St Margaret Redux

And it's now handed in. One. Two. Three ... Huzzah!!

Feeling a bit spacy right now, owing to disturbed sleep patterns this week, but coping a lot better than expected. Nice weather and getting Repton to come out to Manners Mall and have crepes with me helped a lot.

And I just want to say that the standard Margaret legend offers remissions of sins, a place in heaven, and no children born who are blind, deaf, lame or crazy to anyone who reads or writes a copy of her life. Her and me are like that. :-)

March to Ship

I'm currently staying up late trying to finish off my Margaret of Antioch essay. Eye eye eye. I've been on a Search and Destroy mission for //TODO place holders and trying to tidy up poorly written sections, and have been making progess with one section still to do and a mere handful of placeholders left to roust out. It's also massively overlength (like nearly twice as long as it ought to be.) This is not my fault - every time I pointed at a section and told my supervisor I was thinking of cutting it he said 'No, no, keep it in, I like it.' Bah humbug!

In other news, I have until tomorrow to decide if I'm going to do Masters this year. Pros and cons both ways and I'm being infernally indecisive about it.

EDIT: Finished all the writing about half past midnight, now can't sleep. Double bah humbug! Proof reading tomorrow. Just checked scholarship docs and actually have another 10 days to dither - probably best not to make decisions when I'm tired and stressed about essays. :-)

So there was this guy...

...called Sejanus. He did pretty well for himself, in 1st C AD terms, came from a poor family (with some decent breeding), was liked by his boss Tiberius (the emperor), got a lot of power and prestige, had it off with the emperor's daughter-in-law even. Good going for a small-town hick. Then it all went wrong and he crashed and burned. And everybody hated him then, if they hadn't hated him already, and lots of historians said really nasty things about him, especially a chap called Cornelius Tacitus.

Then the Middle Ages happened, and people pretty much forgot about Tacitus, and Sejanus, until some guy called Boccacio found an old manuscript and thought that old Cornelius was pretty cool. Soon, lots of people thought that Tacitus was pretty cool. Not Sejanus, though. They really really hated him. Lots. Even when they'd changed their minds from Tiberius being a shifty dissembler to being a cool and cunning planner, they still hated Sejanus. You could even go to prison for suggesting that someone, like perhaps the King of England's country-bred pretty-boy favourite, was just like Sejanus. Lots of hatred, and even more comments about the thunder of heaven's rage crashing down on those pesky social climbers. Sounds like a lot of rage. But hey, this is the Renaissance by now, and there's lots of political stuff going on that no-one can do anything about, maybe it makes people feel better to have a nice simple villain to rage at. And they can even point out how he died, horribly, so they can feel all righteous about the existing social order. Gosh.

2000 words, somewhat less eloquently expressed, all handed in. Yay! (I am such a hack.)

Another project to hand in tomorrow, another due in two weeks which I've...kind of started, and then all I have to worry about is exams. Phew. It's not so much that I'm on the downhill stretch as that I can see the top of the hill. To all the students who have made it to the end of the semester in somewhat better order: I hate you I hate you I hate you.* That's the favourite phrase of my Latin teacher. Clearly, I'm learning something here. :-)

(*) The fact that many of my woes are entirely self-inflicted is entirely beside the point.

EDITED TO ADD: The Old English project is now done and being printed. My, it's a wonderful view from the top of the hill...

What the...?

Well and so. I'm sitting at home writing a comparative essay on a bunch of English Renaissance texts, and alternately reading a Georgette Heyer novel to take my mind off things.

The essay is ... getting there. Right now I'm about to start a paragraph on feminine chastity and how it's a real fascination of these texts, and need to find some way to make it link in with the ideal of nobility, which is what the essay is officially about.

On the other hand, the novel is getting weird. (Georgette Heyer, Lady of Quality, (London: Arrow Books, 2005).) The female lead has fallen in love with the male lead, the male lead has fallen in love with the female lead, and he's just proposed to her! There's nearly 70 pages left to go! What is she thinking! I should add that in Heyer's world it isn't at all unusual for the proposal, or even marriage, to happen very early in the piece, but the complication there is the marriage of convenience, and the need for both partners to realise that they're actually in love with their spouses. Here, there is no such complication.

I'm so confused...

EDIT: A bunch of people got the flu. I say again: What the...?
EDIT2: Essay going well. Just managed to squeeze in a gratuitous reference to Volpone which we haven't even been studying, because the Celia subplot fit in well with the whole chastity thing. 1200 words down, another 1800 to go. Well, that's the upper limit, anyway. I need to come up with at least another 1300 to be legal. I've never had to write an essay of this length before. It's interesting having all that extra room to move around in.