enchiridion

plural enchiridions · plural enchiridia

1. archaicuncommonA handbook or manual.

   the Enchiridion of Erasmus

   4 more examples

   He [Francis Quarles] wrote long poems, almost epics for length, about Jonah, Esther, Job, Samson, and Solomon, interspersed with meditations after a quite original plan,—Shepherd's Oracles, Comedies, Romances, Fancies, and Meditations,—the quintessence of meditation, —and Enchiridions of Meditation all divine, —and what he calls his Morning Muse; besides prose works as curious as the rest.

   1843 October 16, Henry David Thoreau, “To Mrs. Emerson”, in F[ranklin] B[enjamin] Sanborn, editor, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Familiar Letters, volume VI (Familiar Letters), Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin and Company, published 1906, →OCLC, page 112

   Sartor Resartus was for many years his Enchiridion (he says), while the translations from the German, the references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to read the originals.

   1920, Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley: A Character Sketch

   To counteract these degrading effects he advised that […] the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon, Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the ‘Enchiridion’ of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul.

   1921, Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, London: Chatto & Windus

   If they queried the predictabilities and completions of story, Swift and Sterne were yet more suspicious of the totalisations and regularities of imposed rules, institutes, universal systems, cyclopaedias and enchiridions.

   2009, Thomas Keymer, The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, page 27