Introduction: The utopian mode in dialogue -- Copious discourse: utopia and dialogue -- "Godly conversation": The reformation of utopia -- "It is the man who speaks with God who knows more": education and the decline of dialogue in Christianopolis and the city of the sun -- "Private conference" and "public affairs": natural philosophy, dialogue and the ideal society in New Atlantis -- "Counsel and endevors": millennium and reform in the 1640s -- "Instructive discourses": the proliferation and rejection of utopia in the 1640s and beyond
A study of European utopias in context from the early years of Henry VIII's reign to the Restoration, this book assesses the societies projected by utopian literature from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to the political idealism and millenarianism of the mid-seventeenth century. Renaissance Utopia complements recent scholarly work on early modern communities by providing a thorough investigation of the issues informing a way of modeling a very particular community and literary mode-the utopia
