Ducatrix

Paper update: Today, I managed to write eight pages on Teresa of Avila and another eight on Matilda of Tuscany. I also finished my research and outline on the later paper. I'm feeling rather productive. The Teresa of Avila paper might need a thesis reworking, since I feel like I'm breaking one of the research paper cardinal sins by trying to make a thesis without any real evidence. Tisk, tisk. When will I learn?
One of the strange things about working on research papers is that you end up having a lot of random thoughts, as I discussed last night. Today was no different.
First, I discovered that Matilda apparently signed with the title "ducatrix" when she was married to Welf V. It's a unique title, since it's inbetween duke and duchess. I've been thinking about what mistress name I am going to have. Even though I don't want to work professionally like the lovely Mistress Matisse, who I admire greatly, I do want to have kinky relationships. As far as I can tell, a mistress name is not a requirement, but it would be nice to have one. Ducatrix Matilda? Or maybe Ducatrix Madeline? Usually, it's more like "Mistress Kinky Name Here", but since I stumbled across this little history nugget, it seems like a sign. Although I have been playing around with Anathema as a mistress name. It's just strange enough and has the right sort of dramatic history.
Also, I have once again managed to find the sort of material that might make a good historical romance. I'm working on the relationship between Matilda of Tuscany and Gregory VIII, and they were very close, even to the point where some angry bishops and Emperor Henry IV declared it being inappropriately so. I actually don't want to write a May/December romance about them, not because there's anything wrong with that, but because my sense is they were more of the father/daughter variety. I want to write one of those "historical" novels that Philippa Gregory manages to make so much money off of.
Philippa Gregory writes about real people, and she gets all of the facts she has to get right, but then she basically makes up her own crazy stuff about people. Her books are trashy, but in a way that is hard to notice when you're reading them. (Though the American movie version of The Other Boleyn Girl makes it super obvious.)
My trashy not-really-based-on-history historical novel is this: Gregory was the literal father of Matilda. He knocks up Beatrice when she was hostage of Godfrey V of Lorraine and Gregory was in Germany at the court of Henry III. (See? Based on actual truth, but twisted in a way that is highly unlikely.) Adorable child Matilda hanging out with younger, not-yet-Pope Gregory. Gregory, cunning man that he is, has Matilda's two older siblings, Beatrice and Frederick, murdered, laying the ground for Matilda to inherit her father's holdings. Fantastic.
Like I said last night: probably not helping me write papers. But fun to think about none the less.
One of the things I find that makes paper writing easier (other than say treats and not being under the gun and not having irritating professors and having something interesting to say) is music. Mostly, I've been listening to the delightful Gimme Fiction by Spoon. (It is up, if you look, on YouTube.) I have a lot of thoughts on the album, mostly positive, but I feel like I don't want to carry on too much about it here. Mostly, let me just say that it's nice to be singing lines like "Great dominions, they don't come cheap" midway through a sentence explaining the rhetoric of femininity in Teresa of Avila's writing.

The other song I'm in love with? "Break It Up" by Patti Smith. Smith is one of those people I put on lists about ideas/movies/music I am promising myself to check out. Friday afternoon, I was on my office's computer, and one of the other workers usually messes with it so that it plays random stuff off of Last.fm. Mostly, it's hipster stuff, which I have mixed feelings towards. The first thing that came up this time was this song, and I fell in love. Now I'm going to have to listen to the whole album.