Richard Hakluyt: A Bibliography 1580-1588

This bibliography concerns the ten works written by or produced with the involvement of Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) between 1580 and 1588, describing each book and its history with as much primary and secondary documentation as possible. The introduction gives a brief notice of Hakluyt's life and career, followed by an outline of the bibliography's scope and conventions. The detailed bibliography enables us to trace not only the composition and material form of these writings and their reception, but also Hakluyt's developing interests, his intellectual debts and milieu, the books and other sources available to him, and his patrons and career from his time at Oxford until the imminent publication of the original edition of the Principall Navigations, his celebrated collection of voyages and travels, in 1589. While partly an exercise in documentation, identifying sources and references as a guide to research, it goes further in attempting a study of Hakluyt's books drawing on the various approaches to bibliography, taking these into the allied field of 'the history of the book'.