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Possible definitions for fetialis
fetial
Any of a group of 20 Roman priestly officials who dealt with foreign relations. Selected from noble families and appointed for life, they acted as emissaries to foreign lands in times of conflict. When Rome was offended by another city-state, the fetials would visit the city-state and demand satisfaction. They also delivered treaties and made formal declarations of war, based on the decisions of the Senate. This priesthood had faded by the late republic, but was later revived by Augustus.
fetishism
In psychology, erotic attachment to an inanimate object or an ordinarily asexual part of the human body or the necessity to use a nongenital object in order to achieve sexual gratification. The object is most commonly some other body part or an article of clothing. The condition occurs almost exclusively among men. See also fetish.
feudalism
Social system of rights and duties based on land tenure and personal relationships that prevailed in Europe in the 9th-14th cent. European feudalism originated with the early Frankish kingdom (8th cent.), and spread with Frankish conquests into N Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Slavic lands. The Normans took feudalism to Britain in 1066, and the Crusades took it to the Near East. Under the feudal system, kings granted fiefs to their vassals--lords who, in return for protection, pledged their loyalty and armed forces to the king's use. These vassals in turn granted fiefs to their own vassals, and so on. The ranks of European nobility generally corresponded to the level of vassalage, the number of armed knights they commanded, and the amount of land they owned. Feudalism went hand in hand with manorialism. Because personal loyalty rather than an abstract concept of the state underlay the fulfillment of civic duties, public authority became fragmented and decentralized. With the growing power of the European monarchies and increasing national integration, feudalism was greatly weakened by the end of the 14th cent., though it remained important in Germany and especially Russia into the 19th cent. Outside of Europe, feudalism was the predominant social system in Japan in the 12th-19th cent. (see daimyo, han, shogun), and a version of feudalism was a feature of the Ottoman empire.
serialism
Use of an ordered set of pitches as the basis of a musical composition. The terms twelve-tone music and serialism, though not entirely synonymous, are often used interchangeably. The serial method was worked out by A. Schoenberg in the years 1916-23, though another serial method was being devised simultaneously by Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959). To Schoenberg, it represented the culmination of the growth of chromaticism in the late 19th and early 20th cent. Concerned to erase what he regarded as the system of tonality, which he regarded as outworn but which he realized would frequently assert itself even in the music of composers who desired to ...
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