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Peter Russell, Prints Hent 'the Novigitor': A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). xvi + 448 PP. ISBN 0-300-0843-9. L20.00..
There is a sense in which Sir Peter Russell has been working up to this book for a very long time. Among his earlier publications on this iconic yet enigmatic figure are his succinct and tantalizing Prince Henry the Navigator (1960), and his 1983 lecture Prince Henry the Navigator. The Rise and Fall of a Culture Hero. As that lecture, and Russell's insistence here on the quotation marks, makes clear, Henry acquired a reputation, and a sobriquet, that needs to be viewed with some caution. He did not himself participate in any of the Atlantic voyages of discovery undertaken under his initiative and patronage; nor can the myth that he set up a school of navigation at Sagres where he `personally taught the science of oceanic navigation to sea-captains and pilots' (p. 8) be...