ABSTRACT
The materials for Hakluyt’s life, as distinct from his works, are somewhat exiguous. Professor G. B. Parks, Hakluyt, pp. 242–62, gave a full chronology and list of his manuscripts as they were known in 1928, while E. G. R. Taylor made many of his miscellaneous writings and a somewhat limited correspondence available in her Hakluyts in 1935. R. A. Skelton had made a beginning on a revised chronology for the Handbook very shortly before his death but had not made any appreciable progress with it. We have in what follows revised the 1928 chronology and have attempted to relocate the documents which have moved or have been renumbered since then, a task in which Professor Parks, himself, has given valuable assistance. It has also been possible to elaborate the earlier picture in detail. Information from the London Company records, Christ Church, Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, fill out to some appreciable extent the tale of what he did and when, while a few additional manuscripts have come to light. We still lack any extensive personal data which would throw an intimate light on his personality, and we have no portrait. It is possible that further research on his City background and connections would throw more light on the circumstances under which he collected so much of his materials in London. Study of his Oxford associations, especially within the small circle of contemporaries and near-contemporaries at Christ Church, could also prove valuable, while his place in the group of scholars which includes Camden, the Saviles, Garth, Cope, Mercator, Ortelius and van Meteren, and which finds only some small representation in the learned correspondence of the period as at present known, needs clarification. His Bristol links by way of the cathedral chapter and the mercantile community may also be worth further study. His activities at Westminster 264Abbey made him one of the key figures in a group of intellectual clerics as well as an active administrator of the internal economy of the Abbey. Though his Westminster activities help to fill out the record of his later years they are still rather lightly documented and further searches in the materials on Jacobean London may prove fruitful. Whether, without the discovery of some personal correspondence – which is not very likely – it will ever be possible to draw a convincing personal portrait of him remains problematical. A full list of data may, we hope, provoke further attempts at this desirable result.
