Book Description

The Hakluyt Handbook provides a reference guide to the works of the Reverend Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) and a critical evaluation of his achievements as a collector, editor, translator and author of travel literature. In Volume I, part one consists of a series of essays by specialists in the various field with which Hakluyt was concerned and attempts to evaluate his significance for historians, geographers and students of literature and society; part two comprises an analysis of the quality of his selections of material for his greatest collection The Principal Navigations...of the English Nation in a series of regional studies; and part three is a chronology of his life and writings expanded from that in G.B. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyagers (1928). Parts four and five (in Volume II) analyse the contents and sources of Hakluyt's three major works Divers Voyages (1582), Principall Navigations (1589) and Principal Navigations (1598-1600), and provide detailed bibliographical material on the works with which Hakluyt was associated. A critical bibliography of secondary works and an analytical list of the publications of the Hakluyt Society, 1846-1973, complete the work. An index of books and articles referred to in the volumes is included. The Hakluyt Handbook has been under consideration by the Hakluyt Society for more than a decade and owes much to the late R.A. Skelton (1906-70). The editor Professor D.B. Quinn has had the generous co-operation of more than twenty members of the Society in its compilation. It is hoped that the volumes will not only have value to members of the Society and to many students of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, but that they will stimulate further research on Richard Hakluyt and a further refinement of our knowledge of Hakluyt's sources and bibliography. The main pagination of this and the following volume (Second Series 145) is continuous. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first publis