondary sources are great, because you get the ideas and opinions of someone who does nothing all day but think about this stuff. This makes them pretty good at it, and their opinions are often valuable.
Guess what? Tertiary sources are last on the list. Textbooks, encyclopedia entries, and glossy coffeetable books are usually in this category. They will usually cover a lot of ground, like, oh, "The Middle Ages." This actually makes them pretty useful from a gaming point of view, since the skeleton of the truth is useful for hanging campaign plothooks from. The trouble is, they generally don't footnote a whole lot, so you're never sure where the author is getting the information s/he's presenting. If the author is a respected scholar, you can kind of shift around in your chair and be OK with it. But it's a sad fact: you can't believe everything you read. Just because it's in a spiffy hardback edition doesn't make it true.
Speaking of skepticism: then there's the Internet. This is a great and wonderful tool, filled with all sorts of information. Some of it is even correct. When I can't find books, or I'm too lazy to hit the library, I may include information from web sites to buttress the essays. I will always include a link to these pages, so you can evaluate their utility yourself. I try to find ones that also reference books, that have footnotes, that agree with other sources I've seen - in short, ones like the one I'm trying to build. But there's never a guarantee. Reader beware.
Historical fiction bears mentioning. It can be a great, fairly painless way of absorbing some of the flavor of a time and place. Some authors are very careful and do very good research. This, actually, can be one of the problems. It's hard to know which details in the book are based on fact, and which are invented by the author. Not, of course, that this is necessarily a bad thing for a FRPG player: we invent all sorts of fictious details ourselves, anyway. But one of the goals for this resource is to distinguish history from romance and fantasy, so players and GMs can consciously choose which elements of which they want to include in their games. For this reason, I won't use historical fiction as a reference.
Yeah, well, I'm pretty busy. So if, at the moment, all I've got to reference for a given topic is a textbook by medieval scholar Norman Cantor, who's very reputable, maybe I'll just quote that. It's a tertiary source, but it's by a man who's know to be one of the Big Guys in the field. I feel pretty confident in what he says, so I'll post it. Of course, I'll also reference it, so you can see when I'm just going with one book and when I'm not.
Got a book or journal article that utterly contradicts something I've got here? I'd love to know about it! Send me a reference and I'll check it out and work it into the page if at all possible. My library facilities and time are limited, and I'm human and entirely capable of making errors. Just ask my little sister.
Gripes? Suggestions? Hymns of praise? Go ahead and email me.
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