ABSTRACT
The fourth chapter examines how key ideas in Campanella’s City of the Sun also resonate with the Quirós Memorials. Amongst the numerous ideas that exist about the meaning of the City of the Sun is the argument by various historians that it relates to ‘arcana’ or arcane information Campanella claimed he had omitted from his Monarchy of Spain and would deliver personally to the Spanish monarch. Given the evidence in Chapters 1 and 2 that the Memorials of Quirós shared similar ideas to the Monarchy of Spain, this section examines the possibility that the Quirós writings might also aid in disentangling the significance of the City of the Sun. This chapter contextualises the numerous ways that the City of the Sun has been interpreted over the centuries. It then compares the similarities between the societies of Campanella’s idyllic Taprobana and Quirós’s Austrialia del Espíritu Santo. The chapter highlights how it is possible to sustain the idea that the society he described in the City of the Sun is very similar to the culture Quirós imagined would emerge on Terra Australis Incognita. It further examines the similarities between the actual city in the City of the Sun and the New Jerusalem, particularly in the role they were to play at the heart of their imagined societies. Evidence in this chapter supports the interpretation that the utopian ideas in the Quirós Memorials concerning the End Time and Terra Australis Incognita matched not only with Campanella’s Monarchy of Spain but also his City of the Sun.
