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APPENDIX On Hexter's Account of More's Visit to Antwerp in 1515 In a letter dated from London, 3 September 1516, More tells that he sent a completed copy of the Utopia to Erasmus in Antwerp, "with a prefatory epistle to myfriend Peter'' (Erasmus, Opus Epistolarum, Vol. 2, p. 339). The prefatory epistle begins:''I am almost ashamed, mydear Peter Giles, to send you this little book about the state of Utopia after almost a year when I am sure you looked for it within a month and a half" (39/3­5). From a simple reading of the evidence of the Utopia, where More tells us that he made only one visit to Antwerpduring the recess in the negotiations in the summer of 1515 (47/30­49/16), this would mean that he thought that Giles had every reason to expect that the Utopia would have been written within a month and a half of the end of the visit when they first met each other and had, in their conversations, developed not only the broad outlines but also manyof the details of Raphael's account which More had then offered or agreed to write down in book form. Hexter has collected evidence (Yale ed., Appendix A, pp. 573­76) which points out that if, as More says, he had been away from his family for over four months at the time of his meeting with Giles (49/15­16)—which would put the date around 12 September 1515, since we know that he left England about 12 May (p. 573)—then, because he wrote the work "at leisure" (Erasmus, Epistles, Vol. 3, p. 389), of which he had none after returning to England soon after 21 October (p. 574), we are forced to ask whether he was ever at leisure in the Netherlands between 12 September and 21 October. Hexter goes on to suggest that More's known activities after mid­September were so full that "At this point the question of whether in these conditions More could be said to have 109 110 THE NEW REPUBLIC: A COMMENTARY written the Discourse at leisure seems to be superseded by the question of whether under such circumstances and limitations he could have written it at all" (p. 574). Hexter thinks not, and supposes instead that More in fact made two visits to Giles in Antwerp: the first, following the recess in the negotiations (after 21 July), when he and Giles had the conversations which led to writing the Discourse (p. xxxi), and a second time, around 12 September (which explains More's statement that he was at Giles' when he was four months away from home). At this second visit, Hexter surmises, More took Giles "the nearly complete rough draft of what became the Introduction and Discourse on Utopia" (p. xxxiii), and it was this, polished and completed, which he had every reason to expect''within amonth anda half.'' Hexter's supposition (and he does not present it as anything more, see p. 576, last sentence) depends on judge­ ments about (i) what Erasmus meant by More's "leisure," and (ii) what More could be thought to have done "at leisure" between 12September and 21 Octo­ ber in 1515. There are several points which make me reject Hexter's supposi­ tions for the simpler one­visit reading which accords with the evidence we have from More. First, Hexter himself allows that the first "nearly complete rough draft" which More took to Giles in September (and which needed only six weeks to be polished and copied, p. xxii) would in any case have been writtenin six weeks. If we follow Hexter's proposal, More went first from Bruges to Antwerp soon after 21 July, stayed there on business, met and talked with Giles for, say (?), one week before returning to Bruges by, say (?), 1 August, where, on Hexter's supposition, he must have written the Introduction and Discourse in the remain­ ing six weeks before returning with it, to Giles, in Antwerp by 12 September. In either view then, the work was substantially written in six weeks. The whole question is whether it could have been written "at leisure" in the six weeks after More's visit to Giles in mid­September or, as Hexter would have it, in the six weeks from 1 August to mid­September. Hexter lists three things More is thought to have done after 12 September which make him doubt that he "could have...

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