Meaning of dodecalogy | Babel Free

Definitions

A set of twelve (chiefly used of books).

Examples

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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).”

“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.”

“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.”

“[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).”

“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!”

“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.”

“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, […]”

“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.”

“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).”

“[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.”

“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; […]”

“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”

“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.”

“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’.”

“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.”

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

CEFR level