Middle French in the context of "French Renaissance literature"

A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interact. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" and the Greek suffix, "graphy", meaning "description", so a geographer is someone who studies the earth. The word "geography" is a Middle French word that is believed to have been first used in 1540.

Although geographers are historically known as people who make maps, map making is actually the field of study of cartography, a subset of geography. Geographers do not study only the details of the natural environment or human society, but they also study the reciprocal relationship between these two. For example, they study how the natural environment contributes to human society and how human society affects the natural environment.

Volley fire, as a military tactic, is (in its simplest form) the concept of having soldiers shoot in the same direction en masse. In practice, it often consists of having a line of soldiers all discharge their weapons simultaneously at the enemy forces on command, known as "firing a volley", followed by more lines of soldiers repeating the same manoeuvre in turns. This is usually to compensate for the inaccuracy, slow rate of fire (as many early ranged weapons took a long time and much effort to reload), limited effective range and stopping power of individual weapons, which often requires a massed saturation attack to be effective. The volley fire, specifically the musketry volley technique (also known as the countermarch), requires lines of soldiers to step to the front, fire on command and then march back into a column to reload, while the next row repeats the same process.

The term "volley" came from Middle French volée, substantivation of the verb voler, which in turns came from Latin volare, both meaning "to fly", referring to the pre-firearm practice of archers mass-shooting into the air to shower their enemy with arrows. While the tactic of volley fire is usually associated with Dutch military thinkers in the late 16th century, its principles have been applied to crossbow infantry since at least the Chinese Tang dynasty.

Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; French: ancien français [ɑ̃sjɛ̃ fʁɑ̃sɛ]) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th and mid-14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a group of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse. These dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langues d'oc, the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania, now Southern France.

The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance in the Île-de-France region; this dialect was a predecessor to Modern French. Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into modern forms (Poitevin-Saintongeais, Gallo, Norman, Picard, Walloon, etc.), each with its linguistic features and history.

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (/mɒnˈteɪn/ mon-TAYN; French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; Middle French: [miˈʃɛl ejˈkɛm də mõnˈtaɲə]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), commonly known as Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularising the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous writers of Western literature; his Essais contain some of the most influential essays ever written.

During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style, rather than as an innovation; moreover, his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognised as embodying the spirit of critical thought and open inquiry that began to emerge around that time. He is best known for his sceptical remark, "Que sçay-je ?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; "Que sais-je ?" in modern French).

Prosody (from Middle French prosodie, from Latin prosōdia, from Ancient Greek προσῳδίᾱ (prosōidíā), 'song sung to music', 'pronunciation of syllable') is the theory and practice of versification.

Latin prosody (from Middle French prosodie, from Latin prosōdia, from Ancient Greek προσῳδία prosōidía, 'song sung to music', 'pronunciation of syllable') is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.

A saltire, also called Saint Andrew's Cross or the crux decussata, is a heraldic symbol in the form of a diagonal cross. The word comes from the Middle French sautoir, Medieval Latin saltatoria ("stirrup").

From its use as field sign, the saltire came to be used in a number of flags, in the 16th century for Scotland and Burgundy, in the 18th century also as the ensign of the Russian Navy, and for Ireland. Notable 19th-century usage includes some of the flags of the Confederate States of America. It is also used in the flag of Jamaica and on seals, and as a heraldic charge in coats of arms.

A mole is a massive structure, usually of stone, used as a pier, breakwater, or causeway separating two bodies of water. A mole may have a wooden structure built on top of it that resembles a wooden pier. The defining feature of a mole, however, is that water cannot freely flow underneath it, unlike a true pier. The oldest known mole is at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbor complex on the Red Sea, constructed c. 2500 BCE.

The word comes from Middle French mole, ultimately from Latin mōlēs, referring a large mass, especially of rock, which is also the root of molecule and mole, the name of the unit of measurement.