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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On Hakluyt Society business: Sarah Tyacke in California
On a research visit to the Huntington Library, past president Sarah Tyacke met Professor Emeritus (UCLA) Norman Thrower now aged 96 at his home in Pacific Palisades. He is a long time member of the Society and of the American Friends of the Hakluyt Society, and was the editor of The Three Voyages of Edmond Halley in the Paramore, 1698-1701 published in 1981. He is in good health and remembers his editorship of the Hakluyt Society volumes with some pride. Sarah Tyacke visiting Professor Emeritus Norman Thrower Also at the Huntington Library, Sarah gave a short talk on the history of the Society based closely on the work of Roy [...]
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Richard who? Introducing the Hakluyt Society
Richard Hakluyt For a Society that has been around for nearly 170 years, introducing ourselves like a novice may in some sense seem comical. And surely for the readers of our successful series of publications it is. However for those who are new to the Society, let us start by telling something about who we are and what we do. The Hakluyt Society was founded in 1846 and has been active as a publisher ever since. During this period, we have published more than 340 primary accounts of travel and exploration. A complete list can be found here. The Society is named after Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), collector and editor of [...]
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