Term · Method
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
Primary sources come from the period studied; secondary sources interpret them later.
A playbill, a company's account book, a censor's licence, or a spectator's diary is a primary source. A scholarly biography or textbook chapter is secondary. The line can blur: an eighteenth-century history of the stage is secondary for earlier periods but primary evidence of eighteenth-century attitudes.
Primary sources are not automatically more reliable. They have authors with interests, and their survival is itself shaped by power.