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.

“Carefully steering its readers through New World waters, Remembering the Early Modern Voyage advances measurably our understandings of the intimate relations between boats and books, navigation, and publication. Two of Fuller’s three case studies persuasively demonstrate both how crucial Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations was to the establishment of English imperial history and the enshrining of some of its explorers as heroes, and how comparatively ineffective and thus unremembered were the expeditions and publications that, for one reason or another, found no place in his vast anthology. Her third case study, by foregrounding other forms of remembering than narrative publications, not only  retrieves a forgotten history of whole English communities in the New World, but also throws into relief the ideological dimensions exerted by publications on historical renderings of the early modern New World.”--I.S. MacLaren, Departments of History and Classics, and English and Film Studies, University of Alberta