Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

Richard Hakluyt the Younger (c. 1553-1616) was the most famous English promoter of overseas expansion of his age and in English history. His most renowned publication, Principal Navigations (1598-1600), a massive three-volume series, detailed English exploration, expansion, and trade history. With a focus on inciting the English to act in order to achieve their Providential Empire, Hakluyt’s works carry in them the expressions of time and temporality permeating the late-1500s. In a period of history where new learning, discoveries, and technologies began to transform life, time was called into question. Concerns about how the perception and acceleration of time and temporality altered and transformed in this period influenced Hakluyt’s writings. He drew on the shifting tides of time to promote the English people to action. Hakluyt interwove his writings with Providence, the Protestant’s emphasis on active reading, English chivalry, political, domestic, and foreign concerns. In doing so, Hakluyt’s writings reflect the shifting and transforming conceptions and perceptions of time and temporality that took place in early modern England. In this dissertation, I argue that Hakluyt’s writings reveal the transforming expressions of time and temporality swirling around early modern England and Europe. Hakluyt himself did not set out to employ time and temporality as part of his promotional literature, but he understood the changes occurring and how those changes could impact England’s Providential empire. Hakluyt developed a linear sense of temporal progression towards a Providential foretold English empire by calling for a unified English nation to act as one untied social body for the advancement of England’s empire.

Date

11-9-2021

Committee Chair

Stater, Victor

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.5700

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