A posteriori

And everemoore he hadde a sovereyn prys.

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,

They tell sweet lies of Paradise;
And in those eyes the lovelight lies
And lies--and lies--and lies!

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)