John Skelton, as courtier and cleric, attacks…
1516 CE
John Skelton, as courtier and cleric, attacks religious abuses and absurdities in his play, Magnyfycence in 151.
The one surviving play of the three that he writes, Magnyfycence is one of the best examples of the morality play.
It deals with the same topic as his satires, the evils of ambition; the play's moral, namely "how suddenly worldly wealth doth decay" is a favorite one with him.
Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry describes another piece titled Nigramansir, printed in 1504 by Wynkyn de Worde.
It deals with simony and the love of money in the church; but no copy is known to exist, and some suspicion has been cast on Warton's statement.
Thomas More completes his best known and most controversial work, Utopia, a Christian humanist critique of society in which he attacks the corruptions of power, wealth, and social status.
Erasmus publishes the book in Leuven in 1516, but it will only translated into English and published in his native land in 1551 (long after More's execution), and the 1684 translation will become the most commonly cited.
Writing in Latin, More describes Utopia (Greek pun on 'ou-topos' [no place], 'eu-topos' [good place])—literally, "no place" in Greek—as an imaginary island state based on reason.
In the first of two parts, More contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly, reasonable social arrangements of Utopia and its environs (Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle).
He constructs a dialogue that assails the inequitable social and economic conditions in contemporary Europe, especially war, oppression of the poor, taxation, and unjust laws.
In the second part, the narrator, Raphael Hythloday (whose name alludes both to the healer archangel Raphael, and 'speaker of nonsense', the surname's Greek meaning), describes the ideal community's religion, government, education, economics, wars, laws, and customs.
More’s essay champions the idea of common ownership, a radical idea for this, or any, time.
Utopia's original edition included a symmetrical "Utopian alphabet" omitted by later editions, but which may have been an early attempt at cryptography or precursor of shorthand.
In Utopia, there are no lawyers because of the laws' simplicity and because social gatherings are in public view (encouraging participants to behave well), communal ownership supplants private property, men and women are educated alike, and there is almost complete religious toleration (except for atheists, who are allowed but despised).
More may have used monastic communalism (rather than the biblical communalism in the Acts of the Apostles) as his model, although other concepts such as legalizing euthanasia remain far outside Church doctrine.
Hythlodaeus asserts that a man who refuses to believe in a god or an afterlife could never be trusted, because he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself.
Some take the novel's principal message to be the social need for order and discipline rather than liberty.
Ironically, Hythlodaeus, who believes philosophers should not get involved in politics, addresses More's ultimate conflict between his humanistic beliefs and courtly duties as the King's servant, pointing out that one day those morals will come into conflict with the political reality.
Utopia will give rise to a literary genre, Utopian and dystopian fiction, which features ideal societies or perfect cities, or their opposite.
Early works influenced by Utopia include New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, and Candide by Voltaire.
Although Utopianism combines classical concepts of perfect societies (Plato and Aristotle) with Roman rhetorical finesse (Cicero, Quintilian, epideictic oratory), the Renaissance genre will continue into the Age of Enlightenment and survives in modern science fiction.
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North Europe
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