Again, studying in the library together, my friend Brendan pointed out an unusual word in one of our readings for our Early Modern European Intellectual History Class. Here is a sentence from Trever-Roper’s “The Religious Origins of the Englightenment”:
It is interesting to observe the continuity…between the political radicals of yesterday and today: to see the torch, so nearly dropped from the failing hands of the last Whigs, skillfully caught and carried on by their successors, the first Marxists. This transfer of the same formula to different hands, this neat theoretical lampadophory, occurred at the close of the last century.”Trever-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze p194
The word, lampadophory, comes, according the Oxford English Dictionary, from lampadedromy, an old greek word meaning:
A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.
I was reading just the same sentence of Mr. Trevor-Roper and coudn’t understand the same word. Your answer helped me very much. Thank you!