Nowhere in the Middle Ages by Karma Lochrie (review)

In Nowhere in the Middle Ages, Karma Lochrie proposes a provocative question: was there such a thing as utopianism before Utopia, the eponymous island created by Thomas More in 1516? For Lochrie, More's work has long been viewed incorrectly as an ex nihilo creation linked tightly to the nascent concerns of the early modern world; thus, identifications of "utopian" literature have been based on their similarity to More's idealized and isolated island commonwealth, involving "…travel to an unknown place, encounter with alternative social, political, economic, and religious structures, and an implicit comparison and/or critique of contemporary society" (16). Moving away from this narrow, Utopia-based definition of a utopia, Lochrie argues, opens the discussion to a wealth of medieval texts that contain aspects of "utopian imagination" and gives a more nuanced past both to the concept and to More's text itself. She stresses that the crux of this book lies in the fact that she ends, rather than begins, by discussing More, thus "productively scrambling the inaugural narrative currently telling utopia's story…" (7). This stylistic choice frames Utopia as one of many possible outcomes of the medieval utopian traditions she identifies in the previous chapters, taking up some narrative threads and breaking with others. In examining medieval utopianism, then, Lochrie is not searching for the "roots" of More's work, but exploring the different forms of utopias that existed in the Middle Ages with the goal of expanding not only our understanding of the period's imaginative life, but also the characteristics by which we define utopian thought.

She achieves this "scrambling" by discussing four pairings of core medieval texts with later, mostly early modern texts. While not necessarily related to one another textually (though some are), she uses these pairings to demonstrate four different flavors of "utopian optics." Lochrie makes it clear that her purpose is not to show consistency or even connection between these models of medieval utopianism, but rather to map out a range of utopian possibilities and hint at their afterlives. This choice privileges thematic cohesion over chronological progression, which might be disorienting for historically-minded readers seeking a more linear narrative. Lochrie's four pairings are: first, Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (early fifth century) with Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634); second, the English and French Cokaygne traditions (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries) with Protestant satires and twentieth-century hobo and African-American songs; third, Mandeville's Travels with Richard Brome's The Antipodes (1636); and finally, William Langland's Piers Plowman (fourteenth century) with William Morris' A Dream of John Ball (1886-7).

The Macrobius-Kepler pairing demonstrates what Lochrie terms a "cosmological utopianism"; that is, texts that use imaginary extraterrestrial travel to provoke reflection. The Dream of Scipio, included in Cicero's De republica and transmitted through Macrobius's Commentary, imagines Scipio Africanus's reaction as he is taken by his grandfather in a dream-vision to the heavens, prompting a realization of the cosmic triviality of the Roman Empire and indeed Earth itself: a "global vision of reduced significance" (31). This framing calls up a host of modern parallels in the reader's mind (Carl Sagan's pale blue dot, or the overview effect experienced by astronauts), but Lochrie productively compares it with Kepler's slightly bizarre dream-within-a-dream text relating how his mother, depicted as a sorceress (a portrayal which got her arrested), calls up a demon who has visited "Levania" (the moon). According to Lochrie, the lunar-centered perspective of Kepler's text is what makes it utopian, despite the lack of explicit political or social critique: it invites readers to see the earth (called "Volva" by the moon's inhabitants) as the alternative "other." If we consider "seeing the world with different eyes" the defining trait of utopianism, Lochrie argues, no there-but-unreachable place of "Utopia" is needed; our world, seen from the moon, can be its own mirror.

In the Cokaygne traditions...