Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion

Why do we remember some parts of the historical past, and forget others? Collective memory acts as a filter, a process mediated by ideology, chance, and the very structures of narrative and memory. Remembering the Early Modern Voyage uses three rich case studies to examine the operations of memory on the sixteenth and seventeenth century origins of Anglophone North America: Richard Hakluyt’s famous anthology of Elizabethan voyages, Captain John Smith’s eccentric autobiography, and the little known history of early modern Newfoundland. Attending not only to the narratives themselves, but to their use and reuse over several centuries, this book offers interrogations and recalibrations of a history still critical for the present.