Acknowledgements
Knowledge, wrote Marcel Proust, is a journey of discovery that no one else can take or spare us. Luckily I have received generous assistance along the way. I am indebted to Adrian Green, my PhD supervisor at Durham University, for his unflagging support and his discerning and deeply humane insights into the past. This research would not have been possible without a Durham Arts and Humanities Doctoral Studentship, nor without smaller grants for archival visits from the Durham History Department and the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I would also like to thank Natalie Mears, Nicole Reinhardt, and Andy Wood for their advice and feedback on my work, and Ludmilla Jordanova for encouraging my involvement with the National Portrait Gallery.
My postdoctoral associateship on the TIDE project (Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, 1550–1700) has enabled me to develop my PhD research into a monograph. This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 681884). My warmest thanks to the principal investigator, Nandini Das, and to all my colleagues on the project and in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool for widening my perspectives on global encounters (and many facets of English literature) in a stimulating atmosphere of collegiality.
Further funding and fellowships have been critical to transforming my work. This included two short-term fellowships at Jamestown, one funded by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in 2014, the other by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in 2016. Spending time in Virginia gave me the opportunity to meet the Jamestown archaeological team, including Jim Horn, Merry Outlaw, William Kelso, and Dave Givens. The archaeologists, curators, and researchers at Jamestown Rediscovery and the Omohundro brought my interest in material culture beyond a fascination with transatlantic ‘things’ into more practical ways of achieving cross-disciplinary work. I re-wrote a substantial portion of my material on sociability during a short-term fellowship at the Huntington Library in the summer of 2016, fuelled by many iced coffees and desert garden jaunts. Finally, my time as a 2018 Royal Anthropological Institute Library fellow at the British Museum was immeasurably enrichening, starting with the confidence the committee expressed in the value and importance of bringing indigeneity into the story of English heritage. Learning to approach my material both archaeologically and anthropologically has profoundly influenced my work, the seeds of which have been planted, I hope, in this study.
Several events, and conversations with all their participants, have also been invaluable to developing this book. This includes the ‘Jamestown at 1619’ conference at Dartmouth College in 2017 organized by Jim Horn, Peter Mancall, and Paul Musselwhite, and the ‘Intoxicants, Space, and Material Culture’ workshops at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2017 and the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2018 with Phil Withington, Kathryn James, and Angela McShane. At Dartmouth, Nicholas Canny asked me about female interest in colonization. While that is not the subject of this book, I have thought a great deal about his question since. The topic deserves equal attention to that of masculine interest, and I hope to give a fuller reply in my next project.
Since the American Indian Workshop at Goldsmith’s in London in 2017, conversations with Native Americans have become essential. These have begun to unlock a long history of interaction with indigenous Americans and their cultures that I did not always fully appreciate growing up in America, from the salmon iconographies by Coast Salish artists committed to protecting waterways around Seattle, to visiting Chumash nature reserves in Santa Barbara County. I am deeply appreciative to all those who have shared their histories and songs with me at conferences, museums, and powwows. A special thank you to Stephanie Pratt for our many conversations and for a memorable afternoon at the British Museum, viewing John White’s Roanoke watercolours with the prints and drawings curator, Kim Sloan.
The editorial team at Cambridge University Press, led by Liz Friend-Smith and with the assistance of Atifa Jiwa, have been a pleasure to work with. I am deeply obliged to Michael Braddick, Ethan Shagan, Alexandra Shepard, and Alexandra Walsham for providing the insightful feedback that transformed my draft into a more complete book, asking questions of my material that provoked a richer consideration of it. A portion of Chapter 2 draws on ‘“The Savages of Virginia Our Project”: The Powhatans in Jacobean Political Thought’, my contribution to Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America, ed. Paul Musselwhite, Peter Mancall, and James Horn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 42–59. Chapter 5 engages with some material from my article ‘Locating Colonization at the Jacobean Inns of Court’, The Historical Journal, 61 (2018), 29–51, published by Cambridge University Press. Both are reproduced here with permission.
My family, though closer to the place of Francis Drake’s landing in California than to London, offered wholehearted support from 5,000 miles away, and have always nurtured my rather fanciful love of history. And a book that ends with a discussion of friendship is keenly aware of the importance of friends. I am grateful to those kindred spirits I have found within academia, particularly Finola Finn, and to all those outside of it, who indulged my talk about humanists and featherwork while knowing when to lure me to distraction, and who reminded me that writing a book about Protestant politics could leave room for sweet disorder and a little baroque. While Ciceronian evocations of twinned hearts and blazing souls may seem somewhat extravagant today, the gratitude remains.
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