Introduction to the Special Issue

In a paper entitled “Contemporary Scholarship on Utopianism” presented in 1999 at a Comparative Thematic Network Project meeting in Italy, Lyman Sargent explained that when, two decades earlier, he had begun his research on the concept of utopia and started his bibliography of literary works and his list of utopian communities, none of the academics who were working in the field of utopian studies knew what the others were doing. And this happened, he clarified, because “there were no professional associations or journals through which to share ideas and research.”¹ The creation of the Society for Utopian Studies, in 1975, and of the Utopian Studies journal, in 1990, provided North American scholars with a floor for the discussion of questions pertinent to the field of utopian studies, and they have thus contributed to the shaping of the field. Contributions to the journal by British scholars happened soon after its creation—the Utopian Studies Society was established in the United Kingdom in 1988 and then relaunched in 1999. But continental European scholars have only been consistently contributing to the journal since the turn of the millennium, due to a great extent to the research projects and international conferences organized by Italian scholars. During this period, the Utopian Studies Society added “Europe” to its title, thus stating the international dimension of the research it sought to foster.

The Utopian Studies journal is today widely acknowledged as the forum, par excellence, for utopian studies scholars from all over the world. An examination of its thematic issues allows us to identify the major research trends in the field; however, these issues normally come from the editors’ attempts to establish contemporary utopian fields of study (e.g., “Craftivism,” “Utopia and Education,” “Utopianism in Other Traditions,” “Utopia and Architecture,” “Utopia and Food”—just to mention the topics of the last five thematic issues). In a certain way, they round up the work of pertinent scholars and expand on their themes. The current special issue of Utopian Studies has a discrete ambition.

The special issue is divided into two sections. Section 1 maps the research carried out in the field of utopian studies in four countries on three continents: Australia, Brazil, Poland, and Portugal. It describes their different national research profiles, their distinct ways of group organization, the topics that they have dealt with, the funding they may or may not have, and—even more importantly—their plans for the future. In the year of the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, we pay tribute to the author. More wrote his masterpiece in Latin because he wanted it to circulate in Europe and be understood within a European framework. The publication history of Utopia testifies to this international ambition: The text is the product not only of More’s contact with contemporary accounts of Portuguese intercontinental travels but also of the complicity that More then created with important foreign humanists; this was indeed fundamental to the notability of the founding text of the utopian literary tradition (e.g., Pieter Gillis and Jeroen van Busleyden were Dutch, whereas Guillaume Budé was French, just to mention the authors of the most celebrated paratexts; and Erasmus, whose wit is recognizably present in books I and II of Utopia, was academically active in Paris, Leuven, Cambridge, and Turin, among other places). By mapping the research that is currently being carried out in different countries, giving the relevant contacts for each research group, and by contextualizing the research organization systems of each nation, this special issue aims to offer data that may stimulate the creation of transnational networks in the field of utopian studies and maximize funding opportunities.

But although More resorted to Latin because it was the language of international communication and scholarship of his time, the fate of Utopia was established, right from the beginning, by its translations into different languages: Spanish (in manuscript, 1519–35?; print, 1637), German (book II, 1524), Italian (1548), French (1550), and English (1551).² Section 2 of this special issue focuses on the translation history of Utopia into Brazilian Portuguese, French, Greek, Hungarian, Mandarin, and Polish...