This thesis takes the first edition of Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) as its focus. A significant, sixteenth-century printed text and Richard Hakluyt’s major work, it is familiar to scholars of the period. Its rich archival source has aided understanding of early modern geography, English discovery and cultural encounters. It has also been evaluated in relation to Hakluyt’s substantial contribution to the burgeoning literature of vernacular prose and to imperial expansionism. My thesis conceives a social history of the production, transmission and reception of Principall Navigations from bibliographical analysis, an investigative method that has remained largely untapped. In each chapter, I incorporate information drawn from the material text into an appreciation of historical practice and relocate Principall Navigations more precisely in its socio-historical moment. This engages with and, in some cases, destabilizes current critical positions. In the first chapter, I explore the importance of Hakluyt’s patrons. Francis Walsingham’s essential role is recorded through his connection with the various interdependent networks of people involved in the book’s production and Hakluyt’s description of his ‘prescribed limites’. This chapter re-evaluates authorial subjectivity. In chapter two, Walsingham’s authority over the Queen’s printing house generally and the production of Principall Navigations particularly is traced through the examination of the Stationers’ Company archive and the evolution of the office of the royal printer. This chapter contends that Walsingham commanded the production of Principall Navigations. Chapter three represents a bibliographical study which integrates the production of Principall Navigations into the Queen’s printers’ general work patterns and investigates textual variants and paper-stocks. The date of the interpolation of the Drake leaves is posited with reference to the debate concerning their suppression. The final chapter explores the relationship between early modern readers and empirical records, through historical reading practice, and concludes by evaluating the location of discursive authority.

abstract: The rise of print book culture in sixteenth-century England had profound effects on understandings of identity that are reflected in the prose, poetry, and drama of the age. Drawing on assemblage and actor-network theory, this dissertation argues that models of identity constructed in relation to books in Renaissance England are neither static nor self-contained, arising instead out of a collaborative engagement with books as physical objects that tap into historically specific cultural discourses. Renaissance representations of book usage blur the boundary between human beings and their books, both as textual carriers and as physical artifacts. The first chapter outlines the relationship between book history and assemblage theory to examine how books contribute to the assembly of the human subject in different ways for readers, owners, and authors and to lay a theoretical and historical foundation for reading cultural assemblages in later chapters. The second chapter studies how authors and sometimes printers attempt as makers of books to construct public identities through them. The chapter focuses on how Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Isabella Whitney’s poetry anthologies play with texts and paratexts in order to create the illusion of control over the resulting authorial persona, even while acknowledging that the book itself is a deterritorialized element of their own identities with particular agencies of its own. The third chapter investigates how Renaissance drama represents human beings using books to curate their identity assemblages both publicly and inwardly, particularly as depicted in the work of Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, and the author of Arden of Faversham. The successes and failures of these assemblages on the stage reflect anxieties about the book as an agentive object in an assembled identity. The fourth chapter examines the prose work of Philip Sidney, Roger Ascham, and Fulke Greville, considering the obsession with travel books and writing as a reflection of wider notions about the permeability and possible contamination by foreign influences of the self constructed through books and writings related to travel. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

A propósito do valor histórico e da importância da Biblioteca do Mosteiro de São Bento de São Paulo pela conservação de um singular patrimônio bibliográfico, pretendemos compreender fragmentos de sua história a partir da bibliografia histórica e da cultura monástica entre livros, leituras e bibliotecas. Para tanto, a pesquisa se desenvolveu em três linhas de investigação: a primeira, a análise de obras e de documentos que nos permitiram resgatar aspectos históricos e culturais que proporcionaram a formação da Biblioteca- Livraria no contexto do monaquismo beneditino; a segunda, o estudo da bibliografia histórica e da cultura monástica de livros e de leitores em uma perspectiva de longa duração e dialética com a Biblioteca-Livraria e a sua Coleção de Livros Antigos; e a terceira, a elaboração do Catálogo da Coleção de Livros Antigos da Biblioteca-Livraria do Mosteiro e a identificação de alguns de seus objetos bibliográficos, assim como dos princípios de organização destes. A partir do estudo realizado, entendemos que entre os monges beneditinos sempre houve diversos sinais de uma reflexão e orientação profunda a respeito de bibliotecas e de livros e que a própria Biblioteca-Livraria é reflexo da mentalidade beneditina e emblema mesmo da instituição monástica, de modo que os aspectos espirituais, históricos e culturais do monaquismo beneditino constituem elementos configuradores das etapas de formação de sua identidade bibliográfica e informacional. / Concerning the historical significance of the Library of Saint Benedicts Monastery of São Paulo in its conservation of a unique bibliographical heritage we intend to understand fragments of its history. Our approach is from a point of view of the historical bibliography and the monastic culture found in books, readings and libraries. Within that framework, the research was developed along three lines of investigation: the first one, the analysis of books and documents that allow us to rescue the cultural and historical aspects that provided for the formation of the Old Library in the context of Benedictine monasticism; the second, the study of the historical bibliography and the monastic culture of books and readers from a long term and dialectic perspective with the Old Library and its Old Books Collection; and the third, the elaboration of a Catalogue of the Old Books Collection of the Monasterys Old Library and the identification of some of its bibliographical objects, as well as the principles of their organization. We understand, from the research we conducted, that among the Benedictines there has always been various signs of reflection and profound orientation regarding libraries and books and that the Old Library itself is a consequence of the Benedictine mind-set and an emblem of the monastic institution, so that the spiritual, historical and cultural aspects of the Benedictine monasticism constitute elements of the phases of formation of its bibliographical and informational identity.

A propósito do valor histórico e da importância da Biblioteca do Mosteiro de São Bento de São Paulo pela conservação de um singular patrimônio bibliográfico, pretendemos compreender fragmentos de sua história a partir da bibliografia histórica e da cultura monástica entre livros, leituras e bibliotecas. Para tanto, a pesquisa se desenvolveu em três linhas de investigação: a primeira, a análise de obras e de documentos que nos permitiram resgatar aspectos históricos e culturais que proporcionaram a formação da Biblioteca- Livraria no contexto do monaquismo beneditino; a segunda, o estudo da bibliografia histórica e da cultura monástica de livros e de leitores em uma perspectiva de longa duração e dialética com a Biblioteca-Livraria e a sua Coleção de Livros Antigos; e a terceira, a elaboração do Catálogo da Coleção de Livros Antigos da Biblioteca-Livraria do Mosteiro e a identificação de alguns de seus objetos bibliográficos, assim como dos princípios de organização destes. A partir do estudo realizado, entendemos que entre os monges beneditinos sempre houve diversos sinais de uma reflexão e orientação profunda a respeito de bibliotecas e de livros e que a própria Biblioteca-Livraria é reflexo da mentalidade beneditina e emblema mesmo da instituição monástica, de modo que os aspectos espirituais, históricos e culturais do monaquismo beneditino constituem elementos configuradores das etapas de formação de sua identidade bibliográfica e informacional. / Concerning the historical significance of the Library of Saint Benedicts Monastery of São Paulo in its conservation of a unique bibliographical heritage we intend to understand fragments of its history. Our approach is from a point of view of the historical bibliography and the monastic culture found in books, readings and libraries. Within that framework, the research was developed along three lines of investigation: the first one, the analysis of books and documents that allow us to rescue the cultural and historical aspects that provided for the formation of the Old Library in the context of Benedictine monasticism; the second, the study of the historical bibliography and the monastic culture of books and readers from a long term and dialectic perspective with the Old Library and its Old Books Collection; and the third, the elaboration of a Catalogue of the Old Books Collection of the Monasterys Old Library and the identification of some of its bibliographical objects, as well as the principles of their organization. We understand, from the research we conducted, that among the Benedictines there has always been various signs of reflection and profound orientation regarding libraries and books and that the Old Library itself is a consequence of the Benedictine mind-set and an emblem of the monastic institution, so that the spiritual, historical and cultural aspects of the Benedictine monasticism constitute elements of the phases of formation of its bibliographical and informational identity.