Richard Hakluyt and the “Vulgate Latin” Version ofMandeville’s Travels

Abstract

In his Principall Navigations of 1589, the celebrated Renaissance editor and proponent of English expansion in the Americas Richard Hakluyt the Younger published a Latin version of The Book of Sir John Mandeville (ca. 1356). The version he selected was widely known across continental Europe from the late fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, but was almost unknown in England, and is now referred to as the “Vulgate Latin” in scholarship. Hakluyt’s editorial choice has created something of a puzzle in scholarship; since The Book of Sir John Mandeville was widely available, and repeatedly printed, in English, why this Latin version? And why not translate into English? In the same vein, the editor’s subsequent decision to silently excise the text from the second volume of his second edition (1598–1600), replacing the travel fictions of a probably pseudonymous, purportedly English author with the reports of his better attested Continental Franciscan sources, has incited comment. This article takes a new perspective on these old questions. It considers how the content and material forms of Hakluyt’s source(s) would have shaped readers’ attitudes to the text, as well as Hakluyt’s attitude as an editor. The article also offers a systematic analysis of Hakluyt’s treatment of the text, considering factors such as the decision not to translate the text into English, its textual context and paratexts, and, in particular, Hakluyt’s extensive marginal annotations. The article proposes that the version of Mandeville included in the 1589 edition was chosen and presented with care. However, the attentiveness with which successive editors, finally culminating in Hakluyt himself, treated the Vulgate Latin version is likely to have contributed to the text’s eventual discrediting and exclusion from the second edition of The Principal Navigations.