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UTOPIA AND CIVIC POLITICS IN MID-SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2011

JENNIFER BISHOP
JENNIFER BISHOP*
Affiliation:
Newnham College, Cambridge
*
Newnham College, Cambridge CB3 9DF[email protected]
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Abstract

During the seven years of Edward VI's reign, a variety of ideas about how best to reform the religious, economic, political, and social structures of the English commonwealth were devised, debated, and enacted. London's citizens and governors were increasingly occupied with developing legislative and institutional solutions for pressing social ills such as poverty and vagrancy: the question of how best to govern the commonwealth was not just a philosophical dilemma, but a practical concern. It was within this context that the first English translation of Thomas More's Utopia appeared in London. Published in 1551 by a group of citizens with a keen interest in social reform, the English Utopia may best be described as constituting an engagement with ideas of ‘good government’. This article draws on surviving evidence for the activities and concerns of Utopia's producers, and in particular the sponsor and instigator of the translation, George Tadlowe, in order to demonstrate that this publication represented a timely combination of humanist theory and political practice typical of the civic culture of the Edwardian reformation.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 933 - 953
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Dr Phil Withington for his advice during the preparation of earlier drafts of this article, and for his supervisory guidance during the writing of my M.Phil. dissertation on which this is based. Thanks are also due to the editors of the Historical Journal and to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the text.

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