A posteriori

Old Testament Type
New Testament Antitype
Adam's rib removed by God to create Eve.	Christ pierced in his side by a Roman spear and blood flowing from his side.
The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden bearing the fruit that will damn humanity.	The cross at Golgatha bearing as its fruit, Christ, which will redeem humanity. (In many medieval legends, the cross is cut and shaped from the same tree that grew in the Garden of Eden; in other versions, this tree instead grows from the seed of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the cross is positioned exactly over the geographic spot where Adam was buried by his sons).
God manifesting to Moses as a burning bush, and the bush is not withered by the flames.	God manifesting to the Jews in the Virgin Mary's womb, and Mary's virginity is not tarnished by this divine impregnation.
God provides the children of Israel with mana in the desert to save them from physical starvation	God provides Eucharist to the faithful church, to save them from spiritual starvation.
Jonah spends three days in the belly of the whale before being vomited forth.	Christ spends three days in the tomb before resurrection.
The Israelites pass through the Red Sea to emerge to a new life in the Promised Land.	The faithful emerge through the waters of baptism to emerge to a new life in Heaven.
The journey to the Promised Land	The pilgrimage to Heaven
Abraham's call to sacrifice his son, Isaac	God's decision to sacrifice his son, Jesus
Those who would be saved coming before Noah's Ark to avoid the coming deluge, entering salvation under the cross-shaped mast.	Those who would be saved coming before the crucifixion to avoid the coming fires of hell, entering salvation under the cross.

The list goes on at length, with the figurations varying greatly in terms of how plausible they seem to modern Christians and non-Christians. Typological interpretation was only one of several ways of interpreting the Bible. Others are discussed under fourfold meaning. Some works of medieval literature have been interpreted according to the typological models that were common in medieval religion. For instance, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Miller's Tale of John the Carpenter describes how the gullible carpenter believes the trickster Nicholas' prediction of a coming flood, and John builds three boats out of tubs and hangs them from the rafters in preparation. His efforts provide sly Nicholas with an opportunity to engage in adultery with John's wife. Clearly this situation is a sort of type meant to be contrasted with the Biblical account of Noah's flood. Likewise, Dante's Inferno has passages with biblical overtones strategically placed throughout the poem. The exact extent to which readers can legitimately apply typological and tropological theory to secular literature is a matter of sharp debate among critics. The (in)famous American scholar D. W. Robertson in the last part of the twentieth-century, along with other "Robertsonian" scholars, have applied typological interpretations to secular poems such the Roman de la Rose, the works of Chrétien de Troyes, and medieval love lyrics. That application has been a source of fierce argument, however.

More recent religious poets--such as Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and William Blake have also used typological symbolism in their poetry. Twentieth-century Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis successfully employ typological models in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce.

TYRONIAN NOTA: While modern English authors use an ampersand (&) as an abbreviation for the word and, medieval writers would use a tyronian nota to represent the Latin word et (modern English and). The nota looks a bit like the modern arabic number "7" (&).

TZ'U: A Chinese genre of poetry invented during the T'ang period. It was akin to a song libretto with a tonal pattern similar to the lu-shih, but with irregular meter. This term should not be confused with -tzu, an honorific suffix meaning "master" or "teacher" in names like the military philosopher Sun-Tzu, or Lao-Tzu, the taoist author of the Tao-te Ching.

UBI SUNT MOTIF (Latin, "Where are....?"): A literary motif dealing with the transience of life. The name comes from a longer Latin phrase, "Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?" [Where are those who were before us?], a phrase that begins several medieval poems in Latin. The phrase evokes the transience of life, youth, beauty, and human endeavor. It is a particularly common motif in the ballades. A particularly memorable example comes from medieval French, where Francois Villon repeatedly asks in "The Ballade of Dead Ladies," "Ou sont les nieges d'antan?" ["Where are the snows of yesteryear?"]. Many Anglo-Saxon poems such as "The Ruin" and "The Wanderer" also deal with this theme. Although the motif is similar to the Roman carpe diem motif in its emphasis on transitory existence, the medieval ubi sunt motif usually does not call on the reader to embrace this world's pleasures before the end comes, but instead grimly or sorrowfully urges the reader to prepare spiritually for the afterlife.

ULTIMATE SOURCE: In linguistics, the earliest known or most ancient etymon for a particular word, as opposed to a direct source, the most recent source for a word.

UMLAUT: (1) Jacob Grimm's term for the process of assimilating a vowel to another sound in the following syllable. This process is also called mutation. This process is responsible for many unusual plurals in Germanic languages like English--such as man-men, foot-feet, and so on. (2) The diacritical marking also called a dieresis. Click here for more information on this diacritical marking.

UNDERSTATEMENT: See litotes and meiosis under tropes.

UNDERWORLD: The land of the dead--often depicted as beneath the surface of the earth in a variety of religious literatures. See Descent Into the Underworld.

UNINFLECTED GENITIVE: A genitive that has no case ending to signal its function. A number of such uninflected genitives appeared in Early Modern English--especially for nouns that originally were feminine in Anglo-Saxon grammar or nouns ending in -s or preceding another word beginning with s-. Thus, we might find "for conscience sake" and "for God sake" in Shakespearean plays.

UNINFLECTED PLURAL: A plural word identical to its singular form. For instance, "I saw one deer yesterday, but last week I saw five deer." Here, the word deer is identical whether it is singular or plural. Other examples include sheep, swine, folk, and (in Middle English) horse and kind, which did not develop the plural form horses and kinds until the 1600s through linguistic hypercorrection.

UNITIES, THREE (also known as the "three dramatic unities"): In the 1500s and 1600s, critics of drama expanded Aristotle's ideas in the Poetics to create the rule of the "three unities." A good play, according to this doctrine, must have three traits. The first is unity of action (realistic events following a single plotline and a limited number of characters encompassed by a sense of verisimilitude). The second is unity of time, meaning that the events should be limited to the two or three hours it takes to view the play, or at most to a single day of twelve or twenty-four hours compressed into those two or three hours. Skipping ahead in time over the course of several days or years was considered undesirable, because the audience was thought to be incapable of suspending disbelief regarding the passage of time. The third is unity of space, meaning the play must take place in a single setting or location. It is notable that Shakespeare often broke the three unities in his plays, which may explain why these rules later were never as dominant in England as they were in French and Italian Neoclassical drama. French playwrights like Moliére conformed to the model much more strictly in Love is the Doctor and Tartuffe.

UNIT SET: A series of lowered or raised platforms on stage, often connected by various stairs and exits, which form the various locations for all of a play's scenes. A unit set enables the scene to change rapidly--without intermissions or the drawing of the curtain in order to place new sets.

UNITY: The sense that all the elements in a piece of writing fit together to create a harmonious effect.