The Poetic Transformation of Christian Cabbala

This article follows the development of a genre of eighteenth-century texts, explicitly self-designated as ‘cabbalistic’, initially intended for fortune telling by use of a number-alphabet. Such texts were found in Latin and German and eventually emerged from clandestinity into print, though initially they were often anonymous and with false places of printing. As these texts attracted the attention of those interested in promoting the German vernacular and demonstrating the poetic capacity of that language, they were increasingly identified as ‘paragrams’, lost much of their mantic purpose and increasingly became an inventive technique for the stimulation of the composition of honorific verse.