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  • Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America
  • Ken MacMillan
Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. By Peter C. Mancall (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007) 400 pp. $38.00

Hakluyt's Promise is the first full-length biography of Richard Hakluyt since George Bruner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York, 1928). Since then, as Mancall points out in a valuable "Note on Method and Sources," much more has been learned and written about Hakluyt. Informed by much of this literature, this volume—published in the year of Virginia's quadricentennial—is both important and timely. Mancall argues that by fulfilling his 1568 "promise" to "prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature" that would promote overseas activities, especially cosmography and geography, "by century's end Hakluyt had solidified his position as the most important promoter of English settlement of North America" (3–4). Hakluyt kept his promise via his varied roles as lecturer in geography at Oxford, scholar and ambassadorial aide in Paris, translator of European political narratives, and author and compiler of tracts and volumes about worldwide travel and discovery. Although Hakluyt himself never traveled beyond Paris, largely owing to his efforts "the idea of colonization [was kept] alive in the face of repeated English disappointments during the sixteenth century" (4).

Throughout the book, Mancall situates Hakluyt's activities within the context of contemporary events. Thus, plague, earthquakes, Reformation, Parisian curiosities, London's great stench, fruits of the printing press, and accounts of Elizabethan and European cosmographical knowledge and explorations all make their way into the narrative. This context, which provides useful background to both expert and amateur readers, will surely (and happily) widen the book's audience. It also helps to give the book a strong interdisciplinary flavor in both content and methodology: Intellectual, cultural, and scientific history are elegantly and admirably woven together throughout the book.

Fittingly, Mancall is at his best when describing the argument and structure of Hakluyt's key writings and compilations. In these now well-known [End Page 109] works, Hakluyt offered an edifice of evidence that accredited him to advocate for Elizabethan expansion using polymathic historical, geographical, economic, social, political, religious, and legal justifications. Hakluyt's familiar relationship with Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's chief secretary, plus the significant domestic and international distribution of his published works, provided an essential and eclectic audience—both private and public—that ensured continued interest especially in North American settlements. In contrast to the argument of recent writers who see more renaissance humanism than reformed religion in Hakluyt's ideas, Mancall argues for a deeper religious interpretation of certain writings.

This well-researched, -written, -produced, and -illustrated volume leaves little to criticize. Hakluyt's emergence as a shadowy figure within it is due more to the mystery and documentary lacunae that surround his life than to any fault of the author. Mentions of Hakluyt's education, family, and career as an Anglican priest are rare and brief; more biographical details to tie the largely chronological narrative together would have been welcome. Greater engagement with current literature on empire and exploration would make this book more valuable to specialists. Historians today are ambivalent about ascribing much practical importance to expansionist writings at a time when most ventures failed and the English Crown and state had little if any real interest in overseas empire. That Hakluyt was the most prodigious Elizabethan proponent of empire is unquestionable; that the bulk of his work was received by a humanist-educated and exploration-minded audience as anything more than a collection of antiquarian curiosities, however, is debatable.

Ken MacMillan
University of Calgary
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