and magic The word in Renaissance magic came to refer to any astrological, kabbalistic or magical sign or symbol. John Dee (1527 1608), a mathematician and occultist, designed an esoteric symbol (right), which he described in his 1564 book, : the word hieroglyph is a composite of hiero (holy) and glyph (a distinct character). In the 19th century, this sense of the word appears mainly in Romantic poetry, such as Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the last minstrel (1805), where "A hallow'd taper shed a glimmering light / On mystic implements of magic might; On cross, and character, and talisman," (6.17). Semiotics and epistemology From the esoteric or mystical meanings, learned authors of the Early Modern period abstracted a notion of Character as a code or hierarchical system that embodied all knowledge or all of reality, or a written representation of a philosophical language that would recover the "true names" lost in the confusion of tongues. This idea had currency as a kind of epistemological philosophers' stone for about a century, from the mid 17th century, with Francis Lodwick (1642) and John Wilkins's Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), to the later 18th century and the Encyclopédie where in a long entry under the heading Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed such projects of the past century. See also Typeface anatomy, the graphic elements that make up letters in a typeface References Etymologies Semiotics pt:Caractere