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Multiple Mores? Multiple Mores?
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Memento Mori: Remembering the Commonality of Death in More’s Early Works Memento Mori: Remembering the Commonality of Death in More’s Early Works
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Commonality in Utopia: Public Versus Private Interests Commonality in Utopia: Public Versus Private Interests
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Commonality in More’s Later Works Commonality in More’s Later Works
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5 ‘Nothing is private anywhere’: Utopia in the Context of More’s Thought
Get accessJoanne Paul is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. Publications include The House of Dudley (Penguin, 2022), Counsel and Command in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Thomas More (Polity, 2016). She is currently working on a biography of Thomas More for Penguin and a new edition of Utopia for Oxford World Classics.
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Published:18 December 2023
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Abstract
This chapter seeks to shed light on the central message of More’s Utopia by examining it within the context of More’s concerns throughout his literary career. It maintains that one of More’s fundamental recurring arguments is the moral priority of what is held in common, which he connects to concepts such as death, pride, and politics in a variety of his works, both from the period before he wrote Utopia and after. With this reading, the reader is able to see the same themes at work in Utopia and form a better understanding of More’s intentions in writing it. In Utopia, More creates a fantastic island that represents the eternal ideals that he sees in operation beneath the worldly ‘stage play’ of pride and socially constructed inequality, not as a prescriptive programme, but as a reminder. Utopia, by this reading, operates like the memento mori of More’s earlier works, and is broadly consistent with the message of his later religious polemics.
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