I'm a student pursuing a doctoral degree in late medieval history. My main interests include but are not limited to Latin, Italian, cultural theory, educational curriculum, historiography, cognitive processes, language-theory, gender relations and THE WESTERN CANON (mwahaha); i am not particularly interesting, avant-garde or risque; My main hobbies include the exciting activities of cooking, baking, going to the gym, eating green apple-caramel lollipops, restaurant reviewing and acting as child-like and sassy as possible. I keep these entries from the years of my life - no matter how i feel about them today - available because i find it useful to revisit events i now interpret differently. My name is heather, i'm of Montreal and i was born in the nefarious, ominous year 1984.

I was told a secret today

“You’re the first person i’ve shared this with… but… because Old English poetry is alliterative there is a high chance, when looking up words in the dictionary for a given line, that they will all be on the same page.”
I feel special. Now another twenty-something people know this about Old English poetry. I am thrilled [...]

Verse in Chaucer’s “The Monk’s Tale”

There were two distinct verse traditions in English in the fourteenth century: a system evolving from Old English (and German in general) which depended on the number of stressed syllables in a line and linked by alliteration of initial sounds (no rhyming); a system, beginning in the twelfth century, evolving from Romantic models (Latin and [...]