ABSTRACT
Thomas More’s Utopia has always, justifiably, been taken as the origin for the modern literary genre of utopian writing (see Kumar 1991). However, there is another text which can lay claim to having had just as much of a lasting impact upon the utopic impetus within the modern outlook and especially on the social and spatial ordering of modern society, namely Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1974). Just like More’s Utopia, Bensalem, the island described by Bacon, is represented as a lost place discovered by a group of European sailors, who in this instance come across it after they lose their way in the course of travelling from Peru to Japan and China. But whereas Plato’s Republic figured strongly as the model for More’s Utopia, it was the Renaissance interest in the biblical story of Solomon’s Temple that provided the model for Bacon.
