Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe

Richard Hakluyt is arguably the single most important figure in the history of English travel writing. As an editor and prolific collector of first-hand discovery and adventure narratives, Hakluyt played a key role in the origins of the English empire. He is best known for his edited collection The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), which appeared in a much enlarged second edition as The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (in three volumes 1598, 1599, 1600). This monumental series sought to reinforce a specifically English national identity by establishing a tradition of exploration, trade and diplomacy around the world.Richard Hakluyt and Collected Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary, international collection of essays which brings together the best current scholarship on Richard Hakluyt and his work. The volume develops out of a successful conference on 'Richard Hakluyt 1552-1616: life, times, legacy', held at the National Maritime Museum 15-17 May 2008. The essays presented in Richard Hakluyt and Collected Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe have been chosen for the new and dynamic directions in which they take the study of Hakluyt, and the genre of the early modern travel collection more generally. A key aim of the volume is to understand Hakluyt's work in context, to trace the humanist culture out of which his project emerged, to advance the study of his literary and historical resources, and to assess his wide and lasting impact.The collection is divided into 4 sections. The first, on Early Modern Travel Writing Collections, situates Hakluyt's text in relation to the work of his Continental contemporaries and successors, exploring how Hakluyt was influenced by, and in turn shaped, the European-wide emergent genre of the travel writing collection. The second section, on Editorial Practice, considers Hakluyt's editorial principles, in order to appreciate the significance of the ways he shaped the form as well as the content of the travel writing collection. A third section, Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation, deals more squarely with content, examining the social and political, religious and economic, motivations behind Hakluyt's project to gather together a complete record of English voyages overseas. The fourth, on Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing, focuses on the importance of the rhetorical and literary dimensions of Hakluyt's work and of early modern travel writing collections more generally. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued the work of editing travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.