Project overview
This proposal is to facilitate the completion, and submission to Oxford University Press in December 2015, of the first 4 volumes of Richhard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600), through a series of 3 Editorial Workshops to be held over a 24 month period between July 2013 and June 2015 at the University of Southampton. Hakluyt's landmark work, The Principal Navigations, is the single most important collection of English travel ever published. This massive 3-volume folio, comprising approximately 1.75 million words, was instrumental in promoting English expansion through colonial and trade ventures around the globe and in defining an understanding of English identity. Yet, despite its significance, no critical edition of The Principal Navigations (1598-1600) with explanatory annotations has ever been published. The new edition of Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations will be published in 14 volumes in a rolling programme beginning in 2016, and finishing in 2019. The new edition will satisfy a widely perceived scholarly need and answer a general demand for a quality edition of Hakluyt's text with full editorial apparatus. The edition will be unabridged and presented with minimal modernization. Editorial apparatus will make Hakluyt's text more comprehensible and available, and will create a new generation of readers able to appreciate the scope and depth of this definitive record of early English maritime enterprise and travel. Hakluyt organised The Principal Navigations by geographical region. For this edition, the text has been divided into 14 regional volumes. It is anticipated that when complete each edited volume will be approximately 200,000-250,000 words. The first folio volume of The Principal Navigations (1598), which covers the north and north-east, has been divided into 4 volumes for this OUP edition. Volume 1, Medieval Voyages, will be edited by Professor Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen; Volume 2, Medieval Voyages and the English in Muscovy will be edited by Dr Angela Byrne, National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Professor Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen; Volume 3, Persia and Muscovy Voyages will be edited by Professor Ladan Niayesh, University of Paris VII and Professor Ralph Cleminson, University of Portsmouth; Volume 4, Muscovy, Iceland, Armada, Cadiz will be edited by Professor Anna Agnarsdóttir, University of Iceland, Professor Michael Brennan, University of Leeds, and Dr Felicity Stout, Sheffield University. Byrne and Stout are Early Career Researchers, and though both have been paired with established and experienced academics on their respective volumes, the planned Editorial Workshops will be particularly helpful in supporting their work. The General Editors, in consultation with the publisher, have appointed an international Editorial Board and Editorial Advisory Board of experts who will provide advice on editorial philosophy, textual scholarship, geographical and historical context; navigational issues; place names; translations, and other key matters. The Editorial Board has been convened to assist the General Editors and to provide oversight for the project, and the Editorial Advisory Board has been established to offer advice on specialist aspects of the text. Key members of the Editorial Board, including the Project's Textual Editor, Anthony Payne, will attend the proposed Workshops. It is intended that developments in editorial policy arising from the 3 Editorial Workshops will be disseminated amongst the volume editors of the remaining 10 volumes in order to encourage best practice in volumes published later in the rolling programme.