Nowhere in the Middle Ages by Karma Lochrie (review)

This book considers "utopia" and utopian thought as "word, literary genre, and concept" (2), not as a product of sixteenth-century geopolitical consciousness, but rather as a rich and nuanced presence that animates medieval writing across several genres. Citing the creation myth of the island of Utopia, related by Raphael Hythloday in Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Lochrie writes "Utopus-like, scholars of More's Utopia likewise sever his narrative utopia from his historical past, too, creating of it a conceptual and generic enclave alongside that other coeval birth, 'nascent modernity'" (6). Eschewing textual genealogies that look back reflexively (indeed, tautologically) to More's supposedly inaugural Utopia, Lochrie draws upon the work of theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson to expand the definition of utopianism beyond historical periods or literary genres to include texts that voice utopian desires, perspectives, or "intimations" (6). These medieval "utopian experiments" (7) include Macrobius's commentary on The Dream of Scipio, the French and English versions of Cokaygne, Mandeville's Travels, and Piers Plowman. The utopian trajectories she traces in medieval texts—whether attitudinal, affective, or philosophical—generate their own literary histories of creation and consumption that exist alongside the more familiar utopianism of More's text and that may be placed in dialogue with it. In conceptualizing the utopian drives and imaginative projects of world-making these texts mobilize, Lochrie leaves aside apocalyptic "other worlds" of religious, visionary writing that defer or displace utopian hopes to an eschatological future.

"Utopianism, it turns out, does not always lead to Utopia," Lochrie observes (48). Each chapter gestures outward toward different literary traditions, and charts textual encounters across history and form. The utopian texts she reads do not establish a genealogy of premodern utopian thought that leads inevitably to More's Utopia; rather, they "develop their own utopian idioms and geographies, some of which find resonances in More's work, some of which do not" (7). Chapter 1, "Nowhere Earth: Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and Kepler's Somnium," explores the "cosmic utopianism" (17) of Macrobius's fourth-century commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio and Johannes Kepler's seventeenth-century Somnium, sive astronomia lunae ("Dream, or Lunar Astronomy"), which imagines space travel to the moon. In The Dream of Scipio, Scipio's celestial vista of the earth leads to a sense of estrangement from the earth itself and a reassessment of the place of the Roman Empire within it. The dreamer's privileged perspective produces in him shame and wonder, an affective state that serves as "the beginning of utopian possibility" (29). As a speculative fiction, Macrobius's commentary offers a vision of geographical insularity that differs markedly from that of More's Utopia. Kepler's Somnium draws upon The Dream of Scipio's visionary and allegorical modes to imagine earth from a lunar perspective to develop an argument about theoretical science. Together, Lochrie argues, "these two dreams offer exercises in world making, or rather, 'world re-making,' that mobilizes fabulous fictions and scientific knowledge in order to render the globe itself and our relationship to it both new and strange" (19).

Chapter 2, "Somewhere in the Middle Ages: The Land of Cokaygne, Then and Now," focuses on the potent tradition of Cokaygne, an imaginary island that, "like that of More's Utopia, exists somewhere and nowhere in the geographical and ontological uncanny" (52). Lochrie draws on scholars such as Ruth Levitas, Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, and Fredric Jameson to theorize the role of wish-fulfillment within utopian texts while emphasizing how the Cokaygne tradition, despite its spectacular fantasies of plenty, eschews escapism in favor of more knowing (and plural) cultural critiques. Lochrie argues that despite Cokaygne's early and pervasive associations with gastronomic abundance, the "defining principle of Cokaygne is the elimination of need and unmitigated access to pleasure" rather than the "fantasy of consumption" (55). The French Cocagne offers culinary and sumptuary pleasures devoid of a logic of merit and severed from a moral...