1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910828129703321

Autore

Lochrie Karma

Titolo

Nowhere in the Middle Ages / / Karma Lochrie

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

0-8122-9285-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (281 p.)

Collana

Middle Ages Series

Classificazione

HH 1135

Disciplina

809/.93372

Soggetti

Utopias in literature

Utopias - History

Utopias - History - To 1500

Literature - History and criticism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction. No Past -- Chapter 1. Nowhere Earth: Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and Kepler's Somnium -- Chapter 2. Somewhere in the Middle Ages: The Land of Cokaygne, Then and Now -- Chapter 3. Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville's Cosmopolitan Utopianism -- Chapter 4. "Something Is Missing": Utopian Failure, Piers Plowman and The Dream of John Ball -- Chapter 5. Reading Forward: More's Utopia Unmoored -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Literary and cultural historians typically cite Thomas More's 1516 Utopia as the source of both a genre and a concept. Karma Lochrie rejects this origin myth of utopianism along with the assumption that people in the Middle Ages were incapable of such thinking. In Nowhere in the Middle Ages, Lochrie reframes the terms of the discussion by revealing how utopian thought was, in fact, "somewhere" in the Middle Ages. In the process, she transforms conventional readings of More's Utopia and challenges the very practice of literary history today. Drawing on a range of contemporary scholarship on utopianism and a broad premodern archive, Lochrie charts variant utopian strains in medieval literature and philosophy that diverge from More's work and at the same time plot uncanny connections with it. Examining works



such as Macrobius's fifth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Mandeville's Travels, and William Langland's Piers Plowman, she finds evidence of a number of utopian drives, including the rejection of European centrality, a desire for more egalitarian politics, and a rethinking of the division between animals and humans. Nowhere in the Middle Ages insists on the relevance and transformative potential of medieval utopias for More's work and positions the sixteenth-century text as one alternative in a broader historical phenomenon of utopian thinking. Tracing medieval utopianisms forward in literary history to reveal their influences on early modern and modern literature and philosophy, Lochrie demonstrates that looking backward, we might extend future horizons of utopian thinking.