How do I quote bulleted or numbered points from a source?

Note: This post relates to content in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. For up-to-date guidance, see the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook.

If you need to quote from a bulleted or numbered list, you can reproduce the list in your essay, as in the example below:

Parvini organizes the material into four groups:

  1. Early modern Christian beliefs inherited from the medieval period, indeed the very period that Shakespeare is writing about in the history plays
  2. The structure of feudal and semifeudal society
  3. Emergent humanist ideas about history and politics imported from Renaissance Italy, especially those of Niccolò Machiavelli
  4. The key events of the Wars of the Roses and the corresponding key plot points of Shakespeare’s two tetralogies. (95)

Work Cited

Parvini, Neema. “Historicism ‘By Stealth’: History, Politics, and Power in Richard II and Henry IV.” Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays, edited by Laurie Ellinghausen, Modern Language Association of America, 2017, pp. 94–99.

You can also quote from each point in the list, perhaps paring down some of the information:

Parvini organizes the material as follows: “early modern Christian beliefs inherited from the medieval period,” “the structure of feudal and semifeudal society,” “emergent humanist ideas about history and politics imported from Renaissance Italy,” and “the key events of the War of the Roses and the corresponding key plot points of Shakesepare’s two tetralogies” (95).