PARASOL (Fr., from Ital. parasole: parare, to shield, and sole, sun), a sunshade, a light or small form of umbrella, covered with coloured silk or other material. In Japan and China gaily coloured parasols of paper stretched on bamboo frames are used by all classes. The parasol of an elaborate and highly ornamented type has been the symbol of high honour and office in the East, being borne over rulers, princes and nobles. The negro chiefs of West Africa reserve to themselves the privilege of bearing parasols of considerable size and substantial construction, the size varying and denoting gradations in rank.
PARAVICINO Y ARTEAGA, HORTENSIO FELIX (1580–1633),
Spanish preacher and poet, was born at Madrid on the
12th of October 1580, was educated at the Jesuit college in Ocana, and on the 18th of April 1600 joined the Trinitarian order. A sermon pronounced before Philip III. at Salamanca in 1605 brought Paravicino into notice; he rose to high posts in his order, was entrusted with important foreign missions, became royal preacher in 1616, and on the death of Philip III. in
1621 delivered a famous funeral oration which was the subject of
acute controversy. He died at Madrid on the 12th of December
1633. His Oraciones evangélicas (1638–1641) show that he was
not without a vein of genuine eloquence, but he often degenerates
into vapid declamation, and indulges in far-fetched tropes and
metaphors. His Obras pósthumas, divinas y humanas (1641)
include his devout and secular poems, as well as a play entitled
Gridonia; his verse, like his prose, exaggerates the characteristic
defects of Gongorism.
PARAY-LE-MONIAL, a town of east-central France in the department of Saône-et-Loire, 58 m. W.N.W. of Macon by the Paris-Lyon railway, on which it is a junction for Moulins, Lozanne, Clermont and Roanne. Pop. (1906), 3382. It lies on the slope of a hill on the right bank of the Bourbince and has a port on the Canal du Centre. The chief building in the town is the priory church of St Pierre. Erected in the 12th century in the Romanesque style of Burgundy, it closely resembles the abbey church of Cluny in the length of the transepts, the height
of the vaulting and the general plan. The town is the centre of a district important for its horse-raising; bricks, tiles and
mosaics are the chief manufactures of the town. In the 10th
century a Benedictine priory was founded at Paray-le-Monial.
In the 16th century the town was an industrial centre, but its
prosperity was retarded by the wars of religion and still more
by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. In 1685 the visions
of Marguerite Marie Alacoque, a nun of the convent of the
Visitation, who believed herself to possess the Sacred Heart of
Jesus, attracted religious gatherings to the town, and yearly
pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial still take place.
PARCEL (Fr. parcelle, Ital. particella, Lat. particula, diminutive
of pars, part), a small part or division of anything; particularly,
in the law of real property and conveyancing, a portion
of a manor or estate, and so the name of that portion of a legal
document, such as a conveyance or lease relating to lands,
which contains a description of the estate dealt with. The
word is also used of a package of goods contained in a wrapping
or cover for transmission by carriage, &c., or by post; hence the
term “parcel-post” for the branch of the post-office service
which deals with the transmission of such packages. “Parcel”
was formerly used in an adverbial or quasi-adverbial sense,
meaning “partly,” “to some extent,” thus “parcel-Protestant,”
“parcel-lawyer,” &c. This use survives in "parcel-gilt,” i.e.
partly gilt, a term applied to articles made of silver with a gilt
lining.
PARCHIM (Parchem), a town of Germany, in the grand
duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, on the Elde, which flows
through it in two arms, 23 m. S.E. of Schwerin, on the railway
from Ludwigslust to Neubrandenburg. Pop. (1905), 10,397.
It was the birthplace of Moltke, to whom a monument was
erected in 1876. It is an ancient place surrounded with walls,
and contains a Gothic town hall and two interesting churches.
Founded about 1210, Parchim was during part of the 14th
century the residence of one branch of the family of the dukes
of Mecklenburg. It became a prosperous industrial town during
the 16th century, but this prosperity was destroyed by the
Thirty Years’ War. A revival, however, set in during the
19th century.
See Hübbe, Zur topographischen Entwickelung der Stadt Parchim (Parchim, 1899); and Weltzien, Zur Geschichte Parchims (Parchim, 1903).
PARCHMENT. Skins of certain animals, prepared after
particular methods, have supplied writing material on which has been inscribed the literature of centuries. Such a durable substance, in most cases easily obtainable in fair abundance, would naturally suggest itself for the purpose, and we are therefore prepared for evidence of its use, and also for the survival of actual specimens, from very ancient times. The tradition of the employment of skins as writing material by the ancient Egyptians is to be traced back to the period of the Pharaohs of the IVth Dynasty; and in the British Museum and elsewhere there exist skin-rolls which date back to some 1500
years B.C. But the country which not only manufactured but also exported in abundance the writing material made from
the papyrus plant (see Papyrus) hardly needed to make use
of any other material, and the instances of skin-rolls inscribed
in Egypt must at all times have been rare. But in western
Asia the practice of using skins as writing material must have
been widespread even at a very early period. The Jews made
use of them for their sacred books, and it may be presumed
for other literature also; and the old tradition has been maintained
by this conservative race down to our own day, requiring
the synagogue rolls to be inscribed on this time-honoured
material. No doubt their neighbours the Phoenicians, so ready
to adapt the customs of other nations to their own advantage,
would also have followed the same practice. The Persians
inscribed their annals on skins; and skins were employed by the
Ionian Greeks, as proved by the words of Herodotus (v. 58).
There is no evidence forthcoming that the same usage was
followed by the western Greeks and by the Italic tribes; but it is
difficult to suppose that at a remote period, before the importation
of papyrus, such an obviously convenient writing material
as skin was not used among the early civilized races of Greece
and Italy.
The method of preparation of skins for the service of literature in those distant ages is unknown to us; but it may be assumed that it was more or less imperfect, and that the material was rather of the character of tanned leather than of the thinner and better prepared substance which was to follow at a later time. The improvement of the manufacture to which we refer was to be of a nature so thorough as to endow the material with a new name destined to last down to the present day.
The new manufacture was traditionally attributed to Eumenes II. of Pergamum, 197–158 B.C. The common story, as told by Pliny on the authority of Varro, is that Eumenes, when seeking to enlarge the library of his capital, was opposed by the jealousy of the Ptolemies, who forbade the export of papyrus from Egypt, thus hoping to check the growth of the rival library; and that the Pergamene king was thus compelled to revert to the old custom of using skins as writing material. It is needless to regard this story as literally true, or as other than a popular explanation of a great development of the manufacture of skin material for books in the reign of Eumenes. In former times the prepared skins had been known by the natural titles διφθέραι μεμβράναι, the Latin membranae, and these were at first also attached to the new manufacture; but the latter soon received a special name after the place of its origin, and became known as περγαμηνή, charta pergamena, from which descends our English term parchment, through the French parchemin. The title of pergamena actually appears first in the edict De pretiis rerum of Diocletian (A.D. 301), and in a passage in one of St Jerome’s Epistles.
The principal improvement in the new manufacture was the dressing of the skins in such a way as to render them capable of receiving writing on both sides, the older methods probably treating only one side for the purpose, a practice which was sufficient in times when the roll was the ordinary form of book
