The Coptic origins of the Yoruba

The theory according to which the Yoruba ancestors were Coptic Christians seemed unpopular amongst many Yoruba people despite the fact that the theory was proposed by the most revered Yoruba historian, Samuel Johnson. The aims of this research are firstly, to study Johnson’s Coptic theory of the Yoruba origins and secondly, to highlight the circumstances that might have informed him to associate the Yoruba people with the Coptic Church. This research is achieved through a historical study of a possible interaction between certain ethnic groups in Nigeria and the Coptic Church, and through a comparative study of Church liturgies amongst the Copts and those of the Yoruba traditional churches. The researcher explained that Johnson’s Christian background influenced his narrative of connecting the Yoruba origins with the Copts. The researcher is of the opinion that there is no evidence provided by Johnson according to which the Yoruba people originated from the Copts.

Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by a team of internationally recognized experts specially commissioned to commemorate in 2019 the three-hundredth anniversary of Addison’s death. Almost exclusively known now as the inventor and main author of The Spectator, probably the most widely read and imitated prose work of the eighteenth century, Addison also produced important and influential work across a broad gamut of other literary modes-poems, verse translations, literary criticism, periodical journalism, drama, opera, travel writing. Much of this work is little known nowadays even in specialist academic circles; Addison is often described as the most neglected of the eighteenth century’s major writers. Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays sets out to redress that neglect; it is the first essay collection ever published which addresses the full range and variety of his career and writings. Its fifteen chapters fall into three groupings: an initial group of five dealing with Addison’s work in modes other than the literary periodical (poetry, translation, travel writing, drama); a central core of five addressing The Spectator from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (literary-critical, sociological and political, bibliographical); and a final set of five exploring Addison’s reception within several cultural spheres (philosophy, horticulture, art history) by individual writers (Samuel Johnson) or across larger historical periods (the Romantic age, the Victorian age), and in Britain and Europe (especially France). Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays provides an overdue and appropriately diverse memorial to one of the eighteenth century’s dominant men of letters.

Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Test of Time

This chapter explores the contours of Addison’s afterlife in the eighteenth century by looking carefully at Samuel Johnson’s varied criticism of his works over a lifetime of writing about him. In his final statement in his famous Life of Addison, Johnson declares Addison’s reputation secure from the ups and downs it underwent in the eighteenth century by determining that Addison’s works, like those of Shakespeare, had stood the test of time. In Johnson’s long journey to this conclusion, his work on the Dictionary is perhaps the most important landmark. By citing Addison so frequently and in illustration of so many common words, Johnson demonstrated that Addison’s prose had knit itself into the fabric of English and would therefore endure. Although the enthusiastic cult of Addison that saw him as a perfect Christian had faded by mid-century, Johnson saw his works enduring because they had, almost invisibly, become part of British social discourse, both linguistically and ethically, and thereby ‘given Addison a claim to be numbered among the benefactors of mankind’.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.

Presencia de Samuel Johnson en el «Diccionario castellano» (1786-88) de Esteban de Terreros

El Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes (DC 1786-1788) del jesuita español Esteban de Terreros y Pando fue continuado por Los tres alfabetos francés, latino e italiano con las voces de ciencias y artes que les corresponden en la lengua castellana (1793). Mantenemos la hipótesis en este trabajo de que tanto el prólogo que figura en el DC (1786-1788) como las “Memorias” (1793) que redactó Miguel de Manuel y Rodríguez para su continuación parecen haber bebido de una fuente común: el prefacio que el lexicógrafo inglés Samuel Johnson puso al frente de su A Dictionary of the English Language (DEL 1755). Parecen confirmar esta idea varios indicios que tienen que ver con aspectos externos e internos. Metodológicamente, hemos procedido al cotejo de los textos implicados y a la búsqueda de información sobre cómo Terreros pudo conocer la obra de Johnson y cómo la manejó para la elaboración de su diccionario. Así podremos llegar a confirmar lo que, a nuestro juicio, supone un episodio relevante, de gran calado, para la historia de la lexicografía hispánica.