Friendship portrayed: A new account of Utopia

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 28-47

  Wootton, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54749156701     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1998.45.29     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. See the poem praising Utopia as superior to the Republic which accompanied all the early editions of More's work: Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, C. H. Miller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 19.
2. On the 'modernity' of the Levellers, see David Wootton, 'The Levellers', in Democracy: the Unfinished Journey, ed. John Dunn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 71-89.
3. John Locke, 'Labour', in Political Writings, ed. D. Wootton, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 440-2. For the connection with Utopia see p. 116.
4. But not impossible: on the Dover harbour project of 1584, see David Wootton, 'The Study of Society, 1450-1750', in The History of the Social and Cultural Development of Humanity, vol. V, ed. P. Burke and others, London: Routledge, forthcoming.
5. For example, J. H. Hexter, 'Thomas More: On the Margins of Modernity', Journal of British Studies 1, 1961, pp. 20-37.
6. J. H. Hexter, More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952.
7. Quentin Skinner, 'Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism', in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 123-57.
8. R. S. Sylvester, '"Si Hythlodaeo Credimus": Vision and Revision in More's Utopia' (1968), in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc'hadour, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977, pp. 290-301.
9. On the recent literature, see David Wootton, 'More Foolishness: Utopia after Hexter and Greenblatt', forthcoming in Journal of the History of Ideas.
10. Richard J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993, p. 157.
11. On the adages of 1515 and Utopia, Dominic Baker-Smith, More's Utopia, London: Harper Collins, 1991, pp. 62-4, 66-7, 141-3.
12. The numbering is that of the last edition to appear in Erasmus's lifetime, taken up in all later editions.
13. Joannes Vasaeus, Index rerum et verborum copisissumus ex Des. Erasmi Rotterodami Chiliadibus, Conimbricae, 1549, which must suffice until an index to the Toronto edition is published.
14. Margaret Mann Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus: A Study with Translations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965;
15. an abbreviated paperback appeared as Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of The Adages of Erasmus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
16. Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten van Dorp, 1515, trans. Betty Radice, ed. A. H. T. Levi, rev. edn Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993;
17. The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. N. M. Cheshire and M. J. Heath, ed. Lisa Jardine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
18. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 31, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982; vols. 32, 33, 34, trans. and ed. R. A. B. Mynors, 1989, 1991, 1992. I follow this translation, reproducing the Latin where I vary from it significantly.
19. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 31, pp. 29-30.
20. vol. 31, pp. 14-15. Erasmus returned to the praise of Pythagoras in III.x.1, added in 1536.
21. vol. 31, p. 31. Erasmus stressed that 'Plato did not think everything should be offered equally to old and young, learned and unlearned, stupid and wise, strong and weak, but that distribution should be made to each according to his worth'. The Utopians would have agreed: More, Utopia, p. 143.
22. vol. 31, p. 30.
23. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 230.
24. vol. 32, pp. 229, 230.
25. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 32.
26. vol. 31, pp. 32-50.
27. vol. 31, p. 34.
28. More, Utopia, p. 145.
29. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 50.
30. More, Utopia, p. 145.
31. Utopia, pp. 2, 19, 31n.
32. Utopia, pp. 270-1.
33. Utopia, pp. 27n, 36, 40, 44; also 76, 90, 94.
34. Utopia, p. 272. Erasmus's letter to Froben, which appears in front of Budé's letter in the two Froben editions of 1518 (pp. 5-7) is an introduction as much to More's Progymnasmata as his Utopia.
35. Utopia, p. 13.
36. Erasmus, Complete Works, vol. 31, p. 30n.
37. More, Utopia, p. 253.
38. Hexter, More's Utopia, rev. edn, New York: Harper Torchbook, 1965, pp. 43-8;
39. Skinner, 'Sir Thomas More's Utopia', p. 148.
40. More, Utopia, p. 221.
41. Utopia, p. 19.
42. Utopia, p. 49 (More) and 107 (Hythloday).
43. The call mark is Allen c 36.
44. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 41.
45. vol. 31, p. 34.
46. vol. 31, p. 135.
47. vol. 31, p. 30.
48. George M. Logan, The Meaning of More's Utopia, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 244-5.
49. More, Utopia, pp. 4, 30, 38, 43.
50. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 27-41.
51. See also Lorne Campbell, Margaret Mann Phillips, Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen, J. B. Trapp, 'Quentin Matsys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gillis and Thomas More', Burlington Magazine 120, Nov. 1978, pp. 716-25,
52. and St. Thomas More, Complete Works, vol. 3, pt. 2, ed. C. H. Miller, L. Bradner, C. A. Lynch, R. P. Oliver, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 422. The book needs to be one which jointly involved Erasmus and Giles, which rules out the second (an octavo) and third (a quarto) editions of Utopia. Alan Cromartie suggested to me that it might be Erasmus's New Testament, the best of all gifts, and unquestionably a book about true friendship. But this had appeared relatively long ago (March 1516), and was in any case a folio volume of approximately a thousand pages
53. (Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, p. 185), quite unlike the handsome quarto volume portrayed by Metsys. That volume is too thick to consist only of Utopia, but such a short work would normally have been bound with other pamphlets.
54. Tabella Loquitur: Quanti olim fiterant Pollux et Castor amici,/Erasmum tantos Aegidiumque fero./Morus ab hi dolet esse loco, coniunctus amore/ Tam prope quam quisquam vix queat esse sibi./ Sic desyderio est consultum absentis, ut horum/ Reddat amans animum littera, corpus ego. More, Complete Works, vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 298. On the translation of absentis see the note on p. 423.
55. I owe this point to David Womersley.
56. Allen translates littera as 'letter [?]': Desiderium Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen and others, 12 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906-58, vol. 3, p. 106.
57. Campbell and others (see n. 45 above) and the Yale edition both have 'letter'. Jardine has 'letters', which must be wrong (p. 31 and note). For a poetic usage of the plural meaning 'in words' or 'on paper' see More, Utopia, p. 18. It is theoretically possible that the amans littera was an inscription on the picture frame, now lost. But none of the texts associated with the painting mention any such inscription.
58. Edward J. Surtz, The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy, Education, and Communism in More's Utopia, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957, p. 173, quoting from Erasmus's Apophthegmata (1531) on Lycurgus and the Spartans.
59. On this, see David Wootton, 'Francis Bacon: Your Flexible Friend', in The World of the Favourite, ed. J. H. Elliott and Laurence Brockliss, New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming,
60. and the fine essay by Alan Bray and Michel Rey, 'The Body of the Friend', in English Masculinities, 1660-1800, ed. T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen, London: Addison Wesley Longman, forthcoming.
61. L. J. Mills, One Soul In Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor and Stuart Drama, Bloomington: Principia Press, 1937, p. 80.
62. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 32.
63. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 217-53.
64. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 34.
65. The classic text is Michel de Montaigne's essay Of Friendship': see Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 35-53.
66. The Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 5, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, ed. P. G. Bietenholz, Collected Works, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979, p. 402.
67. More, Utopia, pp. 77-81.
68. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 34, p. 75.
69. More, Utopia, p. 105.
70. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 43.
71. More, Utopia, p. 244.
72. For a discussion of More's political economy see my forthcoming introduction to Thomas More, Utopia, trans. D. Wootton, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
73. More, Utopia, p. 63.