The Religions of India Volume 1: Handbooks on the History of Religions
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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India, Old and New, With a Memorial Address in Honor of Professor Salisbury (1901 )
(Originally published in 1901. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1901. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
The Great Epic of India: Its Character and Origin - Primary Source Edition
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
Edward Washburn Hopkins was an American philologist and scholar. He served as a professor at Bryn Mawr and Yale.
Background
Edward Washburn Hopkins was born on September 8, 1857 in Northampton, Massachussets, United States. He was one of twins, the second and third sons and children of Doctor Lewis Spring and Frances Jane (Washburn) Hopkins. He was a seventh-generation descendant of John Hopkins of Coventry, England, who settled in Cambridge, Massachussets, in 1634, and moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1636. It seems to have been a notably religious family. An ancestress was a sister of Jonathan Edwards. Several ancestors were clergymen; Samuel Hopkins and Mark Hopkins were collateral relatives. His mother was a sister of Reverend Edward Abiel Washburn; she was descended from John Washburn, settler of Duxbury, Massachussets, in 1632.
Education
Hopkins studied at Columbia University, where in 1878 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree; then at Berlin and Leipzig (Sanskrit, Iranian, and "comparative philology, " chiefly under Albrecht Weber and Ernst Windisch), taking the doctorate at Leipzig in 1881.
Career
Hopkins became a tutor in Latin at Columbia, where he also gave instruction in Sanskrit and "Zend" (Avestan). From 1885 to 1895 he was professor of Greek, Sanskrit, and comparative philology at Bryn Mawr. In 1895 he succeeded W. D. Whitney in the Salisbury Professorship of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale, which he held until he became professor emeritus in 1926.
His doctoral dissertation was on the caste-system in the Laws of Manu, and such sociological studies remained one of his leading interests. As early as 1884 appeared his first major work, a translation with scholarly notes of The Ordinances of Manu (begun by A. C. Burnell, completed and edited by Hopkins). But in India such studies inevitably lead into the field of religion, which was the subject of his next book, The Religions of India (1895). It remained for many years almost the only comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the subject. The Great Epic of India (1901) is more severely technical, but it is a mine of information for specialists and has profoundly affected later work in the Hindu epics. His India Old and New (1901), however, is a group of essays addressed rather to the educated public.
He probably attained his zenith as a scholar with Epic Mythology (1915), an example of minute research at its best, which will long remain the standard work in its field; and with The History of Religions (1918), in which he ranged far beyond the confines of India. Of greater popular appeal was the Origin and Evolution of Religion (1923), which astonished its author by attaining for some months the prominence of a "best-seller. " A similar combination of sound knowledge with general interest was the Ethics of India (1924). His last book, Legends of India (1928), reproduces classic Hindu legends freely in English verse and shows an easy mastery of the technique of versification which to many was unexpected in a scholar. But probably most of the work for which specialists will remember him appeared in technical journals.
Hopkins died of a heart attack at his summer home at Madison, Connecticut. He had just spent a year in Europe.
Achievements
Hopkins was one of the three or four leading American Indologists of his generation. He was one of the most active and influential members of the American Oriental Society, and contributed many valuable papers to the Journal of the American Oriental Society, especially on numerical and temporal categories in early Sanskrit literature.
Hopkins was a members of the American Oriental Society, which he served as corresponding secretary (1896-1908), editor of its Journal (1897-1907), and president (1908-1909 and 1922-1923). He was also prominent in various other learned societies, notably the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Connections
On June 3, 1893, Hopkins was married to Mary Sanger Clark of New York City, who survived him for several years. They had one daughter and five sons: Mary Pauline, Clark, Francis Washburn, Edward Lewis, Howard, and Allen Low.
