dodecalogy

plural dodecalogies

1. A set of twelve (chiefly used of books).

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

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

   5 more 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.

   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)

   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.

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

   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).

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

   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.

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

   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.

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