(xi) Utopian writing 1516-1789

Course Material 2021/22
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Utopian writing

The early modern genre of utopian writing was born in 1516 with the publication of one brilliant book: Thomas More's Utopia. The title (a Greek pun) means both 'no place' and 'good place'. More exploited this ambiguity to the full, articulating a vision of a society that, whilst clearly superior to contemporary England in many ways, also raises serious doubts in the reader's mind. The Utopians have ample food, housing and leisure to improve their minds and bodies, but they live in communal households and their clothes are all the same. They are good and need few laws, but they keep slaves. They are pious and believe in a deity, but they are not Christian. Their government is elective and participatory, but they bribe their enemies and employ mercenaries to keep down their neighbours. And, most extraordinarily of all, the Utopians live without money, which, as the character of Thomas More himself says at the end of his book, 'utterly subverts all the nobility, magnificence, splendour and majesty that are (in the popular view) the true ornaments and glory of any commonwealth.’
 
More's portrait of an imaginary society that is, in some sense, ideal was widely imitated by writers throughout early modern Europe. They used the conceit of a traveller's report from the New World to comment upon the customs and political arrangements of their own societies. In this course we will study how a wide range of early modern utopian writers used the genre to articulate novel ideas about politics, education, religion and science. We will explore some of the genre's roots in writings from the ancient world, most notably Plato's Republic. And we will look at visual and architectural representations of utopias and ideal cities.                

The course thus gives students the opportunity of studying early modern society not as it was, but as some of its most engaged critics thought it might be. The disjunction between their utopian societies and the actual conditions of early modern Europe raises some fundamental questions about the nature of historical interpretation. Hence as well as introducing utopian writing in its early modern heyday, the course also offers an accessible and stimulating introduction to intellectual history and the history of political thought.

We teach the course by means of interactive seminars, team debates, and a couple of powerpoint presentations with images. The focus of the course is on interpreting the written and visual sources; we encourage conversation and deliberately avoid lengthy presentations and potentially pompous lectures. The sources are always various, sometimes unusual, but never dull.

Week 1: The Utopian Genre. Week 2: Utopia and Society. Week 3: Utopian Religion before and after the Reformation. Week 4: Educating Utopians. Week 5: Utopia and the Sciences. Week 6: Utopian Politics. Week 7: Utopia, Empire and Environment. Week 8: Conclusion.

Introductory Reading

Thomas More, Utopia [1516], ed. by G. M. Logan and R. M. Adams, trans. by R. M. Adams, revised edition (Cambridge, 2002).
 
Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. by Susan Bruce (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1999).
 
J. C. Davis, 'Utopianism', in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, ed. by J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 329-44 

Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford, 1979).

Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia: The history of an idea (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011).

Page credits & information

Image: Fra Carnevale (attrib.), 'The Ideal City' (c. 1480–1484). © The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, accession no. 37.677.

Section notice

This material is intended for current students but will be interesting to prospective students. It is indicative only.