Rich Johnson
Working Lexicon
A Working Lexicon of Technical and Not-So Technical Terms
Below you will find a list of terms for you to look up and define in a central location (such as your course notebook). An excellent resource for definitions to these and other literary terms is the prodigious Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics; other resources would include any handbook of literary terms (such as that edited by M.H. Abrams). Furthermore, this lexicon is by no means an exhaustive list of the terms you should know. It is simply a beginning. Over the course of the summer, you should continue to build your lexicon of literary terms. Any term you don’t recognize or understand in any of our readings or in any of the class discussions, you should include in this lexicon.
Literary Genres:
- Epic/Heroic
- Elegy
- Panegyric
- Allegory
- Fabilau (pl. fabliaux)
- Romance
- Courtly Love
- Saint's Life
- Exemplum
- Breton Lay
- Beast fable
Manuscript Culture:
- Codex
- Codicology
- Colophon
- Collation
- Carpet page
- Chi-rho
- Incipit
- Explicit
- Flesh side
- Hair side
- Folio (pl. folia)
- Bifolium (pl. bifolia)
- Flyleaf
- Gloss
- Gutter
- Incunable
- Interlace
- Initial
- Marginalia
- Miniature
- Paleography
- Palimpsest
- Parchment
- Vellum
- Provenance
- Recto-Verso
- Rubric
- Scribe
- Script
- Scriptorium
- Shelf mark
- Quire
Historical Terms:
- B.C.E. (Before Common Era)
- C.E. (Common Era)
- Antiquity
- Late Antiquity
- Byzantine
- Carolingian
- Coptic
- Celtic
- Insular (Hiberno-Saxon)
- Romanesque
- Gothic
Miscellaneous:
- Anthropomorphic
- Zoomorphic
- Typology
- Chronicle
- Calendar
- Divine office
- Vernacular
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