The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia

Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.

1 - More and the Republics of Plato
2 - Hythloday's Books: Utopia, Humanism, and the Republic of Letters
3 - Nec minus salutaris quam festivus: Wit, Style, and the Body in More's Utopia
4 - The Religions of the Utopians: Sin and Salvation in Thomas More's Utopia
5 - 'Nothing is private anywhere': Utopia in the context of More's thought
6 - Utopia and Travel Writing
7 - Utopia's Empire: Thomas More's Text and the Early British Atlantic World, c. 1510-1625
8 - The Urban Context for Utopia: The English Urban System, 1450-1516
9 - Utopia Unbound: The Fabrication of the First Latin Editions, 1516-1519
10 - ad fontes et ad futurum: A Survey of Latin Utopias
11 - From Prototype to Genre: Translations and Imitations of Utopia in Early Modern Germany (1524-1753)
12 - Receiving More: Utopia in Spain and New Spain
13 - Utopia in Sixteenth-Century Italy
14 - Inventing Utopia: The Case of Early Modern France
15 - Utopia in Tudor London: Ralph Robinson's Translations and their Civic, Personal, and Political Contexts
16 - Dialogue, Debate, and Orality in Ralph Robinson's Utopias
17 - 'Het onbekent en wonderlijk Eyland': Frans van Hoogstraten's translation of Utopia (1677)
18 - Utopia and Gilbert Burnet in 1684
19 - From Humanism to Enlightenment: Nicolas Gueudeville and his Translation of Thomas More's Utopia
20 - Thomas Rousseau, Translator of an Enlightened Utopia
21 - False Friends (and their Uses): Thomas More's Utopia Among the Victorians
22 - The Cultural Politics of Translation: Translating Thomas More's Utopia into German in the Late Nineteenth Century
23 - Not Just a Light-Hearted Joke: Russian Moreana from the Age of Karamzin to the Rise of Social Democracy and Lenin's 'Stele of Freedom'
24 - Utopia in Eastern Central Europe: The Hungarian Scene
25 - A Catalan in Search of Humanists: Josep Pin i Soler's Translation of More's Utopia (1912)
26 - The Historical Fallacy: Utopia and the Problem of Fiction in Weimar Germany
27 - Japanese Translations of More's Utopia
28 - The Multiple Lives of Utopia in Modern China
29 - Utopia and Utopian Writing in Arabic
30 - Early Modern Utopian Fiction: Utopia and The Isle of Pines
31 - Of Survival and Living Together: The Eighteenth-Century Utopian Novel
32 - Conversation, Formation, and Forms of Utopia in Fin-de-Siècle Socialist Journals
33 - Utopia, the Imperial Settler Utopia, and Imperial Settler Science Fiction
34 - Away from the Ancestral Home: Utopia and Philosophy in Bloch and Beyond
35 - Human Rights and/in Utopia?
36 - Utopia and Moral Economy
37 - Utopia and Architecture
38 - Mapping Utopia
39 - Contemporary Utopianism: An Island Renaissance

Cathy Shrank took her degrees in Cambridge in the 1990s, and has worked at King's College London, Aberdeen, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, and is a scholarly editor of early modern texts, including Shakespeare's Sonnets. Major grants as PI include the AHRC-funded 'Origins of Early Modern Literature', a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and the AHRC-funded project 'Penniless? Thomas Nashe and Precarity in Historical Perspective'. Phil Withington trained as a social and economic historian at Cambridge in the early 1990s and worked at Aberdeen, Leeds, and Cambridge before joining the Department of History at Sheffield in 2012. He has published extensively on social history of the renaissance, urban culture and urbanization, and the history of intoxicants and intoxication. Major grants as PI include an ESRC mid-career fellowship, the ESRC/AHRC-funded project 'Intoxicants and Early Modernity', and the HERA-funded project 'Intoxicating Spaces'.