Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington: The Oxford Handbook on Thomas More’s Utopia

Ruth Houghton

doi:10.1515/pol-2025-2001

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Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington: The Oxford Handbook on Thomas More’s Utopia

Ruth Houghton

Published/Copyright: April 1, 2025

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From the journal Pólemos Volume 19 Issue 1

Reviewed Publication:

Cathy Shrank Phil Withington The Oxford Handbook on Thomas More’s Utopia ( Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023 ) ISBN: 9780198881018, 816 p, £135.00.

Law and utopianism have a complex and often antagonistic relationship. Thomas More’s Utopia famously has few laws and even fewer lawyers; implying that in a utopian society law would be rather superfluous.^[1] And yet, Utopia is an imagined political society with a governance structure and political institutions.^[2] Throughout the utopian tradition that builds on Utopia, the role of law is often interrogated.^[3] For example, in Herland, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1915, the narrator makes a distinction between criminal courts ‘in our country’ and the more informal trial before the ‘Over Mother’ that banishes Terry from the utopia,^[4] and in his utopia James Burgh offers An Account of the First Settlement, Laws, Form of Government, and Police of the Cessares, A People of South America (1764).^[5] Often rejected within legal scholarship for being too fanciful and whimsical,^[6] utopianism is seeing somewhat of a revival in legal scholarship through ideas such as prefigurative legalities,^[7] and studies on progressive politics.^[8] In light of this revival, this book review engages with Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington’s edited collection on More’s Utopia, and considers how it might speak to the intersections between law and humanities.

The aim of The Oxford Handbook on Thomas More’s Utopia is to interrogate the vernacular translations of Utopia and to analyse its appropriation across the world in the 19th and 20th century. To that end, the Handbook is very diverse, with chapters exploring the use of Utopia in China (Chapters 28) and Japan (Chapter 27), as well as the circulation of Latin editions before it was translated in Hungary in 1910 (Chapter 24) and its use in revolutionary movements in France (Chapter 20) and 20th century Russia (Chapter 23). The volume has 39 substantive chapters, which are divided into four distinct parts. Part One: ‘Origins and Contexts’ considers the multifarious influences on More and the writing of Utopia, including classical learning, Christianity, humanism, and ‘an accelerating process of European expansion and colonization’ (6). Part Two: ‘Translations and Editions, 1524–1799’ explores the vernacular editions of Utopia, and in particular considers the different circumstances that informed new publications of the text. This section also explores the different ways the text is used as part of critiquing specific political realities. Part Three moves onto ‘Translations and Editions after 1800’, and the focus shifts outside of Europe. Chapters in this section interrogate the political and ideological role of translation. Part Four: ‘Beyond Utopia’ is concerned with the appropriation of Utopia across different contexts, mediums, and cultural forms.

Although the edited collection does not claim to be exploring the relationship between law and utopia, in the opening pages of the introduction to the volume, the link between law and Utopia is cemented. Shrank and Withington place emphasis on More’s career and training as a lawyer, noting that it was partly his legal work that set the context for the time he spent in Bruges in 1515 where (it is argued) he wrote Book Two of Utopia. They also note the legal training of Claudius Cantiuncula who translated Utopia into German in 1524 in Basel. Cantiuncula’s edition of Utopia removed Book One and replaced it with a legal preface on the ‘classical notions of equity’ (7). This 1524 edition, then, materially represents the relationship between law and utopia.

Aside from this contextual and mostly biographical relationship between utopias and law, the chapters in the volume demonstrate how utopia is discussed by legal theorists,^[9] and how Utopia was circulated as an example of governmental theory or as a blueprint for reform. Indeed, Thomas Smith explicitly references Utopia in his ‘two treatises on the form, state and improvement of English politics, governance, economy, and society: the Discourse of the Commonwealth and De Republica Anglorum’ (131). Several chapters in the Handbook also explore the relationship between Utopia, utopias and colonialism, and that is an interrelationship that is supported, facilitated and often justified by law. Part one of this book review will highlight how the edited collection can be used to explore these substantive interconnections between utopia and law.

The Handbook’s focus on vernacular translations and the different publications of Utopia engages themes of authenticity, truth and authorship. As such, several chapters in the book engage with themes that are relevant to law and humanities scholarship. Part two of this book review explores the utility of the collection for legal methodologies in the law and humanities. When reading utopias, legal scholars can locate both radical ideas to inspire reform, but also (as this Handbook shows) reflect on methods and the construction of ideas of legal authority.

1 Utopia, Law and Colonialism

For Miguel Angel Ramiro Avilés, Utopia is replete with law. In this edited collection, he argues that More underpins Utopia with the rule of law so as to restrict tyranny (590–591; 594), as well as using laws to govern utopians’ dress, travel and working day (580). In ‘Human Rights and/in Utopia?’ Ramiro Avilés considers how Thomas More’s Utopia ‘contributed to inventing what we know today as human rights’ (579). Drawing on the Enlightenment tradition of utopias, the chapter seeks to show how rights and freedoms are a ‘recurrent theme through the history of utopian thought’ (581). One Enlightenment utopia discussed in the chapter is William Hodgson’s The Commonwealth of Reason (1795) which is not a fictional utopia but rather a manifesto that proffers a constitutional text (587).^[10] This chapter can be read alongside Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Musab Bajaber’s argument in Chapter 33 as both chapters demonstrate the close connection between constitutional legal texts and utopias.^[11] The US Declaration of Independence is understood by Weaver-Hightower and Bajaber as a utopian text with its references to ‘utopian ideals’ such as equality, unalienable rights, liberty and happiness (557). Similarly, they label the US Constitution as utopian for its assertion of a ‘more perfect Union’ (557). These two chapters offer insights into the utopian demands of constitutions (and associated rights), and further highlight the need for these utopian roots to be interrogated within legal scholarship.^[12]

A prominent theme across the collection is the relationship between utopia and colonialism. Jessica S Hower’s chapter on ‘Utopia’s Empire: Thomas More’s Text and the Early British Atlantic World, c1510-1625’, explores the links between early modern colonialism and More’s Utopia. Hower notes the role of Utopia ‘as a means of inspiring colonial, promoting colonial scheming, or delegitimizing colonial pursuits’ (123). Indeed, Gregory Claeys notes that ‘When [Utopia is] overpopulated it sends out colonies, seizing the uncultivated land of indigenous peoples’.^[13] Within legal scholarship, and in particular in international legal scholarship, increasingly attention is being given to the role of fictional utopias and law in projects of colonialism.^[14] The techniques of “place-making” explored in Utopia mirror colonial mechanics in the early modern period.^[15] Hower’s chapter serves as an additional point of reference for that work on law, colonialism and utopianism.

Continuing the theme of colonisation, and reflecting on the modern usages of Utopia, Weaver-Hightower and Bajaber’s chapter discusses two key features of Utopia’s imperialism: isolationism and expansionism. Through an exploration of Star Trek, their chapter ‘Utopia, the Imperial Setter Utopia, and Imperial Settler Science Fiction’ shows how these two features are indicative of settler imperial utopias that have informed both the creation of the United States of America, and contemporary US foreign policy. As a wealth of postcolonial scholarship has shown, law (including international law^[16]) is a key tool in the construction of settler colonies. Rather than dismissing utopia as whimsical, legal scholars must interrogate the (sometimes problematic) intersections between utopianism, specific utopian projects and law.

Largely absent from the edited collection is the relationship between Utopia and feminist utopias. One of the more obvious oversights would be Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s utopia, Herland, which mimics the structure of More’s Utopia. Located in a geographically-isolated area, the narrative – similarly to More’s – follows travellers as they are introduced to different aspects of life in the utopia and the indigenous population are exterminated at the beginning.^[17] This provides an additional intertextual example of how Utopia shapes the genre. The lack of engagement with feminist utopias in the Handbook mirrors similar gaps found in the studies of utopias within law. That said, across legal scholarship, both in constitutional law and international law specifically,^[18] there has been a turn towards reading feminist utopias as a form of feminist theory and feminist praxis. These feminist utopias depict alternative governance models or show how law could be “otherwise”, providing potential inspiration for radical law reform projects.

2 Utopia, Law and Humanities

The focus of the edited collection is on the intertextuality of Utopia. As such, chapters explore its relationship with other texts (with chapters that discuss texts as diverse as Machiavelli’s The Prince (2–3), Greek classics, or Star Trek), its construction as a text (through translations, editing, and publishing processes), as well as the development of its canonical status. In so doing, the volume demonstrates the instability of Utopia as a text as there are multiple versions, edited with different political, social and commercial rationales in play, as well as the more complex and shifting relationship between Utopia and utopia. Chapters in the volume show how editors made decisions on whether to publish Book One and Book Two together, or just to publish one of the Books, they made editorial decisions to remove sections, or to add in additional paratextual materials. This iterative construction of the text allows us to reflect on questions of authenticity and authorship and these are themes that resonate with the study of the development of law and legal authority. In this sense we can read Utopia and utopias not just for their substantive suggestions on how to order the “good” society, as we can also use the intertextuality to inform legal methodologies. This review will now just highlight a few chapters that speak most productively to law and humanities.

One example of the interrelationship between texts is Chloë Houston’s chapter which discusses Utopia alongside Francis Bacon’s Isle of Pines. Houston places these two texts into dialogue to explore how Utopia informed other early modern utopian work. What the chapter highlights is the role of genre in the construction of “utopia”. Houston shows how conventions of travel-writing are utilised by More and Bacon and then how through the paratextual materials (preludes, letters added as appendices) the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred. This constructed ambiguity can raise questions for legal scholarship around ideas of form and the reception of a legal text, and specifically how the form of legal writing plays a role in the construction of its authority.

A prominent theme in the Handbook is an interrogation of the canonical status of Utopia. This is readily explored in Marcus Waithe’s chapter, ‘False Friends (and their uses): Thomas More’s Utopia Among the Victorians’. Waithe uncovers how in Victorian Britain, Utopia was utilised by different political factions, including the Edwardian Garden City movement and socialist reformers such as William Morris, as well as ‘Eton headmasters and paternalist Tories’ (9). Morris’ version of the book constructs Utopia as an explicitly socialist project. As Waithe explains, Morris’ ‘Foreword’ assumed a socialist audience (368). Other political factions were able to find alignment with different aspects of the story, for example ‘[t]he Utopian prohibition on hunting for pleasure and the ban on animal sacrifices appealed to a related strand of late nineteenth-century radicalism’ (371). Crucially, Waithe highlights the potential political ambiguity of Utopia as ‘[b]oth democratic and anti-democratic Victorians found things to like in More’s Utopia: it delivered a vision of communism pleasing to conservatives as well as Radicals […]’ (374). This investigation of its multifarious political, social and cultural usage during the Victorian era works to unpack how Utopia was constructed as a canonical text. Such intersections between the political, social and cultural uses of a text act as a reminder to legal theorists of the plurality of factors that play into the construction of legal authority.

As noted above, The Oxford Handbook on Thomas More’s Utopia is not a book about law or legal scholarship, nor does it seek to explore the relationship between law and utopianism or law and Utopia, rather it sets out to offer a diverse and complex interrogation of the vernacular uses of Thomas More’s story. Nevertheless, in reading across the volume there is generative potential for legal scholars and legal theorists. Utopias can be read for their content, providing ideas for reform or offering critique on the status quo. But reading utopias and reflecting on the specific importance of the intertextual and paratextual (as discussed in this Handbook) raises methodological questions for legal scholars working on law and utopias.

Corresponding author: Dr. Ruth Houghton, Senior Lecturer in Law, Newcastle University Law School, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, E-mail: Ruth.Houghton@newcastle.ac.uk

Published Online: 2025-04-01

Published in Print: 2025-04-28

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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