a. (sb.) [f. TRADITION + -ARY1: cf. additionary. (In mod.L. trāditiōnārius.)]
1. = TRADITIONAL a. 1.
1661. Glanvill, Van. Dogm., 249. Traditionary impositions.
a. 1677. Hale, True Relig., I. (1684), 2. By Traditionary Transmission of many important Truths … from Ancestors to their Posterity.
1748. Hartley, Observ. Man, II. iv. 396. The Corrupted Remains of some traditionary Revelation.
1802. Paley, Nat. Theol., xviii. (ed. 2), 329. What can be the traditionary knowledge of a chicken hatched in an oven?
1857. Livingstone, Trav., Introd. 1. Our grandfather was intimately acquainted with all the traditionary legends.
1868. Gladstone, Juv. Mundi, ii. (1869), 41. The traditionary, as opposed to the merely mythical, period.
b. = TRADITIONAL a. 1 b.
1835. Greswell, Parables, I. 442. I see the vestiges of a traditionary paradise in this dream of the poets.
1840. Hood, Up the Rhine, 314. Some two hundred yards distant stood the mill, in an Arabian waste, as remote from corn as the traditionary Mill of Buccleugh.
c. Characterized by tradition.
1844. Ld. Houghton, Palm Leaves, Burial Ground of Scutari. ’Tis well to live and lord o’er those By whom his sires were most renown’d, But his fierce heart finds best repose In this traditionary ground.
† 2. Observant of tradition; = TRADITIONAL a. 2.
1613. Purchas, Pilgrimage, III. x. 247. They hate the Persians,… more then they doe the Christians: like as the Traditionary Iew doth the Textuarie, and the Papist the Protestant.
1666. Tillotson, Rule Faith, III. x. Himself and his Traditionary Brethren.
B. sb. One who maintains or accepts the authority of tradition; a traditionalist. rare.
1727–41. Chambers, Cycl., s.v., The traditionaries are what we more usually call rabbins and rabbinists, or talmudists…. Hillel shone among the traditionaries, and Schammai among the textuaries.
1732. Neal, Hist. Puritans, I. 324 [quotes Strype (see TRADITIONER 1), with traditionaries].
Hence Traditionarily adv. = TRADITIONALLY.
1804. Mitford, Inquiry, xv. § 5 (ed. 2), 347. The antient Welsh airs, which have been transmitted traditionarily by ignorant harpers.
