Abstract

The figure of Thomas More and his work Utopia have followed chaotic but often separate fates all along history. More wrote his Utopia in 1515, when he was under forty years of age and, more important, before the first expressions of the Lutheran movement in England. Ten years after the first edition of Utopia, Europe had become a different world, often a much more hostile one, a place in which Thomas More assured he would not have repeated the same adventure. In 1532, when busy writing his great polemical work against William Tyndale, More went as far as thinking that Utopia, like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, might have become subversive and the books needed to be destroyed. He added that he would “helpe to burne...