Hello colleagues (some of you still my academic superiors),
I know we muddle around the topic of primary and secondary sources, but I myself am somewhat flip-flopping on where to classify a particular source.
I am currently writing my thesis, a half biography half post-Famine Irish cultural nationalism and the press, and I have a memoir written about my subject. Trouble is, the memoir was written by my subject's older brother, about my subject's life, and was published three years after his (the subjects) death.
I'm no longer feeling confident about how to classify this after flip-flopping so much. I know there are obvious definitions, but this one seems to be in a perfectly grey area.
So, what is your opinion?
In medieval, we very often deal with textual sources that are years or centuries later than what we're studying. These are still primary sources, although obviously there are additional factors to consider when analyzing them.
A secondary source is one that places a scholarly distance between itself and the subject, intended to study the event and make an argument about its significance in light of other scholarly historical arguments.
I would certainly classify this as a primary source, but in general I feel it's more useful to think about primary and secondary sources in terms of their function in your argument than in terms of a set of abstract characteristics. Crudely, a secondary source helps you establish a warrant for your claim (historians have not made X argument in Y context before) whereas a primary source provides data or evidence for it.