A special volume of essays to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Society, with a full listing and index of Hakluyt Society publications 1847-1995. Containing: P.E.H. Hair, ’The Hakluyt Society: from Past to Future’; R.C. Bridges, ’William Desborough Cooley and the Foundation of the Hakluyt Society’; Tony Campbell, ’R.H. Major and the British Museum’; R.J. Bingle, ’Henry Yule: India and Cathay’; Ann Savours, ’Clements Markham: longest serving Officer, most prolific Editor’; C.F. Beckingham, ’William Foster and the Records of the India Office’; D.B. Quinn, ’R.A. Skelton of the Map Room’; Michael Strachan, ’Esmond S. de Beer: Scholar and Benefactor’; and R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair, ’The Hakluyt Society and World History’.
Around 1600, the English geographer and cleric Richard Hakluyt sought to honour his nation by publishing a compilation of every document he could find relating to its voyages and trade beyond the boundaries of Europe. The resulting collection of travel narratives, royal letters, ships’ logs, maps, lists, and commentaries was published as Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. Spanning two thousand pages and documenting more than two hundred voyages, Principal Navigations is a window onto how the world appeared to England in 1600. Lines Drawn across the Globe unlocks Richard Hakluyt’s work for modern readers. Mary Fuller traces the history of the book’s compilation and gives order and meaning to its famously diverse contents. From Sierra Leone to Iceland, from Spanish narratives of New Mexico to French accounts of the Saint Lawrence and Portuguese accounts of China, Hakluyt’s shaping of this many-authored book provides a conceptual map of the world’s regions and of England’s real and imagined relations to them: exchange, alliance, aggression, extraction, translation, imitation – always depending on the needs of the moment. At the height of the British imperial project, Principal Navigations came to be seen and valued as a founding document of English national identity. It remains a crucial piece of evidence on the history of empire, the nation, and the world. Yet after a century and a half of modern scholarship, Hakluyt’s book needs to be disentangled from the perspectives of the nineteenth century and read anew. Lines Drawn across the Globe works across the scales of Hakluyt’s collection to deliver a dazzling account of an editorial project that was fundamental to England’s encounter with the world – and the nation’s idea of itself.
This famous book was the first up-to-date survey of its field for a generation; even today, when work on early modern social history proliferates, it remains the only general economic history of the age. This second edition, substantially revised and expanded, is clear in outline, rich in detail, stressing continuity as well as change, balancing the glamour of privilege with the misery and privation of the poor, and dealing with the dark side of Tudor life -- vagabondage, starvation, superstition and cruelty -- as well as its heroic achievements.
Sir Walter Ralegh's account of his 1595 expedition in search of the fabled empire of El Dorado was an immediate publishing success and is one of the most important pieces of Elizabethan travel literature. This edition presents the annotated texts of an unpublished copy of Ralegh's draft of The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana and the subsequent printed versions. It demonstrates how the manuscript was altered for publication, to focus its appeal to investors in gold mines for which Ralegh had very little evidence.
Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of 24 essays which brings together leading international scholarship on Hakluyt and his work. Best known as editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598-1600), Hakluyt was a key figure in promoting English colonial and commercial expansion in the early modern period. He also translated major European travel texts, championed English settlement in North America, and promoted global trade and exploration via a Northeast and Northwest Passage. His work spanned every area of English activity and aspiration, from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the Near East, and India to China and Japan, providing up-to-date information and establishing an ideological framework for English rivalries with Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands. This volume resituates Hakluyt in the political, economic, and intellectual context of his time. The genre of the travel collection to which he contributed emerged from Continental humanist literary culture. Hakluyt adapted this tradition for nationalistic purposes by locating a purported history of 'English' enterprise that stretched as far back as he could go in recovering antiquarian records. The essays in this collection advance the study of Hakluyt's literary and historical resources, his international connections, and his rhetorical and editorial practice. The volume is divided into 5 sections: 'Hakluyt's Contexts'; 'Early Modern Travel Writing Collections'; 'Editorial Practice'; 'Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation'; and 'Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing'. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued his project to edit travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.
Language is the central concern of this book. Colonization, poetry and Shakespeare – and the Renaissance itself – provide the examples. I concentrate on text in context, close reading, interpretation, interpoetics and translation with particular instances and works, examining matters of interpoetics in Renaissance poetry and prose, including epic, and the Hugo translation of Shakespeare in France and trying to bring together analysis that shows how important language is in the age of European expansion and in the Renaissance. I provide close analysis of aspects of colonization, front matter (paratext) in poetry and prose, and Shakespeare that deserve more attention. The main themes and objectives of this book are an exploration of language in European colonial texts of the “New World,” paratexts or front matter, Renaissance poetry and Shakespeare through close reading, including interpoetics (liminality), translation and key words.
