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a formal public commendation; eulogy
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005



(encomium), a laudatory speech. The term originates from the title of one of Isocrates’ most famous speeches, the Panegyricus (380 B.C.).

The practice and theory of the panegyric were worked out intensively in ancient rhetoric. Different types of the genre included speeches praising kings, gods, cities, and animals, as well as speeches that were salutatory, congratulatory, and consolatory. The panegyric’s motifs became systematized: analyzed in turn were the eulogized person’s physical and spiritual qualities, his innate and acquired qualities, and his conduct in war and peace and in court and council. A contrasting literary genre, the denunciation or invective, had an analogous construction.

Paradoxical and parodic panegyrics were popular from early times. An example is Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, which in places becomes harshly satirical. In the Middle Ages panegyrical techniques were used in lives of the saints, and during the Renaissance in political journalism. In the age of classicism, the 17th and 18th centuries, the panegyric glorifying the enlightened monarch flourished: examples are found in the works of J. B. Bossuet and J. B. Massillon in France and of M. V. Lomonosov, F. Prokopovich, and G. Konisskii in Russia. The genre later degenerated rapidly and lost all social significance, surviving only in anniversary speeches. Employed in a broader sense, the term “panegyric” refers to any eulogy, irrespective of how it finds expression—as an ode, for example.


In the East. In the literatures of the East the panegyric took form in remote antiquity as poeticized praise of the deity and the authorities. Examples are found in Sumerian literature of the third millennium B.C., in ancient Egyptian literature between the 21st and 18th centuries B.C., and in Hittite literature of the 18th century B.C.. Panegyric poetry attained its most classic form in Persian literature: the court qasida first perfected by Rudaki and later written by other poets, especially Anvari; the religiophilosophical qasida of Naser Khosrow; and the Sufi ghazal written as a eulogy to the deity. The evolution of the panegyric in Farsi poetry was repeated in all the Islamic literatures, among them Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu. Panegyric traits may also be found in literary genres of the Far East and of Southeast Asia; examples are the Burmese genres of the mawgun and the pyo.


References in periodicals archive ?
This testimony also shows, just as we saw in Epistre invective 3, her panegyrical propensity to argue and to promote woman primarily through anecdote and example.
Eustratius' Life is both a eulogy and an apologia; it reminds its audience of Eutychius' great days at the Council, and deflects attention from his subsequent exile and the controversies of his second patriarchate by showing him also as a provincial healer and miracle worker, and by dwelling with every possible rhetorical embellishment on the panegyrical topos of his return and adventus in Constantinople in 577 and of the imperial favour he received in his later years.
Johnson's impressively documented study analyses the percolation of Vitruvian ideas of proportional form into Jonson's poetic practice, emphasizing the sophistication of his understanding of structures based on harmonic number, and the extent to which his early masques and panegyrical poetry were self-consciously shaped after these principles.
Claudian's ingenious capping of Lucan's lines here is solid evidence for the fact that at least one professional writer of panegyrical poetry took this model |straight', and consequently that the idea itself was within the bounds of what was sayable according to the conventions of Latin panegyrical writing.
47-48) The panegyrical introduction in the above quote assures us that the description that follows is of the twelve instruments invented by Ghazan and also that they are in their original forms, because it implies that the treatise was written during Ghazan's lifetime (or between 1300 and 1304).
She then examines how Agricola Junior, Eck, and Cox used the panegyrical poetry they wrote to create the image of a great man, a "humanist hero." The public image of the Polish and Hungarian kings and ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries formed by Agricola Junior and Eck in their occasional and political poetry is examined, along with the poets' role in producing propaganda that furthered the political aims of their patrons and simultaneously advanced their own positions at court.
35.6 the word (one unconvertible word in Greek character) is used in combination with (one unconvertible word in Greek character) for the sort of panegyrical oratory that has affinities with history; while in Ep.
The Mutineis is essentially a poetic laus urbis, a panegyrical epic comparable in some ways to the Historia Bononiensis of Tommaso Seneca or the Tarentina of Paracleto Malvezzi.
(4.) Pre-Tang examples of panegyrical palace poems include those by emperor Jianwen of Liang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (r.
3 None of the editorial shortcomings exposed in this article are mentioned in the panegyrical review of this volume by C.
The day after the funeral, the participants attended a farewell at which they were thanked for attending, and a final panegyrical sermon in praise of the deceased was given.