Utopian Literature of the Renaissance | Marie Louise Berneri (essay date 1950)
Marie Louise Berneri (essay date 1950)
SOURCE: "Utopias of the Renaissance," in Journey Through Utopia, 1950. Reprint by The Beacon Press, 1951, pp. 52-58.
[In the following excerpt from her critical study of Utopian literature, Berneri argues that "though the Utopias of Thomas More, Campanella and Andreae embody to a great extent the spirit of the Renaissance, they are also a reaction against it. "]
From the Greek ideal commonwealths we now pass to those of the Renaissance. This does not mean that during this gap of fifteen centuries the mind of man had ceased to be interested in building imaginary societies, and a complete survey of Utopian thought should describe its manifestations during the Roman Empire and even more during the following period which is generally, and unjustly, called the Dark Ages. In many legends of that time one finds that the Utopian dream assumes a primitive form as in the early Greek myths.
With the...
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