Three Early Modern Utopias · Thomas More · Utopia / Francis Bacon · New Atlantis / Henry Neville · the Isle of Pines

With the publication of *Utopia* (1516), Thomas More provided a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of *Utopia*.

This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. *New Atlantis* (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. Henry Neville's *The Isle of Pines* (1668), a precursor of Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe*, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period. Bringing together these three New World texts, and situating them in a wider Renaissance context, this edition--which includes letters, maps, and alphabets that accompanied early editions--illustrates the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put.

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