ABSTRACT
More’s Utopia (1516) set an example for later writers who criticized the social conventions of their times by designing an ideal society. For the remarkable thing of More’s fiction is that it combined an abstract discussion of a utopian society with hardly veiled political criticism of autocratic rulers, such as the English and French kings in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The independent opinions expressed by More in his various functions – as a member of parliament, a privy councillor to Henry viii, and lord chancellor of England – were bound to bring him into conflict with the king. When he refused to acknowledge Henry viii as the supreme head of the Church, he was charged with treason and beheaded in 1535. More’s intellectual independence and courage already appeared from his social criticism in Utopia. Its combination of a sketch of the ideal society and a critique of contemporary government has remained a characteristic of the genre of utopian fiction and has set it apart from the idyll as well as the satire by combining elements of both.
