Name: Thomas More's Utopia
Author: Thomas More

Sally Bushell writes in her 2020 study Reading and Mapping Fiction that Utopia is "the earliest example of a literary work to contain an explicit fictional map corresponding to the text", with the anonymous woodcut from the first edition providing "a low oblique view of the island and its capital." 

This image was enhanced for the 1518 edition by Ambrosius Holbein (c.1494–c.1519) who added and reorganized detail so that it could be also interpreted as a skull, thus adding a further layer of meaning to More’s vision. As Bushell observes, the addition of a map – together with examples of the Utopian language and alphabet – reassures ‘the reader about the worth of the work and also its veracity’.

It is used to intentionally ‘blur the boundaries of fact and fiction’ and contributes to the ‘illusion that Utopia is a real place on the edge of the known world’. Bushell also notes that what is omitted is any information about how to find Utopia. It is an enclosed world, free of wider geographical context, and its perfect society remains ultimately inaccessible. 

Ex Carta

 give tangible form to the imagined island commonwealth, combining Renaissance travel imagery with philosophical speculation. Their schematic coasts and harbours translate conceptual satire into coherent geography.

Thomas More’s Utopia was first published in Latin at Louvain in 1516, with the most influential early edition issued by Johann Froben at Basel in 1518, illustrated by Ambrosius Holbein. Cast as a dialogue between More, the Antwerp humanist Peter Giles, and the fictional traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus (usually translated as ‘Hythloday’), it describes an island commonwealth whose social, economic, and political arrangements sharply contrast with those of sixteenth-century Europe. The book’s subtitle can be translated as: ‘A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, on the best state of a commonwealth, and on the new island of Utopia.’ Blending satire, political philosophy, and the conventions of travel writing, 

 quickly became one of the defining works of Renaissance humanism.

The work is sophisticated and complex in its telling, with many layers of humour and irony obscuring More’s pointed criticisms of political, religious, and social life in the sixteenth century. For example, although Hythloday describes the island from the point of view of an intrepid traveller, any early reader familiar with Greek would be alert that his name sounds suspiciously like ‘distributor of nonsense’ (hythlos daion) in that language. Even the name ‘Utopia’ itself is complicated, with a literal meaning of nowhere – οὐ (ou), meaning ‘not’ or ‘no’, and τόπος (topos), ‘place’ – but also the implication of ‘Eutopia’, meaning a ‘good place’. Such puns, double meanings, and scholarly word games abound in the text and frequently undercut its apparent message. The contemporary assumption that the work is a straightforward explication of an ideal society is therefore far too reductive. The word ‘utopia’ itself has long been part of wider discourse, both political and beyond, and is freely used for both idealistic aspirations that should serve as a lodestar to human endeavour, and to rubbish the naivety and impracticability of such notions – a contradiction that reflects the ambiguity of the source material.

Although a work of fantasy, More was basing his treatise on very specific current events in an age of discovery. Writing while in his late thirties, he grew up in a world defined by maps that had changed very little since the time of Ptolemy (c. AD 100–160s/70s), with Jerusalem at their centre and Europe and the Middle East better defined than the more nebulous regions such as Africa and India. However, the world was quickly becoming bigger: Christopher Columbus had made landfall in the Americas in 1492, and in 1505 Amerigo Vespucci published an account of his travels in the region he would give his name to titled 

. Accordingly, in Utopia, More provides Hythloday with Vespucci as his travelling companion during his investigations into the new island. As scholar Richard Serjeantson puts it:

"when Utopia was written it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that travel beyond the confines of the known Ptolemaic world might indeed reveal a civilisation which was indeed superior to the intellectual, social, and political world of Europe."

More combined the imaginative possibilities opened up by these exciting new discoveries with the philosophical tradition established by Plato in his Republic, in which Socrates uses a hypothetical city state to discuss what he considers to be an ideal society. More was also inspired by contemporaneous Free Cities and city states of the Holy Roman Empire and Italy. Utopia was a thought experiment through which More gave himself space to really dig down into how a perfect society would function, in implicit contrast to the compromises and moral failures of his own one. Serjeantson remarks of its legacy:

"Now, of course, we are comfortable with the thought that it is in the nature of Utopia always to be just beyond the edge of the known world. This is one reason why the genre of science fiction is one of Utopia’s many heirs."

This image was enhanced for the 1518 edition by Ambrosius Holbein (c.1494–c.1519) who added and reorganized detail so that it could be also interpreted as a skull, this adding a further layer of meaning to More’s vision. As Sally Bushell observes in 

 (202), the addition of a map – together with examples of the Utopian language and alphabet – reassures ‘the reader about the worth of the work and also its veracity’.

It is used to intentionally ‘blur the boundaries of fact and fiction’ and contributes to the ‘illusion that Utopia is a real place on the edge of the known world’. Bushell also notes that what is omitted is any information about how to find Utopia. It is an enclosed world, free of wider geographical context, and its perfect society remains ultimately inaccessible.