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ssss1 Richard Hakluyt (1850, sec. Introduction) returned to England in 1588 escorting Lady Stafford, the wife of the English ambassador to France, this is to say four years before Thevet died.

ssss1 In André Thevet’s North America, Schlessinger and Stabler (1986) have discussed at length the problems that André Thevet’s liberal use of material and the unreliability of his testimonies pose to modern scholarship. Indeed, as the aforementioned authors state, Thevet’s reputation for sloppy scholarship is not a modern phenomenon. Both Jean de Lery and François de Belleforest attacked Thevet’s work on the basis of its unreliability. Even Richard Hakluyt (1986, xxiii), who visited Thevet in Paris in 1586-87 and from whom he received the Codex Mendoza qualified Thevet’s Cosmographie as “wearie volumes bearing the titles of universall Cosmographie which some men that I could name have published as their owne, beyng in deed most untruly and unprofitablie ramassed and hurled together”.

ssss1 Lestringant (1991, 20–21) has noted the relevance of the Cosmographie de Levant for Thevet’s career, as it was through the dedicatee of this work, Francois III de la Rochefoucault, that the geographer was admitted to the French court in 1559.