A posteriori

FARSA: A medieval Spanish religious play, usually performed in sets rather than alone, with a comic interlude between plays or between acts. An example is Lucas Fernández's Farsas y eglogas al modo y estilo pastoril y castellano (Cuddon 333). Farsa should not be confused with fârsa, a type of boasting poem in the African Galla tribe that recites a catalog of heroes and their deeds (Cuddon 333).

FATRASIE (French, "medley," or "rubbish"): Nonsense verse popular between 1200-1400 in medieval France, usually in eleven-line verse form, often in macaronic text. Their purpose appears to be mocking traditional closed-form poetry.

FAUSTIAN BARGAIN: A temptation motif from German folklore in which an individual sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, wealth, or power. Marlowe's The Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus revolves around this motif.

FAUX AMIS (French, "false friends"): Words in two languages that may technically be cognates with each other (i.e., descended down two separate etymological branches to a common root word), but which are not equivalent in meaning because one or both of them have changed meaning over time from the original root word. For instance, the Spanish word embarazar and the English word embarrass look like cognates, and in fact, the English term was borrowed by way of French from the Spanish word. However, the English word has changed meaning to refer to humiliation, but in the original Spanish, the word embarazar means "impregnate." Even though technically descended from a common ancestor, and thus cognates, the two words are faux amis if we try to translate them as equivalents. Cf. cognate.

FEATHERING: As Kathleen Scott describes this sort of decoration, it is "a spray form of decoration, consisting of short, slightly curving pen lines often ending in a lobe (after c. 1410 usually tinted green), gold motifs, and coloured motifs; [. . .] a basic element of 15th-century book decoration" (Scott 371).

FEMININE ENDING / FEMININE RHYME: See under discussion of meter below.

FEMINIST WRITING: Writing concerned with the unique experience of being a woman or alternatively writing designed to challenge existing preconceptions of gender. Examples of feminist writings include Christine de Pisan's medieval work, The City of Ladies; Aemilia Lanyer's Renaissance treatise, Salve Deus, Rex Judaeorum (which presented the then-shocking idea that Adam was just as much to blame for the fall of man as Eve was in the Genesis account); Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication, and Susan B. Anthony's nineteenth-century essays (which presented the equally shocking idea that women in America and Canada should have the right to vote).

Many female students in my class preface their discussions of feminist writings by stating, "I'm not a feminist, but . . . ." This tendency always puzzled me, since it implies that feminism is something negative, radical, or always liberal. Worse yet, it implies that it's bad for women to want crazy, misguided things like education, equal health insurance, similar pay to what men earn in similar professions, freedom from harassment, and funding for medical problems concerning women, such as breast and uterine cancer research, which are the primary concerns of feminism. Somewhere toward the end of the twentieth-century, detractors of such writers have caricatured these demands as "man-hating" or "anti-family." As an antidote to such thinking, keep in mind the broader definition: a feminist is anyone who thinks that women are people too.

FEUDALISM: The medieval model of government predating the birth of the modern nation-state. Feudal society is a military hierarchy in which a ruler or lord offers mounted fighters a fief (medieval Latin "beneficium"), a unit of land to control in exchange for a military service. The individual who accepted this land became a vassal; the man who granted the land become known as the vassal's liege or his lord. The deal was often sealed by swearing oaths on the Bible or on the relics of saints. Often this military service amounted to forty days' service each year in times of peace or indefinite service in times of war, but the actual terms of service and duties varied considerably on a case-by-case basis. For instance, in the late medieval period, this military service was often abandoned in preference for cash payment or an agreement to provide a certain number of men-at-arms or mounted knights for the lord's use.

In the late medieval period, the fiefdom often became hereditary, and the firstborn son of a knight or lesser nobleman would inherit the land and the military duties from his father upon the father's death. Feudalism had two enormous effects on medieval society. (1) First, it discouraged unified government because individual lords would divide their lands into smaller and smaller sections to give to lesser nobles and knights. These lesser noblemen in turn would subdivide their own lands into even smaller fiefs to give to even less important rulers and knights. Each knight would swear his oath of fealty (loyalty) to the ones who gave him his lands, which was not necessarily the king or higher noblemen, let alone an abstraction like "France" or "England." Feudal government was always an arrangement between individuals, not between nation-states and citizens. (2) Second, it discouraged trade and economic growth. Peasant farmers called serfs worked the fields; they were tied to individual plots of land and forbidden to move or change occupations without the permission of the lord. The feudal lord might claim one-third to one-half of the serf's produce in taxes and fees, and the serfs owed him a set number of days each year in which they would work the lord's fields in exchange for the right to work their own lands. Often, they were required to grind their grain in the lord's mill and bake all their bread in the lord's oven in exchange for other fees. In theory, the entire community might be divided into bellatores (the noblemen who fought), laboratores (the agricultural laborers who grew the food), and oratores (the clergy who prayed and attended to spiritual matters). In actuality, this simple tripartite division known as the three estates of feudalism proved unworkable, and the necessity of skilled craftsmen, merchants, and other occupations was quite visible in spite of the theoretical model espoused in some sermons and political treatises.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect. Perhaps the two most common figurative devices are the simile--a comparison between two distinctly different things using "like" or "as" ("My love's like a red, red rose")--and the metaphor--a figure of speech in which two unlike objects are implicitly compared without the use of "like" or "as." These are both examples of tropes. Any figure of speech that results in a change of meaning is called a trope. Any figure of speech that creates its effect in patterns of words or letters in a sentence, rather than twisting the meaning of words, is called a scheme. Perhaps the most common scheme is parallelism. For a more complete list of schemes and tropes, see the schemes and tropes pages.