Work by the Elizabethan editor Richard Hakluyt remains invaluable to scholars in many fields. Yet for a biographer he is, as Peter Mancall writes, an “elusive quarry” (303), given the nature of his work and the paucity of sources available on his life. As a writer, Hakluyt confined himself almost exclusively toward editing and sometimes translating other men's work; the resulting editions and collections secured his fame but left his own authorship to be reconstructed from the prefaces, margins, and structure of his books. Beyond his work as a promoter of voyages, his life, too, must largely be reconstructed from records, which often provide the only testimony of his family relations and of his functioning as the ecclesiastical professional he also was. His surviving correspondence largely consists of reports to Walter Raleigh, Francis Walsingham, and William Cecil on the geographic inquiries and promotions that he undertook on their behalf.

Hakluyt's Promise begins by imagining a walk through London in 1568, on a route Hakluyt might have taken between two places we know he certainly was: the Westminster School, in which he was a scholar, and the Inns of Court, where his older cousin—a lawyer—first inspired him to study geography. This narrative provides a good example of the work's challenges and the strategies it devises to meet them. The chapters largely build out from the editor's bibliography, building a series of contexts around accounts he would print or have printed over the course of his career; these contexts include related geographic enterprises, inquiries, and publications but also current events, both political and environmental (plagues, droughts, windstorms), and physical settings, whether the streets of London or the kinds of birds and animals the editor would have encountered around the manor he purchased in rural Suffolk, near his Wetheringsett parish. In addition to these environmental and historical recreations, the book is richly illustrated with images from contemporary sources, as “visual clues” (305) to Hakluyt's experienced world.

Mancall pays thorough if sometimes brief attention to the whole range of Hakluyt's writerly and editorial activities, not only the well-known anthologies but also works in manuscript and books he translated, promoted, or influenced; a careful account of Hakluyt's work on the text of Antonio Galvaõ particularly intrigued me. Along the way, welcome attention is reserved for the distinct writing and collecting activities of Hakluyt's older cousin of the same name, which provided the younger Hakluyt with a number of documents, and both Hakluyts’ relations with European intellectuals like Abraham Ortelius, Gerard Mercator, and André Thevet. Some of the substantial documents Hakluyt printed (along with the enterprises from which they arose) receive closer attention: for instance, materials associated with the northern voyages of Martin Frobisher, the expeditions of Humphrey Gilbert, and the Roanoke colony sponsored by Walter Raleigh. Of the enterprises, texts, and narratives receiving sustained attention in the text, almost all are focused on the Americas. The latter part of the book tracks Hakluyt's association with the Virginia Company and looks at accounts of Jamestown by John Smith, which Hakluyt would have known only as a reader, but Africa is mentioned only by way of the texts of John Pory and Leo Africanus. I would have appreciated more attention to the Levant and Muscovy companies, and both Hakluyts’ connections with them. Despite this tilt toward materials that the anthologies indicate formed only part of Hakluyt's interests, Promise does follow the editor's career beyond his association with American enterprises and into his later work for the East India Company, including Dialogues in the English and Malaine Languages (1614), in whose preparation Hakluyt played some unspecified role.

Even as the historical and spatial contexts of Hakluyt's life are recreated, the responses of the book's central figure to them are repeatedly imagined (perhaps unavoidably) as normative and generic: faced with a given circumstance, “Hakluyt must have thought” what any reasonable person would have thought in such circumstances. Hakluyt's life was indeed devoid of the extreme acts that enliven the biographies of contemporaries like Richard Grenville, Martin Frobisher, or Francis Drake, all equally reticent as writers, and to that extent such a portrayal seems reasonable enough. Not all readers will feel that the gain in empathy justifies the resultant blandness of the book's central figure, however. Of greater interest are Mancall's observations of things Hakluyt did not choose to write about, although he could have: for instance, he did not write about America again after 1609.

The book's narrative strategies represent a deliberate choice and indicate its aim of reaching an audience that is not exclusively academic. Mancall has detoured around overt engagement with the controversies animating discussions of Hakluyt's work; quotations in the text draw on primary sources rather than contemporary scholarship. Yet the book is unmistakably scholarly in its underpinnings; thorough, careful, and useful footnotes guide interested readers to a wealth of sometimes little-known supporting materials. The brief but incisive concluding “Note on Methods and Sources” will be of value for many academic readers, laying out the rationale for the book's approach to Hakluyt, “a creature of the age of print” (305).

The challenge of writing Hakluyt's biography has not been fully undertaken since G. B. Parks's Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, which originally appeared in 1929, and while there have been no intervening discoveries of previously unknown documents, some aspects of Hakluyt's intellectual environment (e.g., the nature of his relationship with Thevet, the French cosmographer) were still poorly understood in Parks's day. Mancall's differently conceived but thoroughly researched book provides a welcome updating and supplement to the Parks biography and is sure to be frequently consulted. Hakluyt's Promise has not exhausted exploration of the intellectual and political contexts that informed Hakluyt's work, but it does in fact promise to spearhead a new wave of focused attention to Hakluyt's life and work.