A posteriori

PHONETICS: The study of phonemes, or units of sound in spoken language.

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: Written symbols that linguists use to represent speech sounds. One common transcription system is the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). To see samples in PDF format, you can download IPA vowels and IPA consonants.

PHONOGRAM: A written symbol that indicates a spoken sound. Students should not confuse this term with a gramophone (an antique record-player).

PHONOLOGY: According to Algeo, "The units of sound (phonemes) of a language with their possible arrangements and varieties of vocal expression" (329). More generally, the study of sounds and sound-systems in a language.

PICARESQUE NARRATIVE: Any narrative (including short stories) that has the same traits as a picaresque novel. See discussion under picaresque novel.

PICARESQUE NOVEL (from Spanish picaro, a rogue or thief; also called the picaresque narrative and the Räuberroman in German): A humorous novel in which the plot consists of a young knave's misadventures and escapades narrated in comic or satiric scenes. This roguish protagonist--called a picaro--makes his (or sometimes her) way through cunning and trickery rather than through virtue or industry. The picaro frequently travels from place to place engaging in a variety of jobs for several masters and getting into mischief. The picaresque novel is usually episodic in nature and realistic in its presentation of the seamier aspects of society.

The genre first emerged in 1553 in the anonymous Spanish work Lazarillo de Tormes, and later Spanish authors like Mateo Aleman and Fracisco Quevedo produced other similar works. The first English specimen was Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Probably the most famous example of the genre is French: Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715), which ensured the genre's continuing influence on literature. Other examples include Defoe's Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild, Smollett's Roderick Random, Thomas Mann's unfinished Felix Krull, and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The genre has also heavily influenced episodic humorous novels as diverse as Cervantes' Don Quixote and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

PICARO (Spanish "thief," also called picaroon): A knave or rascal who is the protagonist in picaresque novels. See discussion under picaresque novel, above.

PICKUP SYLLABLE: Another term the unstressed syllable in anacrusis.

PIDGIN: A simplified, limited language combining features from many languages and used among persons who share no common language amongst themselves. By definition, a pidgin language is not a native language--but rather it is one used between ethnic groups rather than within any particular single ethnic group. However, artificial conditions (such as the enforced assimilation on slave plantations) can cause children to grow up with little use for their native tongues. This can cause the pidgin language to develop into a much richer creole.

PIECE-BIEN-FAIT: The French term for the dramatic genre called the "well-made play." See discussion under well-made play.

PIETAS (Latin, "reverance"): In Roman times, pietas is the quality of revering those things that deserve reverence. The word is the source for our modern English word piety and piousness (reverence toward the divine), but the Latin term is far more all-embracing--indicating not only devotion to the gods, but also devotion to one's gens (family) and patria (homeland or country). Thus, it also means patriotism and familial responsibility. In Virgil's Aeneid, one epithet frequently applied to Aeneas is pius Aeneas, implying that Aeneas particularly embodies this quality so valued by the Romans.

PILGRIMAGE: An act of spiritual devotion or penance in which an individual travels without material comforts to a distant holy place. The journey often has spiritual overtones--it may symbolize a journey to the celestial city of heaven or repeat the journey of a saint or biblical hero. Pilgrimage has become a prominent symbol in both Western Christian writings and Middle-Eastern Islamic writings. John Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are two literary examples using the pilgrimage motif.

P'ING HUA: A Chinese yarn or tall tale. The genre typically involves a strong narrative presence and colloquial or idiomatic Chinese. The tone is realistic, but the content is typically fantastic or hyperbolic. Contrast with the Russian skaz.

PIT: In indoor theaters during the Renaissance, the most expensive and prestigious bench seating was the pit--an area directly in front of the stage. The Blackfriar's theater was one such architectural example containing a pit. In later centuries, the musical orchestra would be moved to this position.

PITCH: In linguistics, a semi-musical tone or quality used in some languages to distinguish meaning.

PLACE OF ARTICULATION: The point in the oral cavity where the position of speech organs (lips, teeth, tongue, etc.) is most important for a particular sound.

PLAGIARISM: Accidental or intentional intellectual theft in which a writer, poet, artist, scholar, or student steals an original idea, phrase, or section of writing from someone else and presents this material as his or her own work without indicating the source via appropriate explanation or citation. Click here for more information.

PLATONIC: In common usage, people often use the word "platonic" to mean "intellectual rather than physical." Thus, a Platonic love-affair is one in which the couple is attracted to each other for mental or psychological qualities rather than bodily attributes. More specifically, however, Platonic philosophy is Plato's idea that behind (or above or outside) the imperfect physical world, another intangible world of abstract ideas has its own existence. These abstract-but-perfect ideas (called Platonic forms) appear only as dim outlines (or shadows) in the physical world. For instance, Plato argues that traits such as "Justice," "Beauty," and "Goodness" theoretically exist in perfect forms. Material creatures, who cannot see or enjoy the abstract quality of Beauty itself, can only enjoy specific manifestations of Beauty--such as sunsets or starlight or silvery snow. What the unenlightened do not realize is that it is not these specific objects they should admire, but the quality of beauty behind them--the form of absolute Beauty that is eternal and unchanging even as specific sunsets fade and yearly snowfalls melt away. Because these abstract traits remain eternal even as the physical world changes ever, Plato concludes that the Platonic forms are somehow even more real than the concrete things we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste every day. His breathtaking, nearly mystical conclusion is that the physical world is the illusion or dream, and the world of the mind is closer to the "real" world of the eternal forms.

Platonic thinking profoundly influences Plotinus, Boethius, Saint Augustine, Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, Spenser's "Hymn in Honor of Beauty," Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

PLAY: A specific piece of drama, usually enacted on a stage by diverse actors who often wear makeup or costumes to make them resemble the character they portray. See drama.

PLEONASM: A habit of speech or writing in which an idea repeats itself in a single sentence, i.e., a redundancy. For example, "tiny little town" is a pleonasm, as opposed to "tiny town" or "little town." Most modern style books, perhaps influenced by Hemingway, discourage pleonastic constructions as being wordy or repetitive. I also steer students away from them. However, pleonasms have been fashionable in other centuries. Geoffrey of Vinsauf favored them in his twelfth-century style manual, the Poetria Nova. The New Testament book of Mark happily used them, as David Smith points out (8). Consider Mark 13:33, "Blepete, agrupneite!" ("Watch out! Be aware!") in which the author emphasizes alertness by using a pleonasm.

PLOSIVE: In linguistics, another term for a stop.

PLOT: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. In order for a plot to begin, some sort of catalyst is necessary. While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects. Note that, while it is most common for events to unfold chronologically or ab ovo (in which the first event happens first, the second event happens second, and so on), many stories structure the plot in such a way that the reader encounters happenings out of order. A common technique along this line is to "begin" the story in the middle of the action, a technique called beginning in medias res (Latin for "in the middle[s] of things"). Some narratives involve several short episodic plots occurring one after the other (like chivalric romances), or they may involve multiple subplots taking place simultaneously with the main plot (as in many of Shakespeare's plays).

PLUCK BUFFET: Anthropologists suggest that pre-adolescent male children in a variety of cultures share the game of "pluck buffet." In this game, one child trades blows on the arm or chest with another to see who is "bravest" or "toughest." Alternatively, pluck buffet also refers to any game in which two individuals challenge each other to some contest (often archery) and the loser must receive a strike from the winner. For instance, the poem "Garland" depicts Richard the Lion-Hearted and Robin Hood having an archery contest, and the loser must "Beare a buffet on his hede." This becomes an important theme in ballads like Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. Pluck buffet may also lie at the heart of a Celtic motif known as the "trade of blows" in which one warrior agrees to trade strikes with another; in the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pluck buffet takes a potentially lethal turn when Gawain and the green elf-knight play the game using giant axes.

POETIC DICTION: Distinctive language used by poets, i.e., language that would not be common in their everyday speech. The most common signs of poetic diction include involve archaisms, neologisms, rhyme, and unusual figures of speech. Teachers often point to Spenser's use of words like gentil and tobraken, or Shakespeare's use of abysm and climature, or Emily Dickinson's use of thee and thine. When they ask students, "why did this poet write in such a way?" students often mistakenly reply, "Because that's the way people talked back then." On the contrary, in the 1500s, Spenser is resurrecting language that was common in Chaucer's day in the 1300s--not the language of his own time. The words abysm and climature are made-up words Shakespeare invented from abyss/chasm and climate/temperature, not words he would hear in everyday use on the London streets. Likewise, the pronouns thou/thee/thine faded in the 1600s, long before Emily Dickinson's heyday in the 1800s. These poets chose such language precisely because it is unusual for their time--because it is different from humdrum ordinary speech. (That's what makes it striking poetry, after all.)

The concept of literary decorum (and its requirement for certain genres and characters to use lofty, elevated language) also generated thick poetic diction. As M. H. Abrams notes in volume I of The Norton Anthology, the results were phrases such as "the finny tribe" for "fish" and the "the bleating kind" for "sheep" (2958). To modern poets, such phrasing might seem overblown. The point, however, is that poetic diction is vastly different from daily speech.

POETIC LICENSE: The freedom of a poet or other literary writer to depart from the norms of common discourse, literal reality, or historical truth in order to create a special effect in or for the reader. When applied to prose writers, the term is often called "artistic license." Contrast with verisimilitude.

POETIC JUSTICE: The phrase and the idea was coined by Thomas Rymer in the late 1600s. He claimed that a narrative or drama should distribute rewards and punishments proportionately to the virtues and villainies of each character in the story. Thus, when a particularly vicious character meets a despicable end appropriate for his crimes, we say it is "poetic justice." This formula for resolving plots has fallen into disfavor in later centuries, and no widely influential critics today advocate such a formula without qualifications.

POETIC SPEAKER: The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings. It is a convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as the historical author of the poem. For instance, consider the poet Lord Byron's mock epic Don Juan. Lord Byron wrote the poem as a young man in his late twenties. However, the speaker of the poem depicts himself as being an elderly man looking back cynically on the days of youth. Clearly, the "voice" talking and narrating the story is not identical with the author. In the same way, the speaker of the poem "My Last Duchess" characterizes himself through his words as a Renaissance nobleman in Italy who is cold-blooded--quite capable of murdering a wife who displeases him--but the author of the poem was actually Robert Browning, a mild-mannered English poet writing in the early nineteenth-century. Many students (and literary critics) attempt to decipher clues about the author's own attitudes, beliefs, feelings, or biographical details through the words in a poem. However, such an activity must always be done with caution. Shakespeare may write a sonnet in which the poetic speaker pours out his passion for a woman with bad breath and wiry black hair (Sonnet 130), but it does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare himself was attracted to halitosis, or that his wife had black hair, or that he had a fling with such a woman. In fact, it is a convention in some genres, such as the medieval visio or dream vision, that the poetic speaker is a dull, imperceptive caricature of the author. See also authorial voice and dream vision, above.

POETRY: A variable literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language. These patterns typically consist of patterns of meter (regular patterns of high and low stress), syllabification (the number of syllables in each line of text), rhyme, alliteration, or combinations of these elements. The poem typically involves figurative language such as schemes and tropes, and the poem may bend (or outright break) the conventions of normal communicative speech in the attempt to embody an original idea or convey a linguistic experience. Many modern students mistakenly believe that rhyme is the dominant feature separating poetry from prose (non-poetic) writings. However, rhyme is actually a fairly recent addition to poetry. In classical Greece and Rome, meter was the trait that separated poetry from prose.

POINT OF VIEW: The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. Point of view governs the reader's access to the story. Many narratives appear in the first person (the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it). Another common type of narrative is the third-person narrative (the narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on). When the narrator reports speech and action, but never comments on the thoughts of other characters, it is the dramatic third person point of view or objective point of view. The third-person narrator can be omniscient--a narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives. The narrator can also be limited--a narrator who is confined to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single character, or at most a limited number of characters. Finally, there is the unreliable narrator (a narrator who describes events in the story, but seems to make obvious mistakes or misinterpretations that may be apparent to a careful reader). Unreliable narration often serves to characterize the narrator as someone foolish or unobservant. See also authorial voice.

POINT OF VIEW CHARACTER: The central figure in a limited point of view narration, the character through whom the reader experiences the author's representation of the world. See point of view, above.

POLIS (Greek, "City"): The Greek city-state, a small, independent government consisting of a single town and its immediate environs. Some of these city-states were democracies in which every male citizen voted on every government action. Others were oligarchies in which a few rich or aristocratic families cooperated and shared powers. Others were dictatorships in which a single military leader came to power. The two most influential city-states were Athens and Sparta. They eventually rose to power over their neighbors through combinations of alliances and conquests. Athens was famous for its culture and art and intellectual life. Sparta was famous for its toughness and its martial lifestyle.

POLYGENESIS: The theory that, if two similar stories, words, or images appear in two different geographic regions or languages, they are actually unrelated to each other. Each one arose independently. For an analogy, in both early Mayan architecture and in Egyptian architecture, pyramids are striking engineering features. However, since no contact took place between the two cultures, archeologists believe each group invented the design independently rather than adopting it from a single source (such as one group borrowing it from the other). Circumstances such as the lack of mortar, concrete, or flying buttresses ensured that both Mayans and Egyptians would come up with a wide-base structure to support any large or tall edifice--leading to pyramid designs by default.

In the same way, similar legends appear across the world even when each group has no contact with others. Many cultures that master metallurgy create legends or myths about crippled smiths (witness Hephaestus or Vulcan in Greco-Roman myth, Weiland in Norse and Germanic legend, and Silverhand in Celtic myth). Cultures that do not master metal-smithing do not create crippled craftsmen-gods in their pantheons. This can be explained by the theory of polygenesis. Men who are crippled cannot join the hunters in gathering food or join the farmers in digging irrigation ditches, so they tend to stay in the village and work as craftsmen, developing skills that ultimately seem magical to the untrained without these years of experience. However, the archetype of the crippled craftsman/god does not appear in cultures without the technology of metal-working.

In the same way, flood-narratives appear across many cultures--Noah's flood in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as in Welsh, Chaldean, and Greek legends. Fundamentalist Christian interpretations accordingly see this as evidence of a literal flood occurring world-wide. Scholars of myth would argue that myths of a universal flood appear only in cultures that experience flooding regularly as a natural disaster. Aborigines in the Australian outbreak or desert-dwelling tribesmen do not necessarily share such a legend. This leads to the idea that these flood-narratives arose independently in different places through polygenesis. See also archetype. Contrast with monogenesis.

POLYSYLLABIC: Having more than one syllable.

POLYSYNDETON: Using many conjunctions to achieve an overwhelming effect in a sentence. For example, "This term, I am taking biology and English and history and math and music and physics and sociology." All those ands make the student sound like she is completely overwhelmed. It is the opposite of asyndeton. Both polysyndeton and asyndeton are examples of rhetorical schemes. For a literary example of polysyndeton, click here.

POMPÉ: In classical Greco-Roman culture, many major festivals were marked by a pompé. A pompé was a combination of a parade, pilgrimage, and religious procession Worshipper would don special garb, line up in rows by the thousands, and then travel through the city or from one holy site to another (such as from the Parthenon to the site of the Eleusinian mysteries). The most important pompé in Athens celebrated Athena's birthday. On this day, her shrine would be cleaned and scrubbed, and the cult statue would be physically carried or carted in a procession leading to the Aegean, where it would be cleansed with sea-water and given a new peplos (woman's cloak) to wear for the upcoming year.

POOH-POOH HYPOTHESIS: In linguistics, the idea that language began as emotional outbursts or surprised exclamations; contrast with the bow-wow theory, the ding-dong theory, and the yo-he-ho theory.

PORTMANTEAU WORD: The French term for a linguistic blending.

PORTRAIT EN CREUX: A rhetorical or literary device in which a writer mentions an absence to evoke the counterpart presence. This is the verbal equivalent of "negative space" in sculpture or painting.

POSTMODERNISM: A general (and often hotly debated) label referring to the philosophical, artistic, and literary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to the present day. We can speak of postmodern art, music, architecture, literature, and poetry using the same generic label. The tendencies of postmodernism include (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation--in some cases bordering on gimmickry, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, and (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness (often postmodernism mocks its own characteristic traits). In many ways, these traits are all features that first appeared in modernism, but postmodernism magnifies and intensifies these earlier characteristics. It also seems to me that, while modernism rejected much of tradition, it clung to science as a hopeful and objective cure to the past insanities of history, culture and superstition. Modernism hoped to tear down tradition and longed to build something better in its ruins. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is often suspicious of scientific claims, and often denies the possibility or desirability of establishing any objective truths and shared cultural standards. It usually embraces pluralism and spurns monolithic beliefs, and it often borders on solipsism. While modernism mourned the passing of unified cultural tradition, and wept for its demise in the ruined heap of civilization, so to speak, postmodernism tends to dance in the ruins and play with the fragments.

Some of the new literary movements growing from postmodernism include the darker or horrific tales of science fiction, neo-Gothic literature, late twentieth-century horror stories, concrete poetry, magic realism, Theater of the Absurd, and so on. Finally, postmodernism is often used loosely and interchangeably with the critical movements following post-structuralism--the growing realms of Marxist, materialist, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches to literature that developed during and after the 1970s. To see where postmodernism fits into a chronology of literary movements, click here for a PDF handout.

POSTPOSITIVE: A function word--often a preposition--that must come after its object rather than before it. By definition, a postpositive word or phrase cannot begin a sentence. Several words in Latin and Greek are postpositives.

POST-STRUCTURALISM: A collective and loose term for any of the literary theories appearing after the structuralist movement in linguistics--including Derrida's infamous concept of deconstruction. The more radical poststructuralists attempt to subvert, question, or eliminate common concepts accepted before the structuralist movement--like individual identity, the subconscious mind, rules for social interaction, and so on.

PREFIX: A morpheme added to the beginning of a word. For instance, the prefix re- can be added to the word play to create the word replay.

PREQUEL (formed from the prefix pre- and the root word sequel): A novel, play, film, or other narrative usually written after the popular success of an earlier work but set before the events in that successful earlier work, and incorporating characters, settings, and situations with which the audience is already familiar. Contrast with sequel and series.

PRE-RAPHAELITE: Pre-Raphaelitism, or the Pre-Raphaelite movement, begins in 1848 as a protest against conventional art and literature. A band of young London artists, poets, and intellectuals formed a "brotherhood" dedicated to re-creating the type of medieval art existing before the Renaissance. Hence, they took their name from Raphael (1483-1520), the earliest major Renaissance artist in Italy. Like the Romantic poets, Pre-Raphaelites wished to regain the spirit of simple devotion and adherence to nature. Hence, they rejected modernity, mass production, and urbanization. Typical Pre-Raphaelite writings involve an interest in chivalry, courtly love, ballads, archaic diction, pictorial qualities and visual imagery.

The first Pre-Raphaelites included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the ringleader), William Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, John Everett Millais, and Frederick George Stephens initially. The movement later grew to include or influence Dante Rossetti's sister, the poet Christina Rossetti; William Morris, the craftsman and writer; the author Swinburne, and Burne-Jones the artist. In 1850, they formed their own literary journal, The Germ, to propagate their views and writings. Click here to download a PDF file of Christina Rossetti's poem, "A Birthday," to sample the diction and style of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.

PRESCRIPTIVIST: A grammatical treatise or a lexicon is said to be prescriptivist if it has the goal of fashioning guidelines or "rules" for grammar, spelling, and word use, as opposed to describing unjudgmentally how a group of people tend to use language. Contrast with descriptivist.

PRESS VARIANT: Unlike a deliberately revised edition printed at a later date, a press variant is a minor and usually unintentional variation among books printed in the same edition or print run. Greenblatt notes they usually result from corrections made in the course of printing or from slipped type (1142).

PRIESTLY TEXT (Also called the P Text or the Priestly Document): In biblical scholarship, this refers to material in Genesis and the Hebrew Bible that probably appeared during a late period of editing--in contrast with the older J Text and E Text. The name P Text comes from "Priestly Text." Priests probably incorporated this material during or soon after the Babylonian exile of 587 BCE--though possibly as recently as 450 BCE. (Some scholars in the minority argue that portions of the material might date "pre-exilicly" from the late eighth/early seventh century BCE during Hezekiah's reign, but this stance is not widely held.) At the time of the exile, the Judaic priests were probably desperate to retain their unique monotheistic beliefs in the face of overwhelming Babylonian influence, but they also faced the challenge of harmonizing their world view with that of Babylonian tradition.

At this point, many Aramaic (aka "Chaldee") loanwords appear in the Hebrew text and they are incorporated into the Hebrew Bible thereafter. This influence explains why today most biblical concordances and dictionaries (such as the 1979 version of Strong's Comprehensive Concordance of the Bible) refer to their Hebrew sections as a "Concordance of Hebrew and Chaldean," a "Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary," or a "Hebrew and Aramaic Dictionary." Christ will still be using some Aramaic terms 400 years later in the New Testament gospels, which show how influential and long-lasting the linguistic effects of the Exile were on the Hebrew vocabulary. Biblical scholars think that Genesis 1:1-2:3 and other sections such as Genesis 6 come from the P Text, and these are probably the latest additions to the Genesis account. The foreign loanwords mean these sections couldn't have been written before coming into contact with the Chaldeans--at least not in the form in which they come down to us today in surviving manuscripts.

Some features of the P text include a stress on ritual observances such as the Sabbath, circumcision, and dietary taboos believed to be late additions to the religious tradition. Other features of the P text--such as the details of the Passover ritual, ordination ceremonies, and descriptions of the tabernacle--appear to have come from now lost older manuscript traditions after being updated and modified in the P tradition. Finally, the P text is marked the prominence it gives to Aaron (as opposed to the dominant role of Moses in the J and E texts), the account of Moses' death in Deuteronomy, the legal materials of Leviticus and Numbers, and a series of genealogies showing some influence from Mesopotamian sources.

If students are reading a study Bible like the Anchor Bible series, the editors helpfully mark which sections come from the J, E, and P Texts.

PRIMARY SOURCE: Literary scholars distinguish between primary sources, secondary sources, and educational resources. Students should also. To understand the difference, click here.

PRIMATE: See discussion under Chain of Being.

PRIMOGENITURE: The late medieval custom of allowing the first born legitimate male child to inherit all of his father's properties, estates, wealth, and titles upon the father's death. Primogeniture was a key issue in determining succession to the royal throne, and it plays an important part in Edmund's villainy in King Lear, in King Henry V's claim to the French throne in Henry V, and in many other Shakespearean plays. In medieval times, primogeniture lead to huge social problems since Western Europe was producing large numbers of second born militarily trained knights who had no means of making a livelihood. Since the firstborn son inherited everything, the only legitimate option for the other sons was becoming celibate and then joining the church hierarchy as clerics or entering monasteries. Since this was not always a preferable option for hot-blooded young men, many involved themselves in coups to gain the family estate, took up lives of brigandage, or became mercenaries and wandered from one war to another seeking their fortunes. When Pope Urban II called the first crusade to reclaim Jerusalem, the church saw that part of the solution to this problem was to provide a legitimate arena of warfare for these dispossessed knights. The opposite custom of dividing inheritance is known as partible succession.

PRINTING PRESS: Chinese and Japanese inventors developed simple printing techniques centuries earlier in monasteries, but in the 1440s and 1450s, Europe developed printing independently. Even though forerunners of the printed book might have existed in Holland, the most important developments were in Mainz, Germany, where "Indulgence" was printed in 1454, and the Gutenberg Bible in 1456. John of Gutenberg is credited with the invention by fifteenth-century writers, and the invention spread rapidly to Italy, France, Holland, and other countries. William Caxton set up a printing press in Europe (Bruges) in 1475, and there printed the first book in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Returning to England in 1476, Caxton set up his second printing press in Westminster. He next printed a number of Latin texts before printing in English the Dicts or Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1483), Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485), and others for about a hundred titles in total. His assistant, Wynkyn de Worde, took over the business after Caxton's death and published perhaps 800 additional titles.

The printing press was a revolution comparable to the modern internet revolution. It made books for the first time cheap enough for mass production and mass purchasing, ensuring a rise in literacy, blurring dialectal vocabularies, spreading geographic and cultural knowledge, and fueling the flames of religious reformation.

PRIS: See prys.

PRIVATE SYMBOL: In contrast with an archetype (universal symbol), a private symbol is one that an individual artist arbitrarily assigns a personal meaning to. Nearly all members of an ethnic, religious, or linguistic group might share a cultural symbol and agree upon its meaning with little discussion, but private symbols may only be discernable in the context of one specific story or poem. Examples of private symbols include the elaborate mythologies created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion (such as the One Ring as a symbol of power lust) or William Butler Yeats' use of Constantinople as a symbol to represent poetic artifice in "Sailing to Byzantium," or Yeats' use of a gyre to symbolize the cycles of history and the sphinx as an emblem of the Antichrist in "The Second Coming." See also token and emblem.

PROBLEM PLAY: There are two common meanings to this term. (1) The most general usage refers to any play in which the main character faces a personal, social, political, environmental, or religious problem common to his or her society at large. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is representative of a problem play in that Loman must face the challenges of what the author considers false values in a capitalistic society. (2) In a narrower sense, Shakespearean scholars apply the term "problem play" to a group of Shakespeare's plays, also called "bitter comedies," especially Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well. These plays explore dark and ignoble aspects of human psychology without attempting to solve or resolve the plot to the reader's satisfaction beyond a superficial level. Because of the uneasy endings, the plays do not seem to follow the standard conventions of Renaissance comedy.

PROCATALEPSIS (Greek "anticipation"): Procatalepsis is a rhetorical strategy in which the writer raises an objection and then immediately answers it; by doing so, the rhetor seeks to strengthen his argument by dealing with possible objections before his audience can raise counter-arguments.

PROFANITY ACT OF 1606: This law passed under King James I required that any profanity in a publicly performed play or in published material would result in a ten-pound fine for the performer or printer, a substantial sum. Three of Shakespeare's quartos show signs of revision to meet the requirement of the Profanity Act, such as omissions of obscenity, the word "God" changed to "heaven," or "Jove," etc. Contrast with the Censorship Ordinance.

PROLOGUE: (1) In original Greek tragedy, the prologue was either the action or a set of introductory speeches before the first entry (parados) of the chorus. Here, a single actor's monologue or a dialogue between two actors would establish the play's background events. (2) In later literature, a prologue is a section of any introductory material before the first chapter or the main material of a prose work, or any such material before the first stanza of a poetic work.

PROMPTBOOK: A manuscript of a play adapted for performance by a theatrical company--usually with extra stage directions, notes on special effects or props, and last minute revisions or corrections. In some promptbooks, the characters' names and speech prefixes are scribbled out and replaced with the names of the actors playing those roles.

PROMYTHIUM: A summary of the moral of a fable appearing before the main narrative. If the summary is found at the end of the narrative, it is called an epimythium. Contrast with prologue.

PRONUNCIATION SPELLING: A new spelling of an old word that more accurately reflects the current pronunciation than the original spelling does.

PROPAGANDA (Latin, "things that must be sent forth"): In its original use, the term referred to a committee of cardinals the Roman Catholic church founded in 1622 (the Congregatio de propaganda fide). This group established specific educational materials to be sent with priests-in-training for foreign missions . The term is today used to refer to information, rumors, ideas, and artwork spread deliberately to help or harm another specific group, movement, belief, institution, or government. The term's connotations are mostly negative. When literature or journalism is propaganda and when it is not is hotly debated. For instance, the Roman Emperor Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid for specific goals. He wanted Virgil to glorify Rome's greatness, instill public pride in Rome's past, and cultivate traditional Roman virtues such as loyalty to the family, the Empire, and the gods. Is this propaganda? Or patriotism?

Typically, readers claim a work is propaganda when it sets forth an argument with which they personally disagree. In other cases, readers will call a work propagandistic if they can perceive that the characters or the author advances particular doctrines or principles. Harry Shaw notes: "Propaganda is attacked by most critics and general readers because it is an attempt to influence opinions and actions deliberately, but by this definition all education and most literature are propagandistic" (220).

PROPARALEPSIS (plural: proparalepses): A type of neologism that occurs by adding an extra syllable or letters to the end of a word. For instance, Shakespeare in Hamlet creates the word climature by adding the end of the word temperature to climate (1.1.12). The wizardly windbag Glyndwr (Glendower) proclaims that he "can call spirits from the vasty deep" in 1 Henry IV (3.1.52). We would expect him to speak of the "vast deep" normally. Proparalepsis is an example of a rhetorical scheme.

PROPS (abbreviation of "stage properties"): Handheld objects, furniture and similar items on stage apart from costumes and the stage scenery itself used to provide verisimilitude, to reinforce the setting, to help characterize the actors holding or wearing them, or to provide visual objects for practical, symbolic, or demonstrative purposes on the stage.

PROSCENIUM: An arch that frames a box set and holds the curtain, thus creating a sort of invisible boundary through which the audience views the on-stage action of a play.

PROSE: Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. Many modern genres such as short stories, novels, letters, essays, and treatises are typically written in prose.

PROSKENION: A raised stage constructed before the skene in classical Greek drama. The proskenion sharply divided the actors from the chorus, and the elevated height made the actors more visible to the audience.

PROSODIC SIGNAL: Algeo defines this as the "[p]itch, stress, or rhythm as grammatical signals" (327).

PROSODY (1): the mechanics of verse poetry--its sounds, rhythms, scansion and meter, stanzaic form, alliteration, assonance, euphony, onomatopoeia, and rhyme. (2) The study or analysis of the previously listed material. This is also called versification.

PROSOPOPOEIA (Grk prosopon, "face"): a form of personification in which an inanimate object gains the ability to speak. For instance, in the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Dream of the Rood," the wooden cross verbally describes the death of Christ from its own perspective. Ecocritical writers might describe clearcutting from the viewpoint of the tree, and so on. See personification, above.

PROSTHESIS: Adding an extra syllable or letters to the beginning of a word for poetic effect. Shakespeare writes in his sonnets, "All alone, I beweep my outcast state." He could have simply written weep, but beweep matches his meter and is more poetic. Too many students are all afrightened by the use of prosthesis. Prosthesis creates a poetic effect, turning a run-of-the-mill word into something novel. Prosthesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme. It results in a neologism.

PROTAGONIST: The main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention. See character.

PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN: The reconstructed ancestor of all Indo-European languages. Many scholars use this term interchangeably with Indo-European. Click here for more information.

PROTOZEUGMA: See discussion under zeugma.

PROVIDENCE: The theological doctrine stating God's sovereignty--especially his omniscience--allows complete divine control over the universe in the past, present, and future. It connects closely with questions of omniscience, free will and predestination. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Milton emphasises providence as one of his themes, depicting a universe in which God allows complete free will, but one in which God will ultimately use providence to turn even evil choices and decisions to a greater good in the long run through his own mysterious means.

PROZEUGMA: See discussion under zeugma.

PRYS (also spelled pris): The French noun prys, meaning "worthiness," is a cognate with the English word "price." Prys was rich in connotations, appearing frequently in French chansons de geste and medieval romances. It embodies knightly worthiness on a number of levels. A knight who has prys is loyal, brave, polite, courtly, proud, refined in taste, and perhaps a bit foolhardy and arrogant, quick to take anger at an insult and fast to accept a challenge or dual. Chaucer uses this term to describe the Knight in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales:

PSEUDONYM: Another term for a pen name.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM: The sense that characters in fictional narratives have realistic "interiority" or complex emotional and intellectual depth, including perhaps subconscious urges and fears they are not aware of. On an outward level, this realism typically involves reacting to external characters and situations in a manner consistent with the expectations of readers (verisimilitude). On an internal level, it may involve the revelation of characters' thoughts and internal meditations about themselves and others. Such internal machinations are a standard part of Elizabethan drama in the form of the soliloquy. However, psychological realism is associated most closely with the movement toward "realism" and "naturalism" in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. After psychoanalysis appeared, Freudian ideas influenced many writers who sought to incorporate his theories into their own depictions of characters.

Whether or not we can speak of psychological realism in literary works before the Renaissance is a thorny issue. Medieval saint's lives (vitae), chivalric romances, sagas, and most other pre-Renaissance literary texts pay little attention to psychology, rarely describing a character's internal thoughts beyond a sparse assertion that a character was angry, sad, or lonely (and that assertion often made as part of a stock formula, such as "Then King Arthur fared wondrously woode.") Often ancient works are so focused on allegory to the exclusion of psychology that some critics assert pre-Renaissance writers and readers had very little sense of interiority or any unique "self" apart from tribe, family, religious caste, occupation, or social standing. The difference is so marked that some scholars like Harold Bloom speak of "the invention of the human" in the Renaissance. On the other hand, it is difficult to read something like The Confessions of Saint Augustine without getting a sense of a real human being intensely aware of his own psychology. Possibly, the difference is rooted in conventions of literature rather than any actual historical change in human self-awareness, but the debate continues.

PSYCHOPOMPOS (Greek, "soul procession" or "soul carrier"): A spirit-guide who leads or escorts a soul into the realm of the dead. Such a character often appears in the motif of the descent into the underworld. Examples of a psychopompos would be deities like Hermes and Charon in Greek mythology, or the characters of Virgil and Beatrice in Dante's Inferno.

PULP FICTION: Mass market novels printed cheaply and intended for a general audience. The content was usually melodramatic, titillating, or thrilling. The earliest samples are the "penny dreadfuls" or "bloods" of the eighteenth century, which were followed in the nineteenth century by so-called "dime novels" (which were sold for ten cents). Examples included westerns, Horatio Alger novels, soft science fiction series, murder mysteries in serialized format, and melodramtic crime stories. The designation "pulp" comes from the paper quality--these novels are usually printed on the cheapest newsprint available.

PUN (also called paranomasia): A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. For example, in Matthew 16:18, Christ puns in Koine Greek: "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church." Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, puns upon Romeo's vile death (vile=vial, the vial of poison Romeo consumed). Shakespeare's poetic speaker also puns upon his first name (Will) and his lover's desire (her will) in the sonnets, and John Donne puns upon his last name in "Hymn to God the Father." Originally, puns were a common literary trope in serious literature, but after the eighteenth century, puns have been primarily considered a low form of humor. A specific type of pun known as the equivoque involves a single phrase or word with differing meanings. For instance, one epitaph for a bank teller reads "He checked his cash, cashed in his checks, / And left his window. / Who's next?" The nineteenth-century poet, Anita Owen, uses a pun to side-splitting effect in her verse:

O dreamy eyes,

Another type of pun is the asteismus, in which one speaker uses a word one way, but a second speaker responds using the word in a different sense. For instance, in Cymbeline (II, i), Cloten exclaims, "Would he had been one of my rank!" A lord retorts, "To have smell'd like a fool," twisting the meaning of rank from a noun referring to "noble status" to an adjective connoting "a foul smell." Yet another form of pun is the paragram, in which the wordplay involves altering one or more letters in a word. It is often considered a low form of humor, as in various knock-knock jokes or puns such as, "What's homicidal and lives in the sea? Answer: Jack the Kipper." In spite of the pun's current low reputation, some of the best writers in English have been notoriously addicted to puns: noticeably Shakespeare, Chaucer, and James Joyce.

PURGATION: See discussion under catharsis.

PURGATORY (Latin, purgare, "to purge"): Donald Logan writes:

It would be nearly impossible to exaggerate the significance of purgatory in the life of the medieval church, especially in the way that life was lived by individual Christians. The antechamber of heaven where the good but not perfect souls suffer their temporary punishment had a fixed place in the beliefs of virtually all Christians in the Western Church and deeply affected their religious practices. Apart from heretics like the Waldensians and the Cathars and, later, John Wyclif, purgatory was believed in as firmly as the Eucharist, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity and other central beliefs of the church and played a role almost as large as the Eucharist and the Virgin in the daily devotional lives of people. The one could assist one's deceased father and mother and other loved ones and shorten their stay in purgatory led to the development of a rich variety of religious devotions and practices, from which, it is safe to say, no parish in Christendom was exempt. -- F. Donald Logan, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 287.

The medieval and Catholic doctrine of purgatory stated that Christian souls who had accepted rites of baptism and been accepted into the body of the faithful church, but who died unexpectedly with unconfessed sins or minor venial faults, would not be sent to hell, but would rather spend an indeterminate period in a spiritual place of temporal punishment. The same temporary suffering was believed to be the fate of baptised infants who had not yet reached the age of reason where they could choose to accept Christian doctrine and make first confession. In this spiritual place, popularly called purgatory, such souls would suffer for awhile as an act of penance. This would purify them so they could enter heaven. The Council of Florence (1431 AD) was the first time the church officially embraced purgatory as a doctrine, but the belief in purgatory had long been a part of church practice going back to the patristic period of the fourth century, when Epiphanius mentions the practice of praying for deceased souls in order to lessen their time in purgatory. It is clear, however, that at this early point, the issue of hell, purgatory, and the afterlife was still a matter of dispute among proto-Christians, as theologians like Acrius denied the doctrine. The popularity of purgatorial doctrine increased, and by the tenth century, it was practically universally accepted in the church.

In the Middle Ages, some heretical groups like the Albigensians, the Waldensians, and the Hussites challenged the belief, but the first serious breach with the doctrine appears in the sixteenth-century during the Protestant Reformation. At that time, Martin Luther initially considered retaining the doctrine of Purgatory in the Lutheran Church, as witnessed in the Leipzig Disputation, but as the breach between Catholics and Protestants increased, political pressure to make a clean break with "popishness" decided the issue. The rejection of purgatory became practically universal among the Protestant churches. John Calvin's doctrine was especially sharp in its break, and Calvinist teaching included the doctrine of infant damnation, in which all children who die in the womb, in childbirth, or during infancy were damned for eternity in hell. Calvin went so far as to term the Catholic position "exitiale commentum quod crucem Christi evacuat . . . quod fidem nostram labefacit et evertit" (Institutiones, lib. III, cap. v, 6, quoted in The Catholic Encyclopedia). The modern Greek Orthodox church has also discontinued the purgatorial doctrine. Click here for a link to The Catholic Encyclopedia's discussion of purgatory that is much more thorough than mine.

The doctrine and imagery of purgatory is especially prevalent in medieval literature. It is the focus of Marie de France's Saint Patrick's Purgatory. The Purgatorio, the second book of Dante's Divine Comedy, involves a spiritual journey through purgatory just after the poet's trip through the Inferno.

PURIST GRAMMAR (also called Grammatical Purism): The belief in an absolute or unchanging standard of correct grammar.

PURITAN: Most familiar to modern Americans as the religious denomination of the Mayflower colonists, the Puritans were a Protestant sect particularly active during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a positive sense, Americans associate Puritanism with the struggle for religious freedom since the Puritans colonized America to escape religious persecution; however, the idea is something of a misconception since the Puritans' hope was to create an all-encompassing Puritan culture in the new colony, not to create a cosmopolitan, tolerant society open to other branches of Protestant Christianity, much less Catholicism, Judaism, or other religions. (That sort of religious tolerance comes about in American culture largely as a result of the Deism fashionable among intellectuals in the eighteenth century during the writing of the Constitution.) In its negative sense, the word Puritan often evokes the idea of dour, grim, religious conformity, since Puritans stereotypically wore only black and white; they frowned upon drinking, dancing, and displays of sexuality; burned aging misfits as witches; censored literature, and closed Shakespeare's playhouses in England because of acting's "immorality." These tendencies have led to H. L. Mencken's jest defining Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

Puritanism forms the backdrop of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible in American literature. Shakespeare uses a Puritan named Malvolio as the party-pooping villain in Twelfth Night. See also Roundhead and Puritan Interregnum.

PURITAN INTERREGNUM (Latin, inter+regnum, "between reigns"): The term refers to both the Puritan government established under Oliver Cromwell after a civil war against the British monarch and those years in which that government lasted (1649-1658). This interregnum marks the end of the English Renaissance. It came into being after a long civil war between two political factions, the Roundheads, non-aristocrats who supported Puritan reforms, and the Cavaliers, the aristocratic courtiers loyal to the monarchy. Ultimately, the Stuart monarch was captured and executed, and his supporters fled to the continent with the heir to the throne, leaving the Puritans in power. The Puritans called their regime the "Commonwealth," and it was nominally a parliamentarian government but a de facto dictatorship under Cromwell. This government fell apart upon Cromwell's death. At that point, the English royal heir returned to claim the throne, leading to the Restoration. See also Puritan, above.

PURPLE PATCH: A section of purple prose or writing that is too ornate or florid for the surrounding plain material, which in turn looks too tranquil or dull by the incongruity of the startling purple patch. The colorful image for this term comes from Horace's Ars Poetica 2.3.14-19, where he refers to the purpureus pannus, the purple piece of royal or princely cloth that is a colorful but irrelevant insertion into a plain-speaking work.

PURPLE PROSE: Writing that seems overdone or which makes excessive use of imagery, figures of speech, poetic diction, and polysyllabication. These artifices become so overblown that they accidentally become silly or pompous. See also purple patch.

PYRRHIC: In classical Greek or Latin poetry, this foot consists of two unaccented syllables--the opposite of a spondee. At best, a pyrrhic foot is an unusual aberration in English verse, and most prosodists (including me!) do not accept it as a foot at all because it contains no accented syllable. Normally, the context or prevailing iambs, trochees, or spondees in surrounding lines overwhelms any potential pyrrhic foot, and a speaker reading the foot aloud will tend artificially to stress either the first or last syllable. See meter for more information.

Q-TEXT: The term for a hypothetical ur-text or source manuscript that served as the source for the synoptic gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke), but which did not influence John. The abbreviation "Q" comes from German Quelle (source).

QUADRIVIUM: The study of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which formed the basis of a master's degree in medieval education, as opposed to the trivium, the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which in medieval education formed the basis of a bachelor's degree.

QUALITATIVE CHANGE: In linguistics, an alteration in the perceived quality of a sound or the basic nature of a sound. Contrast with quantitative change, below.

QUALITATIVE METER: Meter that relies on patterns of heavily stress syllables and lightly stressed meters. In English, most poems are qualitative in nature. This contrasts with quantitative meter (below), which was common in Greek and Latin. See meter.

QUANTITATIVE CHANGE: In linguistics, an alteration in the length of a sound--particularly vowel sounds. Contrast with qualitative change.

QUANTITATIVE METER: Meter that relies not on the alternation of heavily stressed or lightly stressed syllables, but rather on the alternation of "long syllables" and "short syllables" (i.e., syllables categorized accordingly to the time interval it takes for the human mouth to pronounce the syllable). For instance, under this scheme, in English, the word hour and at are both one-syllable words of similar stress. However, the word hour takes slightly longer to shape in the mouth than the more terse word at. We might thus call the word hour a "long syllable" and the word at a "short syllable." This label contrasts with the most common use of the terms in regular meter, which relies upon how heavy the stress is in each syllable. Quantitative meter has never worked well in Germanic languages like English, but it was common in Latin, Greek, Sanskirt, and Arabic poetry. Contrast with qualitative meter.

QUATRAIN: Also sometimes used interchangeably with "stave," a quatrain is a stanza of four lines, often rhyming in an ABAB pattern. Three quatrains form the main body of a Shakespearean or English sonnet along with a final couplet. See sonnet and rubaiyat.

QUARTO: A term from early bookmaking. When a single, large sheet is folded once to create two leaves (four pages counting the front and back), and then bound together, the resulting text is called a folio. If the folio is folded in half once more, the resulting size of page is called a quarto. Thus, a quarto is a sheet of material folded twice, to create four leaves, or eight pages, which results in a medium-sized book. On a single sheet, the page visible on the right-hand side of an open book or the "top" side of such a page is called the recto side (Latin for "right"), and the reverse or "bottom" side of such a page (the page visible on the left-hand side of an open book) is called the verso side. Compare quarto with bad quarto and folio and octavo (below).

QUEM QUAERITIS (Latin, "Whom do you seek?"): This Latin expression comes from the Vulgate New Testament when the angel addresses the women coming to visit Christ's empty tomb. The angel guarding the sepulchre asks, "Whom do you seek?" When told that Christ was resurrected, the women departed joyfully. In the medieval church, this phrase was part of the Roman Catholic liturgy as part of the Easter Introit and read aloud in church each year. One theory is that the quem quaeritis trope grew into an entire branch of medieval drama. Mary Marshall and other early scholars like E. K. Chambers (author of The Medieval Stage, 1903) suggested that the part of the angel and the women visiting the tomb was taken up by layfolk and performed inside the church on Easter. The enactment was later enlarged and moved to the area outside the church and watched by the congregation. Eventually, the plays expanded in scope to include other Bible stories and were performed in the vernacular languages rather than Latin. These performances eventually may have evolved into mystery plays run by guilds, falling outside the church's control altogether. More recent scholars such as V. A. Kolve question this theory, however, so students should take the argument with a grain of salt.

QUIRE: A collection of individual leaves sewn together, usually containing between four and twelve leaves per quire. This "gathering" or "booklet" of individual pages would then be sewn into the larger collection of pages to make the entire book. In manuscripts written after 1400, the quires are often systematically labeled in order to help the bookbinder place them in the correct order. They provide important evidence for the history of specific manuscripts. Missing pages cut out of a quire show modern scholars evidence of ancient censorship, and the markings of the quire can show that books have been rebound or taken apart and "recycled" into new books.

RADICAL INNOCENCE: The Romantics valued innocence as something pure, wholesome, fulfilling, natural, and individualistic. They saw it as antithetical to the corrupting influence of civilized conformity and the heartless, mechanized, industrialized, materialistic society of the Enlightenment. As Emerson put it, "the simple genuine self against the whole world" was the movement of the Romanticism, and radical innocence was its essence. The state of innocence was thought to be the ideal one for humanity. Radical innocence was the ability of an adult to maintain a child-like sense of wonder, faith, and goodness in spite of being aware of the cruelties, injustices, and heartaches of the world. The term has become something of a catchphrase in modernist and postmodernist writings. See for instance, Yeats' quotation below:

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will.

--William Butler Yeats, "A Prayer for My Daughter" (1920)

RASH BOON: A motif in folklore and in Celtic and Arthurian literature in which an individual too hastily promises to fulfill another character's request without hearing exactly what that request is. For instance, in the first tale in The Mabinogion, "Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed," Pwyll promises to give Gwawl son of Clud whatever he requests. Gwawl demands that Pwyll give him his wife, Rhiannon, much to Pwyll's dismay! In the French Erec et Enide, we see the knight Erec involved in such a motif. In The Wife of Bath's Tale, the rapist knight makes a rash boon to the aged hag--and the hag later claims that boon before Gwenevere's court, demanding that the knight marry her.

RÄUBERROMAN (German, "Robber-novel"): The German term for a picaresque novel.

REALISM: An elastic and ambiguous term with two meanings. (1) First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world. It is a theory or tendency in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It is an attempt to reflect life "as it actually is"--a concept in some ways similar to what the Greeks would call mimesis. Typically, "realism" involves careful description of everyday life, "warts and all," often the lives of middle and lower class characters in the case of socialist realism. In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme. As J. A. Cuddon notes, realism "more crudely [. . .] suggests jackets off, sleeves rolled up, 'no nonsense'" attitudes toward literary art (773).

(2) Secondly and more specifically, realism refers to a literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although realism and the concern for aspects of verisimilitude have been components of literary art to one degree or another in nearly all centuries, the term realism also applies more specifically to the tendency to create detailed, probing analyses of the way "things really are," usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention, cliché, formulaic traits of genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism. This tendency reveals itself in the growing mania for photography (invented 1839), the tendency toward hyper-realistic paintings and sculpture, the continuing rise of the popular prose novel, the growth of "realism" in philosophical movements, and in the increasingly realistic stage productions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement contrasts with (and is often used as an antonym for) literary forms such as the romance, science-fiction, fantasy, magic realism, mythology, surrealistic art, modernism and postmodernism.

Note that the earlier literary movement known as naturalism is often used as a precursor and antonym for realism, even though both literary movements share many similarities. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between naturalism and realism. Some writers are classified as part of both movements. Personally, I distinguish between them by noting how naturalism goes out of its way to obsessively and grimly point out the limitations of human potential. Realism shares this concern, but seems less obsessed with this point. My distinction, however, is one not generally accepted by literary critics. Often, writers like Thomas Hardy are said to be both naturalistic and realistic, for instance.

Examining the wide variety of writers called "realists" at one time or another shows how flexible the term is. These writers include such diverse artists as Mark Twain, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Tolstoy, Gogol, Gorki, William Howells, William Burroughs, Thomas Hardy, and Norman Mailer. Dramatists normally considered realists include Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Strindberg.

REARSTAGE: The section of the stage farthest away from the viewing audience, the back of the visible stage as opposed to "backstage" and out of sight.

REBUS: A visual pun in which a written sign stands for a different meaning than its normal one--usually because the two words sound alike. For instance, the letters C and U sound like the words see and you in the instant messenger version of "C U later!" The rebus is a common feature in Egyptian hieroglyphic writings and Babylonian cuneiform.

RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION: The accent used by upper class British citizens--usually considered a prestigious or "classy" pronunciation. Linguists refer to this accent by the abbreviation RP. [One personal aside--for any computer users reading this who are working with speech recognition software, my wife has found that artificially imitating an "RP" accent almost doubles her computer's consistency in speech recognition for voice commands--at least when working with Macintosh software!]

RECONSTRUCTION: A hypothetical earlier form of a word that probably existed, but for which no direct evidence is available. Linguists normally mark reconstructions by placing an asterisk in front of them. This marks them as a hypothetical word. For instance, the Indo-European word *ekwos--which developed into equus in Latin, ech in Old Irish, and eoh in Old English, is a reconstruction.

REFLEXIVE CONSTRUCTION: A verb combined with a reflexive pronoun functioning as the direct object. For instance, in Spanish, Yo me llavo ("I wash myself"). In English, this often creates a redundant phrase, such as "I repent me of my promise."

REFRAIN: A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work. Sometimes the repetition involves minor changes in wording. A refrain might consist of a nonsense word (such as Shakespeare's "With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" in the song from As You Like It), a single word (such as "Nevermore" in Poe's "The Raven"), or even an entire separate stanza that is repeated alternating with each stanza in the poem. If the refrain is meant to be sung by all the auditors listening, such as in Burns' "Auld Lang Syne," the refrain is often called a chorus. The device is ancient. Examples are found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, Greek, Latin, and Provençal verse, and in many, many ballads.

REGIONAL DIALECT: Another term for geographic dialect.

REGIONAL LITERATURE: Literature that accurately seeks to portray or is associated with a particular geographic region or people. Often regional literature is set within a particular area, and the writer or poet tries to capture the customs, dialect, behavior, and historical background of that region. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native are two examples of regional novels. Eudora Welty and William Faulkner are often held up as examples of Southern regional writers generally. More specifically, Appalachian poets include Ron Rash, Danny Marion, Lynn Powell, and Rita Sims Quillen.

REGISTER DIALECT: A dialectal variation used only for a particular circumstance or for a specific purpose. For instance, the ceremonial language of sermons, weddings, and funerals often uses words like brethren or beloved. These words are rarely used outside of that specialized register.

RELIC: The physical remains of a saint or biblical figure, or an object closely associated with a saint, biblical figure, or a miracle. Sample relics might be Saint Veronica's veil, a sandal of the Virgin Mary, the skull of John the Baptist, a hair or fingernail of the disciple Mark, a bone from Saint John the Divine, a splinter or fragment from Christ's cross, or the lance that was embedded in Christ's side. In medieval Christianity, such relics were thought to be powerful, holy items imbued with divine potency. In Christian belief, the spirits of the saints continued to exist after their deaths, and these spirits would eventually return to their bodies after God resurrects their physical forms on the judgment day. Since the spirits still existed, however, they could theoretically interact with the physical world. It was thought that the spirits of these saints continued to be connected to their physical remains. Thus, possessing a part of Saint Julian's body would ensure that the spirit of Saint Julian would linger near that body-part, and be close at hand to aid the possessor. When a medieval Christian wanted divine intervention, he might pray near the relic and ask that saint to intercede on his behalf. [An important note for confused modern Protestants--in medieval Catholic doctrine, "intercession" does not mean worshipping the saints per se, but rather asking the deceased saint to pray to God on the living individual's behalf, much like a modern Protestant might ask his or her neighbor to pray for him. Many non-Catholics do not understand the distinction, and they accordingly accuse medieval Christians of idolatry.]

Medieval churches usually included one or more relics under, on, or within the altar, and shrines might be built around immobile relics. These relics were considered especially valuable, and they were often sealed in gold or silver containers, encrusted with gems, or placed inside silken reliquary purses. Often special objects such as a bishop's staff or a king's crown might be constructed with a minor relic inside it. For instance, King Charlemagne's sword (c. 800 CE) was supposedly designed so that its hilt contained two splinters of the true cross.

With poor communication between regions, certain confusions were bound to occur. Three different medieval churches were built to house three different "true skulls of John the Baptist." In the fourteenth century, it became increasingly common for con-artists to sell fake relics to unsuspecting victims. Chaucer writes of this practice in his depiction of the Pardoner in his Canterbury Tales. There, the Pardoner merrily sells pig-bones, which he claims are the bones of saints, to other travelers. Probably the most famous relic in Arthurian legends is the Holy Grail, variously described in Christian iconography as being (1) the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, (2) the cup used to catch the blood that spurted from Christ's side after the Centurion Longus stabbed him, (3) the actual spear Longus used to stab Christ, or alternatively in German legends (4), a mystical stone providing endless food.

RENAISSANCE: There are two common uses of the word.

(1) The term originally described a period of cultural, technological, and artistic vitality during the economic expansion in Britain in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Thinkers at this time and later saw themselves as rediscovering and redistributing the legacy of classical Greco-Roman culture by renewing forgotten studies and artistic practices, hence the name "renaissance" or "rebirth." They believed they were breaking with the days of "ignorance" and "superstition" represented by recent medieval thinking, and returning to a golden age akin to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans from centuries earlier--a cultural idea that will eventually culminate in the Enlightenment of the late 1600s up until about 1799 or so. The Renaissance saw the rise of new poetic forms in the sonnet and a flowering of drama in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. The English Renaissance is often divided into the Elizabethan period--the years that "Good Queen Bess" (Queen Elizabeth I) ruled--and the Jacobean period, in which King James I ruled. (The Latin form of James is Jacobus, hence the name Jacobean). Typically, we refer to this period as the Renaissance, often with a definite article and a capital R. You can click here to download a PDF handout placing this period in chronological order with other periods of literary history.

(2) In a looser sense, a renaissance (usually with an uncapitalized r) is any period in which a people or nation experiences a period of vitality and explosive growth in its art, poetry, education, economy, linguistic development, or scientific knowledge. The term is positive in connotation. Historians refer to a Carolingian renaissance after Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 AD. Medievalists refer to an "Ottonian renaissance" to describe the growth of learning under the descendents of Emperor Otto I. Haskins speaks of a "little renaissance" or a "Twelfth-Century renaissance" to describe the architecture, art, and philosophy emerging in France and Italy in the late 1100s. Even in the twentieth century, American scholars often refer to a "Harlem Renaissance" among African-American jazz musicians and literary artists of the 1930s and an "Irish Literary Renaissance" among Irish writers, to name but a few examples. The capitalization in these specific cases varies from writer to writer.

RENGA: Japanese linked verse--a poetic dialogue formed by a succession of waka in which poets take turns composing the poem as a party-game. The rules for the games were supposedly laid down in 1186 CE by Fujiwara Sadaie (1162-1241) and Fujiwara Sadatake (c. 1139-1202). The first three lines have a set pattern of 5/7/5 syllables. One poet writes these three lines, then passes his poem to another person. That person then writes two lines of 7/7 syllables. The next three lines of 5/7/5 are written by a third person, and so on, until a lengthy poem of a hundred lines or so results. Of these long composite poems, the first three--called the hokku, are always the most important. The renga eventually develops into the renku (see below), and the hokku of these two poetic forms ultimately evolves into the haiku in the19th century. See hokku, haiku, waka, and renku.

RENKU (also called haikai renga): An earthier, humorous variant on the courtly renga introduced by Iio Sogi, Yamazzaki Sokan, and Nishiyama Soin. While the form of the renku are identical to the renga, the subject-matter, tone, and vocabulary are quite different. Ultimately, the hokku section of the renku or haikai renga develop into the modern haiku after Matsuo Bashó took the poetic form and elevated it to a meaningful zen reaction to nature. See hokku, haiku, and renga.

REPERTORY: A number of plays an acting company had prepared for performance at any given time. Unlike modern drama, in which a particular popular performance may continue for weeks on end such as Les Miserables or Cats, Renaissance acting companies usually performed a different play each day, perhaps performing a dozen plays in a month and more than thirty in the course of the season, as Greenblatt notes (1140).

REPHAIM: The Oxford Companion to the Bible goes into some detail on this term, and I summarize the material from Ackerman's article in this vocabulary entry. Several biblical texts, including Isaiah 26:14 and Proverbs 2:18, refer to rephaim--dead "shades" (NRSV) or "ghosts." These passages suggest the rephaim inhabit the underworld. In other biblical texts like Deuteronomy 2:20, Deuteronomy 3:11-13, and Joshua 12:4 and Joshua 13:12, these beings are described as a race of terrible giants who once lived in parts of Palestine and the Transjordan region and were somehow related to the Nephilim. In outdated scholarship from the 19th century, Hebrew linguists thought that these two meanings--ghost and giant--were distinct from each other. However, the discovery of Ugaritic texts in 1928 strongly suggests the two terms are at the very least closely related and probably synonymous. At Ugarit (modern Syria), the word Rephaim signified members of the once-living aristocracy who attained some sort of semi-divine or superhuman powers after death in Ugaritic belief. In the underworld, these beings were thought to have the power to harm or aid the living. Accordingly, most Biblical scholars think the term Rephaim probably referred to those among the deceased, especially the spirits of the deceased giant Nephilim, who continued to exercise their powers after death in most Semitic beliefs of the region. The conjunction can best be seen in Isaiah 14:9, where the Rephaim of the underworld are explicitly described as those "who were leaders of the earth" and those "who were kings of the nations." See Ackerman's entry in Metzger and Coogan, page 647, for more information.

REPRESENTATION: See mimesis.

REPRESENTATIVE CHARACTER: A flat character who embodies all of the other members of a group (such as teachers, students, cowboys, detectives, and so on). Representative characters are often stereotypes. They need not be derogatory, but they are almost always simplified.

RESTORATION: The restoration, also called the Restoration Period, is the time from 1660, when the Stuart monarch Charles II was re-established as ruler of England, to about 1700. Earlier, between 1649-1658, the Stuart line had lost its control over the nation after the Roundhead general Oliver Cromwell had created a Puritan dictatorship under "parliament's" control. During this earlier Puritan Interregnum, literature was heavily censored and drama was outlawed as immoral. After Cromwell's death in 1658 and Charles II's restoration to power, restoration drama (particularly comedies) and poetry flowered anew. The restoration is the early stage of the Enlightenment philosophy in England, signaling a movement rejecting dogmatic Puritanism and embracing logic and rational skepticism.

RETARDED PRONUNCIATION: An old-fashioned way of pronunciation that lingers in one dialect even after a newer pronunciation has been accepted by other dialects in the same language. Contrast with advanced pronunciation.

RETRACTION (From Latin re- + tractare, "to pull back"): A writing in prose or verse in which the author "takes back" an earlier statement or piece of writing, often with an accompanying apology or explanation concerning her earlier errors. When this retraction appears in a conventionalized form of verse, it is often called a palinode. One of the most famous retractions is Chaucer's conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, in which the author (or perhaps only Chaucer's persona) renounces most of his earlier writings. See also palinode.

RETROFLEX: In linguistics, any sound produced with the tongue-tip bent or curled backward--such as the sound of the liquid . Retroflex s over time often change into the liquid and vice-versa. For instance, Algeo points to the the in Sarah, Katherine, and steorra (Old English "star") is respectively a cognate with the in Sally, Kathleeen, and stella (Latin "star"). See page twenty-six of The Origins and Development of the English Language for further information.

REVENGE PLAY (also called a revenge tragedy): A Renaissance genre of drama in which the plot revolves around the hero's attempt to avenge a previous wrong by killing the perpetrator of the deed, commonly with a great deal of bloodshed and incidental violence. A famous example is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Conventional features involve a reluctant protagonist who is called upon to avenge the murder of a loved one. Shakespeare's Hamlet has also been called a revenge play by some scholars.

REVENGE TRAGEDY: Another term for a revenge play.

REVERSAL: See peripeteia.

RHAPSODOI: Wandering poet-singers in the Homeric age of Greece--the equivalent of a bard in the Celtic tradition. These rhapsodoi usually sang or chanted while accompanying themselves on the lyre. Homer is traditionally said to be such a figure. The rhapsodoi probably engaged in oral-formulaic poetry rather than writing their works down.

RHETORIC: The art of persuasive argument through writing or speech--the art of eloquence and charismatic language. A lengthier discussion can be found under the rhetoric link.

RHETORICAL FIGURES: Figures of speech such as schemes and tropes.

RHOTACISM (from Greek, rho or "r"): A shift linguistically from [z] to an [r].

RHYME (from Old French, rime meaning "series," in turn adopted from Latin rithmus and Greek rhythmos): Also spelled rime, rhyme is a matching similarity of sounds in two or more words, especially when their accented vowels and all succeeding consonants are identical. For instance, the word-pairs listed here are all rhymes: skating/dating, emotion/demotion, fascinate/deracinate, and plain/stain. Rhyming is frequently more than mere decoration in poetry. It helps to establish stanzaic form by marking the ends of lines, it is an aid in memorization when performing oral formulaic literature, and it contributes to the sense of unity in a poem. The best rhymes delight because of the human fascination with varying patterned repetition, but a successful and unexpected rhyme can also surprise the reader (which is especially important in comic verse). They may also serve as a rhythmical device for intensifying meaning. Several different types of rhyme and rhyme schemes exist: see also cliché rhymes, crossed rhyme, double rhyme, end rhyme, exact rhyme, eye rhyme, feminine ending, half rhyme, head rhyme, imperfect rhyme, inexact rhyme, interlaced rhyme, internal rhyme, leonine verse, masculine ending, perfect rhyme, rhyme royal, slant rhyme, tail-rhyme, and triple rhyme.

RHYME ROYAL (Often spelled as "rime royal"): A seven-line stanzaic form invented by Chaucer in the fourteenth century and later modified by Spenser and other Renaissance poets. In rhyme royal, the stanzas are writen in iambic pentameter in a fixed rhyme scheme (ABABBCC). An example follows below from Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence:

There was roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and down in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright.
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stockdove broods;
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters;
And the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

RHYME SCHEME: The pattern of rhyme. The traditional way to mark these patterns of rhyme is to assign a letter of the alphabet to each rhyming sound at the end of each line. For instance, here is the first stanza of James Shirley's poem "Of Death," from 1659. I have marked each line from the first stanza with an alphabetical letter at the end of each line to indicate rhyme:

The glories of our blood and state --------------A
Are shadows, not substantial things; -----------B
There is no armor against fate; ------------------A
Death lays his icy hand on kings: ---------------B
Scepter and crown -------------------------------C
Must tumble down, --------------------------------C
And in the dust be equal made ------------------D
With the poor crooked scythe and spade. -----D

Thus, the rhyme scheme for each stanza in the poem above is ABABCCDD. It is conventional in most poetic genres that every stanza follow the same rhyme scheme, though it is possible to have interlocking rhyme scheme such as terza rima. It is also common for poets to deliberately vary their rhyme scheme for artistic purposes--such as Philip Larkin's "Toads," in which the poetic speaker complains about his desire to stop working so hard, and his rhymes degenerate into half-rhymes or slant rhymes as an indication that he doesn't want to go to the effort of perfection. Among the most common rhyme schemes in English, we find heroic couplets (AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, etc.) and quatrains (ABAB, CDCD, etc.), but the possible permutations are theoretically infinite.

RHYTHM (from Greek, "flowing"): The varying speed, loudness, pitch, elevation, intensity, and expressiveness of speech, especially poetry. In verse the rhythm is normally regular; in prose it may or may not be regular. See sprung rhythm for an exception to this general rule. Also see meter, dipody, and syzygy.

RIDDLE (from Old English roedel, from roedan meaning "to give council" or "to read"): A universal form of literature in which a puzzling question or a conundrum is presented to the reader. The reader is often challenged to solve this enigma, which requires ingenuity in discovering the hidden meaning. A riddle may involve puns, symbolism, synecdoche, personification (especially prosopopoeia), or unusual imagery.

For instance, a Norse riddle asks, "Tell me what I am. Thirty white horses round a red hill. First they champ. Then they stamp. Now they stand still." The answer is the speaker's teeth; these thirty white horses circle the "red hill" of the tongue; they champ and stamp while the riddler speaks, but stand still at the end of his riddle. Another famous example is the riddle of the sphinx from Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy. The sphinx asks Oedipus, "What goes on four feet, on two feet, and then three. But the more feet it goes on, the weaker is he?" The answer is a human being, which crawls as an infant, walks erect on two feet as an adult, and totters on a staff (the third leg) in old age.

The earliest known English riddles are recorded in the Exeter Book, and they probably date back to the 8th century. Examples, however, can be found in Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, and many other languages. Authors of Anglo-Latin riddles include Aldhelm of Sherborne, Archbishop Tatwine of Canterbury, and Abbot Eusebius of Wearmouth. A large Renaissance collection can also be found in Nicolas Reusner's Aenigmatographia (1602).

RIME COUÉE: The French term for tail-rhyme. See discussion under tail-rhyme.

RIME RICHE: The French term for identical rhyme. See identical rhyme.

RIME ROYAL: An alternative spelling for rhyme royal.

RISING ACTION: The action in a play before the climax in Freytag's pyramid.

RISING RHYME: Another term for masculine rhyme in which the final foot ends in a stressed syllable. See meter.

R-LESS SPEECH: Any dialect in which [r] is pronounced only before a vowel. Examples include Bostonian accents in America and "RP" (Received Pronunciation) among upper class British speakers.

ROBERTSONIAN: Following or adhering to the exegeticial readings of medieval literature espoused by American scholar D. W. Robertson. See discussion under fourfold interpretation.

ROLE: Another term for an actor's part in a play.

ROMAN À CLEF (French, "novel with a key"; also called livre à clef, "book with a key," pronounced roh MAHN ah CLAY): A narrative that represents actual historical characters and events in the form of fiction. Usually in this fictional setting, the author presents descriptions of real contemporary figures but uses fictitious names for them. However, the character's common traits and mannerisms would be so well-known that readers "in the know" would recognize them. Typically the "keys" would be published later if readers had trouble figuring out who was who.

Most literary historians think of the genre as a type of novel originating in seventeenth-century France in works like Madame de Scudéry's Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53) and Clélie (1656-60). However, examples actually exist from much earlier medieval poetry. For instance, in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the character Harry Bailly appears to have been an actual innkeeper who lived in Southwark. Many of the other pilgrims also appear to have real-life correspondences; J. M. Manly long ago summarized the evidence in Some New Light on Chaucer (NY, Henry Holt and Company, 1926).

More recent examples of this genre include The New Atlantis (1709), published with a key to its characters; Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818), which contained hidden versions of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley; Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928); Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale; Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister; and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. In English, a roman à clef is often called a key-novel. In German, it is a Schlüsselroman.

ROMAN IMPERIAL PERIOD: After long centuries of representative democracy, within only a few generations, power in Roman government first collapsed into unofficial triumvirates and ultimately into dictatorships. Although Julius Caesar was a monarch in all but name, historians consider his nephew Octavian (alias Caesar Augustus) the first official Emperor, and his rise to power in 27 CE marks the end of the Roman Republican Period and the beginning of the Roman Imperial Period. Writers living during this enormous power shift include Cicero, Julius Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, Livy, and Tibullus. Imperial writers who wrote primarily after the Republic collapsed include Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Longinus, Pliny the Elder, Jospehus, Lucan, Martial, Plutarch, Statius, Tacitus, Juvenal, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, and Apuleius. The Roman Empire itself collapsed in the fifth century CE. Vandals sacked the city of Rome in 455 CE, and in 476, another wave of barbarians dethroned the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus.

ROMAN REPUBLICAN PERIOD: The period of Roman history between 514 BCE up until 27 CE, when Rome was primarily and (at least officially) a Republic with elected senators. After Rome's traditional founding in 753 BCE, it fell under the power of Etruscan rulers who were viewed as tyrants. The Romans rebelled, and rose from a primitive monarchy to a complex system of indirect representation under Patrician families, where the richest individuals in select families were eligible for public office; they would represent either particular districts or a number of "clients" (the forerunners of modern special interest groups). By the first century BCE, Julius Caesar, Sulla, the Gracchi brothers, and other men increasingly upset this system--sometimes as part of oligarchic coalitions, sometimes as dictators (Latin imperatores). Although Julius Caesar was a monarch in all but name, historians consider his nephew Octavian (alias Caesar Augustus) the first official Emperor, and his rise to power in 27 CE marks the end of the Republican Period and the beginning of the Imperial Period. Examples of early Roman and Republican literature include Plautus, Ennius, and Terence. Writers that bridge the gap between the two periods include Cicero, Julius Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, Livy, and Tibullus.

ROMAN STOICISM: The philosophy espoused by Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, "Roman Stoicism" actually originates with earlier Greek thinkers, a specific school of philosophers that met at the stoa in Athens. Stoicism asserts that the natural world consists of suffering, and that the appropriate response of a human being is to face this suffering with dignity and a lack of tears while doing one's duty, acknowledging that life and pleasure are transitory. The philosophy is often contrasted with Epicurean philosophy, which asserted that wisdom lay in a "carpe diem" existence in which humanity, faced with the transience of life, should strive to enjoy itself as much as possible by using reason and moderation to find pleasure. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism dealt with the same problem: the brevity of life. However, they reached opposite conclusions concerning the appropriate response to that problem. Roman characters like Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid are often analyzed in terms of how they embody (or fail to embody) the virtues of Stoicism.

ROMANCE, GOTHIC: See gothic novel

ROMANCE, HISTORICAL A narrative that takes a small episode or group of episodes from some ancient or famous chronicle and then independently develops those events in much greater detail. Greek writers, for instance, often took small segments from Homeric epics and developed their own independent stories focusing on side-events or sub-plots that take place "in the background"--mostly concerning minor background characters with only occasional cameos by the major Homeric characters like Odysseus, Penelope, Agamemnon, or Ajax. Many medieval romances--such as Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and John Lydgate's Fall of the Princes of Troy--similarly take material from Homeric legend and turn them into chivalric versions of the historical romance--complete with anachronistic knights and courtly love affairs.

In the words of Stephen Barney's introduction to Troilus and Criseyde in the third edition of the Riverside Chaucer, "We now name this genre historical romance, a genre frequently and skillfully used by Shakespeare, Stendhal, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Faulkner" (471). While not necessarily always writing medieval romances in poetic form, these later artists certainly have created works in the spirit of the historical romance. Constrast with the historical novel.

ROMANCE, MEDIEVAL (also called a chivalric romance): In medieval use, romance referred to episodic French and German poetry dealing with chivalry and the adventures of knights in warfare as they rescue fair maidens and confront supernatural challenges. The medieval metrical romances resembled the earlier chansons de gestes and epics. However, unlike the Greek and Roman epics, medieval romances represent not a heroic age of tribal wars, but a courtly or chivalric period of history involving highly developed manners and civility, as M. H. Abrams notes. Their standard plot involves a single knight seeking to win a scornful lady's favor by undertaking a dangerous quest. Along the way, this knight encounters mysterious hermits, confronts evil blackguards and brigands, slays monsters and dragons, competes anonymously in tournaments, and suffers from wounds, starvation, deprivation, and exposure in the wilderness. He may incidentally save a few extra villages and pretty maidens along the way before finishing his primary task. (This is why scholars say romances are episodic--the plot can be stretched or contracted so the author can insert or remove any number of small, short adventures along the hero's way to the larger quest.)

Medieval romances often focus on the supernatural. In the classical epic, supernatural events originate in the will and actions of the gods. However, in secular medieval romance, the supernatural originates in magic, spells, enchantments, and fairy trickery. Divine miracles are less frequent, but are always Christian in origin when they do occur, involving relics and angelic visitations. A secondary concern is courtly love and the proprieties of aristocratic courtship--especially the consequnces of arranged marriage and adultery.

Scholars usually divide medieval romances into four loose categories based on subject-matter:

(1) "The Matter of Rome": stories based on the history and legends of Greco-Roman origin such as the Trojan war, Thebes, mythological figures, and the exploits of Alexander the Great. The medieval poet usually creates an anachronistic work by turning these figures into knights as he knew them.

(2) "The Matter of Britain": stories based on Celtic subject-matter, especially Camelot, King Arthur, and his knights of the round table, including material derived from the Celto-French Bretons and Breton lais.

(3) "The Matter of England": stories based on heroes like King Horn and Guy of Warwick.

(4) "The Matter of France": stories based on Charlemagne, Roland, and his knights.

A large number of such romances survive due to their enormous popularity, including the works of Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1190), Hartmann von Aue (c. 1203), Gottfried von Strassburg (c. 1210), and Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1210). England produced its own romances in the fourteenth century, including the Lay of Havelok the Dane and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In 1485, Caxton printed the lengthy romance Le Morte D'Arthur, a prose work that constituted a grand synthesis of Arthurian legends. Gradually, the poetic genre of medieval romance was superseded by prose works of Renaissance romance. See romance, renaissance.

ROMANCE, METRICAL: Any medieval romance written in verse or meter.

ROMANCE, MODERN: In contrast with medieval and Renaissance romance, the meaning of a modern romance has become more restricted in the 20th century. Modern nonscholarly speakers refer to romances when they mean formulaic stories recounting the growth of a passionate sexual relationship. The conventional plotline involves a third-person narrative or a first-person narrative told from the viewpoint of a young woman between the ages of eighteen and her late twenties. She encounters a potential paramour in the form of a slightly older man. The two are prevented from forming a relationship due to social, psychological, economic, or interpersonal constraints. The primary plot involves the two overcoming these constraints through melodramatic efforts. The story conventionally ends happily with the two characters professing their love for each other and building a life together. See melodrama, romance, medieval, and romance, renaissance.

ROMANCE, RENAISSANCE: The original medieval genre of metrical romances gradually were replaced by prose works in the 1500s. At that point, the meaning of a "romance" expanded to include any lengthy French or Spanish story written in the 1500s and 1600s involving episodic encounters with supernatural or exciting events. The connotations were of wild adventures rather than romantic longing as in the modern meaning of romance. See romance, medieval and romance, modern.

ROMANTIC COMEDY: Sympathetic comedy that presents the adventures of young lovers trying to overcome social, psychological, or interpersonal constraints to achieve a successful union. Commedia dell'arte is a general type of drama that falls into this category. Several Shakespearean plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream also fall into this category.

ROMANTIC POETS: See discussion under Romanticism.

ROMANTICISM: The term refers to the artistic philosophy prevalent during the first third of the nineteenth century (about 1800-1830). Romanticism rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment, which stressed that logic and reason were the best response humans had in the face of cruelty, stupidity, superstition, and barbarism. Instead, the Romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and natural passions provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living. The Romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over "artifice" and "convention," the human need for emotional outlets, the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. Their writings often are set in rural, pastoral or Gothic settings and they show an obsessive concern with "innocent" characters--children, young lovers, and animals. The major Romantic poets included William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Gordon Byron. Contrast with Enlightenment. You can click here to download a PDF handout placing these periods of literary history in chronological order.

RONDEAU (French, "little circle"): A short poem consisting of ten, thirteen, or fifteen lines using only two rhymes which concludes each section with an abbreviated line that serves as a refrain. We can see an example of the rondeau in the following poem from Austin Dobson's With Pipe and Flute:

With pipe and flute the rustic Pan
Of old made music sweet for man;
And wonder hushed the warbling bird,
And closer drew the calm-eyed herd,
The rolling river slowlier ran.
Ah! would,--ah! would, a little span,
Some air of Arcady could fan
This age of ours, too seldom stirred
With pipe and flute!
But now for gold we plot and plan;
And from Beersheba unto Dan
Apollo's self might pass unheard,
Or find the night-jar's note preferred--
Not so it fared when time began
With pipe and flute!

The rondeau is an uncommon genre in English because of the need to repeat two rhymes so many times. Languages with matching masculine and feminine endings for nouns--such as French, Spanish, and Italian--serve as a much better medium for the genre. Cf. rondel, roundel, roundelay, villanelle.

RONDEL: A short poem resembling the rondeau. It usually totals fourteen lines containing only two rhyming sounds. The first two lines are repeated at the middle of the poem and again at the end. The rondel differs from the rondeau only in the number of lines and the use of complete (not partial) lines for the refrain. Cf. rondeau, roundel, roundelay, villanelle.

ROOT: (1) a base morpheme without affixes attached to it. (2) A word in an older language that became the source for future words in later languages. For instance, the Latin word unus ("one") is the root for Spanish uno and French une, which also mean "one." The Latin root word caballus (horse) gives us words such as words as the Spanish caballo, Old French caval, Modern English cavalry, and modern French cheval (all meaning horse or associated with horses). Words in different languages that ultimately descend from the same root--cousins and siblings on the linguistic family tree--are said to be cognates to each other. Etymology is the study of how words can be traced back to an older root.

ROOT CREATION: Creating a new word by inventing its form from scratch--without reference to any pre-existing word or sound.

ROUND CHARACTER: A round character is depicted with such psychological depth and detail that he or she seems like a "real" person. The round character contrasts with the flat character, a character who serves a specific or minor literary function in a text, and who may be a stock character or simplified stereotype. If the round character changes or evolves over the course of a narrative or appears to have the capacity for such change, the character is also dynamic. Typically, a short story has one round character and several flat ones. However, in longer novels and plays, there may be many round characters. The terms flat and round were first coined by the novelist E. M. Forster in his study, Aspects of the Novel. See also dynamic character, flat character, character, characterization, and stock character.

ROUNDED VOWEL: A vowel made with the lips sticking out--i.e., all of the back vowels except [a].

ROUNDEL: A poem in the pattern of the rondeau, but only having eleven lines. Like the rondeau and the rondel, the roundel uses only two rhymes and a twice-repeated refrain. Cf. rondeau, rondel, roundelay, villanelle.

ROUNDELAY: A term used as a generic label for fixed forms of poetry using limited rhymes--such as the rondeau, rondel, and roundel. The word roundelay can be used in reference to the musical background (setting) for a poem in a fixed form and also for a round dance that is to be performed while the music plays and the poem is recited or sung. Cf. rondeau, rondel, roundel, villanelle.

ROUNDHEAD: Not to be confused with round character, (see above), a Roundhead is a member or supporter of the parliamentarian or Puritan party during the English Civil War, one of those who opposed King Charles I (c. 1625-49) and his Cavalier followers. The designation comes from the way the Puritans tended to cut their hair ascetically short, which contrasted with the long luxurious locks of the Cavaliers. Ultimately, Cromwell led the Roundheads in a coup d'état and established a Puritan dictatorship in England, leading to the end of the English Renaissance. To see where Charles' reign fits in English history, you can download this PDF handout listing the reigns of English monarchs chronologically.

RP: The linguist's abbreviation for received pronunciation, a prestigious British dialect used by the upper social classes and in public schooling.

RUBAIYAT: An Arabic term meaning a quatrain, or four-line stanza. The term is nearly always included in the title of any Arabic poem that is built upon such quatrains. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald's loose translation of the eleventh-century Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam's work) is probably the best known example for English-speakers. Two of its most famous quatrains appear below:

A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread--and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,

RUN-ON LINE: See discussion under enjambement. Not to be confused with a run-on sentence, a grammatical error.

RUNE: In a writing system designed to be scratched or carved on a flat surface such as wood or stone, the individual letters are known as runes. Typically, these markings have few or no curves, circles, or dots, but instead, each mark consists of a number of straight cuts or strokes. (The strokes may, however, involve complex combinations of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.) Runic writing systems tend to appear in areas where paper or parchment are scarce or unknown or where ink is commonly unavailable. Typical runic marks might indicate ownership of a house or object, they may be magic spells designed to be cut or scratched on a shield as a pagan protective charm, and they may mark boundary stones. It is accordinly rare to find lengthy literary writings done in runes--which naturally tend to force brevity upon the communicant given the effort involved in cutting or carving them. Runes were common among ancient and medieval inhabitants of Scandinavia, the continental Germanic tribes, and among the Anglo-Saxons who invaded Britain. By the High Middle Ages, parchment, pen, and ink had largely displaced the runic writing systems. Contrast with ogam markings among the Celts.

SAGA: The word comes from the Old Norse term for a "saw" or a "saying." Sagas are Scandinavian and Icelandic prose narratives about famous historical heroes, notable families, or the exploits of kings and warriors. Until the 12th century, most sagas were folklore, and they passed from person to person by oral transmission. Thereafter, scribes wrote them down. The Icelandic sagas take place when Iceland was first settled by Vikings (930-1030 AD). Examples include Grettir's Saga, Njál's Saga, Egil's Saga, and the Saga of Eric the Red. The saga is marked by literary and social conventions including warriors who stop in the midst of combat to recite extemporaneous poetry, individuals wearing dark blue cloaks when they are about to kill someone, elaborate genealogies and "back-story" before the main plot, casual violence, and recitations of the names and features of magical swords and weapons. Later sagas show signs of being influenced by continental literature--particularly French tales of chivalry and knighthood. For modern readers, the appearance of these traits often seems to sit uneasily with the surrounding material. In common usage, the term saga has been erroneously applied to any exciting, long narrative. See cycle and epic.

SAINT: See discussion under vita.

SAINT'S LIFE: Another term for the medieval genre called a vita. See discussion under vita.

SALIC LAW: French law stating that the right of a king's son to inherit the French throne passes only patrilineally rather than matrilineally. In England, however, the English Queen Consort (a queen married to a ruling husband) can become the Queen Regnant (a queen ruling in her own right) if her husband dies and there are no other male relatives in line to inherit the throne. Likewise, in French Salic Law, if the queen remarries after the king dies, any children she has from the new husband cannot claim the throne. Likewise, if a male king dies without heirs, only his brothers and their male offspring can claim the throne. This right does not pass to male children of the queen that she might have later. However, under English law, a male descended from the English Queen can ascend to the throne. The differences between Salic and English Law regarding inheritance play a key part in Shakespeare's Henry V, in which King Henry must determine whether he can justly claim the throne of France.

SAMOYEDIC: A non-Indo-European branch of Uralic languages spoken in northern Siberia.

The pattern is notoriously difficult in English, but more common in Greek. The term Sapphic comes from the name of the female Greek poet Sappho.

SAPPHIC ODE: Virtually identical with a Horatian ode, a Sapphic ode consists of quatrains in which the first three lines consist of eleven syllables and the fourth line contains five. The metrical pattern is described under Sapphic meter.

SAPPHICS: Verses written in Sapphic meter.

SAPPHIC VERSE: Verse written in Sapphic meter.

SARCASM: Another term for verbal irony--the act of ostensibly saying one thing but meaning another. See further discussion under irony.

SATEM LANGUAGE: One of the two main branches of Indo-European languages. These languages are generally associated with eastern Indo-European languages and they often have a sibilant sound rather than the palatal /k/ found in equivalent centum words. Click here for more information.

SATIRE: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards. Satire became an especially popular technique used during the Enlightenment, in which it was believed that an artist could correct folly by using art as a mirror to reflect society. When people viewed the satire and saw their faults magnified in a distorted reflection, they could see how ridiculous their behavior was and then correct that tendency in themselves. The tradition of satire continues today. Popular cartoons such as The Simpsons and televised comedies like The Daily Show make use of it in modern media. Conventionally, formal satire involves a direct, first-person-address, either to the audience or to a listener mentioned within the work. An example of formal satire is Alexander Pope's Moral Essays. Indirect satire conventionally employs the form of a fictional narrative--such as Byron's Don Juan or Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and similar tools are almost always used in satire. Horatian satire tends to focus lightly on laughter and ridicule, but it maintains a playful tone. Generally, the tone is sympathetic and good humored, somewhat tolerant of imperfection and folly even while expressing amusement at it. The name comes from the Roman poet Horace (65 BCE-8 CE), who preferred to ridicule human folly in general rather than condemn specific persons. In contrast, Juvenalian satire also uses withering invective, insults, and a slashing attack. The name comes from the Roman poet Juvenal (60-140 CE), who frequently employed the device, but the label is applied to British writers such as Swift and Pope as well. Compare with medieval estates satire and spoof.

SATIRIC COMEDY: Any drama or comic poem involving humor as a means of satire.

SATYR PLAY: A burlesque play submitted by Athenian playwrights along with their tragic trilogies. On each day of the Dionysia, one tragedy was performed, followed by one satyr play.

SCANSION: The act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter. To perform scansion, the student breaks down each line into individual metrical feet and determines which syllables have heavy stress and which have lighter stress. According to the early conventions of English poetry, each foot should have at least one stressed syllable, though feet with all unstressed syllables are found occasionally in Greek and other poetic traditions.

SCATOLOGY: Not to be confused with eschatology, scatology refers to so-called "potty-humor"--jokes or stories dealing with feces designed to elicit either laughter or disgust. Anthropologists have noted that scatological humor occurs in nearly every human culture. In some cultures and time periods, scatology is treated as vulgar or low-brow (for instance, the Victorian period in England). At other times, scatological elements appear in stories that are not necessarily meant to be low-brow. For instance, many serious medieval legends of demons link them to excrement, and the audience of French fabliaux appear to be noblemen and aristocrats rather than bourgeois rabble. Scatology also appears in medieval plays such as Mankind and in works associated various French fabliaux (singular fabliau). Chaucer relies heavily on scatological humor in "The Summoner's Tale." See fabliau.

SCHEMA ATTICUM: This popular grammatical construction appears in ancient Attic Greek (and it is later mimicked in New Testament Greek). It is a specific type of enallage in which a neuter plural subject takes a singular verb (Smith 9). Normally, this construction would be considered a grammatical error in Greek, but if poets, playwrights, or prophets do it intentionally, it becomes high art. The device leads to some interesting translation decisions in modern English editions of the Bible or Greek literature. Should the translator "normalize" the grammar so it doesn't look odd to English students? Or should the translator bravely insert his own English grammatical "error" to match the intentional "error" in the original Greek text? See schema pindarikon, below.

SCHEMA PINDARIKON: This popular grammatical construction appears in the ancient Attic Greek of Pindar and later in New Testament Greek. It is a type of enallage in which any compound subject takes a singular verb (Smith 9). Normally, that would be considered a grammatical error, but if the poet Pindar does it, it is high art. This general term contrasts with the more specific schema atticum, above.

SCENE: A dramatic sequence that takes place within a single locale (or setting) on stage. Often scenes serve as the subdivision of an act within a play. Note that when we use the word scene generically or in the text of a paper (for example, "there are three scenes in the play"), we do not capitalize the word. See The MLA Handbook, 6th edition, section 3.6.5 for further information involving capitalization of scenes.

SCEOP (A-S, "shaper," also spelled scop): An Anglo-Saxon singer or musician who would perform in a mead hall. Cf. bard.

SCENERY: The visual environment created onstage using a backdrop and props. The purpose of scenery is either to suggest vaguely a specific setting or produce the illusion of actually watching events in that specific setting.

SCHISM: A schism is a split or division in the church concerning religious belief or organizational structure--one in which a single church splits into two or more separate denominations--often hostile to each other. Click here for more information.

SCHOLASTICISM: In medieval universities, scholasticism was the philosophy in which all branches of educaton were developed and ordered by theological principles or schemata.

SCHOOL: While common parlance uses the word school to refer to a specific institute of learning, literary scholars use this term to refer to groups of writers or poets who share similar styles, literary techniques, or social concerns regardless of their educational backgrounds. In some rare cases, the group's members recognize that they share these concerns while they are alive, and they purposely name themselves or their movement to reflect their characteristics. For instance, the American Beat poets, the French Imagists, and the English Pre-Raphaelites recognized and named themselves as being part of their respective movements. It is far more common, however, for later generations of scholars and critics to look back and lump groups of artists or thinkers into specific schools. For instance, the Romantic poets, the Spenserians, the Cavalier poets, the Metaphysical poets, and the Gothic novelists are specific schools of literature, but these labels did not appear for the particular groups until years after the writers lived. Art historians make similar distinctions about the Bauhaus school, the Expressionist movement, the Fauves, the Cubists, and so on. Shared intellectual or philosophical tendencies mark schools of philosophy as well--such as the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Skeptics, the Sophists, the Platonists, and the Neo-platonists--and these terms are often applied in a general way to writers who existed in later centuries. Accordingly, we might speak of both Marcus Aurelius and Hemingway as part of the Stoic school, even though the two lived two thousand years apart from each other on different continents, and one was a meditative Roman Emperor who outlawed gladiatorial combat and the other an American ambulance driver obsessed with machisimo and bull-fighting. Keep in mind, divisions into such artificial schools of thought are often arbitrary, contradictory, and murky. They work best at pointing out general similarities rather than creating sharp, clear categorical labels.

SCHWA: The mid-central vowel or the phonetic symbol for it. This phonetic symbol is typically an upside down e. The schwa vowel appears in words like putt and sofa and duh. The same sound appears blended with an /r/ in words like pert, shirt, and motor. See also intrusive schwa.

SCIENCE FICTION (originally "scientifiction," a neologism coined by editor Hugo Gernsback in his pulp magazine Amazing Stories): Literature in which speculative technology, time travel, alien races, intelligent robots, gene-engineering, space travel, experimental medicine, psionic abilities, dimensional portals, or altered scientific principles contribute to the plot or background. Many purists make a distinction between "hard" science fiction (in which the story attempts to follow accepted scientific realism and extrapolates the outcomes or consequences of scientific discovery in a hard-headed manner) and "soft" science fiction (which often involves looser adherence to scientific knowledge and more fantasy-elements). The basic premise is usually built on a "what if" scenario--i.e., it explores what might occur if a certain technology or event occurred. Examples include Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Octavia Butler's Dawn, H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man, Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and William Gibson's Neuromancer. See also space opera, speculative fiction, and Cthulhu mythos.

SCOP (pronounced like "shop"): An alternative spelling of sceop. See sceop.

SCRIBAL CORRUPTION: A general term referring to errors in a text made by later scribes rather than the original authors. In many cases, these mistakes are obviously the result of human error while copying, such as accidentally repeating or leaving out a word or line(s) from the original manuscript. "Eye skips," for instance, are errors that result when a scribe's eye drops from the original word or line he was copying to a different word or line that begins with the same letter or word, causing him to leave out the intermediary material. Other scribal errors come about when a scribe attempts to "correct" or "simplify" a text he doesn't understand well. One of the more amusing examples of scribal corruption comes from the Anglo-Saxon monks of medieval Britain. There, a monk was copying a text that referred to heaven as the "Isle of Joy." The word joy in Anglo-Saxon was gliw. (It's the word that gives us the modern word glee.) Unfortunately, an Anglo-Saxon monk misread the final letter. This final letter was wynn--an Anglo-Saxon letter that looks sort of like the modern letter p, but which represents a /w/ sound. You can see samples of the letters by clicking here. The scribe mistakenly thought he was viewing the letter thorn, which represents a -th sound. Thus, he miswrote the word as Glith in an Anglo-Saxon educational poem called "Adrian and Ritheus." The error had its consequences. Hundreds of this scribe's newly Christianized and newly literate students therefore diligently learned that heaven was located on "The Isle of Glith." This no doubt caused some confusion initially among the early Christian converts. The problem of scribal corruption was still prevalent five hundred years later in Chaucer's day. Chaucer complains about the "negligence and rape" done to his poetry at the hands of his own scribe, Adam, in his short poem, "Chaucer's Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scrivyen."

SCRIBAL -E: When a scribe adds an unpronounced -e to words for reasons of manuscript spacing, this is called a scribal -e. This practice was common in the days before English orthography became standardized. Note that this practice should not be confused with the Middle English final -e, which often is pronounced as an unstressed syllable at the end of words in Chaucer and writings of the fourteenth century.

SCRIBE: A literate individual who reproduces the works of other authors by copying them from older texts or from a dictating author. In many parts of the ancient world, such as Classical Rome and Classical Greece, a large number of scribes were slaves who belonged to wealthy government officials and to poets or authors. In other cultures such as Egypt or Tibet, scribes have been seen as priestly or semi-magical individuals. In the medieval period, many monks were given the task of copying classics from the earlier period along with Bibles and patristic writings. Their efforts preserved much of Greco-Roman philosophy and history that might otherwise have been lost. See also auctor, scrivener and scriptorium.

SCRIM: In drama, a flimsy curtain that becomes transparent when backlit, permitting action to take place under varying lighting.

SCRIPTORIUM: An area set aside in a monastery for monks to work as scribes and copy books.

SCRIVENER: Another term for a scribe. The term scrivener became especially common during the 1700s and 1800s for legal copyists, as evidenced in works such as Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." See scribe above.