dodecalogy

English

Etymology

From dodeca- +‎ -logy.

Noun

dodecalogy (plural dodecalogies)

1. A set of twelve (chiefly used of books).
   • 1883, Jacob Grimm, translated by James Steven Stallybrass, Teutonic Mythology […], volume III, London: George Bell & Sons, […], pages li (Preface to the Second Edition (1844)) and 984 (Devil):

     Of all forms of belief, the Monotheistic is at once the most agreeable to reason and the most honouring to Deity. It also seems to be the original form, out of whose lap to a childlike antiquity Polytheism easily unfolded itself, by the loftiest attributes of the one God being conceived first as a trilogy, then as a dodecalogy. […] Before the might of the one all-governing God the kakodæmon’s power fades away. Then out of this unity there grow up trilogies (Brahma, Vishnu, Siva; Zeus, Poseidon, Pluto; Wuotan, Donar, Frô; Hâr, Iafnhâr, Thriði), dodecalogies, and the plenitude of pantheism.

   • 1932, India and the World, volume I, →OCLC, footnote by editor, page 250:

     The author does not say anything here about four other pieces which should go with Robespierre to complete the Dodecalogy.

   • 1951 October 6, Maurice Collis, “Book Reviews”, in Time and Tide, volume 32, page 948, columns 2–3:

     If he [the novelist] wants to narrate a complete life, with all its complications of family and friends, he will have at least to make a triptych of it, with the subordinate characters looking towards a central figure, or group them round a country house or a public institution—something that outlasts and gives meaning to their impermanence. We are even promised a dodecalogy on the theme of life in a Cambridge college.

   • 1958, Book-of-the-Month Club News, New York, N.Y.: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., page 12, column 1:

     Nearly half the text presents “Friends and Authors,” with particular stress on Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall and the gestation of the Bounty trilogy, and on Mazo de la Roche and her Jalna dodecalogy (the story of how the volume missed rejection by a hair’s-breadth is a simon-pure cliffhanger).

   • 1962, Show: The Magazine of the Arts, volume 2, page 81:

     People began discussing his “Music of Time” (a work in progress running to twelve volumes; five have been published) as a mid-century masterwork, […]. The passage presented here is from “The Kindly Ones,” the sixth volume in “The Music of Time” dodecalogy.

   • 1974, The Statesman, volume 20, page 12, column 1:

     The sad truth about trilogies (and tetralogies, for that matter, let alone dodecalogies like Anthony Powell’s Come Dancing series) is that unless the constituent parts are self-contained, they are very difficult to treat separately.

   • 1977, Notes and Queries, volume 222, page 159, column 1:

     [Ludovico] Ariosto has even made a mark on contemporary fiction: Antony Powell makes considerable play with what sounds like [Robert] McNulty’s edition, in the final volume of his dodecalogy, Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).

   • 1980, Ed Sanders, “A Mortal Frame”, in Fame & Love in New York, Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island Foundation, →ISBN, part four (J’Accuse), page 317:

     The entire Balzac Study Group was on hand; they can be forgiven their curiosity, for here lay a fit swarm of ideas for their next project—literature’s first simultaneously published dodecalogy!

   • 1993, George Woodcock, “One’s Own Vision and Experience: Clark Blaise, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, Alice Munro, Sheila Watson”, in George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Fiction, Toronto, Ont.: ECW Press, →ISBN, page 111:

     Looking through the volumes of his dodecalogy, The New Age, that have so far appeared, it seems as though [Hugh] Hood’s problems are partly those of the culture to which he belongs.

   • 1994, Indian Review of Books, volume 3, page 13, column 3:

     The 1980s witnessed a remarkable resurgence of Indian mythology in literary, theatrical and academic spheres. In literature we saw the gripping Hindi dodecalogy of Ram Kumar Bhramar on the Mahabharata while novels on the epic came in Bengali from Kalkut and Dipak Chandra, in Oriya from Pratibha Ray, […]

   • 2003 September 28, Christopher Hart, “Barbarism lies just beyond”, in The Daily Telegraph‎^[1], London: Telegraph Media Group, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 22 February 2024:

     Arthur the King is the second of "an unconnected Dark Ages sequence". I hope [Allan] Massie doesn't stop at a mere trilogy. With entertainment as high-wrought and glittering as this, even a dodecalogy would be too short.

   • 2004 October, Niklas Holzberg, “Illud Quod Medium Est: Middles in Martial”, in Stratis Kyriakidis, Francesco De Martino, editors, Middles in Latin Poetry, Bari: Levante, →ISBN, pages 249–250:

     Exploring this avenue further in my book Martial und das antike Epigramm, I have tried to interpret the Epigrammaton libri XII as a sort of ‘dodecalogy’ and would accordingly reject Peter White’s libellus theory.¹¹ […] They are both epodes, and this type of poem only appears three more times in the rest of the ‘dodecalogy’ (3.14; 9.77; 11.59).

   • 2005, Latomus: revue d’études latines, page 1017:

     [Niklas] Holzberg’s suggestion that Epigrams 1-12 (i.e. not the Liber spectaculorum, the Xenia and the Apophoreta) from the very beginning were devised as a “dodecalogy” and that the preface of Book 1 really is a preface to the 12 books issued together is new, as far as I am aware, and certainly opens new perspectives on Martial as a composer not only of individual books, but like the epic poets, as an architect of a large set of volumes.

   • 2006, Gnomon, volume 78, numbers 5–8, page 693:

     There are some comprehensive concepts in the outlook of [Sven] Lorenz (and [Niklas] Holzberg) that will need to be heeded by anyone working on Martial in the future – particularly the view of Martial’s 12 Books of Epigrams as a ‘dodecalogy’ and of the figure of Domitian as an ‘epigrammatic emperor’ devised in accordance with the rules of the genre – but, as L. points out, there are «erstaunlich wenig Berührungspunkte» between his and Lorenz’s work; […]

   • 2006, Betsy McCall, The Dragons’ Child, Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 209:

     In the Shadow of the Dragons Dodecalogy / The Dragons’ Gift / The Dragons’ Child / The Dragons’ Shadow / The Dragons’ Rival / The Dragons’ Jewel / The Dragons’ Blood / The Dragons’ Crown / The Dragons’ Eye / The Dragons’ Curse / The Dragons’ Nemesis / The Dragons’ Price / And the prequel book / The Dragons’ Lord

   • 2015, Gideon Nisbet, “Introduction”, in Epigrams (Oxford World’s Classics), Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages xx and xxvi:

     This view of Martial notices the dodecalogy’s lack of an overriding ethical agenda, implicitly in contrast to a morally outraged Juvenal (in whom modern scholarship no longer really believes), but reads it as evidence of a real-life character flaw rather than a literary performance. […] The two centuries after Martial’s death appeared to ratify Pliny’s scepticism: we have next to no evidence that the epigrams were being read at all. When Hadrian’s adoptive heir Aelius Verus (ad 101–38) called Martial ‘his Virgil’,⁸ he declared himself as an attentive reader of the dodecalogy and was perhaps trying to outrage respectable opinion.

   • 2015, John Bodel, “[The Publication of Pliny’s Letters] The manuscript tradition and forms of publication in Pliny’s day”, in Ilaria Marchesi, editor, Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity in the Epistles, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, footnote 76, page 40:

     In contrast to the absence of indications of unity across the corpus, the arrangement and thematic coherence of individual books are frequently noted: see e.g. Scherf 1998; 2001: 71–105 (Epigrammaton liber, Xenia, Apophoreta); Watson 2003: 29–31; Coleman 2006: lxii–lxiv. [Niklas] Holzberg 2002: 135–51 and 2004/5 goes further, arguing that the entire twelve-book corpus exhibits a unified structure as a sort of ‘dodecalogy’.

   • 2015, E[dward] L. Risden, “Introduction. The ‘Author of the Century’ in His Century: Extending the Intellectual Landscape”, in Tolkien’s Intellectual Landscape, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, →ISBN, page 16:

     The fantasy trilogy hasn’t disappeared; it has gained momentum and in some instances become a dodecalogy, and the material of modern fantasy has spread from print to subway graffiti, role-playing games, film, tv, and online culture.

   • 2018, “About the Contributors”, in David Kipen, editor, Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018, New York, N.Y.: The Modern Library, →ISBN, page 515:

     Powell, Anthony British novelist, author of the towering “Dance to the Music of Time” dodecalogy.