Anthony Payne. Richard Hakluyt: A Bibliography 1580-1588, with Essays on the Suppression of the Voyage to Cadiz in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and Hakluyt and the East India Company. London: Hakluyt Society, 2024. xxxv + 767 pp. ISBN 9781916931008. $195.00 hardback.

“What restless nights, what painfull dayes, what heat, what cold I have indured.” So begins both the second edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Voyages, Traffiques, Navigation and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598), and, in epigraph form, Anthony Payne’s Richard Hakluyt: A Bibliography 1580-1588. It is a fitting quote for both works. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations is a work filled with a vast array of material documenting both the history and contemporary travails of English travelers, as well as its editor’s journeys across England and overseas to collect those materials. Virginia Woolf called it “the Elizabethan lumber room” for its nature as a collection of texts “loosely tied together,” noting too that it is “not often, perhaps, read through”.¹ The scale of the work means that Woolf’s assertion remains true today, with the work often read in excerpted form rather than as a full comprehensive text. While many scholars may only encounter Hakluyt’s work in excerpts, such cannot be said for Payne, and A Bibliography is clearly the result of many years spent exploring both Hakluyt’s magnum opus and his wider body of work, as well as contemporary print and textual networks. A Bibliography specifically focuses on the print and manuscript published texts Hakluyt was involved with in the decade before the first publication of his most famous work, offering granular bibliographic detail on their publication and reception.

Scholarship on Hakluyt’s works is largely dependent on three reference works published in the twentieth century: George Park’s Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (1928), which offers an account of Hakluyt’s biography and writings; E.G.R. Taylor’s The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (1935), which includes reproductions of material written by Hakluyt and his uncle, offering brief but as Payne notes, “unsystematic’” annotation; and, finally, the most revered and commonly utilized, The Hakluyt Handbook (1974), a collection of essays, biographical, and bibliographical material edited by David B. Quinn.² Though a monumental and still fundamental work for Hakluyt scholarship, The Hakluyt Handbook largely focuses its bibliographical energies on Hakluyt’s most famous work, with other material afforded only a “title and a basic collation” (xxvi). Payne’s A Bibliography aims and succeeds at extending that study by providing extensive primary and secondary documentation at a “higher level of bibliographical sophistication than previously attempted”, focusing on works either written by or produced through Hakluyt’s involvement between 1580 and 1588 (xxvi). It also offers examination of Hakluyt’s two manuscript books, which are not examined in detail in The Hakluyt Handbook. This analysis draws on Payne’s previously published work in Hakluyt and Oxford (2017), particularly in its analysis of Hakluyt’s own analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics produced while he was at Oxford, further expanding the material available to Hakluyt scholars and scholars of early modern Aristotelian thought. Payne has already published a considerable amount of scholarship on Hakluyt and his works, focusing much of his attention on the textual contexts, as befits his expertise in bibliographic studies. A Bibliography builds on his previous book Richard Hakluyt: a Guide to His Books and to Those Associated with Him, 1580-1625 (2008) and his doctoral research, and it has been updated to reflect recently published scholarship on Hakluyt and his work during this period, as well as references to the wider and fast-developing field of travel writing. The introduction to A Bibliography offers a neat overview of this scholarship, as well as the current debates within Hakluyt scholarship including the relevance that his work as a religious minister had for his geographic writing and its importance in this early period of Hakluyt’s work.

One of the great strengths of A Bibliography and of Payne’s work is its broad definition of what it means for a multifaceted writer, editor, and translator such as Hakluyt to have been “involved” with a text. There are ten works included within A Bibliography, which include both the aforementioned manuscripts written by Hakluyt and—previously not subject to close bibliographical study—works edited or translated by Hakluyt, such as René de Goulaine de Laudonnière’s A Notable Historie (1587) and Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s De orbe novo (1587), and works whose translation or publication was encouraged by Hakluyt, including Juan González de Mendoza’s The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China (1588) and the original publication of Laudonnière’s L’histoire notable in Paris in 1586. The latter category makes up the majority of the works included in A Bibliography, and their chronological ordering of these texts offers an incidental biographical reading of Hakluyt’s work during this period as his social network expanded along with—or possibly because of—his growing influence over what material made it to publication overseas and then through translation to the text markets in England. Chapter Seven, for example, which charts the publication of Laudonnière’s text in French (a publication encouraged by Hakluyt), is followed soon after by Chapter Nine, the edition of Laudonnière’s text Hakluyt translated himself. The chronological ordering of the texts also gives an indication into Hakluyt’s pace during this period, with the majority published between 1585-88. This broader field of work covering material influenced by Hakluyt as well as that directly produced by him gives a more comprehensive understanding of his textual influence than previous bibliographical studies, such as Quinn’s, have done.

Each chapter in A Bibliography includes a brief description of its link to Hakluyt, bibliographical citations, information on its title, collation, type and decoration, contents, running titles, illustrations, copies collated, a survey of the current location of surviving copies, information on its authorship, printer, dedicatee, any subsequent editions, and paratexts. As this list suggests, the bibliographical information offered for each text is both extensive and exhaustive, much of it conducted during Payne’s doctoral research and updated in recent years. It offers insight into which texts were the most popular and reprinted in following centuries, which is useful considering the enduring imperial importance of Hakluyt’s work. There are also glimpses of potential for study of the connections between these texts: there are recurring printers and text owners whose connections to Hakluyt had been less explored, such as William Waad, who visited Edward Stafford’s embassy in Paris while Hakluyt was serving as chaplain there, passing on information while undertaking various sensitive diplomatic missions. He would later become an investor in the Virginia Company, and his copy of Laudonnière’s L’histoire notable is today held by the Middle Temple Library.

A Bibliography also includes two additional essays as appendices: the first on the suppression of the voyage to Cadiz in the second edition of The Principal Navigations, and the second on Hakluyt’s relationship with the East India Company, covering both how Hakluyt acquired material from the company’s early voyages and their publication histories, as well as offering an annotated list ‘of contemporary sources of information on trade in the East Indies” (494). Both essays have previously been published in the Journal of the Hakluyt Society, and it is good to see them reprinted here in revised form for wider dissemination. Including them as appendices to this volume gives the reader a sense of how Hakluyt’s textual and publication concerns at work in the 1580s carried over into later periods, as well as offering useful and typically detailed information on his relationship with one of the most significant trading companies of the period. It would perhaps have been useful to have an essay in this section which covered the gap between 1588 and the publication of the first volume of the second edition of The Principal Navigations in 1598. The decade between the two editions was a busy one for Hakluyt as he returned to England, married, and took up the position in Wetheringsett, which he would hold for the rest of his life. Without material linking the work of A Bibliography with the appendices, the essays do feel less connected to the work of the main text. Even without that connective material, though, in documenting the wide array of material Hakluyt was involved with during this developmentally influential period, A Bibliography allows us to chart more than just Hakluyt’s textual outputs, but also gives an insight into his social connections, his approach to publishing, and his priorities for his geographic work.

In sum, Richard Hakluyt: A Bibliography 1580-1588 joins the list of essential texts for anyone working on Richard Hakluyt. The detail that it offers regarding Hakluyt’s involvement in publications in the 1580s is comprehensive, and for scholars of travel writing it provides an insight into the ways in which these textual and publication networks were constructed. For those working more broadly on travel writing and travel studies, A Bibliography may be useful in providing an insight into the technicalities of publication, as well as the processes of translation. These movable texts sometimes feel difficult to follow as they slip between languages and across national borders, but here Payne has pinned them down for perusal. For scholars intent on building their own bibliographies, A Bibliography offers a potential model for useful, analytical and detailed scholarship. Future volumes documenting Hakluyt’s involvement in publications including both the second edition of The Principal Navigations and other works would no doubt be equally invaluable, though with Payne’s fastidious attention to detail, that work may equal the scale of The Principal Navigations itself.

Emily Stevenson

Oxford University