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“Plain Broad Narratives of Substantial Facts”: Credibility, Narrative, and Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Julia Schleck
Julia Schleck*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

This article compares voyage narratives printed in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 Principall Navigations to contemporaneous travel histories in an effort to contextualize the epistemological status of each group of texts and debunk the former’s reputation for greater factuality. It critiques the use commonly made of Hakluyt’s narratives in literary studies, arguing that the privileging of these texts over other sources results in postcolonial studies that ironically valorize a type of writing which promoted the colonial mindset these studies seek to expose.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , Fall 2006 , pp. 768 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2006

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Footnotes

*

A preliminary version of this article was read at the annual meeting of The Renaissance Society of America in 2004. I am grateful to the panel’s respondent, Michèle Longino, for her thoughtful commentary and for her enthusiasm regarding the ideas expressed in this paper. Thanks are due as well to Ernest Gilman, John Archer, John Guillory, David Landreth, Elizabeth Bearden, and Kelly Stage, all of whom provided helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article, and, of course, to John, without whose witty intellect and support my titles (and my work) would fall entirely flat.

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