Abstract
Anthony Payne's Richard Hakluyt appears to be an antiquarian's delight at first sight, with its abundance of technical details relating to the books it surveys. No doubt Payne, an antiquarian by profession, produced here a handy guide for Hakluyt's book-hunters. Yet this massive work holds valuable material for Hakluyt scholars who are less interested in bindings and collations while also making considerable contributions to the field of the history of the book in general, as well as to the history of early modern English travel literature in particular.
Two aspects of this work are of special interest to researchers. The first is Payne's focus on Hakluyt's work before what is rightly considered the apex of his career – the publication of the two editions of The Principal Navigations in 1589 and 1598–1600. The decision to focus on the years 1580–1588 – this bibliography is possibly the first work to study Hakluyt's early works together – is particularly significant at present, as the last few years have seen the publication of The Principal Navigations' critical editions. The second, which complements the first, is the use of a descriptive bibliography for the study of these works. The examination of every possible feature of Hakluyt's books, except for their respective contents, yields some intriguing insights regarding the development of his career. Payne meticulously provides the raw material, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions.
We used to think of Hakluyt as an editor, but the years 1580–1588 saw him doing little editorial work. Most of the texts in this bibliography are foreign travel narratives whose publication and/or translation he initiated. Only three of them can be considered as authored by Hakluyt: Diverse Voyages (1582), a collection of travel narratives recording voyages to North America and a precursor to The Principal Navigations, and the two manuscripts presented to Elizabeth I – his analysis of Aristotle's Politics (1583) and the colonial treatise Discourse of Western Planting (1584). Despite the difference in genre, two themes emerge when examining these works together. The first is their tendency to combine the dissemination of geographical knowledge with the promotion of overseas projects. Hakluyt's works always seem to serve additional ends beyond mere edification, and this is apparent from the very beginning. His publishing activity commenced during Humphrey Gilbert's efforts to realize his six-year royal patent for discovering and colonizing the Atlantic coast of North America, which the young geographer most likely supported implicitly. In the mid 1580s, he became a vociferous champion of Sir Walter Raleigh's colonizing schemes in the same region. The second, as can be inferred from these two examples, is Hakluyt's ‘obsession’ (to borrow Peter Mancall's terminology) with the Americas (North America, in particular): seven out of the ten works included in this bibliography are dedicated to the New World.
One work that stands out among this collection of geographical writing is Hakluyt's 1583 analysis of Aristotle's Politics. Here, Payne's erudite bibliography is especially helpful in discussing the circumstances that produced this ‘anomaly’. The immediate context for the analysis is Hakluyt's long stint at the University of Oxford (1570–1583), where he studied the Politics as an undergraduate and later also taught it. Finishing his work on the analysis just before leaving Oxford for Paris, this piece may seem like an apt summary of his academic career, but there is more to it. Hakluyt dedicated his analysis to Queen Elizabeth I, probably in an attempt to seek her patronage for himself. As Payne shows, there is also a personal side to this dedication that may explain to an extent his bold move in addressing his monarch: Hakluyt acknowledges that he owed his education to Elizabeth I, whose stipends for Queen's Scholars enabled him to study at Westminster School (1564–1570) and then at Oxford, thus showing her that the Crown's investment in him bore fruit. Hakluyt, however, presented this work to the Queen only a year later, together with his Discourse on Western Planting, which got him an audience with her. By that time, he had become a less obscure figure than he had been when writing the dedication, after serving for a year as a chaplain to the English ambassador in France, which gave him his first dip into the waters of politics. In this sense, one can hardly find a better text than Aristotle's Politics to mark Hakluyt's transition into the public sphere.
Students of the history of the book will find special interest in the details provided on the number of surviving copies of each work and the printers involved in their production. The second of these subjects seems to be of greater significance, particularly for those who study the publication of travel literature in early modern England (some of the texts, however, were published in Paris during Hakluyt's service as a chaplain in the English embassy). The examination of the English printers who produced the geographer's early works is fascinating, helping one to understand their respective reasons for printing travel literature. In this respect, Payne's bibliography reminds one, to an extent, of John Parker's forgotten yet valuable Books to Build an Empire. 1
The bibliography ends with two essays by the author, discussing aspects of Hakluyt's career after 1589. Unfortunately, neither essay is thesis-driven – an element that undermines their potency. This issue is less problematic regarding the first essay, which examines the removal of the narrative of the 1596 raid on Cadiz from the second edition of The Principal Navigations, as the exploration for possible reasons for this censorial act appears to be more compelling than the answer itself. However, the second essay, which surveys the materials Hakluyt provided to the East India Company, could have done much more to discuss that later period in the geographer's career. Despite this reservation, Payne's bibliography, in its unique way, is a significant addition to the body of scholarly writing on Hakluyt.