Abecedarian (Med. Lat. term for an ABC primer). An alphabetic acrostic (q.v.), a poem in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. In modern times the a. has been widely viewed as a mere word game or mnemonic device for children, but in many ancient cultures the form was commonly associated with divinity, being used for prayers, hymns, and oracles. In divine poetry not only the Word but even letters and sounds, given pattern, bear mystical significance and incantatory power—as do numbers The a., only one of several such forms, held even greater significance for being the archetype of the Alpha Omega trope. But even outside religious contexts the principle held power, since in the a. the master code of the lang, is made the constitutive device of the form. The earliest attested examples are Semitic, and abecedarii held an esp. important place in Heb. religious poetry, to judge from the dozen odd examples in the OT. The best known of these is Psalm 119, which comprises 22 octave stanzas, one for each letter of the Heb. alphabet, all lines of each octave beginning with the same letter. The more common stanzaic type, however, is that used by Chaucer for his ABC, where only the first line of the stanza bears the letter (cf. the ornate initials of illuminated mss.). Psalms 111-12 represent the astrophic type, wherein the initials of each successive line form the alphabet. In the Japanese form, Iroha mojigusari, the first line must begin with the first and end with the second letter of the alphabet, the second with the second and third, and so on. A number of abecedarii are extant in Cl. and Alexandrian Gr., but they were also popular in Byzantine Gr. and are copious in Med. Lat.: St. Augustine’s well-known abecedarian psalm against the Donatists (Migne, PL 43.23 ff.) is the earliest known example of medieval rhythmical verse.—K. Krumbacher, Gesch. der byzantinischen Lit., 2d ed. (1897); C. Daux, Le Chant abécédaire de St. Augustin (1905); H. Le-clercq, “Abécédaire,” Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne, ed. F. Cabrol (1907); Meyer, v. 2, eh. 6; F. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, 2d ed. (1925), sect. 14; R. Marcus, “Alphabetic Acrostics in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” JNES 6 (1947); Raby, Secular.
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