Making something of it: Questions of value in the early English travel collection

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Early English ◽  
Richard Hakluyt

AbstractIn the second half of the sixteenth century, experiences and narratives of English travel to distant places first began to matter enough to be collected and published. Tracing early accounts of West Africa and Muscovy through the several collections of Richard Eden (1553, 1555) and Richard Hakluyt (1589, 1600) allows for comparison of how different editors handled the same materials at different moments. The evidence suggests that both editors differentiated between the African and Russian materials according to perceptions of these materials' value, or meaning, for their own collecting and publishing projects. Looking at how this was so, and considering why it was so, provides a closer and more detailed look at how travel writing acquired value in the context of print; it also offers an an approach to the larger question of how Englishmen "read" the places and cultures they encountered, actually or virtually, outside of Europe.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter Writing Manuals

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Webster Newbold
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Book Reading ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Vernacular Rhetoric ◽  
The Core ◽  
Vernacular Literacy ◽  
Early English

Abstract Two noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), and Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586). Both works reflected and sought to influence literacy habits in the book-reading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three aspects are likely to have stirred reader interest: a connection for vernacular learners with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige education; a focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance; and a large collection of model letters, in which readers would have found exemplary discourse coupled with proto-fictional and amatory elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Early English ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis ◽  
The Middle Ages

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.

The Journey of Master Anthony Jenkinson to Persia, 1562-1563

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurosh Meshkat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Richard Hakluyt

AbstractThe article provides an account of Anthony Jenkinson's journey to Persia, and assesses the faithfulness of his narrative by examining it in a broader literary context consisting of his diplomatic instructions, the oral sources informing his narrative, and extracts from the Persian chronicles where possible. The second part of the article compares E. Delmar Morgan's nineteenth-century interpretation and presentation of Jenkinson's narrative with its reception in England when it was first published by Richard Hakluyt in the late sixteenth-century.

Religious Patronage as Gendered Family Memory in Sixteenth-century England

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-29
Author(s):  
Stephanie Thomson ◽  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Early English ◽  
A Site ◽  
Large Corpus

Through an analysis of a large corpus of sixteenth-century wills and testaments, this article explores Englishwomen’s end-of-life religious patronage a site for the production of family identity and memory, and as a mechanism by which family and faith were woven together. It considers both the influence of the family on women’s post-mortem piety, and their role as executrices for their husbands. In doing so, it argues that women were integral to producing the commemorative practices that ensured their families’ immortality, and that these practices were in turn an important means by which religious practice and belief were renegotiated and refigured during the early English Reformation.

Richmond Free Blacks and African Colonization, 1816–1832

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Tyler McGraw
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Richard Hakluyt

Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1588, was referring to the Elizabethan poor whose ranks were newly enlarged by the economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century. His rationale for government-sponsored colonization has hardly been improved upon in the subsequent four hundred years and examples of its application can be found over much of the globe, from Acadians in Louisiana to convicts in Australia. Two hundred and forty years after Hakluyt, the American Colonization Society was founded in Washington, D.C., to encourage the emigration of American free blacks to Africa.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document