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  • Cosmography’s Promise and Richard Hakluyt’s World
  • David Harris Sacks (bio)
Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America. Peter C. Mancall. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. xii, 378 pp.

Richard Hakluyt, the younger (1552?–1616) was a famous man in his own day, regularly called upon for his expert advice on oceanic navigation and overseas discovery, praised widely for his prodigious researches and publications on those subjects, and warmly thanked by a score or more of individuals —authors and others—for his encouragement and material support of their projects and ventures. Copies of his publications graced the libraries of some of the most prominent figures of his time, men such as Sir Philip Sidney; Sir Thomas Egerton; Sir Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury; Sir Walter Ralegh; John Selden; Lancelot Andrewes, sometime Bishop of Winchester and King’s Almoner; and John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury.1 With the backing of a remarkable range of important patrons—among them Sir Francis Walsingham and Lord Charles Howard, the Lord Admiral, as well as Cecil and Ralegh and other prominent courtiers and counselor—he received and profited from a number of preferments, starting with his selection as Queen’s Scholar at Westminster School and then at Christ Church College, Oxford and ending with his presentation to a series of lucrative and increasingly important ecclesiastical posts including his election as a Canon of Westminster Abbey.2

Although Hakluyt was widely celebrated during his lifetime and for some years beyond, interest in him and his writings somewhat abated during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the English moved [End Page 161] from the age of new discoveries to a consolidation of their results. But it revived again in the mid-nineteenth century as the British Empire reached its maturity and scholars and readers were drawn to learn about its origins and early history. The forming of the Hakluyt Society, whose publications of texts of navigation and exploration began in 1847, marks the turning point. More recently, with the growth of interest in histories of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization, scholars less eager to celebrate the achievements of the empire-builders have mined Hakluyt’s writings to support their critiques.3 At the same time, the emergence of “Atlantic history” has reinforced the desire to know more about Hakluyt’s person and publications.

However, despite this more than century-long focus on Hakluyt’s work, his life has rarely been the subject of a sustained biographical treatment. Peter Mancall’s Hakluyt’s Promise is the first such effort since George Bruner Parks’s Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, published in 1928. David Beers Quinn, who on the basis of his universally acknowledged command of the field might have been expected to follow in Parks’s footsteps, eschewed the task. Instead, in partnership with his wife, Alison, he offered only a detailed 68-page chronology listing and briefly commenting on the events in the geographer’s life as they occurred year by year. Although this compilation underpins virtually all subsequent studies of Hakluyt, no recent publication about him and his work provides a continuous narrative filling out the surviving details.4 The picture is little altered, for example, by the relatively brief entries devoted to Hakluyt in the recently revised Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and American National Biography. 5 For this reason, Mancall’s comprehensive new treatment of Hakluyt’s life and publications will be especially welcome to all those interested in the growth during the early modern era of geographical and ethnographic knowledge and the history of travel writing and colonial enterprise. Centering on the main occurrences in its subject’s life treated stage by stage from his beginnings as a young student at Westminster and then an Oxford don, the book brings together in one place virtually all the known facts of Hakluyt’s career as a humanist scholar, historian and cosmographer, government advisor, clergyman, and promoter of exploration and colonial trade and settlement, and treats them in the context of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English and European affairs and the beginnings of the Atlantic world. [End Page 162]

In producing his biography, Mancall...

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