Utopia

Abstract

‘Utopia’ is one of the rare literary neologisms of the Renaissance that can be traced to a clear and confirmed source. It was the English humanist Thomas More who created the term 500 years ago to describe an ideal imaginary society in his Latin text De optimo reipublicae deque nova insula Utopia, first published in Leuven in 1516. At a time when European expeditions to the ‘New World’ were bringing back news of peoples, places and politics so different from those of Europe, the discovery of Utopia – an island community whose inhabitants enjoyed a peaceful, plentiful, egalitarian and ordered existence – seemed within the realms of possibility. Juxtaposing a tale of Raphaël Hythloday’s fictio..