sovran

(redirected from sovranty)

sovran

(ˈsɒvrən)

n, adj

a literary word for sovereign

ˈsovranly adv

ˈsovranty n

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

References in periodicals archive ?

The earliest appearance of the loathly lady motif comes in the figure of the Irish Sovranty Hag, an imbroglio of cultural ideas about political power contestation, in which gender roles are loosened, dissolved, and resolved.

Shifting traditions: Chaucer's narrative accomplishment in the wife of bath's tale considered in the context of the shift from oral tradition to literate print tradition

"How sweet is mortal Sovranty!"--think some: Others--"How blest the Paradise to come!" Ah, take the Cash in hand and wave the Rest; Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

Secular pleasures and FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

At her transformation she announces "I am the Sovranty" and explains that her appearance replicates the trials of ruling a kingdom: what can be unpleasant and difficult will eventually become beautiful and good to the right ruler.

Similarly, William Albrecht links the loathly lady story to the Celtic Adventure of Daire's Sons, where "the lady changes herself into a hag in order to test the hero's fitness for the 'Sovranty of Erin' and recovers her beauty when he has gone to bed with her.

The heroism of Heurodis: self-mutilation and restoration in Sir Orfeo

In distinguishing vice from virtue, Tacitus was, as the late Oxford historian Sir Ronald Syme once put it, "ever alert for the contrast of name and substance." (35) Tacitus acknowledged that there was, in Syme's British phrasing and spelling, "the nominal sovranty of law." (36) All the same, he knew that, whatever the appearance, in reality, "sovranty"--sovereignty--in the Roman Empire had been ceded to one man, and thereby to those who, through the force of their arms, through the force of their martial and financial might, kept that one man in power.