ABSTRACT
Despite the nationalistic – even secular – focus upon the travels of his countrymen indicated by the title of The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, the world that Richard Hakluyt relates in 1589 is one defined by religion and informed by a clearly Protestant, evangelical approach to religious diversity. Yet Hakluyt’s reorientation of the world towards English interests and concerns also necessitated a series of different engagements with non-Christian faiths and a flexible attitude to the impermeable divisions enshrined in pan-Christian religious dogma. The intricate patterns of acceptance, elision, and rejection of other faiths that emerge in Hakluyt’s influential 1589 volume, extended by him in his larger 1598–1600 edition, are the subject of this essay.
