PETER C. MANCALL. Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2007. Pp. 378. $38.00

Abstract

Research into the life and works of the English colonial propagandist, editor, and translator of travel writings Richard Hakluyt was well served in the twentieth century. His great compendium, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in its full three-volume form in 1598–1600, was reprinted in 1903–1905 in what is still the standard modern edition, while a facsimile of the original version (1589) appeared in 1965. Hakluyt's writings, printed and manuscript, were collected by E. G. R. Taylor and published with those of his cousin and mentor, Richard Hakluyt the lawyer, as The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts in 1935. In 1993 Hakluyt's A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), a treatise advocating colonial settlement in North America that was circulated in manuscript only, appeared in an annotated edition by D. B. and A. M. Quinn with a facsimile of the sole extant manuscript. In 1928 George Bruner Parks published his Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, which remains the best book-length account of Hakluyt's life. A collection of thematic essays and biographical and bibliographical material was published as The Hakluyt Handbook in 1974, edited by D. B. Quinn. The groundwork for further studies of Hakluyt is firmly established and interest in him shows no signs of abating, with the publication of a major collection of papers given at the three-day conference on Hakluyt at Great Britain's National Maritime Museum in 2008 and a new, annotated edition of the Principal Navigations under active consideration.