The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society by Chloë Houston (review)

In 2016, it will be 500 years since the original publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. In that 500 years, research into utopian studies has developed to such an extent that two large international utopian studies societies have thrived and continue to grow. With The Renaissance Utopia, Chloë Houston makes a significant contribution to this field. Houston firstly reviews utopian literature from 1516 to the 1650s; then examines the utopian mode of literature, the dialogue. The dialogue was the literary form used by Thomas More in Utopia and it continued to be central to utopian literature, even though conventional forms of dialogue ceased to be employed in literature generally. Finally, she demonstrates that the 1640s was a uniquely active period in the history of utopian literature.

Houston contends that Tudor dialogues added to the English utopian mode of discourse in the sixteenth century. To demonstrate this, she examines lesser-known works, such as Thomas Nicholls’s A Pleasant Dialogue between a lady called Listra, and a Pilgrim: Concerning the Gouernement and Commonweale of the great Prouince of Crangalor (1579), and Thomas Lupton’s Sivqila, too Good to be True (1580). Both books use the dialogue literary form. Houston believes that the educational association of the reformation of English morals with the reformation of society more broadly can be seen in these two books, demonstrating that the dialogue was uniquely appropriate for the expression of utopian ideals and an important part of a humanist education. These texts represent a shift in utopian discourse away from More’s irony, satire, and philosophical enquiry to a more social and moral approach.

Although the book is essentially about the English utopian traditions, Houston analyses the decline of the dialogue in the Italian Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun written in Italian in 1602 and first published in Frankfurt in Latin in 1623, and the German Lutheran pastor Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis published in 1619. She claims that the emphasis both Campanella and Andreae placed on social change, more practical aspects of Utopia, particularly scientific knowledge, and the introduction of conversation in the dialogue, made an important method of teaching for the narrator and was meant to be educational for the reader. While Andreae adopts the form of a travel narrative, both incorporated elements of the dialogue that demonstrate its continued association with the utopian mode, without the dialogue form being integral to that mode. While More intimated that humanity could improve itself morally and socially and thus make an ideal society possible, Campanella and Andreae presented this as a serious goal that not only could be but should be achieved.

Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis represented a change in the use of the utopian mode of dialogue. It was not a satire, irony, or philosophical enquiry as More’s Utopia was, nor did it follow the moral and social approach of the Tudor utopians, or even the practical application and educational adaption of Campanella and Andreae; but Bacon brought the institution to the centre of Utopia as a serious means of promoting social change. In seventeenth-century thought, scientific and religious activities generally overlapped and Bacon had a tendency to describe one sphere in terms of another. The purpose of religion in his utopian Bensalem, with its unity and stability, is to support natural philosophy. Conversation is central to the practice and communication of the institutionalisation of natural philosophy. In the house of Salomon, the dialogue between the father and the narrator is one-sided and monological. Conversation becomes the means to communicate information in the New Atlantis but the use of dialogue in the text demonstrates its continuing importance in the utopian mode of literature.

The highlights of the book are the last two chapters, which demonstrate that Utopian thought proliferated in the 1640s particularly with the growth of the millenarianism that focused its attention on the ideal society. The political instability and religious fervour of...