A posteriori

RELATIVE CLAUSE: TBA under "Clause" link.

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.