“I Would Rather Be Honest Than Wise”

Abstract

Published in the wake of two major communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe, namely, the advent of print and the voyages of discovery, Thomas More's Utopia taps into the authorship conventions and fictional protocols associated with printing and cartographic practices. This study maps out the sociocultural impact of print on historical, geographical and fictional representations of space in Utopia. It also explores the extent to which the book and its parerga function as part of a new economy of writing and reading, rooted in early modern forms of textual legitimation. This new understanding of the printed text pertaining to the publication of Utopia calls for a reexamination of the authorial and epistemological strategies for establishing credibility in close relation to the writing protocols entailed by the early sixteenth-century print culture.