Utopia
Contributions
- Thomas More
- author
Related resources
- has translation
- Tableau du meilleur gouvernement possible ou l'Utopie de Thomas Morus, chancelier d'Angleterre. En deux livres. Traduction nouvelle, dédiée à S.E.M. le Comte de Vergennes, Ministre des Affaires Étrangères. Par M.T. Rousseau translation has other edition
Notes
Written in Latin for a European audience, More's 'Utopia' is the quintessential humanist dialogue and was an immediate sensation. Set as a dialogue in Antwerp between More and a traveller (Raphael Nonsenso) who spent five years on the island of Utopia, the complexity of the work ensured that it would have nearly as many interpretations as readers.
More's 'Utopia' (literally "no place") gave its name to a literary genre but the germ of such fiction is probably to be found in ancient depictions of paradise, such as Utnapishtim (Epic of Gilgamesh), the Elysian Fields (Homer's 'Odyssey') and Atlantis (Plato's 'Republic'). The more contemporary depiction of Shangri-La dates from 1933 (James Hilton's 'Lost Horizon').
More's contribution was to add topical realism to the mixture of paradisiac political and travelogical elements already present in the genre. Utopia broadly satirises European society for its short-sighted love of gain, its lack of Christian piety and charity, and its unreasonableness, and attacks injustices in the English criminal code. However, More's 'Utopia' is not an ideal state, as the word has since come to mean.
It was first translated into English by Ralph Robinson in 1551. The Url is to the 1895 bilingual reprint of this edition.