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The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.27.2.0370

2154-9648

Jill Buttery,

Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving

Chloë Houston's The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society traces two main developments in utopian literature from 1516 until its proliferation in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The first is the transition from utopia as philosophical satire to utopia as an imaginative means to achieve social reform. Second is the movement from utopias primarily being written as dialogues to utopias being written as narratives. Houston argues that as writers sought to reach a wider readership they rejected the dialogue form, which prompted a shift from a reliance on the dialogue in the sixteenth century to the adoption of a narrative form in the mid-seventeenth century. Her chronological approach is useful, as the texts are placed in context with the political and social changes of the early modern period in order to trace the developmental changes. Houston draws on the earlier work of Nina Chordas, Forms in Early Modern Utopia: The Ethnography of Perfection (2010). Both authors selected similar texts to explore within the same period, from 1516 to the mid-1660s. However, their treatments vary, as Chordas focuses more on ethnographic representation and Houston focuses on the presentation of philosophical satire and eventually social reform. Both critics demonstrate that although the dialogue form was widely used during the sixteenth century, it devolved into first-person narrative from the mid-seventeenth century on, eventually to become a precursor of the utopia novel.Houston examines a series of utopias in context from 1516 to the 1650s in order to explain how utopia changed from a playful, intellectual mode of philosophical inquiry to a serious attempt at describing and achieving practical social reform. She looks in detail at how utopias aspired to improve the forms of their own societies as part of a changing discourse of human perfectibility. The Renaissance Utopia is a study of texts; both literary and social forms are central to the reading of utopia. The aim is to bring disparate texts into dialogue with one another: importantly, to explore how the utopia text changed from an ironic interrogation of the notion of the ideal society to a tool employed in a fervent attempt to make it real. The development of the utopian form is considered mainly within English literature, except for chapter 3, which discusses Johann Andrea and Tomasso Campanella. The consistent thread throughout is that utopias are read as dialogues, arguing that the utopian literature of this period is characterized by an engagement with dialogue in the wake of More's Utopia (1516). Moreover, Houston argues that the concept of dialogue continued to be central to utopian literature even as it ceased to employ the conventional forms of dialogue and, eventually, utopia itself. The main objective of the study is to highlight that utopian literature of the Renaissance period merits reassessment. Paying attention to sixteenth-century utopias will help us gain an understanding of the explosion of utopianism in the mid-seventeenth century. Houston also demonstrates how the sociopolitical and literary conditions of the preceding period shaped utopian literature in new and distinctive ways. She argues that Renaissance utopia, both travel narrative and dialogue, is rooted in forms of writing that contain multiple layers of meaning. These forms maintain an uncertain relationship with the truth and draw the reader into the process of making sense of the text. This parallels the reader's experience of reading the text and the author's experience within it.The question of whether the changes in utopian forms and content made the utopias of the seventeenth century different from those of the early sixteenth, such as Thomas More's Utopia, is addressed through detailed contextual and chronological reading of the texts. In chapter 1, on More's Utopia, Houston demonstrates the usefulness of the structure of the dialogue form. She examines how it enables the juxtaposition of a series of viewpoints through the presence of multiple voices. This is explored in relation to classical sources of dialogue, mainly Plato's Republic, as well as Lucian's True History. In addition, Houston considers other source texts that explained how best to live, namely, the works of Saint Augustine—Of the City of God against the Pagans and Confessions. Houston demonstrates that More's Utopia establishes the features and qualities that later sixteenth-century utopias would draw on, such as travel narrative, the dialogue form, and the seemingly ideal society, but treats with irony questions that later utopia literature would take seriously. The contrast between More's Utopia and the utopias of the later sixteenth century is explored in chapter 2, where lesser-known texts fill a gap that has previously been overlooked. These are Thomas Nicholl's A pleasant Dialogue between a Lady called Listra and a Pilgrim. Concerning the gouernement and common weale of the great prouince of Crangalor (1579) and Thomas Lupton's Sivquila, Too Good to be True (1580). Houston refers to these two dialogues as Reformation fictions. She demonstrates how the dialogue form's capacity for multiple voices was restricted to develop a polemical stance. Late sixteenth-century utopias became associated with social reform rather than satire and philosophical inquiry, as illustrated by More's Utopia. The later dialogues serve to demonstrate the centrality of religion to literature and life in the period and the ongoing process of consolidation of Protestantism in English society.To explore the decline of dialogue Houston incorporates two non-English texts into her study, which are discussed in chapter 3, on “the decline of dialogue.” This chapter places the reading of English utopia writing in a wider European context and examines Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619) and Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1623). Houston considers these two texts as precursors to later English utopia, and they serve to illuminate how dialogue became less useful in the seventeenth century. This is achieved by demonstrating that utopia became more practically focused and less philosophical and therefore had less use for the conventional structures of the dialogue form. What does emerge is the continued usefulness of some elements of dialogue such as the notion of conversation. This is further explored in chapter 4, with English utopia texts of the mid-seventeenth century, which were in dialogue with each other rather than dialogic in their structure. The travel narrative remained important, and elements of dialogue, such as recorded and indirect speech, were used to illustrate the effectiveness of conversation that communicates information, which Houston demonstrates through a reading of Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627).The texts in chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate that the structure of the dialogue form was entirely absent by the mid-seventeenth century. However, the concept of dialogue presented through conversation as a narrative device remained a feature of utopian literature. Houston discusses texts written from the 1640s onward, including Gabriel Plattes's Macaria (1641), Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666), works by Samuel Hartlib, and Samuel Gott's Nova Solyma (1648). These serve to demonstrate that during the mid-seventeenth-century decades there was a turning away from the usual forms for writing utopia, that is, dialogue and travel narrative. What emerged were two paths. The first was more imaginative, based on travel writing, and eventually became the forerunner of the utopian novel. The second was less imaginary and more practical, as reformers used utopia to promote social reform.This book would be useful for early modern scholars with an interest in utopian studies, travel writing, and the dialogue form. The clear and consistent chronological presentation successfully traces the changes that occurred to forms of representation such as dialogue and travel writing. The inclusion of other European texts adds a further dimension to the study of utopia literature. In particular, the juxtaposition of Protestant and Catholic writers serves to demonstrate that utopia and the dialogue form appealed to both sides of the religious divide in the early modern period.