Books by Claire Jowitt
The Journeying Play This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provid... more The Journeying Play This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Reassessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.
Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern English literature, in this st... more Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern English literature, in this study Claire Jowitt offers an original and compelling analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer) Jowitt shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism, international relations, and contemporary politics. She considers the ways in which piracy can, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than simply challenge, some of the foundations underpinning Renaissance orthodoxies-absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems.
Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton.
What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England.
The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.
Contents: Introduction; Subversive pirates? Representations of Purser and Clinton 1538–1639; The uses and abuses of 'piracy': discourses of mercantilism and empire in accounts of Drake's 'famous voyage' 1580–1630; 'Et in arcadia ego': piracy and politics in prose romance 1580–1603; Pirates and politics: drama of the 'long 1590s'; Jacobean connections: piracy and politics in 17th-century drama and romance; Politics and pirate typology in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's late Jacobean pirate drama; Bibliography; Index.
This study explores the use of allegory in Renaissance travel drama and further develops our unde... more This study explores the use of allegory in Renaissance travel drama and further develops our understanding of the allegorical nature of colonial discourse by focusing on the negotiations between gender and monarchy in "geographic" drama. Claire Jowitt argues that travel drama tells two stories, one about the "real" colony described in the text, and one about the desires of the colonizing nation. She shows how gender behaviour, sexual appetite, piracy and other forms of anti-establishment activities in colonial and remote locations can be read as coded political allegories. Travel dramas are read against English colonial ambitions and as expressions of carefully coded descriptions and evaluations of the foreign and domestic policies of English rulers.
Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of 2... more Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of 24 essays which brings together leading international scholarship on Hakluyt and his work. Best known as editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598-1600), Hakluyt was a key figure in promoting English colonial and commercial expansion in the early modern period. He also translated major European travel texts, championed English settlement in North America, and promoted global trade and exploration via a Northeast and Northwest Passage. His work spanned every area of English activity and aspiration, from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the Near East, and India to China and Japan, providing up-to-date information and establishing an ideological framework for English rivalries with Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands.
This volume resituates Hakluyt in the political, economic, and intellectual context of his time. The genre of the travel collection to which he contributed emerged from Continental humanist literary culture. Hakluyt adapted this tradition for nationalistic purposes by locating a purported history of 'English' enterprise that stretched as far back as he could go in recovering antiquarian records. The essays in this collection advance the study of Hakluyt's literary and historical resources, his international connections, and his rhetorical and editorial practice. The volume is divided into 5 sections: 'Hakluyt's Contexts'; 'Early Modern Travel Writing Collections'; 'Editorial Practice'; 'Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation'; and 'Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing'. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued his project to edit travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.
Contents: Introduction, Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt; Section I Hakluyt in Context: Hakluyt's London: discovery and overseas trade, Anthony Payne; From the History of Travayle to the history of travel collections: the rise of an early modern genre, Joan-Pau Rubiés. Section II Early Modern Travel Collections: A world seen through another's eyes: Hakluyt, Ramusio, and the narratives of the Navigationi e Viaggi, Margaret Small; Three tales of the New World: nation, religion, and colonialism in Hakluyt, de Bry, and Hulsius, Sven Trakulhun; Hakluyt in France: Pierre Bergeron and travel writing collections, Grégoire Holtz; 'Honour to our nation': nationalism, The Principal Navigations and travel collections in the long 18th century, Matthew Day; Richard Hakluyt and the visual world of early modern travel narratives, Peter C. Mancall. Section III Editorial Practices: '[T]ouching the state of the country of Guiana, and whether it were fit to be planted by the English': Sir Robert Cecil, Richard Hakluyt and the writing of Guiana, 1595-1612, Joyce Lorimer; Richard Hakluyt's two Indias: textual sparagmos and editorial practice, Nandini Das; Forming the captivity of Thomas Saunders: Hakluyt's editorial practices and their ideological effects, Julia Schleck; Framing 'the English nation': reading between text and paratext in The Principal Navigations (1598-1600), Colm MacCrossan; 'The strange and wonderfull discoverie of Russia': Hakluyt and censorship, Felicity Stout. Section IV Allegiances and Ideologies, Politics, Religion, Nation: ‘We (upon peril of my life) shall make the Spaniards ridiculous to all Europe’: Richard Hakluyt’s ‘discourse’ of Spain, Francisco J. Borge; Balance of power and freedom of the seas: Richard Hakluyt and Alberico Gentili, Diego Pirillo; Richard Hakluyt and the demands of Pietas Patriae, David A. Boruchoff; ‘To deduce a colonie’: Richard Hakluyt’s Godly mission in its contexts, c.1580-1616, David Harris Sacks; Hakluyt’s multiple faiths, Matthew Dimmock. Section V Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing: ‘His dark materials’: the problem of dullness in Hakluyt’s collections, Mary C. Fuller; ‘To pot straight way wee goe’: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1562-64, Bernhard Klein; Hakluyt, Purchas, and the romance of Virginia, Daniel Carey; ‘Accidentall restraints’: straits and passages in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Elizabeth Heale; Hakluyt’s Oceans: Maritime Rhetoric in The Principal Navigations, Steve Mentz; Hakluyt’s legacy: armchair travel in English Renaissance drame, Claire Jowitt. Coda: The legacy of Richard Hakluyt: reflections on the history of the Hakluyt Society, Roy Bridges; Works cited; Index.
'Pirates' hold enormous popular appeal as swashbuckling rogues performing feats of daring on hig... more 'Pirates' hold enormous popular appeal as swashbuckling rogues performing feats of daring on high seas. Yet 'pirates' possess deeper meanings as they undertake a rich variety of cultural work: as allegories of religious and political issues; as actors in the theatre of empire; in terms of gendered behaviour, national, legal and racial identities. Even the application of the term itself is contested since one person's 'pirate' is another 'privateer'. The new, inter-disciplinary essays in this collection work together to show how various, and how important, were the figures of the 'pirate', the 'corsair', the 'buccaneer' and the 'privateer' in the years 1550-1650. This period is one of the most lively in maritime history as it marks the beginning of the Age of Empire when, for example, the English nation seriously attempted, for the first time, to express ambitions for an empire to rival that of Spain and Portugal in the West and the Ottomans in the East. The discussions of the politics of plunder in this book by noted historians, lawyers, and literary scholars, provide an illuminating, previously neglected window on the cultural meanings of 'pirates' at the start of the Age of Empire.
Contemporary ideals of science representing disinterested and objective fields of investigation h... more Contemporary ideals of science representing disinterested and objective fields of investigation have their origins in the seventeenth century. However, 'new science' did not simply or uniformly replace earlier beliefs about the workings of the natural world, but entered into competition with them. It is this complex process of competition and negotiation concerning ways of seeing the natural world that is charted by the essays in this book. The collection traces the many overlaps between 'literary' and 'scientific' discourses as writers in this period attempted both to understand imaginatively and empirically the workings of the natural world, and shows that a discrete separation between such discourses and spheres is untenable.
The collection is designed around four main themes-'Philosophy, Thought and Natural Knowledge', 'Religion, Politics and the Natural World', 'Gender, Sexuality and Scientific Thought' and 'New Worlds and New Philosophies.' Within these themes, the contributors focus on the contests between different ways of seeing and understanding the natural world in a wide range of writings from the period: in poetry and art, in political texts, in descriptions of real and imagined colonial landscapes, as well as in more obviously 'scientific' documents.
Journal Articles by Claire Jowitt
It was only at the end of the sixteenth century that the English nation seriously attempted for t... more It was only at the end of the sixteenth century that the English nation seriously attempted for the first time to express ambitions for an empire to rival those of Spain in the west (in the New World) and of the Ottomans in the east.1 A series of bulls issued by Pope Alexander VI, ratified by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, had carved up the known and unknown worlds between Spain and Portugal, thereby debarring other nations from trade in the New World. In the Treaty of Saragossa of 1529, a new line of demarcation in the Pacific split the control of lands in this region between Spain and Portugal. The response of European nations excluded from colonial and imperial expansion, valuable natural resources, and trading opportunities, was to both plunder and seek ways to break the monopoly through actual and textual activities.2 Sea captains were at the vanguard of the response to secure what the English believed to be the nation’s share of territory and trade, and their activities are central to written accounts of explorations and adventures.
This article explores the reasons behind the use of a particular generic feature in Caroline trav... more This article explores the reasons behind the use of a particular generic feature in Caroline travel writing - the dream or dream vision - in two mid-to-late 1630s texts, William Davenant’s generically complex poem ‘Madagascar. A Poem written to Prince Rupert’, which was published in 1638, and Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes (performed 1638, published 1640). In both texts a dream, or a dream vision, is central to the text’s plot, but it is also important thematically; the travel described is presented as wholly imaginary which, paradoxically, I will argue, allows a searching, though nuanced in Davenant’s text, critique of domestic politics. Each text uses travel as a vehicle to explore the unease and tensions created by the years of Charles I’s personal rule, and some of the political difficulties it created for the king and his subjects, as well as offering suggestions of potential ways to defuse the situation.
This contribution focuses on a particular group of maritime agents in Shakespeare’s plays, namely... more This contribution focuses on a particular group of maritime agents in Shakespeare’s plays, namely pirates, and the cultural-political questions they raise.
Massinger's The Renegado is read as a political allegory concerning the Prince of Wales and the D... more Massinger's The Renegado is read as a political allegory concerning the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Buckingham's abortive mission to the Spanish court to woo the Infanta Maria. The characters of Donusa and Vitelli, Muslim princess and Venetian gentleman, are seen as representations of the Infanta and the Prince, and the ideological difficulties of their relationship are read as expressions of concern about the wisdom of the match. The Jesuit character of Francisco is shown to allegorise the Duke of Buckingham, and the politics of Massinger's unusually positive representation of a militantly Catholic figure are explored.
This article explores the ways Massinger's The Unnatural Combat (1624-25?) intervenes in topical ... more This article explores the ways Massinger's The Unnatural Combat (1624-25?) intervenes in topical political issues specific to the final months of James I's reign. In particular the play's representation of piracy and other “unnatural”, particularly sexual, crimes are read as a reflection of the factional politics of James' court. Specifically, the play's allegory - an attack on the Duke of Buckingham and his policies - is shown to be an attempt to appeal to the politics of Massinger's patron in this period, Sir Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery. The essay examines the cultural work performed by representations of pirates and piracy, as these apparently subversive figures and crimes in fact are often used to critique Jacobean orthodoxies.
Margaret Cavendish appropriated images of Elizabeth I in order to show her support for an imperia... more Margaret Cavendish appropriated images of Elizabeth I in order to show her support for an imperialist England and to question the status Restoration society awarded to women. During the seventeenth century hagiographic representations of Elizabeth I were increasingly used to criticise the policies and
personalities of the Stuart monarchs. William Cavendish, for example, harked back to England’s glorious past under Elizabeth in order to inculcate in Charles II’s government expansionist and imperialist policies. Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World demonstrates similar concerns but Cavendish’s work is also interested in using representations of Elizabeth I as a way of exploring both the disenfranchisement of women and, I argue, the possibility of female empowerment.
This article focuses on one particular transition between the foreign policies of Elizabeth and J... more This article focuses on one particular transition between the foreign policies of Elizabeth and James, the state's attitude to piracy. By focusing on the representation of piracy in a dramatic text, Fortune by Land and Sea (1607–9), by Thomas Heywood and William Rowley, I explore the extent to which such seaborne activities are aligned with the oppositional discourses which were critical of Jacobean policies. I argue that Fortune by Land and Sea uses values and activities associated with Elizabeth in James's reign as a contrast to those promulgated by the new monarch. In the play we have two spheres represented—one at sea with young Forrest, one on land with Philip—and the contrasts between the brave and adventurous young Forrest and the passive, arguably weak, Philip can be seen as tapping into a nostalgia for Elizabethan values that threatens to undermine Jacobean policies. In what follows, then, I test the extent to which Fortune by Land and Sea should be read as expressing a growing, but coded, sense of dissatisfaction with the king.
This article explores the figure of the pirate in literature and criticism. In particular it pays... more This article explores the figure of the pirate in literature and criticism. In particular it pays attention to some of the ways literary critics and cultural historians have suggested pirates should be understood: whether as political or sexual radicals, as interceptors of and disrupters to networks of economic and cultural exchange, or as key, if often unrecognised, players in the formation of Empire. The role of pirates and piracy is examined in a number of genres here, but the complex and contradictory ways these exciting but dangerous figures are represented in Renaissance drama is of central concern.
Richard Eden is best known as the first English translator of Peter Martyr's De Orbe Novo Decades... more Richard Eden is best known as the first English translator of Peter Martyr's De Orbe Novo Decades (1516). In this text, and in his 1553 translation of sections of Sebastian Muenster's Cosmographiae Universalis, Eden, for the first time, made available detailed information about the New World to an English speaking readership. Consequently, his texts are highly significant in determining the ways in which Spanish control of New World territory and riches was mediated to an English audience. Eden translated these texts in a troubled and unstable political climate. England officially reverted to the old faith in 1553 after nearly twenty years of Protestantism. Mary Tudor married Philip of Spain in 1554, and some commentators argued that England, similar to the New World, became little more than a vassal of Spain. Therefore, an analysis of this first English translation of descriptions of the New World is important in assessing whether Eden wanted his readership to support Spanish interests in the New World and England, or was urging the English nation to compete for territory abroad and remain staunchly independent of Spanish interference at home.
This essay examines the complex interaction between gender and the New World in two early-to-mid-... more This essay examines the complex interaction between gender and the New World in two early-to-mid-seventeenth-century comedies, Fletcher's and Massinger's collaborative The Sea Voyage (1622) and Massinger's single-authored The City Madam (1632). Both texts engage with the Virginian enterprise and the troubled history of the Jamestown venture. Indeed, characters' attitudes towards, and behaviour in, colonial situations are used to measure their conformity to expected
gender behaviour. Furthermore, this article argues that characters' gender performance -specifically their attitude to sexual commerce - figures as a metaphor for a larger set of commercial relations with the New World.
Cannibalism, plunder, starvation and murder… they all appear in an epic Tudor account of English ... more Cannibalism, plunder, starvation and murder… they all appear in an epic Tudor account of English voyages of discovery, compiled by Richard Hakluyt, a man who rarely left the country.
This article, published in BBC History Magazine (2012) hails one of history’s greatest travel books
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Books by Claire Jowitt
Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton.
What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England.
The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.
Contents: Introduction; Subversive pirates? Representations of Purser and Clinton 1538–1639; The uses and abuses of 'piracy': discourses of mercantilism and empire in accounts of Drake's 'famous voyage' 1580–1630; 'Et in arcadia ego': piracy and politics in prose romance 1580–1603; Pirates and politics: drama of the 'long 1590s'; Jacobean connections: piracy and politics in 17th-century drama and romance; Politics and pirate typology in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's late Jacobean pirate drama; Bibliography; Index.
This volume resituates Hakluyt in the political, economic, and intellectual context of his time. The genre of the travel collection to which he contributed emerged from Continental humanist literary culture. Hakluyt adapted this tradition for nationalistic purposes by locating a purported history of 'English' enterprise that stretched as far back as he could go in recovering antiquarian records. The essays in this collection advance the study of Hakluyt's literary and historical resources, his international connections, and his rhetorical and editorial practice. The volume is divided into 5 sections: 'Hakluyt's Contexts'; 'Early Modern Travel Writing Collections'; 'Editorial Practice'; 'Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation'; and 'Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing'. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued his project to edit travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.
Contents: Introduction, Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt; Section I Hakluyt in Context: Hakluyt's London: discovery and overseas trade, Anthony Payne; From the History of Travayle to the history of travel collections: the rise of an early modern genre, Joan-Pau Rubiés. Section II Early Modern Travel Collections: A world seen through another's eyes: Hakluyt, Ramusio, and the narratives of the Navigationi e Viaggi, Margaret Small; Three tales of the New World: nation, religion, and colonialism in Hakluyt, de Bry, and Hulsius, Sven Trakulhun; Hakluyt in France: Pierre Bergeron and travel writing collections, Grégoire Holtz; 'Honour to our nation': nationalism, The Principal Navigations and travel collections in the long 18th century, Matthew Day; Richard Hakluyt and the visual world of early modern travel narratives, Peter C. Mancall. Section III Editorial Practices: '[T]ouching the state of the country of Guiana, and whether it were fit to be planted by the English': Sir Robert Cecil, Richard Hakluyt and the writing of Guiana, 1595-1612, Joyce Lorimer; Richard Hakluyt's two Indias: textual sparagmos and editorial practice, Nandini Das; Forming the captivity of Thomas Saunders: Hakluyt's editorial practices and their ideological effects, Julia Schleck; Framing 'the English nation': reading between text and paratext in The Principal Navigations (1598-1600), Colm MacCrossan; 'The strange and wonderfull discoverie of Russia': Hakluyt and censorship, Felicity Stout. Section IV Allegiances and Ideologies, Politics, Religion, Nation: ‘We (upon peril of my life) shall make the Spaniards ridiculous to all Europe’: Richard Hakluyt’s ‘discourse’ of Spain, Francisco J. Borge; Balance of power and freedom of the seas: Richard Hakluyt and Alberico Gentili, Diego Pirillo; Richard Hakluyt and the demands of Pietas Patriae, David A. Boruchoff; ‘To deduce a colonie’: Richard Hakluyt’s Godly mission in its contexts, c.1580-1616, David Harris Sacks; Hakluyt’s multiple faiths, Matthew Dimmock. Section V Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing: ‘His dark materials’: the problem of dullness in Hakluyt’s collections, Mary C. Fuller; ‘To pot straight way wee goe’: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1562-64, Bernhard Klein; Hakluyt, Purchas, and the romance of Virginia, Daniel Carey; ‘Accidentall restraints’: straits and passages in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Elizabeth Heale; Hakluyt’s Oceans: Maritime Rhetoric in The Principal Navigations, Steve Mentz; Hakluyt’s legacy: armchair travel in English Renaissance drame, Claire Jowitt. Coda: The legacy of Richard Hakluyt: reflections on the history of the Hakluyt Society, Roy Bridges; Works cited; Index.
The collection is designed around four main themes-'Philosophy, Thought and Natural Knowledge', 'Religion, Politics and the Natural World', 'Gender, Sexuality and Scientific Thought' and 'New Worlds and New Philosophies.' Within these themes, the contributors focus on the contests between different ways of seeing and understanding the natural world in a wide range of writings from the period: in poetry and art, in political texts, in descriptions of real and imagined colonial landscapes, as well as in more obviously 'scientific' documents.
Journal Articles by Claire Jowitt
personalities of the Stuart monarchs. William Cavendish, for example, harked back to England’s glorious past under Elizabeth in order to inculcate in Charles II’s government expansionist and imperialist policies. Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World demonstrates similar concerns but Cavendish’s work is also interested in using representations of Elizabeth I as a way of exploring both the disenfranchisement of women and, I argue, the possibility of female empowerment.
gender behaviour. Furthermore, this article argues that characters' gender performance -specifically their attitude to sexual commerce - figures as a metaphor for a larger set of commercial relations with the New World.
This article, published in BBC History Magazine (2012) hails one of history’s greatest travel books
Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton.
What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England.
The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.
Contents: Introduction; Subversive pirates? Representations of Purser and Clinton 1538–1639; The uses and abuses of 'piracy': discourses of mercantilism and empire in accounts of Drake's 'famous voyage' 1580–1630; 'Et in arcadia ego': piracy and politics in prose romance 1580–1603; Pirates and politics: drama of the 'long 1590s'; Jacobean connections: piracy and politics in 17th-century drama and romance; Politics and pirate typology in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's late Jacobean pirate drama; Bibliography; Index.
This volume resituates Hakluyt in the political, economic, and intellectual context of his time. The genre of the travel collection to which he contributed emerged from Continental humanist literary culture. Hakluyt adapted this tradition for nationalistic purposes by locating a purported history of 'English' enterprise that stretched as far back as he could go in recovering antiquarian records. The essays in this collection advance the study of Hakluyt's literary and historical resources, his international connections, and his rhetorical and editorial practice. The volume is divided into 5 sections: 'Hakluyt's Contexts'; 'Early Modern Travel Writing Collections'; 'Editorial Practice'; 'Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation'; and 'Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing'. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued his project to edit travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.
Contents: Introduction, Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt; Section I Hakluyt in Context: Hakluyt's London: discovery and overseas trade, Anthony Payne; From the History of Travayle to the history of travel collections: the rise of an early modern genre, Joan-Pau Rubiés. Section II Early Modern Travel Collections: A world seen through another's eyes: Hakluyt, Ramusio, and the narratives of the Navigationi e Viaggi, Margaret Small; Three tales of the New World: nation, religion, and colonialism in Hakluyt, de Bry, and Hulsius, Sven Trakulhun; Hakluyt in France: Pierre Bergeron and travel writing collections, Grégoire Holtz; 'Honour to our nation': nationalism, The Principal Navigations and travel collections in the long 18th century, Matthew Day; Richard Hakluyt and the visual world of early modern travel narratives, Peter C. Mancall. Section III Editorial Practices: '[T]ouching the state of the country of Guiana, and whether it were fit to be planted by the English': Sir Robert Cecil, Richard Hakluyt and the writing of Guiana, 1595-1612, Joyce Lorimer; Richard Hakluyt's two Indias: textual sparagmos and editorial practice, Nandini Das; Forming the captivity of Thomas Saunders: Hakluyt's editorial practices and their ideological effects, Julia Schleck; Framing 'the English nation': reading between text and paratext in The Principal Navigations (1598-1600), Colm MacCrossan; 'The strange and wonderfull discoverie of Russia': Hakluyt and censorship, Felicity Stout. Section IV Allegiances and Ideologies, Politics, Religion, Nation: ‘We (upon peril of my life) shall make the Spaniards ridiculous to all Europe’: Richard Hakluyt’s ‘discourse’ of Spain, Francisco J. Borge; Balance of power and freedom of the seas: Richard Hakluyt and Alberico Gentili, Diego Pirillo; Richard Hakluyt and the demands of Pietas Patriae, David A. Boruchoff; ‘To deduce a colonie’: Richard Hakluyt’s Godly mission in its contexts, c.1580-1616, David Harris Sacks; Hakluyt’s multiple faiths, Matthew Dimmock. Section V Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing: ‘His dark materials’: the problem of dullness in Hakluyt’s collections, Mary C. Fuller; ‘To pot straight way wee goe’: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1562-64, Bernhard Klein; Hakluyt, Purchas, and the romance of Virginia, Daniel Carey; ‘Accidentall restraints’: straits and passages in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Elizabeth Heale; Hakluyt’s Oceans: Maritime Rhetoric in The Principal Navigations, Steve Mentz; Hakluyt’s legacy: armchair travel in English Renaissance drame, Claire Jowitt. Coda: The legacy of Richard Hakluyt: reflections on the history of the Hakluyt Society, Roy Bridges; Works cited; Index.
The collection is designed around four main themes-'Philosophy, Thought and Natural Knowledge', 'Religion, Politics and the Natural World', 'Gender, Sexuality and Scientific Thought' and 'New Worlds and New Philosophies.' Within these themes, the contributors focus on the contests between different ways of seeing and understanding the natural world in a wide range of writings from the period: in poetry and art, in political texts, in descriptions of real and imagined colonial landscapes, as well as in more obviously 'scientific' documents.
personalities of the Stuart monarchs. William Cavendish, for example, harked back to England’s glorious past under Elizabeth in order to inculcate in Charles II’s government expansionist and imperialist policies. Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World demonstrates similar concerns but Cavendish’s work is also interested in using representations of Elizabeth I as a way of exploring both the disenfranchisement of women and, I argue, the possibility of female empowerment.
gender behaviour. Furthermore, this article argues that characters' gender performance -specifically their attitude to sexual commerce - figures as a metaphor for a larger set of commercial relations with the New World.
This article, published in BBC History Magazine (2012) hails one of history’s greatest travel books
play Bonduca engages with early-seventeenth-century British
colonial ambitions. The play ends with the defeat of the Britons
by a more powerful civilization and the establishment of the Roman occupation in the British Isles. The rout of the Britons described in this text might, initially, seem unpromising material
for Fletcher to use to question the merits of contemporary colonial policies. Yet, through a series of resemblances between contemporary Virginia and pre-Christian Briton, between ancient British characters and contemporary or near-contemporary monarchs, and through the dramatization of questions concerning the benefits and drawbacks of “Romanization,” this is exactly what the play achieves.
Europeans—specifically Portuguese colonialists—from the indigenous inhabitants of the Spice Islands. In this chapter, I explore The Island Princess in relation to Renaissance understandings of human difference, focusing on the ways in which culturally constructed markers of color, ethnicity, religion, and nation are deployed.
This essay explores the connections between piracy and empire formation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These years were crucial to English, later British, empire formation, as this was when the nation seriously attempted, for the first time, to express ambitions for an empire to rival that of Spain in the west and the Ottomans in the east. The essay focuses on the ways textual representations of the trading successes and seaborne activities of notorious Elizabethan pirates Purser and Clinton produced in this sixty-year period offer a critique of the nation’s activities in these arenas.
the Museum of London Docklands, 20 May–30 October 2011, Journal for Maritime Research,
13:2, 180-183, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.2011.622883
This edited volume brings together varied essays examining how queens—whether regnant, regent or consort—and other female rulers or female monarchs’ representatives were involved, or were represented as being involved, in activities of colonization, piracy, and trade. The inter-disciplinary collection will include essays on the representations of queenship through the themes of colonization, exploration, and piracy found in literature, as well as chapters adopting a historical approach to analyse the roles of queens and female rulers in foreign affairs. It further seeks to show how female rulers defended their authority and used negotiations through these three concepts in early modern Europe, 1450-1700. The collection focuses both on well-known queens, such as Queen Elizabeth I of England and Catherine de Medici, and on less familiar figures, such as Caterina Cornaro of Cyprus and Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain.
* Explore or represent English Studies at the interface with other languages, cultures, professions and disciplines from the medieval period to the present day.
* Reflect on or contribute to interdisciplinary conversations, or which are the product of thinking across disciplines or across sectors.
* Explore the intersections between English Studies, Digital Humanities, and the new technologies of any period.
Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA
Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.