Posts from Hakluyt Society authors, editors, series editors and grant recipients
Interesting background stories from the research work of Hakluyt Society authors, editors, series editors and grant recipients
How to read Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600)?
MF: For me, one of the great challenges of working on Hakluyt’s collection has been finding productive ways to apply the tools of textual analysis – “literary criticism” – to a work that is not at all a “literary” text (or if it is, only in scattered moments), and which has both many discrete authors and one fairly taciturn editor. My Annual Lecture gave an overview of some lines of approach; I’ll describe a few of them here. Principal Navigations (1598-1600) [Hakluyt Society Extra Series, Nos. 1-12] is organized by geography: each of Hakluyt’s three volumes groups together voyages to particular parts of the globe. Mary Fuller (MIT), Experiments in Reading Hakluyt's Principal [...]
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Author’s View: The ‘Joys’ of editing the Banks Iceland and North Atlantic papers
Editing the Banks Iceland correspondence was a joy – now that it is finished and I look back on the experience. It all began last century when I was at the London School of Economics working on my doctoral thesis on Anglo-Icelandic relations 1800–1820. I was in the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum looking at the Banks Iceland correspondence preserved there. The curator said I must meet Harold B. Carter. Harold was an Australian research scientist who had become interested in Banks – after all Banks is very well-known as "the Father of Australia"; he adorned the $5 bill at the time - and before leaving Sydney for [...]
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The Series Editor’s View: or, what Hakluyt Society Series Editors do
When and how did you become Hakluyt Society Series Editor? I first became a series editor in 2008, after about a year's apprenticeship as an assistant editor, in which I took on the role of preparing the report for Council on progress with volumes. I already had some experience as an editor of some of the catalogues published by the National Maritime Museum, where I was a curator. Since then I have edited the Society's annual lectures and worked closely with volume editors in preparing travel accounts for publication. I focus on the 18th to 20th centuries, while my fellow series editor, Professor Joyce Lorimer, concentrates on earlier periods. So far [...]
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2015 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize winner: “Printing the Pacific”
By Katherine Parker I am grateful to have been chosen as an Honorable Mention in the Hakluyt Society’s Essay Prize Contest. As a student member and active participant, I think it vital that more early-career scholars join organizations such as the Hakluyt Society. New minds can bring fresh topics and methodologies, but younger colleagues also benefit from interaction with more seasoned scholars who can assess and direct their work. My own research, including the essay discussed here, owes a great debt to previous historians of exploration and encounter, and it is to them, especially Glyndwr Williams, that I credit my intellectual development. In the paper submitted to the Hakluyt Society, [...]
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The Cabot Project
By Dr Heather Dalton In compiling Diverse Voyages (1582), Richard Hakluyt was keen to establish the historical precedent that ‘we of England’ had only to reclaim North America rather than conquer it. However, finding texts that proved that these lands ‘of equitie and right appertaine vnto us’ was problematic and Hakluyt opened this book with a document related to a voyage from Bristol led by a Genoese navigator. This was ‘A latine copie of the letters patentes of King Henrie the Seuenth, graunted vnto Iohn Gabote and his three sonnes, Lewes, Sebastian, and Santius, for the discouering of newe and vnknowen landes’. [See: Hakluyt Society First Series, no. 7] Although [...]
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