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The article provides information regarding two English clergy who served in Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of Great Britain, Bishop of Leighlin and Dean of St Patrick Richard Meredith, who served from 1584 to circa 1592, and Dr. Meredith Hanmer, who moved to Ireland on or about 1591, returning to England in 1593 after serving as vicar choral of Christ Church in Dublin. The two men are confused in the 1885 "Calendar of State Papers Ireland," edited by .H. C. Hamilton and others.

Considered precursors of ḥadīth criticism, the opinions of ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh b. Jaʿfar al-Madīnī (161–234/778–849), extensively cited by later ḥadīth scholars, have given considerable weight to the credibility of a ḥadīth and its transmitters. Despite his centrality to the science of ḥadīth, there is not a single monograph dedicated to him and his intellectual output in the scholarly literature in English. This article presents a critical reconstruction of his life. Although the biographical sources on ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī are copious, the earliest details, especially on evaluation of his scholarly accomplishment, are often tendentious and contradictory. There is also a controversy related to his submission to the miḥna. Analysis of these biographical reports intimates that the questioning voices mainly came from the early Ḥanbalī circle, while other scholars, comprising Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn's disciples and non-Baghdadis, especially of Basran and Khurasani origins, tended to defend ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī. This paper argues that ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī's unfaltering status as a leading ḥadīth critic can be attributed to the geographical outreach of his supporters, whose overall attitude towards the createdness of the Qurʾān is more tolerant compared with that of the Ḥanbalīs. More importantly, ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī's contribution to the formation of ḥadīth criticism as a discipline was realized from early on, which is manifest in his knowledge of ʿilm al-rijāl and mastery of ʿilal al-ḥadīth. His theorization of ḥadīth transmission through the framework of the madār al-isnād also laid the epistemological foundation for the following ḥadīth critics in their formulation of the disciplinary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the time Joseph Morgan died (ca. 1750), he had lived longer in, and written more about, North Africa than any other Briton. This paper examines his first published work after his return to England ca. 1720: a translation of the life of the Prophet Muḥammad which appeared in London in 1723 and 1725. While there had been previous biographies of the Prophet in English, Morgan's was the first that was completely based on an account by a Muslim Andalusian author, Mohamed Rabadan, who had written it in the first decade of the seventeenth century. It was partly based on the work of the thirteenth-century muḥaddith, Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad al-Bakrī and infused with Sufi imagery. This biography presented a highly positive view of the Prophet, the like of which had not existed before in any European language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much to be gained from interpreting the tenth-century Exeter Book riddles as a characteristically biographical group of texts. They comprise a rich source of information for the study of Anglo-Saxon concepts of life courses and life stages, but have yet to be treated as such despite current enthusiasm surrounding the study of historical life cycles. Probably this is due to their status as biographies of largely non-human subjects. Equipped with the insights of life-writing scholarship, including Paul de Man's argument that all autobiography is prosopopoeia and personification, it becomes possible to see the riddles' value as discourses on life progression and indeed as early examples of life-writing and 'object biography' in the English vernacular. Building on a consideration of the riddles alongside their Latin analogues as well as influential contemporary schemes of the life course, this paper advocates the interrogation of such critical labels as 3'anthropomorphism' and 'personification', often applied to the riddles. These terms are so imprecise as to obfuscate more than they reveal of the ideas of human and non-human life experience and progression at work in these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a different approach to writing about oneself—Stanley Cavell's idea of philosophy as autobiography. In Cavell's understanding, the acknowledgement of the partiality of the self is an essential condition for achieving the universal. In the apparently paradoxical combination of the ‘philosophical’ (which is traditionally connected with a search for the objective and the universal) and the ‘autobiographical’ (which is conventionally associated with the subjective and the personal), Cavell shows us a way of focusing on the self and yet always transcending the self. The task requires, however, a reconstruction of the notions of philosophy and autobiography, and at the same time the destabilising of our conceptions of self and language. Cavell seeks to achieve this through the idea of finding one's voice, understood as an autobiographical exercise. This necessitates both negotiation of the inheritance from the past and innovation for the future, initiation into the language community and deviation from it. What this amounts to, in ways that the paper seeks to explain, is a process of the self and language in translation. This is a sense of ‘translation’ that is broader than the conventional understanding of the term. Such a conception can, it is argued, exercise a therapeutic effect on the self, destabilising the myth of self-identity. The implications of this account for the contemporary vogue for narrative in educational research, as well as for classroom practice, are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Anglo-Irish author Hugh Kelly (1739-1777), focusing particularly on his early career as a journalist in London, England. He wrote for the periodicals "Gentleman's Journal" and "Gazetteer" in the 1760s, as well as served as managing editor of "The Public Ledger" in 1760, during the early years of the reign of King George III of Great Britain. References to his career are found in the personal papers of British Under Secretary of State Edward Weston, as well as those of pamphleteers John Hume and Dr John Campbell.

The article discusses English Reverend Richard Clarke (1723-1802), notable for his preaching in South Carolina in the 1750s. It is largely based upon information taken from the court records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, England regarding a probate case for the estate of haberdasher Kezia Sindram, the aunt of Clarke's fourth wife Sarah Lee, with additional information found in "The Papers of Henry Laurens," by British merchant and South Carolina politician Laurens. It discusses Clarke's career as an educator, writer, and minister; his family and relatives; and his associates.