Using Hakluyt Society publications for research and teaching
Notes from students, researchers and teachers on their experiences in using Hakluyt Society publications for research and teaching
Rifling through the religious baggage of early modern travellers
By Hector Roddan Just like today, early modern travel writing was informed by various assumptions and experiences of life at home. My research has focussed on how travellers’ religious backgrounds informed their descriptions of other societies. I discuss texts by English visitors to Russia, Turkey, India, Southeast Asia and Polynesia between 1550-1800. Both mainstream and minority English religious beliefs informed descriptions and critiques of other societies’ beliefs and practices. Many travellers in this period were content to ‘catechise the world by their own home’.[1] Indeed, the seventeenth-century antiquarian Henry Blount bemoaned the fact that many contemporary descriptions of Islam reiterated the perceived doctrinal errors of Turkish religion, rather than identifying [...]
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Hakluyt and Me: Using the Hakluyt Society Publications for my Doctoral Thesis
By Hector Roddan The publications of the Hakluyt Society are a fantastic resource. I was fortunate enough to make use of their editions of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations as well as several other works published by the Society whilst researching my doctoral thesis on representations of early modern religion in travel narratives. In this post, I explore some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the Society’s vast archive of published travel works. Editorial practices have evolved over the hundred-and-fifty years since the Society began publishing travel texts. Although recent volumes come complete with scholarly annotations and footnotes, this is not always the case for older publications. Whilst these [...]
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