Nowhere Land

Laura Massey catalogues a first edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

From the post...

As a young man More struggled to reconcile secular governance with the demands of Christianity. By his early thirties he was writing histories and epigrams that celebrated royal power but also betrayed “a profound sense of unease with the corruption often associated with kingship” (ODNB). These concerns were given their full expression in Utopia, an imaginative satire written just as he was embarking on a career in the English royal court.

The publication of Utopia is an excellent demonstration of the tightly-knit network of intellectuals and publishers that crossed Europe during the Renaissance. The book was inspired by a 1515 trip to Antwerp, where More visited Erasmus’s friend, the scholar Peter Gilles. Once More had returned to England the three men maintained a correspondence on the text, collaboratively editing and titling it, while Gilles created the Utopian alphabet. In November 1516 the manuscript was entrusted to another friend of Erasmus, the prominent printer Thierry Martin, whose device appears in the colophon (below). In mid-December More wrote to Erasmus, calling the book “ours” and saying that he waited on its completion just as a mother would the return of her son from abroad. The first copies appeared in early January 1517.