Histories of the utopian genre tend either to begin with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), or start with Thales and Plato and the classical city, and then turn in short order to More. Both ways effectively accept More’s implicit claim as to his work’s novelty, its break with medieval-clerical language and tradition: the pun in its title, depending on knowledge of Greek, pretends to divide humanist from Scholastic readers, letting only the former in on the joke concerning Utopia’s fictive status. Karma Lochrie allows that Utopia establishes a new literary genre. But she is concerned to show that the three centuries before More were rich in utopian traditions both discursive and generic, and to argue that More was working within and upon them when he composed Utopia. For Lochrie, More’s antimedievalism goes only language deep; otherwise, he should be understood as developing medieval society’s complex discursive legacy concerning other worlds.

She devotes chapters to four otherworldly works, each representing a discursive tradition: Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, with its Stoic cosmologism; the fable of the Land of Cokaygne, associated with Carnivalesque materialism and skepticism; Mandeville’s Travels, animated by a cosmopolitan ethical minimalism; and William Langland’s Piers Plowman, shadowing the ethical and organizing power of craftwork. To establish that these works are part of an alternative-world tradition broader than the strictly utopian, she discusses one or two textual descendants in the latter pages of each chapter. Though she does conclude with a chapter on Utopia itself, her overall emphasis is on the manysidedness of medieval utopianism.

The most original chapters are on Cokaygne and Mandeville. Lochrie argues for the superior cognitive value of the mid-thirteenth-century French poem Le fabliau de Cokagne over the more discussed Middle English Land of Cokaygne (ca. 1330). Le fabliau, some memorable pages show, is a sharper, more questioning, indeed more seriously utopian work than has been recognized. The Middle English poem, extant in a manuscript evidently produced by an Anglo-Norman community in Ireland, retains the utopian questioning, but complicates it to somewhat doubtful ends by combining it with a satire on monasticism (the island of Cokaygne becomes an abbey). Lochrie’s assessment of the effect of the satiric component might be debated; but her reading is based on a philological knowledge and analysis of the manuscript and poem far superior to what one encounters in the better-known accounts of the history of utopia.

Lochrie makes a similar case for the philosophical depth of Mandeville’s book of wonderful sights and lands. Mandeville’s description of Cathayan, Greek Orthodox, and Saracen cultures—religiously minimalist and undogmatic, all of them, though in distinct ways—successfully relativizes and calls into question Western Christian missionary dogmatism. This argument carries conviction, as does Lochrie’s contention that Utopia itself learned from these parts of Mandeville’s book (though her claim that Utopia is backwardly provincial seems to me to overlook Hythlodaeus’s stress on how the Utopians are quick to imitate and take over what they find of value in encounters with other cultures).

Finally, Lochrie’s chapter on Piers Plowman as a work about its own failures of vision, of negative utopianism, offers a patient and penetrating reading of this complex and difficult poem. Although the dream vision was subsequently to figure often in utopian generic tradition (witness Morris), Langland’s importance to More is not primarily formal, but rather ideological. The poem’s staging of the attempted education of Will (of Will as desire or power of resolve, and as Will Langland) into a communal Will, and the eventual passage of Saint Peter’s mediating power to Piers Plowman, with the substitution of a gift of crafts for that of tongues—this peasant re-visioning of the church, Lochrie argues, Langland’s discovery of a work-based communal Christianity, was, in its persistence as an ideology, of major assistance to Utopia’s critique of private property, and to its extension and quasi-secularization of monastic values. This seems obviously right; and though, as Lochrie notes, it has been suggested before, I know of no one who has actually worked out the case as Lochrie has. Lochrie’s book explains, then, far better than those influential critics who hold that More’s achievement in Utopia is to offer a radical critique of radical humanist political discourse, how More felt himself able to imitate The Republic to such devastating effect, exposing it as prepolitical, as taking traditional class society for granted.