England And The Discovery Of America 1481 1620

David Beers Quinn was an Irish historian who wrote extensively on the voyages of discovery and colonisation of America. Many of his publications appeared as volumes of the Hakluyt Society. He became interested in the voyages of discovery made by Humphrey Gilbert. At that time historians relied uncritically on the works of Richard Hakluyt published around 1600. Quinn's work and the new sources he discovered resulted in his first volume for the Hakluyt Society, and marked the beginning of his seminal work on voyages of exploration, which he developed from 1944 at University College, Swansea.

Between the year 1000 and the mid-14th century, several remarkable events unfolded as Europeans made contact with a very substantial part of the inhabited world, much of it never previously known or suspected to exist by them. Leif Ericsson and other Vikings discovered North America; European crusading armies established themselves in Syria and Palestine; Marco Polo and other Italian merchants, and missionaries such as John of Monte Corvino, penetrated the dominions of Mongolia and China; the Vivaldi brothers sought to open a sea route to India; Jaime Ferrer was lured by dreams of locating the source of West African gold; and the Atlantic island groups, the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, were all discovered. In this detailed survey, Phillips describes these exciting quests while also exploring their closely related myths and legends, all the while setting the stage for the even greater exploits of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and their successors. For this new Clarendon Paperback edition, Phillips has added both an introduction and a bibliographical essay, the latter of which surveys recent work in what is becoming a thriving area of new research.

Of northern European nations, the British had the greatest impact on the Americas. Their history there embraces far more than the colonies that became the United States: England had been in the New World for a century before those colonies were established, and the British presence long outlived their loss. This integrated account of that involvement spans the entire arc of British territories from the Caribbean to Canada, and the entire period from the first appearance of the English to the disintegration of the British and other Euro-American empires. A fascinating story, engrossingly told, it fills a major gap in current historiography.

What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed. Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions as Utopia, The Faerie Queene, and The Tempest, they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.