In 1719, the former secretary of State and famous English writer Joseph Addison passed away and was burried in Westminster Abbey among the great national poets. A few decades later, the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson defined Joseph Addison’s prose style as the quintessence of Englishness in his Lives of the English Poets. This selection of essays ambitions to celebrate the tercentenary of his death by showing that Addison was part of the European as much as the English Enlightenment. It explores how European countries and cultures played a decisive, if somewhat ambiguous role in his career and writing. It finally offers insights of Addison’s huge literary and journalistic legacy in Europe.

Claire Boulard Jouslin is senior lecturer in British history in Université Sor-bonne Nouvelle-Paris3. Her research interest include various aspects of the English eighteenth-century society such as landscape gardening, the history of the periodical press, women’s journalistic writings and Franco-British cultural transfers.

Klaus-Dieter Ertler is Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Graz (Austria). His main research interests include the "Spectators" in the Romance cultures and the francophone and hispanophone novel.