1515

1515 is the hinge between the historical journey that gave Utopia its setting and the imagined voyage through which the book presents its political argument. In May, Thomas More went to the Low Countries on an embassy; while away, he formed a friendship with Peter Giles in Antwerp. The book turns that meeting-place and the experience of travel into a literary threshold: factual diplomacy gives way to the encounter with Raphael Hythloday, whose reports of distant societies lead to the description of Utopia.

Embassy and political setting

In May 1515, Thomas More, not yet knighted, joined a commission to the Low Countries with Cuthbert Tunstal and others. They were to confer with the ambassadors of Charles V, then Archduke of Austria, about renewing an alliance. More was about thirty-seven and remained away from England for six months. The mission placed him amid the diplomacy of a period when Wolsey, made a cardinal by Leo X in 1515, became Lord Chancellor; from that year until 1523, Wolsey and Henry VIII ruled without calling Parliament.

The embassy’s route supplied the book with the geography of its opening frame. The commissioners met Charles V’s representatives at Bruges, then went to Brussels while the ambassadors sought further instructions. More proceeded to Antwerp, where he met Peter Giles, a municipal secretary and scholar. The introductory account makes the practical business of diplomacy and the pleasure of friendship the credible, ordinary ground from which its fiction can begin.

Composition and publication

The book’s composition straddled 1515 and 1516. Its second part, the description of Utopia, was probably written toward the close of 1515; the first, introductory part followed in early 1516. This order means the imagined commonwealth was conceived before the narrative frame that would introduce it. The frame makes the island’s account seem to emerge from a particular meeting and conversation, although its main subject had likely already taken shape.

Utopia was written in Latin and first printed at Louvain late in 1516, under the editorship of Erasmus, Peter Giles, and other friends of Thomas More in Flanders. More revised it for a new edition printed by Frobenius at Basle in November 1518. It was not printed in England during More’s lifetime: its first English publication came in 1551, in Ralph Robinson’s translation. Gilbert Burnet produced a more literary translation in 1684. These later dates mark the work’s movement beyond the year in which its imagined island was first composed.

From Antwerp encounter to travel narrative

In the book’s fictionalized opening, More returns from mass at St. Mary’s in Antwerp and encounters Peter Giles talking with a weathered stranger. Giles introduces the stranger as Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese traveller and philosopher, learned especially in Greek. The episode echoes the historical friendship made during the embassy, but turns it into the occasion for an extended account of places and political arrangements unknown to the European characters.

Raphael’s authority rests on travel rather than office. He had accompanied Amerigo Vespucci on three of his four voyages and stayed behind with twenty-four others at the farthest place reached on the last voyage. After Vespucci sailed away, the group gradually won the inhabitants’ trust. A local prince supplied their needs and travel provisions, including boats for journeys by water, wagons for land travel, and a guide who could introduce them to other rulers. Their route led from the harsh, sparsely inhabited lands near the equator toward greener regions with towns, trade, and well-governed commonwealths. In this literary arrangement, travel establishes the perspective from which European institutions can be judged against alternatives.

Raphael also describes showing people the magnetic needle, which they had not known before. Their ships had initially been flat-bottomed, with sails woven from reeds and wicker or made of leather; later, he saw vessels with round keels and canvas sails, and sailors skilled in astronomy and navigation. The new instrument widened their seafaring beyond the summer season, but its use also carries a warning: the people trust the loadstone so completely that an apparent advantage may become a source of danger through imprudence. The travel account thus presents knowledge as both a means of exchange and a power whose consequences are not automatically beneficial.

The year’s argumentative frame

The conversation moves from reports of other peoples to the question of whether a learned traveller should serve a king. Peter Giles argues that Raphael’s knowledge could help rulers and the public; Raphael rejects court service as a form of enslavement and values the freedom to live as he chooses. The dispute gives the narrative a political problem before Utopia itself is described: whether counsel can improve power from within, or whether the conditions of court life make such service unacceptable.

The frame then passes through a comic discussion of punishment and poverty. Raphael recalls proposing a different treatment for thieves; a jester’s remarks about beggars and religious orders provoke laughter, though some listeners take the proposal seriously. The exchange gives way to the larger disagreement over property. Raphael argues that measures can only palliate social ills while property remains; More objects that common ownership would weaken incentives to work and threaten order. Raphael answers from experience, saying he lived among the Utopians for five years and would not have left them but to bring knowledge of the new world to Europeans. Their account of Utopia therefore arrives as evidence in an argument, not as a detached description.

The dialogue’s close preserves that tension rather than resolving it. More’s narrator commends the Utopian constitution in general but remains troubled by its customs, religion, warfare, and common ownership without money; he postpones a fuller examination and admits that he cannot agree with everything Raphael has related. The book’s temporal point of origin is therefore also a point of interpretive uncertainty: the imagined society offers a standard for criticizing familiar institutions, while the frame withholds an uncomplicated endorsement of its entire design.