Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore: "Domestic Security"

Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore

University of Arkansas

Domestic Economy and Domestic Security:

The English Housewife and her Nation

ABSTRACT

As the changing economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to increased social and physical mobility, the housewife, as a central figure of English domesticity, became an increasingly important figure in Renaissance England. “Her” domestic centrality was made possible by the anxieties and complications accessed through increased travel, mobility, and change. At the same time, these complications led English men and women to create ever stricter definitions to control the role and depiction of the English housewife, in whose image the entire country now had a vested interest. As the English translation of Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman, Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife, and Elizabeth Jocelin’s posthumous The Mother’s Legacie to her Unborne Childe reflect, English society invested enormous amounts of energy in attempting to create a stable, safe identity for itself by crafting a stable, safe identity for the housewife. This figure necessarily influenced the way that Englishwomen and men thought and wrote about a definition of the foreign and a particular, domestic, English national identity.

FULL TEXT

1> As the changing economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to increased social and physical mobility, and vice versa, the ideals of English national identity were increasingly shaped in response to the perceived threats or difference of the foreign. England itself became increasingly conceptualized as a domestic space; the English housewife became a symbol for discussions of the problems and virtues of England historically, politically, and socially. This focus on the idealization of the housewife had uses ranging from the domestication of history to expressions of a need for class control and hierarchy. What all such narratives reflect, though, regardless of intent, is a newly centralized facet of the English national identity, a new definition created in response to the increase of travel and the changes involved therein. As such, it was perhaps natural that the housewife, as a central figure of English domesticity, became an increasingly important figure in Renaissance England; “her” domestic centrality was made possible by the anxieties and complications accessed through increased travel, mobility, and change. At the same time, these complications led English men and women to create ever stricter definitions to control the role and depiction of the English housewife, in whose image the entire country now had a vested interest. This figure, also, then influenced the way that Englishwomen and men thought and wrote about their own culture and history. By juxtaposing the values created through these sorts of domestic exercises, the English people could articulate a definition of the foreign and claim a particular, domestic, English national identity.

2> The formation of this English national identity is here examined through the relationships between three different sorts of texts about housewives: Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman as translated by Richard Hyrde, Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife, and Elizabeth Jocelin’s posthumous The Mother’s Legacie to her Unborne Childe. Vives’s text, of course, does not deal specifically with the idea of the English housewife, but both the original Latin text of the 1520s and the English translation in 1585 mark relatively early examples of the emerging interest in literature explicitly about women’s roles. In the 1585 translation, Hyrde preserves Vives’s prefatory dedication to then-queen Katherine, heading the preface only to identify the author and the dedicatee. No additional English preface is created, and Hyrde’s title page is similarly restrained; there is relatively little to resituate the text as explicitly English, but the project of translation itself, particularly after the Reformation represents complicated intersections of reclamation of certain identities, as will be examined, here. If Vives’s text can only be considered in terms of English identity specifically insofar as its patronage and translation make it “English,” Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife is more clearly and consciously a product of nationalism. “English” is, indeed, the largest word on the title page, emphasizing the particular nationality considered within the pages of Markham’s text. Further, the title page promises that this text is “[a] worke very profitable and necessarie, gathered for the generall good of this kingdome” (Markham 1). From the earliest introduction to the text, Markham privileges the instruction of the English housewife as integral to the good of the kingdom at large. Though less explicitly invested in national identity, Elizabeth Jocelin’s text reveals an interest in a different sort of instruction, one which may be targeted, like Vives’s treatise and Markham’s huswifery book, at education, but which also ensures a place for the housewife herself in history as author rather than subject.  Thus, the three texts together trace an evolution of discussions of the housewife, as her role in, and contributions to, society become ever more centralized and acknowledged.

3> Further, these three texts mark an increasing individualization of the housewife, from Vives’s Christian woman, who could be maid, wife, or widow of any European nation, to Markham’s more specific English housewife, to Jocelin’s own personal voice. By very virtue of the publication of her text, though, Jocelin becomes simultaneously an individual in history and a representative of a larger group. As Vives speaks to women, Jocelin is cast as speaking for women, though the Approbation both justifies the publication of the text by implying that she is exceptional and, in preserving her voice, makes her exceptional. Nonetheless, the very fact that her advice is considered sound and worthy of national consideration reflects the increasing investment of English identity in the nation’s housewives. This investment was partly influenced by the gender politics of Elizabethan England; as Louis Adrian Montrose’s seminal essay outlines, the inviolable body of the queen was inextricably bound to the inviolable space of England (“Subject” 315), and Elizabeth used her gender to build upon the established political imagery of body and country. On the one hand, Elizabeth’s use of gender shores personal political power; as Montrose outlines in that essay, “Elizabeth perpetuates her maidenhood in a cult of virginity; transfers her wifely duties from the household to the state; and invests her maternity in her political rather than in her natural body” (Montrose “Subject” 310). However, the terms which Elizabeth used were both determined by and available to the subjects she governed, and “her subjects might rework those terms to serve their turns.” (Montrose “Subject” 310). Thus, the terms which Elizabeth uses to secure her space can also become a way of securing English housewives within their domestic spaces; as Jocelin’s use indicates, though, those terms may also be a way to codify identity and to preserve one’s voice.

4> Markham’s text, an example of both impositions and preservations, is distinctive partly as an example of the particularly English genre of the cookbook.  By Markam’s 1615 publication, the genre was well-established; Wendy Wall traces some of the history of the cookbook as a distinct genre, noting that “[h]ousewifery, first published as a subset of knowledge in sixteenth-century husbandry books, broke off as a separate discourse in the 1570s when English cookbooks appeared in bookstalls” (333). This genre, she notes, was distinct from its European counterpart in terms of the intended audience; cookbooks, elsewhere, were designed for professional men–chefs. Cookbooks, in England, were designed instead for domestic women–huswifes. Not least significant for the discussion here is the planned journey of the book. The cookbook elsewhere was a product of men for men, which moved from the workplace of the printers’ shop to the workplace of the kitchen. The cookbook in England was instead a product for an audience of consumer-producers, a product brought into the home to govern production in the home. The cookbook was then a kind of foreign invader of the domestic space at the same time that it shored up ideas about that space. Wall addresses the product of this generic difference when she argues that “[a]s the earliest published domestic advice manuals and cookbooks in England shaped conceptions of domesticity, they made readers self-conscious about the meaning of daily life” (333). 

5> There were, of course, other invaders of the home making the English particularly self-conscious of domestic meaning and its making in the 16^th century. Though the argument of this essay focuses particularly on the economic formation of nationalism in response to the foreign, the political and religious shifts of the time were equally important contributors. When Kim F. Hall, for example, argues that “[t]he cookbook played a relatively unheralded role in the formation of European nationalism,” her argument is not only economic, but also political and even specifically geographic (170). Hall herself outlines the intersection thus:

“in making ‘preserves and conserves,’ seventeenth-century women participated in a growing movement from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic economy, and made the English home an important part of [...] the modern world system. While it may look odd to read both nationalism and a developing world system in the same cultural enterprise, in this case it seems precisely the tension between a changing world economy and attempts to define the boundaries of individual national identities that produces such ambivalent (and often contradictory) notions of the foreign and the domestic in English texts.” (Hall 169)

6> The identity of the English household was formed by the English housewife at its center, and this household formed in new patterns, with new importance, as the major concerns of the country itself shifted, in some ways, from domestic concerns to international–or as international concerns began to necessarily impact the domestic. As England became an increasingly colonial player in terms of trade, politics, and territory, her people also become more invested in identifying what set them apart. Nationalism simultaneously became and resulted from the drive to define Englishness, both in opposition to, and as something that could be taken, “abroad.” Hall notes, to this point, that “the shaping of the English woman’s role in the household was necessary, not only for maintaining domestic order, but for the absorption of the foreign necessitated by colonialism” (170). England and her housewives defined each other in acts of mutual and self-protection.

7> The use of the feminine pronoun for the state, above, is intentional and intentionally reflects a significant proportion of the discourse of the day. Speaking about the later period of the Civil War, Christopher Orchard outlines the common use of the figure of the female body as the disordered body politic, by both the opposing factions, as “a subtle consensual agreement that inscribed the female body as a passive subject that followed prescriptive gender codes of behavior” (Orchard 10). The agreement is significant as a reflection that “the ideological bifurcation that had divided citizens along religious, political, and class lines did not preclude both Royalist and Parliamentarian writers from employing the same analogy, that of the female body, to describe political crisis.” (Orchard 10) I would extend the argument backwards to acknowledge that this image is available to the Englishmen of the Civil War because it has already been established in the preceding decades as the dominant figure of English national identity. In the face of imminent civil war, the well-ordered housewife instead becomes an unordered hussy as the civil order breaks down, emphasizing the connection between the English domestic order and the English people’s self-definition.

8> The preeminence of the housewife and her domain–as well as her later, implicit culpability in the civil disorder of the mid-century–resulted from her place at the center of the home and the home’s place at the center of the state. Wall summarizes that “[a]s the ‘first society” and ‘seminary,’ the early modern family bore the tremendous burden of inculcating citizenship in a patriarchal and hierarchical world by structuring the proper dependencies that founded church, state, and body politic.” (331). Colonialism and protocapitalism then go hand in hand in defining many of the major changes to these structures of the state and her people; Wall observes the impact of these changes in the figure of the housewife as represented in huswifery guides, as well, noting that as they “[r]espond [...] to widespread economic changes ushered in by the emergence of protocapitalism, these guides interpret housewifery in different ways: its destructive potential is circumscribed as a game, its economic value becomes the sign of national character” (335). The “proto” element of this particular capitalism is also essential to the huswife’s place, because the economic nature of the period meant that “[t]he household was, after all, the primary unit of production as well as consumption in the period” (Wall 333). The household produced goods and citizens; it was also the site of use of the colonial products that were made possible by the export of citizens and of “Englishness.”

9> Part of the relationship between England and her housewives was the domestication of the space within which they both existed, particularly as idealized by the English themselves. This space was contained, defined, and protected. Mary Thomas Crane points out that the term “huswife” is used mostly by male writers (212).  She associates use of the term with “anxiety, first over working-class women’s wage-earning potential within the home (with fears of a concomitant sexual independence) and, later, anxiety over upper-class women’s increasing idleness (with fears of concomitant sexual freedom) as they were confined to a domestic sphere where servants did most of the work” (Crane 212). The anxiety of sexual freedom as connected to proscribed social roles mirrors the elision of “huswife” and “hussy;” the terms used to describe women are unstable because the roles ascribed to them are too bound to the anxieties that destabilize those roles, leading to “attempt[s] to separate huswives from hussies by confining women within the space of the home” (Crane 216).  In Markham’s text, especially, there is a decided emphasis on the physical limitations of the space controlled by the housewife. Whereas “the perfect husbandman[‘s] [...] office and employments are ever for the most part abroad, or removed from the house [...] our English housewife [...] hath her most general employments within the house” (Markham 5). Vives similarly limits the movements of women, though he clarifies that “I say not this becau[se] I would have women continually sh[ut] up and kept in, but because I wold ha[ve] them go seldome abroad, and be little [a]mong men” (280). The limitations placed on the movements of women are not about movement itself but instead about the risk of contamination for the domestic space.  Movement “abroad,” for both Vives and Markham, implies a scope which necessitates encounters with the foreign and the unfamiliar. The space of the domestic, in contrast, does not necessarily have to be completely isolated, but ought to be restricted to interactions with familiar–that is, the housewife ought to operate within a particular, demarcated sphere of influence.

10> However, the relationship between the housewife and her space was much more complex than one of simple confinement; woman and space, like woman and nation, defined one another. When Markham later discusses the making of malt, he clarifies that “[t]his office or place belongeth particularly to the housewife [...] it is properly the work and care of the woman, for it is a house work, and done altogether within doors, where generally lieth her charge” (180). Even as the domestic space limits the housewife, it is also through that space that the housewife exerts control; this space is her responsibility and within her power. Within the household, the housewife is assigned a space and influence that are definably hers. In this particular instance, that control may seem to extend over only a relatively minor element of English life. In fact, though, these minor features added up to include almost the sum of English domestic product; malt, bread, herbs, physics, and cloth are all among the several products which Markham expects the English housewife either to produce or to have produced with assistance from other women within her local markets. Lena Cowen Orlin’s list of likely reasons for men’s much more rapid rate of remarriage in the period reflects the emphasis on women’s productivity in the period; she links men’s quick remarriages to “how dependent they were upon their partners for running their households, rearing children, supervising servants, and contributing to family incomes” (Orlin 164) In a very real sense, the economy of England depended on the domestic spaces of housewives.

11> Further, in addition to the influence that might spread from the products of these physical spaces, the social space affected by the English housewife was quite wide. Just as many products took root in the home economies of English housewives, so, too, did English citizens. Though on the face of it, such a claim may seem so obvious as to be of little value, the increasing literature about the role of the English housewife reflects a clear concern with the influence the housewife exerted beyond her sphere. Surely her influence on her children was “natural” in contemporary thought, but that influence then meant that, insofar as she shaped its citizens, the housewife shaped England as a whole. Thus, the housewife became conceptualized not only as a symbol of national identity, but as a maker, an idea which could cause more anxiety in the deeply patriarchal English social structure; Crane describes the conflict as centered on “anxiety about the role of women [...] around the unstable boundaries between their potential as ‘producers’ [...] and a literally ‘conservative’ sense [...] of their role as caretakers and preservers [...]” (212). Markham’s work makes this especially clear, as each section of his text begins with a discussion of the wider implications and consequences of the housewife’s knowledge and practices.  The proper education of the English housewife is important, Markham claims, because “from the general example of her virtues, and the most approved skill of her knowledges, those of her family may both learn to serve God, and sustain man in that godly and profitable sort which is required of every true Christian” (5). Though Markham does not ever cast the role of the housewife as one of explicit instruction or education, her example and her creation of a sound domestic space are central to the proper formation of those in her charge.

12> Vives engages with this influence of the wife by first discussing her ability to shape the very specific space of her own household, a space where the propriety of her influence was accepted and, largely, uncontested. Discussing concord within the house, Vives tells the wife that “a great part of this matter resteth in thy hand [...] to have thy husband pleasaunt and loving to thee, and to lead thy life wealthfully: or else [...] to have him froward and crabbed, and to ordain for thy self grievous torment” (183). Though Vives largely casts the surest path to marital contentment as one of submission of the wife’s part, he nonetheless casts this as her choice – she can control the space within which she lives. This is more explicit in Vives’s promise that “if thou by vertuous living and buxumnes, gyve him cause to love thee, thou shalt be mystres in a merry house” (182). Just as Markham allows that which is in the house to be a part of the housewife’s “charge,” so Vives emphasizes the housewife’s leading role in the domestic space. If she correctly forms her household, she can naturally rule over that successful space as its appropriate mistress. Vives then begins to connect this household space more explicitly with the larger social order. For example, Vives’s list of rules from “Pithagoras’ discipline” ends that “sedition [should be put] out of the Citie, and discord out of the house” (231). The housewife’s successful performance of her domestic duty is a fulfillment of the natural order, and each level of that order relates to the next. As Valerie Traub, M. Lindsey Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan point out, this is the natural result of the image of the ruler as parent, which meant “the parent was also given the rights and responsibilities of a ruler. In order for the subject to enact the monarch’s will, he or she required a measure of authority in his or her own right” (3). The natural result was that “the political status of the family, while reinforcing the subordination of the wife, nevertheless offers women a public role and a proximity to power” (Traub, Kaplan, and Callaghan 3). The housewife has power over her family as an image of the parent-ruler. As such, harmony does not just result from the elimination of discord and sedition, but depends on the elimination of discord at the domestic level which will naturally result in the elimination of sedition on the civic level.

13> This sentiment is echoed when Jocelin explains the effect she hopes to achieve through her text, though she claims to write to an audience of only one.

“Againe, I may perhaps be wondred at for writing in this kinde, considering there are so many excellent books, whose least note is worth all my meditations. I confesse it, and thus excuse my selfe. I write not to the world, but to mine own childe, who it may be, will more profit by a few weake instructions comming from a dead mother (who cannot every day praise or reprove it as it deserves) then by farre better from much more learned.” (Jocelin 10-11)

14> Though Jocelin’s focus is only her own offspring, she nonetheless feels compelled to enter her voice into record in order to control her particular contribution to the social order. Further, Jocelin’s text here affirms the unique nature of the voice of the housewife; she asserts that, in the role of mother, the housewife’s words have a particular power to shape those within her household. In this shaping, then, the housewife necessarily contributes to the kingdom at large, shaping the space of England through the shape of her own domestic space. The role of the good housewife, Jocelin’s text implies, is amending the country’s ills from within the domestic space. This interest in the wider world is more explicitly echoed when Jocelin casts her concerns for her child in terms of the larger issues of England, as when she warns that “our Kingdome hath of late afforded more examples of those who have been slain by their friends in a drunken quarrell, than of those that have fallen by the enemies sword” (Jocelin 72). Through proper instruction of her own child, though, Jocelin hopes to contribute to the solution to this discord. The housewife, herself a domestic figure, becomes an agent in keeping England free of violence and vice within its borders, preserving the national domestic space through the proper ordering of her private domestic space.

15> The acknowledgement of these influences of the housewife was intimately bound up with anxieties about her role and about her security. Because the idea of the housewife belonged so completely to the domestic, anxieties about her role often took the form of discussions about travel and foreignness. Foreignness here needs special attention, as the word, when considered in juxtaposition with the ideal of the English housewife, could include not only ideas of foreign countries and practices, but also ideas of practices foreign to nature, or of social settings, such as the court or the city market, which were foreign to the specific domestic space envisioned by many Englishwomen and men as the proper provenance of this housewife. Even as rules governing movement were created and encoded through huswifery texts and conduct texts, the facts of the changing economy meant that women’s roles were shifting and involved both more travel and an increased level of consumerism. More, and more diverse, goods were being brought into the home–Hall’s sugar and Wall’s cookbooks are two immediate examples–and the English household was, thus, increasingly less self-sufficient, mirroring changes in the national economy. This then inspired fears about foreign influences, both as “unnatural” and as potentially damaging to the English economy and English national identity. While such anxiety partially limited the scope of the housewife, both Elizabeth’s use in her iconography and Jocelin’s use in her text indicate the ways that opposition and othering could be used to shore up ideas of particularly English feminine identities.

16> The anxiety about new products, new movements, and new economies was particularly connected to the English housewife because any concern with consumption and economy necessarily created concerns about the domestic space of England. Though Michelle M. Dowd focuses her discussion of these concerns on a consideration of the Dekker and Webster play Westward Ho!, she makes several important points about the connection between “consumer power and illicit sexuality” (230). As Dowd argues, “[t]he same economic changes that made London the ‘national lodestone’ also had a dramatic impact on urban housewives and their connections to the market” (225). Where these housewives might previously have largely taken their own domestically produced goods to market and collaborated with other housewives to produce or barter for other domestically produced goods, many products were now moved across counties or even countries, and, though Dowd focuses on urban housewives, these changes were occurring across the country. As Dowd points out, the shifting market then naturally led to a greater reliance on “goods produced outside the home” (225). This, then, necessitated a certain amount of movement on the part of the good English housewife, as well as an addition to her roles: part of the primary role of these housewives was now consuming, rather than producing. This consumption not only changed the established economy, then, but also changed the definitions and delineations of the housewife. Travel, particularly as it altered economy, threatened the domestic; even within the accepted spaces of England, the housewife’s travel threatened her family’s domestic space by necessitating an introduction of the foreign and the unfamiliar.

17> Vives warns his reader quite explicitly against the evils of consumerism at several places throughout his text, as when he admonishes that wives must “beware thou fall not into such a wicked minde, to will him for lucre of monye to occup anye unhonest craftes, or to do any unhappy deeds, that though mayest live more delicatelye, or more wealthy, or go more gayly and gorgiouslly arrayed, or dwell in more goodly housing” (211). Though here the specific warning is against allowing consumptive desires to lead to sinful acts, the very connection between the two implies a very particular view of consumerism. The desire for better goods is an evil which is “wicked” and unnatural, and thus leads to wicked and unnatural deeds. Further, these consumer desires are here essentially domestic. Though a desire for a “wealthier” lifestyle might imply class movement, the basic focus is on improvements to house or person – to those areas which lie with the wife’s sphere of influence. A desire to change the quality of these domestic goods implies a discontent which disorders the familiar domestic space. In contrast, a properly ordered domestic space is one where the wife is satisfied with her social space and so contents herself with those goods most precisely appropriate to her “place.”

18> Markham quite explicitly endorses this idea of domestic space suiting social place when he discusses the necessity of the housewife conforming to the estate of her husband.  Markham argues that “it is meet that our English housewife be a woman of great modesty and temperance as well inwardly as outwardly” (Markham 7). Modesty speaks to a lack of ambition, while temperance implies a balance of resources and expenditures, which Markham explicates when he explains that:

“her apparel and diet [...] she shall proportion according to the competency of her husband’s estate and calling, making her circle rather strait than large, for it is a rule if we extend to the uttermost we take away increase, if we go beyond we enter into consumption, but if we preserve any part, we build strong forts against the adversities of fortune, provided that such preservation be honest and conscionable; for as lavish prodigality is brutish, so miserable covetousness is hellish.” (Markham 7)

19> Building on Markham’s earlier claims about the space of the housewife, these prescriptions more clearly relate that space to a particular social sphere. These prescriptions are not limited to warning the wife simply against overeager consumerism; Markham also points to a need for a particular kind of consumption as appropriate to the housewife’s class and resources. She must not consume over eagerly or too widely, but neither should she limit herself in any way inappropriate to her station. The boundaries of her desires should be enlarged or shrunk exactly according to her social status. 

20> Markham continues his discussion of the appropriate consumption of the English housewife through his discussion of her apparel and diet in more specific terms, and these terms tend to be more specifically limiting than liberating. He claims that her diet should “be rather to satisfy nature than [...] revive new appetites” (Markham 8), focusing on the need for the housewife to act according to natural orders and desires. More precisely, he says that the diet of the house ought to “be esteemed rather for the familiar acquaintance she has with it, than for the strangeness and rarity it bringeth from other countries” (Markham 8).  Not only, then, should the diet of, and provided by, the English housewife accord to nature, it ought specifically to accord to English nature. In much the same way that Markham or Vives would limit the wife’s travel to those areas with which she is already familiar, so they would limit her experiences to the same, thus, again, preserve the domestic space from the contamination of the foreign. “Strangeness” is, in Markham’s text, suspect by nature, and so the housewife should most naturally avoid its influence.

21> One other distinct space of anxiety that stemmed from these fears of consumerism, consumption, and foreign influence was fashion, where concerns about both nature and nation guided much of the dialogue. Just as Markham would have the English housewife’s dress “as far from the vanity of new and fantastic fashions, as near to the comely imitations of modest matrons” (Markham 7-8), Jocelin warns her child and her reader about the foolishness of those who “deforme and transforme themselves by these new fangled fashions” (Jocelin 32). The emphasis on “new” here reflects the ways in which the threatening foreign might be cast as any sort of unfamiliar, whether because the object was not English, not natural, or not traditional. Jocelin, though, also links this idea of the “new” to the “unnatural,” saying that it is “a monstrous thing to see a man, whom God hath created of an excellent forme, each part answering the due proportion of another [...] by a fantasticall habit [...] make himselfe so ugly, that one cannot finde amongst all Gods creatures any thing like him” (Jocelin 31). This concern with attire reflects England’s aversion to foreign influence, which could creep in sinisterly through foreign fashions and product, but the concern with fashion was not just that it could corrupt a person’s English identity, but that it could also corrupt one’s natural and Christian identity.

22> Though these prescriptions regarding fashion, diet, and ordering of the house all reveal a very particular preoccupation with the established order, the English housewife was also subject to the more traditional paranoia of the Renaissance man. The most serious transgressions against nature are addressed when the concerns about consumerism give way to more explicit fears about sexual misbehavior. Unnatural consumer behavior may result from an exposure to the foreign and a break from natural Englishness, but sexual transgression necessitates a break into unnatural behavior which is more explicitly damaging to country and society. Vives, in particular, draws again and again on the idea of nature as a base for his arguments, and this language is strongest in his condemnation of adultery. Vives does not only condemn adultery in women, though the focus of his text necessitates a certain imbalance in his discussion of this “unnatural” practice. Though Vives counsels the good wife to remain calm in her remonstrations of husband made ill through relations with a concubine (Vives [226]), his discussion of the event still clearly casts concubines as foreign invaders bringing disease, through the husband, into the domestic space. However, in the instance of male adultery, the housewife had the power, through careful handling, to maintain the domestic order of things, by gently exhorting her husband to better action and then by submitting to his will.

23> The consequences of female adultery imply that this act is more severely unnatural and so more essentially foreign to the proper housewife. Not incidentally, the sections where Vives discusses adultery by a wife are also where the strongest identification amongst housewife, household, and country occur. In discussing the unnatural behavior of the female adulterer, Vives asks, “What greater offence can they do: or what greater wickedness can they infect them selves withal, that destroy their countrey, and perish al lawes and justice, and murther their fathers and mothers, and finally defile and marre all thinges both spirituall and temporal?” (Vives 187). The destruction of the domestic space is quite explicitly the destruction of all larger social orders as well, spreading out of the family to encompass entire nations. In return, according to Vives’s depiction of the natural order, all of those social spheres will revenge themselves upon the wife who commits adultery. Closely mirroring his list of the offended orders, Vives describes that “thy countrey folkes, all rightes and lawes, thy countrey it selfe, thy parentes, all thy kinfolke, and thine husband him selfe shall condemne and punish thee” (187-188). While concord in the house is implicitly connected to the end of sedition in the city earlier in Vives’s text, here Vives clearly shows the deeply unnatural behavior of adultery as leading to ever greater and more unnatural disruptions–which then must turn on the adulterer to restore any semblance of balance. The destruction of the marital bond destroys the domestic space of the housewife. Thus, insofar as that domestic space creates all others, its destruction must lead to a reverberation through all social spheres touching the housewife’s own.

24> Vives, Markham, and Jocelin all assume the importance of keeping the housewife from transgressions and reflect the currents of thought that linked transgression to contamination from “foreign” influences. These concerns were important, though, specifically because of the ways that the ideal housewife ought to reflect English identity. Through her proper preservation and proper ordering of the domestic space, the housewife could become the perfect symbol of England. She was, as an ideal, paradoxically self-sufficient, self-contained, and also subjugated to her husband – a perfect locus of control, who was somehow conceived of as both totally self-controlled and totally controlled by someone else – specifically, by her husband. As Christopher D. Gabbard surmises, in England, “patriarchalism manifested itself both on the political and on the household levels. Depending on the signs and symbols of monarchy for legitimizing the male’s household rule, domestic patriarchalism became entrenched as England’s governing gender ideology” (88). However, an important element of this manifestation of patriarchalism in England was also the extent to which the monarchy depended on the “signs and symbols” of male household rule to legitimize the ruling ideology. While Elizabeth I’s rule complicated this structure to some extent, Montrose emphasizes the ways that the power of the royal cult rested on “virginal, erotic, and maternal aspects of the Elizabethan feminine [...] appropriate[d] from the domestic domain [...]” (Montrose “Shaping” 64). Further, more poetic, less practical texts than those discussed here, often dedicated to Elizabeth, came back time and again to the idea that “the woman who has the prerogative of a goddess, who is authorized to be out of place, can best justify her authority by putting other women in their places” (Montrose “Shaping 76”); through this logic, “[t]he royal exception could prove the patriarchal rule in society at large” (Montrose “Shaping” 80). Thus the power of one royal woman emphasized the importance of other women staying in their place; subordination of women becomes ever more central to social stability. Whenever England was represented as a domestic space, the housewife became an important anchor for that space, and so the stability of her role influenced, conceptually, the stability of the state.

25> Vives particularly tends to speak of the ideal housewife in terms related to the ideal state, a connection made more significant by the patronage of his text by Henry VIII. Speaking of the role of the wife, Vives writes that “[n]ature sheweth, that the males duety is to succour and defend, and the females to followe and to waite uppon the male, and to creepe under his ayde, and obey him, that shee may live the better” (Vives 204). The wife is, of course, the subject, who must let herself be governed by her husband’s reason; this is quite specifically the natural order of things. This is, then, related to the natural social order, when Vives directs the wife to “[l]et the aucthoritie and rule bee reserved unto thine husbande: and bee thou an example to all thine house, what soveraignety they owe unto him” (Vives 206-207).  Through the proper enactment of her role, the housewife reinforces patriarchalism – an exact counter to the sort of extensive damage which results in these texts from any disorder on the part of the housewife. Through her support of her husband, sovereignty is enforced in the domestic space; her influence then enforces sovereignty on each ascendant level of the social order.  

26> This stability also functions symbolically to reinforce the domestic space and the domestic economy of England. Markham provides the clearest and most explicit example of this in his discussion of the English housewife’s role in making malt. This practice is first linked to the space of the housewife, and so reinforces her domesticity, the definitions of her identity, and her authority within her assigned space. The making of malt, in Markham, is a locus for the intersection of both the housewife’s power and for control of her power. Moving from that relationship to space, then, the making of malt also becomes an action wherein the housewife proves her ability to order her household, provides for the growth of that household, and reaches beyond the household to order the world beyond. Markham dictates that

“It is most requisite and fit that our housewife be experienced and well practiced in the well making of malt, both for the necessary and continual use therof, as also for the general profit which accrueth and ariseth to the husband, housewife, and the whole family: for as from it is made the drink, by which the household is nourished and sustained, so to the fruitful husband [...] it is an excellent merchandise, and a commodity of so great trade, that not alone especial towns and counties are maintained thereby, but also the whole kingdom, and divers others of our neighboring nations.” (Markham 180)

27> The housewife must be expert and practiced in the areas pertaining to her domestic space. Through her expert management, she can guarantee the success and stability of her house. Not only, then, does her influence within her house determine the behavior of those within the household – children, husband, and servants – but her influence can also actually affect the economy of the country. Thus, in stabilizing her local or national economy, the housewife actively encourages the kind of self-sufficiency of which she is a symbol.

28> In addition to stabilizing the English social system, though, the housewife also reflected the ways that the English wanted to think about themselves and their national identity on a more individualized level. This involved not only ideals of self-sufficiency, but also much more exact qualities and virtues. Vives and Jocelin both reflect the Christian nature of the English national identity, but the complications of the situation between Vives’s original authorship and Hyrde’s translation, in addition to the rapidly shifting landscape of English Renaissance religious thoughts, mark the difficultly of generalizing across decades the various ways in which the English housewife might be expected to practice religion. Certainly, though, she was meant to align her beliefs with her husband’s and to serve as an example to those within her household. Markham helpfully summarizes that he wishes “English housewife [to] be a godly, constant, and religious woman, learning from the worthy preacher, and her husband, those good examples which she shall with all careful diligence see exercised amongst her servants” (7). Again, her subjection to her husband creates a stability within the house, the virtue of which is then transferred to those over whom she has control. Though Markham was writing well after the English Reformation, there would likely be some stability throughout the English Renaissance at least in the ideal that so long as the housewife aligned with whatever she was told by her preacher and her husband, she could effectively govern the beliefs of her household and ensure that her domestic space was correctly aligned with the larger social order. That the breakdown of stability and of religious coherence that characterized the civil war was so often characterized in terms of unruly women emphasizes the conceptual link between the housewife’s identity and the idea of English stability and order.

29> The elements of the English housewife’s identity involved a promise that the housewife could be and inspire more than even domestic stability or social hegemony. In protecting the housewife from foreign influences that might corrupt her nature or her Englishness, the domestic sphere could then serve as protective space for English national identity. Through conduct manuals, moral treatises, huswifery books, and countless other texts, authors sought to express the central nature of the domestic space and, at the same time, to control that space. Fears of foreign influence in both national character and national economy were then acted out in domestic terms, so that the English housewife was encouraged to be ever more self-sufficient and isolated, ever more dependent on her husband, and ever more influential in society, simultaneously. As Vives, Markham, and Jocelin’s texts reflect, English society invested enormous amounts of energy in attempting to create a stable, safe identity for itself by crafting a stable, safe identity for the housewife. So long as the housewife was “of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsels, and generally skilful in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation” (Markham 8), England itself could be assured of the preservation of its domestic security.

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WORKS CITED

Crane, Mary Thomas. “‘Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds’: Conflicting Identities of Early Modern English Women.” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Burlington: Ashgate, 2000.

Dowd, Michelle M. “Leaning Too Hard Upon the Pen: Suburb Wenches and City Wives in Westward Ho.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2003): 224-242.

Gabbard, D. Christopher. "Gender Stereotyping in Early Modern Travel Writing on Holland.” Studies in English Literature 43.1 (2003): 83-100.

Hall, Kim F. “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century.” In Traub, Kaplan, and Callaghan. 169-191.

Jocelin, Elizabeth. The Mother’s Legacie to her Unborn Child. London, 1624. Early English Books Online. Web. 10 August 2015.

Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. 1615. Ed. Michael R. Best. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1986.

Montrose, Louise Adrian. “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text.” Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts. Ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 303-340.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.” Representations 2 (1983): 61-94.

Orchard, Christopher. “The Rhetoric of Corporeality and the Political Subject: Containing the Dissenting Female Body in Civil War England.” Women as Sites of Culture: Women’s Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Susan Shifrin. Burlington: Ashgate, 2002. 9-24.

Orlin, Lena Cowen. “Private Life and Domesticity.” A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature. Ed. Donna B. Hamilton. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 160-179.

Traub, Valerie, M. Lindsey Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Wall, Wendy. “Blood in the Kitchen: Violence and Early Modern Domestic Work.” Women and Violence in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honor of Paul Jorgensen. Eds. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002. 329-360.

Vives, Juan Luis. The Instruction of a Christian Woman. Trans. Richard Hyrde. London, 1585. Early English Books Online. Web. 3 Nov 2012.

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Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore received her PhD from the University of Arkansas in 2016. Her dissertation on subversive translation and transcription in the Henrician Court prioritized examination of women’s strategies in manuscript production. Her essay “Education and Agency in The Miseries of Mavillia” is forthcoming in Explorations in Renaissance Culture.

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APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,

Volume Nine (2016): Texts & Contexts

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Andie Silva: "More’s Utopia as Cultural Brand"

Andie Silva

York College (CUNY)

Counterfeit Letters and Fictional Trials:

Thomas More’s Utopia as Cultural Brand

1> Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) remains a text that defies straight-forward interpretations. Is it a political tract, a philosophical reflection, a Humanist satire, or some unique combination of these styles? As More himself disdainfully acknowledges in his prefatory letter to Peter Giles, Utopia’s failure or success relies on “the natures of men [which] be so divers” that, at best, they are sour and unpleasant and, at worst, “so narrow in the shoulders that he can bear no tests nor taunts” (A Fruteful, and Pleasaunt Worke of the Beste State of a Publyque Weale, 1551, A3r). Alongside the overwhelming number of paratextual materials which accompany each edition of Utopia, this letter points to the work’s tantalizing instability. More is at once overzealous about shaping his work’s reception and self-aware about the impossibility of authorial control. Regardless of what genre we choose to assign to it, Utopia may be primarily a work about mediation.

2> While there is still controversy about what properly defines “utopia” as a genre, modern critics acknowledge that the term typically describes a style blending travel narrative, political ideology, and prose fiction.[1] Due to its innovative structure, Paul Saltzman argues that the Utopian genre can only be understood from a modern perspective, since “More’s Utopia itself seems to have been interpreted in the early seventeenth century not so much as a particular kind of prose fiction as a particular kind of concept [...] as a model of argument rather than a creator of a genre” (29). This article intervenes in the debate around Utopia’s genre by arguing that marketing and design practices developed by printers, publishers, and editors (henceforth “print agents”) contributed to making Utopia not only a recognizable genre but a brand name in its own right. Print agents took advantage of Utopia’s malleability by shaping the book’s paratexts to attract their own pre-established markets. Eventually, each editorial change aided in branding Utopia as part of a recognizable set of protocols that could be sustained independently of More or his original narrative.

3> Utopia’s print agents faced the challenge of not only marketing a text by a controversial author (and potential traitor to the crown), but also of instructing their readers on the peculiarities of this new style. Published in English seven times and translated twice between 1551–1639 (Ralph Robinson’s translation, which was printed in 1551, 1553, 1597, 1624, and 1639; and Gilbert Burnet’s anonymous translation printed in 1684 and 1685), the work addressed conflicts between past, present, and future England by engaging with socio-political dissatisfactions and theorizing on the nature of place and nationhood. As a product of the work of print agents and, later, an iconic signifier for cheap-print pamphlets about the Civil War, the word “utopia” grew to become an iconic cultural brand for the early modern reader—one which could represent (and also disrupt) the status quo and challenge readers to re-interpret not only literary texts but the very makeup of English politics.[2] To understand how print agents’ specific strategies functioned to give Utopia its market and cultural value, we may turn to marketing theory on iconic brands, as outlined by Douglas B. Holt in How Brands Become Icons (2004). Modern marketing theory provides us with a unique vocabulary with which to identify the deliberate strategies print agents used to define their markets. Holt’s concept of “cultural branding” is particularly helpful in explaining how and why print agents managed to make Utopia such a pervasive and long-lasting influence in early modern culture and politics. A brief overview of what defines a product as a brand (rather than simply a useful material object) is thus necessary.

4> Market theorist F. J. Levy argues that marketing offers foremost a symbolic value: the work of ad men is less to prove a product’s superiority but rather to demonstrate how the product impacts the consumer’s own life. So, for example, a print agent advertising Utopia cannot simply take advantage of the popularity of travel narratives; in order to “sell” he must also offer consumers a unique, new value that distinguishes More’s work from other publications. Building on this, Holt suggests that what elevates a product to a brand is in part its capacity to engage in social change, offering idealized solutions for the most current social anxieties. Holt conceptualizes “iconic brands” as those that are able to transcend fleeting popularity and become part of the consumer’s everyday cultural experiences. His case-studies include Coke, Budweiser, and Harley Davidson—American brands that have established themselves as a memorable part of mass culture across different generations and historical contexts. These iconic brands have, following Holt, reached a status of cultural branding that has made their product and social message instantly recognizable even to non-consumers (e.g. Coke’s message of cross-cultural diversity as exemplified by ads like Mean Joe Green’s “Hey Kid, Catch!”). Successful cultural branding must therefore present a unique story or identity that adapts to the consumer’s social, ideological, and historical needs. According to Holt, cultural icons typically feature:

·         a reliable story, or “identity myth,” that addresses current social anxieties (39 ff.);

·         versatile historical awareness, wherein the brand becomes “a historical entity whose desirability comes from myths that address the most important social tensions of the nation” (38); and

·         “cultural and political authority,” that is the credibility to participate in social and political conversations (95 ff.)

5> When these elements combine, the brand becomes an active, recognizable part of popular culture by inviting the consumer to see herself as a trusted investor, responsible for sustaining the brand’s reliability and longevity. Identity myths combine the brand’s material elements and its identity values: while each product will have specific qualities that distinguish it from other competitors, these elements, or “markers” only mean something to an audience when they can be used to tell a specific story.[3] This is a key factor for understanding how print agents marketed Utopia and the ways the text lent itself to new kinds of packaging and interpretations.

6> According to Holt, the ability to open up spaces for dialogue and dissent is the mark of a cultural icon. Iconic brands stand out by their populist appeal; they do not represent the ruling class or prevailing ideologies but instead “are usually set in populist worlds: places separated not only from everyday life but from the realms of commerce and elite control” (9). As a result, brands become cultural icons because of their ability to fabricate an ideal: a story that is believable enough to attract the consumer, but unlikely enough to provoke the spark for concrete social change. Within this perspective, Utopia’s fiction can be said to invite readers to “address cultural anxieties from afar, from imaginary worlds rather than from the worlds that [they] regularly encounter in their everyday lives” (8). If Utopia accomplishes this successfully across multiple and distinct moments in English history, much credit goes to the enterprising labor of each print agent.

Creating a National Brand

7> The first Latin edition of Utopia was printed in 1516 by Dirk Martens and, as indicated by the numerous prefatory letters, emerged from the collaboration between Thomas More, Peter Giles, and Erasmus. Three more editions appeared in 1517 and 1518 (in that year Johannes Froben printed two consecutive editions) overseen by More and Erasmus. No Latin edition contains the same paratextual materials in quite the same order, and many editions add or omit paratexts with no apparent organizing logic. In addition to the two books that compose the body of the text, the first edition includes letters from More to Giles, from Giles to Jerome Busleiden, from Busleiden to More, and from Johannes Paludanus to Giles.[4] This first edition additionally contains: a meter in the “original” Utopian tongue; verses by the supposed poet laureate of Utopia; a verse from humanist Cornelius Grapheus to the reader; a Utopian alphabet (presented by Peter Giles); and a map depicting the island.  In the second edition, printed in 1517 in Paris, More adds two more letters: one from Jerome Budé to Thomas Lupset and a second letter to Peter Giles. He also removes the Utopian poem and alphabet. One more letter is added to the 1518 edition, where Erasmus addresses their new printer, Froben. The abundance and variety of prefatory letters in More’s Utopia no doubt provided an open invitation for future print agents to act as editors, compilers, and critics. Although scholars have discussed at length the significance of the original paratexts in particular, and Utopia’s literary contributions in general, a closer analysis reveals that print agents had a unique role in marketing the text to middle-class buyers and readers.[5]

8> The first two English editions of Utopia, printed by Abraham Vele, highlight the work’s appeal to the middle-class book buyer while simultaneously downplaying More’s own controversial status. As David Weil Baker rightly claims, the title-pages of the 1551 and 1556 editions respectively undermine and re-establish translator Ralph Robinson’s social position by presenting him first as a “citizen and goldsmith of London” and then as “sometime fellowe of Corpus Christi college in Oxford.” While Baker ascribes this editorial choice to Robinson, Abraham Vele likely played a significant role in composing these title-pages. A profitable and savvy printer, Vele knew to re-package the work to make it appeal to a broader variety of tastes, presuming perhaps that most of his potential buyers might be more interested in Utopia as a New World travel narrative, and not for its Humanist values.

9> As the allusions to Diogenes and frequent references to More’s broader Humanist connections indicate, Robinson’s prefatory letter reveals a desire to reach a Humanist audience. Vele, however, sets the full title of Utopia to function with and against Robinson’s dedication, disrupting and reframing his high-literature persona. The title maintains a linguistic semblance to the original Latin title, and was likely submitted by the translator: A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia. The attribution that follows advertises Thomas More as a “knyght,” while Robinson is a “citizen and goldsmyth of London,” and his friend Tadlowe is a “citizen haberdasher of the same cittie.” Since the Latin title refers to More as “the distinguished and eloquent author Thomas More citizen and sheriff of the Famous City of London” (Kinney 34), the choice of appellatives does not seem to stem from Robinson’s translation. Instead, Vele’s choice draws a direct connection between the author and translator’s social status and his potential readers’ own middle-class background. His title-page targets two markets at once: the ambitious readers who would want the association with trendy, popular literature and those who want to feel that this access is within their reach, produced by citizens whom, like them, aspire to aristocratic connections.

10> The popularity of the first printed edition, coupled with the ascension of a Catholic ruler in 1553, must have encouraged Vele to produce a new edition of Utopia. The title-page for the 1556 edition more explicitly advertises Utopia as a literary, cultural product. Under Queen Mary, now-Catholic-martyr More can be praised as “the right worthy and famous Sir Thomas More knight” (emphasis mine), while Robinson earns the distinction of a “fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford.” Besides being “newly perused and corrected,” the second edition further boasts of “divers notes in the margins,” most of which are translated from the Latin and some which were added by Robinson himself. In addition to translations of the original paratextual materials (including some letters and poems), this edition features an epistle from Vele himself, labeled “the printer to the reader.” In this closing address, Vele apologizes to his readers for not including the Utopian alphabet to which Peter Giles refers in his letter to Jerome Busledein (in this edition the letter immediately precedes Vele’s addendum). Vele in turn claims that “I have not as yet the true characters or fourmes of the Utopiane letters [...] seyng it is a tongue to us muche straunger then the Indian, the Persian, the Syrian, the Arabicke, the Egyptian, the Macedonian [...] etc” (ns). By adding this note, Vele chooses to actively participate in More’s satire, promising the appearance of something he certainly knew was not real. Even if Vele had seen a Latin or continental edition containing the printed alphabet, his note deliberately compares the Utopian tongue with real-world languages and joins in the dialogue of the letters by referring specifically to Giles’s letter appended before the poems. Furthermore, Vele’s epistle also functions as a playful marketing move towards a possible third edition, presenting Vele as a print agent engaged in using his personal resources to improve and enhance his publications.

11> Vele’s participation in the ruse, and not simply his note promising more paratexts, helps reinforce Utopia’s market value as satire. In order to solidify the unique story this text presents and give it an identity myth, Vele lends his own credibility to the fiction. Savvy readers would eventually learn to recognize through paratextual materials what distinguished Utopia from other available travel narratives: depending on its framing devices, the work opened itself up to new contexts, new social circles, and even new social critiques. Utopia’s popularity for both printers and readers appears to die out for over forty years, but interest in More and his ideal commonwealth must have remained strong, particularly as the political threat associated with More’s name began to dissipate. Hence, the work’s identity myth accordingly began to lose its more explicit allusions to the humanist project in general, and More’s politics in particular. In the three editions discussed below, we may see Utopia working across a new set of historical contexts.

12> Thomas Creede’s edition at the end of the sixteenth century is modest yet powerful evidence that Utopia’s popularity continued to justify new publications. Creede, who often financed his own publications, published his reprint in 1597 without modifying much from Vele’s 1556 edition—choosing to leave out only Vele’s and Robinson’s envoys to the reader.[6] Creede’s edition is nonetheless an important turning point. As the House of Stuart rose to the throne, English citizens began to experience increasing political instabilities. The constant clashes between the Privy Council and the king would eventually lead to Civil War. Amidst this political mine field, print agents’ marketing strategies expanded the context of Utopia beyond a topical, widespread critique of Henrician politics, making it more appropriate to their current political climate. The Utopia brand begins to solidify in the popular imagination by becoming a constant amongst political and social changes in England. As a new generation of readers became invested in such changes, print agents adjusted the text’s identity myth to meet the needs of their growing market.

13> Bernard Alsop, Creede’s former apprentice, is responsible for the next edition of Utopia in 1624. He makes the crucial decision to change the title of his edition, effectively using the text’s most iconic marker to create a simple, recognizable brand name: “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia” appears atop the title-page, highlighting the word “utopia” in capital letters. Alsop reframes the text to call attention to its recognizable literary inheritance—an important element for the brand’s value—by including a frontispiece with a large engraving of More and, below it, an inscription in Latin. This title-page describes More as “right honorable and worthy of all fame” and “lord Chancellor of England,” in line with Alsop’s evident interest in rescuing the author’s historical importance and political authority. The Latin inscription further helps readers associate More with the classical tradition. Even for a reader unable to understand that the inscription praises More’s sacrifice as a Catholic martyr, Alsop’s choice of Latin immediately inscribes the work as a valuable literary commodity. Although Alsop, like Vele and Creede before him, begins with the commonplace announcement that this new edition is “newly corrected and purged of all errors happened in the former editions,” this print agent is much more invested in reinventing Utopia as a recognizable brand name. As Holt explains, “brands that author a successful myth earn the right to come back later with new myths that touch on the same cultural concerns” (125). Alsop realizes that Utopia is by now a marketable name, and that it therefore merits a new history. The repackaging extends beyond the branding title “Utopia” and the engraving of More on the title-page: it is further reinforced by Alsop’s dedicatory epistle to Cresacre More, Thomas More’s great-grandson, who was then working on a biography of More.[7]

14> Inheritance is an important theme for Alsop, and his dedication highlights both lineage and literary status as essential qualities of the More family. The print agent defines his motives as “noble,” and purely in the interest of preserving the text as Cresacre’s birth right. Alsop attaches the “honorable pedigree” carried by the More family to the book’s own virtues, which as a genre is “yet unparalleled in that nature” and thus deserves to be shared with a new generation of readers (A2). To fuel interest for a book whose popularity was already established, Alsop builds up its historical value as an English landmark. In a surprisingly elitist move, Alsop claims that failing to dedicate the work to Cresacre would be “a theft of the worst nature [...] and I might as well take from you the Lands of the Honorable and auncient Family of Cresacre (with which God and your right hath endowed you) as bestow upon a stranger this glorious Commonwealth” (A2v). By elevating the book to the value of an inheritable commodity, the print agent highlights Utopia’s material and social attributes. The reader who owns this copy can feel like he is part of this cultural inheritance even if he does not own lands and cannot claim any rights to the work itself. This in turn makes the book at once old and new: reclaiming More’s lineage and history is an innovative strategy that only works because Utopia is by now far removed from More’s reputation as traitor and his problematic Catholic identity.

15> Whereas Abraham Vele had to devise specific marketing strategies to frame the work as accessible to the middle-class buyer, Alsop moves somewhat in the opposite direction, building an established, aristocratic lineage for the book and its author. At the same time, however, Alsop also makes the work highly attractive to readers who might see books as status symbols. While each print agent highlighted the social capital of Utopia, their unique contexts expand the amount and variety of readers, always inviting new groups to identify with the brand’s identity myth. By purchasing the book, the reader also buys into More’s rebranded status as literary, cultural, and English inheritance. In many ways, this is the edition that truly brands Utopia (and, in turn, More) as the text (and author) we know and edit today. As Holt has argued, the power of the brand resides not simply in the product, but in its ability to renew itself according to new consumers, new identities, and new contexts. It is not until 1624 that Utopia can emerge as a canonical text, with a praised author and a long, venerable history. Once Utopia becomes established as genre representative of satirical criticisms of government,[8] the association with More fades into the background, leaving only a generic brand reference that authors and print agents can apply to various literary and marketing contexts.

16> Political and social discontent had grown exponentially during the time between 1624, when Alsop first reprinted and rebranded Utopia, and 1639, when he decided to put out his second edition of Utopia. England was facing increasing poverty, loss in international trades, and out-of-control population growths.[9] The growing conflicts between Parliament and Charles I brought on popular dissatisfaction and domestic unrest, whereas the Bishops’ War of 1639 ominously foretold an imminent Civil War. If Thomas More’s controversial status sometimes clouded Utopia’s true message, Alsop’s rebranding in 1624 allowed the author’s history to fade away from the book’s new packaging. By his second edition, new social conflicts encouraged Alsop to foreground the ideological connotations of the work. Evidence of the print agent’s constant renegotiation of his brand, Alsop’s 1639 edition changes the title once more, this time highlighting the island’s political structure: The Commonwealth of Utopia. By re-focusing the new edition on its central narrative, and not so much on patronage or authorship, Alsop is able to remind English readers that the story (or identity myth) told by Utopia provides a space in which to rehearse their political and social anxieties. The island of Utopia, after all, held a government that hid under its “ideal commonwealth” a harsh control of its citizens, closed borders, and non-existent property laws. Although he addresses the same patron, Alsop’s new dedication to Cresacre More is much more subdued and appears less invested in reinforcing the text’s aristocratic values. This edition is trimmed of its paratexts as well, omitting More’s letter to Giles and all the poems that close the work after Book II. Alsop likely felt that a government-themed Utopia would better cater to his reader’s interests, and reworked the edition to step away from the text’s more ironic and playful aspects to focus instead on its political relevance. Holt argues that the most iconic brands help its consumers imagine resolutions for the anxieties brought on by “tensions between ideology and individual experience” (57); in this case, tensions between what the national, English ideal was supposed to represent (lawfulness, monarchy, economic superiority) and what citizens were experiencing (injustice, poverty, an overbearing government). Utopia, even as it fails to resolve any of these conflicts, provides room for conversation and hope for reform.[10] By removing the additional paratexts and changing the title once more, Alsop shifts Utopia’s themes to attend to the interests of his market. The new title signals a different marketing approach that helps potential readers recognize the political capital of Alsop’s new edition.[11]

17> Utopia thus became an iconic brand as a result of its unique textual production history, the ever-changing status of its polarizing author, and a malleable yet attractive identity myth. Taking on anxieties about More as historical and political figure; the expansion of the New World; and English political instability, the print agents responsible for circulating More’s Utopia created a unique identity myth that could be immediately recognizable and yet could just as easily lend itself to new interpretations. A thorough look at the history of Utopia’s English editions demonstrates this brand-making process. Vele and Robinson at first attempted to legitimize the work while still making it appeal to a middle-class public; Alsop repackaged More and his text as English literary landmarks. By the end of the seventeenth century, the word “utopia” could be used to label anything that referred to a remote location, an ideal society, or a political complaint.

Generic Cultural Branding

18> If we are to fully understand the staying power of utopia as a name-brand, we must broaden our definitions of the kinds of popular texts Utopia eventually influenced. Gary Saul Morson acknowledges that “nonliterary (tractarian) utopias have been important in establishing the conventions according to which utopian literary works have been interpreted, and so have helped constitute the generic tradition” (78). Yet, Morson qualifies this point by claiming that a distinction must be made between ideology and fiction, since the latter need not provide supporting evidence or historical groundwork for its claims. This distinction between fiction and nonfiction, however, is blurred in the case of ephemeral pamphlets, which were produced to address specific historical moments and yet often did so under the guise of a fantastical story. The pamphlets discussed below take on pre-established reading protocols from Utopia, building on readers’ previous knowledge to construct new stories. In doing so, they manage to extract Utopia’s most abstract markers and apply them generically to vague (often ironic) concepts of justice, religion, and lawfulness. This generic marketing approach relies on the “reduction of the brand to a handful of abstract concepts” (Holt 20), effectively employing protocols that guide book-buyers toward books that can increase their social capital. Even if they have no direct link with More’s original work, these generics help connect readers with the growing genre and advance the English identity myth created by its previous print agents.

19> Arguably, one of the features that distinguish More’s work from other fictional ideal worlds (and makes it a cultural icon) is its political exigency. The narrative depends on the constant production and denial of expectations: More is the voice of the preface, but he is not Morus, the narrator; Giles and his fellow humanist collaborators testify to the fictional island’s existence only to make it absurdly unreal; Morus describes the ideal commonwealth only to reject it at the end, and so on. This assertion and denial process forces the reader to question not just where or what Utopia is, but what is “ideal” (and whether that ideal is even desirable). This quality separates More’s narrative from other contemporary English works that represent more straight-forward ideologies or imaginary voyages. It is precisely this feature that benefits these brand generics and in the seventeenth century gives print agents, writers, and readers a place to confront the political instabilities of the Civil War. The anonymous The King of Utopia his letter to the Citizens of Cosmopolis, the Metropolitan City of Utopia (1647) is perhaps the best illustration of such a trend. The King of Utopia may be the first appearance anywhere of a work marketing itself as a “Utopia generic”: it takes up the brand created by Utopia’s print agents and uses it to advertise a different text altogether.

20> The King of Utopia utilizes the word “utopia” both in its paratext and as part of its narrative, introducing a fictionalized political context (and imitating the utopian genre) without any interest in recreating More’s narrative or furthering the fictional island of Utopia. If indeed the first reference to Utopia as a form of branding does not appear before the mid-seventeenth century, this pamphlet may be concrete evidence that Bernard Alsop’s 1624 edition was centrally responsible for branding the work with its single, most recognizable marker. The name “utopia,” at first a direct reference to the island of Utopia, becomes a generic reference that could be used to market and describe texts that tackled political ideology by creating fictional worlds. That this text is written after the beginning of the Civil War is also an important marker, since the island Utopia will serve as an imaginary location for resolutions on both sides.[12] The King of Utopia’s anonymous author and fictional translator claims to have found two letters, both written originally in the Utopian tongue: in the first, Cosmopolis’s King justifies his absence to his citizens, revealing the circumstances (and individuals) that have kept him from returning to the city. The Citizens’ response follows suit, urging the king to return and promising him that a loyal and supportive people await him in Cosmopolis. Most of the pamphlet is overtaken by obscure references and metaphors. The King never directly explains who or what has “so puzzled my pentarquie” (A1) or what events could actually bring him back to the throne. The King’s mention of his pentarquy should clue in the reader that this is an “every man” monarch, intended as a universal figure representative of all Christian kingdoms. The King proclaims his own fictional yet particularly English identity, citing a maxim of state “observed ever since that beautifull English Moore made Utopia a Monarchy” (A1v). The Utopia named in this pamphlet is simultaneously a fictional and a real place—the king and his citizens recognize themselves as Utopian in the same sentence where they point to the pamphlet’s parent text and author.[13] The generic-branding reference to More functions to indicate that Utopia is not simply an ideal “no place”; instead, it is an in-between space where the reader can confront his anxieties about the return of monarchy.

21> The King’s letter urges his citizens to hope for his return, but also to understand the extreme strain under which he finds himself both physically and mentally: “I am retarded, anticipated and restrain’d from my intentions [...] my thoughts are as Civil War within my breast, like evil members in a good commonwealth” (f.2). The absent monarch embodies the land itself, placed under a domestic conflict that he cannot resolve without his citizens. Reality and fiction coexist in this generic Utopia: the author, masked as translator, uses a fictional location to give voice to English struggles. In this imagined scenario, the nostalgic reader can share with the King a longing for his return, and read his own feelings reproduced in the citizens’ letter. Of course, part of Utopia’s identity myth is that it challenges a straight reading. Its contradictions force the reader to question the government being portrayed and to look for a solution to the problem of interpreting the text. The author of The King of Utopia attempts a similar double-move, obscuring the King’s true meaning behind metaphors as well as a faux-translator’s deliberately poor interpretations. The two letters appear to be intentionally convoluted, are often absurd and overly symbolic, and make it almost impossible to extract anything beyond the fact that the King seeks to return and that the citizens are ready to receive him.[14]

22> The citizens’ answer reinforces this circular language by expressing their loss in a series of paradoxes:

“we mourne without sorrow, starve with satiety, weep and laugh, move yet sit still, fast and feast [...] be not then (as our most pious physitian) negligent, but speedily yield thy royall remedy to our unstable (and infirme) condition [...] regulate our libertie, and captivate our senses in the service of thy vertues: let the memory of our learned Licurgus, that unparalel’d mirror of his time, the glory of his nation, make us more Lovers of Moor for this institute of our Utopian commonwealth [...] briefly he in our monarchy drew the picture of al happy governments, and our ingrateful hands have disfigured the figure […]” (f.5-6)

23> The repetitive references to More and his work insist on reminding the reader that More’s island in Utopia was an ideal monarchy and not a commonwealth: the citizens long for a return to its original “picture of al happy governments.” The King of Utopia works precisely because it is so vague; by hindering a straight-forward interpretation, the paradoxes force the reader to add his own personal experience so as to create any meaning. The brand Utopia is only a promise of resolution, a hope for addressing anxieties; it does not need to offer an actual fix. As Richard Halpern observes, the function of the genre is to create tension: “the island itself is constructed as the representation of desires it cannot locate and of which it cannot take account” (149). This in turn leads the reader to confront and address dangerous revolutionary desires, locating them inside the text and eventually finding ways to express them in the real world.

24> Although The King of Utopia pretends to discuss political ideals in a fictional context, it concludes by forcing the reader back into reality. The text switches from paradoxical metaphors to sharp irony as the reader is led away from the fictional world of Utopia and reminded of the actual author of the text. The “Postscript from the Translator to the Reader” offers a sarcastic apology for the bad translation, claiming that although the translator “is not wel vers’d in the Utopian tongue,” he is nonetheless supposed to be the best reader of Utopian in England (f.5). Despite their questionable quality as literary texts, “these letters being of such consequence, [they are] well worthy to be read by English-men” (ibid.). Once more, the issue of language and communication is a key element for the genre, as it gives the narrative a national, English identity. The translator goes as far as suggesting that Utopia has now been colonized by both the reader and the translator, as it “learn’d to speake English (by an English quill).” The pamphlet never pretends to offer an answer to the reader’s frustrations, focusing instead on highlighting the ways in which England is “broken” and only England’s king and its citizens can fix it. Because the reader is invited to identify with the citizens in the letter, he is encouraged to act like them and demand real change. Manuel and Manuel argue that the Utopian thought became popular during the Civil War because writers could use it to demand action from others: “Utopians, often people without political weight or authority, cling to the hope that men of great power will put into practice and make real the ‘idea’ that they, the superior creators, have invented” (332). This notion applies to the generic brand as well, since the Utopia in The King of Utopia serves as a point of reference for “symbolic resolutions” (Holt 58). This is one of the important ways in which, according to Holt, a brand can be recognized as a cultural icon: it serves to tell a story that gives voice to, and thus helps placate, social anxiety. The author of this pamphlet makes use of More’s identity myth of irony, paradox, and political reform to expose the incoherencies caused by the Civil War.[15] 

25> The author additionally mimics More by supporting the narrative with his own satirical paratext.[16] A false errata list, which “the translator and printers amends [sic] for mistaking,” offers made-up page numbers and critical corrections for a number of controversial terms:

“page 103. Line 50. For a good thing read a true subject. Page 883. Line 75. For Tyranny, read Taxations. Page 68. Line 15 for Burglary read Plunder, Page 94. Line 101. For Common-wealth read Committee. Page 115 for Service read Sacriledge. Page 40. line 100. For Bishop read Presbyter. Page 56 line 80 for Pulpit read Tub. Page 37. Line 64 for Preaching read Prating” (f.5v)

26> These corrections allow the text to speak more explicitly about the print agent’s complaints against Parliament by singling out specific groups (“committees” like the Committee of Examinations, and “Presbyterians,” who sought to overthrow the Episcopalian bishops and, with them, the king) and social abuses (like excessive “Taxations” and the “Plundering” of lands from those who did not support Parliament). While the language of the fictional letters is cloudy and twisted with metaphors, the printer and the author/translator (who might well be the same person) stand out as the true authors of the text.

27> By calling attention to the errata, the print agents grant textual production a central role: the peripheral details (the colophon, note from the translator, errata lists) in fact contain the pamphlet’s true message. Further, by virtue of being paratextual, these additions can escape the fictional world and speak directly to the reader. Despite the satirical tone, the pamphlet delivers its message on the title-page (“England is by th’ English broken”) and in the closing errata. Citing a number of texts that use errata lists and admissions of error as symbolic metaphors for the reading process, Michael Saenger points out that error “is usually used as a means of asking the reader to see beyond the printed page, and to search for the original that the page strives to represent” (205). Using the errata to contrast specific, political terms with their “corrections,” the print agents describe the Civil War and Parliament as a poorly written text in dire need of correction. The press must call on its “true subjects,” the middle-class readers by the bookstalls, to correct and amend the country’s mistakes. The author enacts real-world reform through the notion of textual reform, using the Utopia brand to emphasize the status of the text as political intervention. Reinforcing the world-upside-down metaphor, the imprint claims the pamphlet was first printed in Cosmopolis in “the year 7461” and then “reprinted at London an. Dom. 1647.”  Utopia is not, then, simply a literary reference to More’s description of the ideal government, but the memory of a time when England could still count on a king and his citizens to keep their land and their religion intact.

28> As a brand generic, The King of Utopia utilizes the iconic name to attract potential readers and create an immediate thematic connection (or protocol) for understanding the author’s political criticism. Although other authors are much less explicit about making use of their generic Utopia brand, it is possible to see a growing trend among texts: locating in Utopia the place not for the ideal government, but for idealized, fair trials. Political critique therefore becomes more specific, tackling issues of religious persecution and social injustice. In The examination of Tilenus before the Triers; in order to [sic] his intended settlement in the office of a publick preacher in the commonwealth of Utopia (1658), for instance, Bishop Laurence Womock takes on the pseudonym Tylenus to narrate a fictional dialogue. In it, Tylenus is vetted by Triers (such as Dr. Absolute and Dr. Dam-Man) for a preaching position in Utopia. Womock’s pamphlet aims to criticize a commission of Triers created during the commonwealth to examine whether appointed preachers were following sanctioned Calvinist doctrines.[17] By placing a specific, contemporary event within the island of Utopia and assigning caricatures to represent the Triers, Womock argues that the questioning process is absurd and nonsensical. Satire is already an embedded marker of the Utopian brand, so Womock can use its central narrative to present his arguments against the Triers and refute the Tenets of the Remonstrants through a traditional dialogue. In other words, the mention of Utopia automatically brands the text, so that readers understand the absurdity and irony of the situation, allowing the rest of Womock’s pamphlet to argue his ideological assertions with straight-forward rhetoric.

29> Branding a text with the word “utopia” creates the opportunity for authors to discuss controversial topics in a now-commonplace fictional safe space, while still questioning what is “ideal” (and therefore righteous) and investigating how to recuperate this ideal in the real world. The brand might function as part of the narrative, as is the case of Womock’s pamphlet, or it might serve as advertisement to attract more readers. In A Letter Found in Utopia (1675), for example, an anonymous author praises Peter Sterry’s Discourse of the Freedom of the Will (1675), arguing for religious acceptance. Although the work has no mention of Utopia or More in the narrative, the print agent clearly used the title to make the work attractive and draw in readers interested in any work with the brand Utopia on its title-page. Here, the brand-name alone is a sufficient marketing strategy.

30> Through and after the Civil War, authors continued to brand their works by using Utopia to create a new kind of identity myth. The use of the generic brand could serve to represent a “no place,” or “any place,” as in: Passes Granted, by the Free-born People of England to severall of the most eminent perjur’d rebels assembled in Junto at Webminster. Who are now desirous to transport themselves into New England, to Amsterdam, or Utopia (1648), which cites parliamentary traitors and condemns them to exile. Similarly, A Copie of the Quaeries, or, A Comment upon the Life, and Actions of the Great Tyrant and his Complices; OLIVER the first and last of that name, not unfit, not unworthy of thy perusal (1659) advertises having been “printed in Utopia,” referencing other queries and petitions printed against Parliament.[18] The queries vary from more serious questions like “whether (like that of most weddings) the first joyfull day of this present Parliament, will not be the fore-runner of a great many years of sorrowes” (A2), to derisive ones like “whether Cromwell and Henry [the VIII] when they have compared their notes in the other world, will not be good company in hell together” (A3v). The print agent uses the label “printed in Utopia” to brand the petition as political criticism and remind readers of the real queries and petitions that should be made against the Commonwealth.

31> While the Utopia brand can represent stories of righteous judgment, its most important marker is that it allows citizens to participate actively in public debates. The authors of The Loyal City of Bristol, vindicated from Amsterdamnism, or Devil’s Borough (1681) argue at the start that their pamphlet has a valuable social purpose, stating in the epistle to the reader that “the description was design’d only to turn the fanatick zeal here into ridicule” (A2). The only reference to Utopia appears at the heading of the text, “A Letter from the Bishop of Utopia,” and seems to be a device for defending the city of Bristol as a just and law-abiding place. Bristol coffee houses were at the time considered “meeting places of factitious persons, and centers of false, scandalous news, libels and pamphlets” (Tapsell 109). The bishop’s letter denies reports that the city is harboring Presbyterians and supporting religious dissent. In the pamphlet, the anonymous author relates the persecution and apprehension of dissenters and guarantees that the city itself is still loyal to the king. Here, the brand-name “utopia” is designed to attract the reader to purchase a politico-religious tract, placing Utopia as the location for righteous monarchical support. Like Womock, the authors of this tract use the brand to avoid having to set up an intricate or misleading satire. Because the Utopia brand already represents the ironies and paradoxes of political structures, the author can deliver his message from under the protection of claiming to speak from Utopia, and not from or against England.

32> The final and latest example of seventeenth-century Utopia generics deals with this literary paradox by using the genre’s playfulness to address social flaws inherent to the middle-class marketplace. This text is worth a closer look because it uses a variety of strategies discussed above to create an elaborate new narrative. While it seems to draw the furthest away from More’s original text, this pamphlet attempts to use the brand’s political and social significance as the starting point for complaints against middle-class workers. Whether taken seriously or as a playful reflection on the English marketplace, John Dunton’s reference to Utopia demonstrates that the brand continued to influence printed texts even before the appearance of Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s translation in 1684. Thus, what at first glance appears to be a long, forty-five year gap between Alsop’s second edition and Burnet’s translation is merely a matter of perspective. The King of Utopia was published less than ten years after Alsop’s second printing and, broadly speaking, Utopia as cultural brand remained alive in the print marketplace through political, social, and religious pamphlets throughout the length of the seventeenth century.

33> John Dunton’s The Informer’s Doom: or, an Amazing Seasonable Letter from Utopia, Directed at the Man in the Moon (1683) depicts a mock-trial of English characters and tradesmen. Dunton uses references to two utopian texts to advertise his pamphlet: More’s Utopia and Domingo Gonzalez’s faux-narrative The Man in the Moon. Although the narrative is supposed to take place on the Utopian island, Dunton does not disguise the fact that his characters represent English values: e.g. Conscience the Judge, Mr. Sincerity, and Mr. Protestant. The Utopian judge indicts a list of personages that Dunton believes to be “grand and bitter enemies that disturb and molest all kingdoms and states” (as stated in the title-page), including Pope Innocent XI, Justice Implacable, Mr. Violence, A Witch, and Sir John Fraud. Because this is Utopia, all the trials are expected to automatically dispense rightful justice (as Dunton sees it). Similarly, each character can only earn his final punishment after hearing the testimony of good citizens, good Christians, and honorable tradesmen. However, the pamphlet’s accusations expose (perhaps unwittingly) a social paradox: the “cheats” attributed to each profession are the inevitable results of the capitalist system.[19] The problem of reading Dunton’s text is much like that of reading More’s Utopia: how seriously is the reader expected to take this? In pointing out largely irresolvable problems and an impossible resolution to dishonest behaviors in the trading and selling of goods, Dunton (un)intentionally satirizes his own narrative: if one were to judge every act of dishonesty done in the city, there would be no one left to serve in the jury.

34> The most interesting section of the dialogue is the trial of Sir John Fraud, whose request for a jury demands the appearance and subsequent vetting of a variety of London workers. Sir Fraud is described as “an upstart, come out of Italy, begot of Pride [...] a raiser of rents, and enemy to the kingdom, and hast insinuated [himself] into all trades, estates, and professions” (f.81-2) and his judgment gives Dunton an excuse to complain about the dishonesty of London tradesmen, most of whom are not qualified to join the jury due to their own misdeeds. Most of the “cheats” result from workers attempting to improve their social standing or their financial profits. The tanner, for instance, is accused of unbecoming class ambition (“hoping to make the proud Princox your son the upstart gentleman [...] [and] marry your daughter at the least to an esquire, that she may, if possible, be a gentlewoman,” f.110); the merchant is said to undercut the “poor gentlemen” who cannot resell products bought from the merchant at equal or higher prices; the weavers are accused of cheating “poor countrey huswives” with poorly constructed knits (f.141) in order to sell more products. Amongst the few who make it past the judge are higher-born men (a knight, a gentleman, and an esquire), a priest, as well as professions that Dunton considers to be non-speculative and therefore cannot lead to excessive profits or class leverage (the waterman, the grocer, a husbandman, and even a poet).

35> Unsurprisingly, the printer and the bookseller also get the judge’s seal of approval, even though the printer scrapes by on a technicality, since “he cheats the bookseller sometimes in working on half an impression for himself, when the bookseller hath had his number he is to pay for; but because the printer only doth thus to those booksellers that he thinks will never pay him, he shall pass on the jury as an indifferent honest man” (f.125). The bookseller, on the other hand, is a utopian model “of a gentile profession,” with “a good report in Utopia” (f.152), who gets accepted as quickly as he is dismissed from the narrative. Dunton’s praise of the bookseller is surely meant to reflect on his own character, but it is worth recalling that print is the only trade in the island Utopia that had been imported from the continent. Further, in vetting the printer and the bookseller as honest men, Dunton authorizes the two professionals as honorable citizens and the best sources for truthful, politically important news, therefore reinforcing printed books as one of the few marketplace commodities worth the consumer’s trust.

36> Dunton’s generic Utopia gathers a few of Utopia’s more abstract markers and turns them into exaggerated caricatures. Taking advantage of other generic brands’ own reading of Utopia as a place for fair judgments, he portrays a court where everyone is punished and every tradesman is a knave for having capitalist instincts. Although Gregory Claeys sees this kind of adaptation as showing a “concern to bound human desires and ambitions by institutional restraints aiming at regularity and orderliness rather than a desire for moral perfection” (xii), there is no question that The Informers Doom is evidence of the trickle-down effect of the Utopia brand, which by now has been dissociated from any specific political context and shows no attempts on the part of the print agents in challenging the reader to face real-life social conflicts. Yet, the absurdity of the text calls into question the social complaint genre. Without a certain degree of capitalist enterprise, no professional (especially not printers or booksellers) would be able to survive, nor would they be able to compete in an increasingly speculative society. Dunton, in particular, could not have lived by the model he describes in this pamphlet and still have managed to print over 200 books (Parks).

37> Utopia came to represent, for modern readers and consumers, something between the ideal and the possible; a viable way to discuss ideology and to think of “the possibility of a world upside down and at the same time to cast a shadow over the legitimacy of an upright world” (Heilbrunn 104). It is impossible to know now if satire, political argument, or humanist criticism was More’s primary goal in creating his Utopia. If we are to judge by the moving parts of the first Latin editions, More and his circle of friends appreciated the text for its playful structure: add a letter, and you support the fantasy, remove a map and you highlight the unlikely “no place” that is Utopia. Similarly, as Utopia moved across print agents, translators, and markets, the iconic brand emerged as “a magical device of transformation” (113) in which repetition, familiarity and interpretative dissonance helped shape a recognizable commodity.  The narrative and the framing of Utopia work together to shape the text as a marketable cultural product, teaching the reader to identify features that make it at once unique and yet reproducible.

38> Understanding the printing history of More’s Utopia as part of a cultural branding process allows us to consider the ways in which More’s narrative (and More himself) became such a cultural icon in England. Print agents read and interpreted the work to make it appeal to their unique markets and to respond to timely historical contexts. However, while doing that, each agent helped define recognizable aspects of the text that could be repeated, copied, and reproduced in generic form. Considering Utopia as an iconic brand—one which survives precisely for its ability to tell different stories and create new identity myths with each historical change—can offer readers and scholars of Thomas More a new way to understand the multiplicity of narratives contained within this single book. While it is not likely that the average reader encountered or even read more than one or two versions of the text, this analysis of brand generics proves that Utopia was a culturally pervasive text across social and class divisions. The variety of pamphlets and tracts making use of the word “utopia” to brand their product is evidence of this text’s unusual history, filling in the gaps between each edition of More’s text and the bigger picture of Utopia in the English imagination.

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Notes

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[1] As Gary Saul Morson and J. C. Davis discuss, the classical genre can be traced back to Plato’s Republic, but More’s revitalization adds new and unique elements to the tradition. While More may not have invented the political fiction genre, he has been credited with inventing the word “utopia” that now labels it. Following its initial popularity, Amy Boesky claims that Utopia remained unique in the English marketplace: “with the exception of two dialogues [...] Utopia was not imitated in England until Francis Bacon wrote New Atlantis in the 1620s” (11).

[2] This analysis deliberately avoids texts modeled after More’s narrative structure (particularly fictional travel narratives), looking instead at cheap-print works that use Utopia not as a literary form but as a generic reference. Many faux narratives populated the print marketplace before and after Bacon’s attempt at replicating More, including Thomas Lupton’s Siuqila Too Good to Be True [...] The Wonderful Manners of the People of Mauqsun (1584), Francis Goodwin’s groundbreaking science fiction, The Man in the Moon (1638), and Samuel Harlib’s A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641). Although these works reproduce (in varying degrees of quality)  the popularity of Utopia by creating satirical travel narratives, they appear less concerned with political or ideological critique, a feature many may argue is what sets More’s work apart from previous utopias.

[3] Holt defines material markers as the brand’s physical identifiers: a name, a logo, and a unique design (3).

[4] Routh argues that these letters indicate the limited audience of the original printing: those who would know the aforementioned authors and take their name as a commendation for the work.

[5] See Terence Cave, Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (2008).

[6] It is possible that Creede inherited the rights to the edition and did not have to spend much money to publish it. Nonetheless, his decision to publish a reprint suggests there was still a market for Utopia even forty years after Vele.

[7] The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore was published in 1631. Given Alsop’s choice of Cresacre More for the dedication, he must have known of his involvement in the biography. It is possible that this dedication was also a play for Cresacre’s business or future associations with the More family.

[8] Of course, Utopia’s narrative is much more complex and paradoxical, as Manuel and Manuel, Cave, Boesky, et. al have demonstrated. However, for the purposes of this analysis, I mean to argue that Utopia as an iconic brand entered the popular imagination as a signifier for political critique, satire, and irony—especially as it applied to Cromwell’s commonwealth.

[9] See Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1993); Peter Lawson, “Property Crime and Hard Times in England 1559-1624” in Law and History Review 4.1 (1986); and Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Trade 1550-1653 (2003).

[10] By suggesting that the island of Utopia represents the ideal commonwealth, the title indicates that the conflicts presented in Book I will be resolved in Book II. Yet, the organization and behavior of the Utopians proves to be less than ideal. For a discussion of the ways in which More sets up this failure both rhetorically and thematically, see Arthur F. Kinney, “Encomium Sapientiae: Thomas More and Utopia,” in Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (1986).

[11] Not discussed here are Richard Chiswell’s 1684 and 1685 editions, which feature a new translation of the Latin text by bishop Gilbert Burnet. Although they omit the original paratexts, these editions include a preface from a religiously-reformed Burnet in hopes to regain favor with the king. Chiswell’s unadorned, bare-bones reproduction of the popular text suggests that the brand had by then become a guaranteed sell.

[12] Manuel and Manuel and Robert Appelbaum have argued that Utopias were mostly used by Parliamentarians hoping to defend the idea of a commonwealth. Yet, most of the pamphlets I located and discuss here focus on the royalist appeal of the work and More’s own reservations against the suggestion that a republic could in fact work.

[13] For more on the rhetoric of parenting in early modern literature, see Brooks, Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (2005).

[14] The author hints at the pamphlet’s deliberately bad language in the extended title of the work, stating the King’s letter is bound with “the citizen’s answer thereunto, translated out of the Utopian tongue, into broken English.” He asks his reader and book-buyer rhetorically: “but why Broken English? O Sir! What here’s spoken, imports that England is by the English broken.” He later returns to this problem in “The Postcript from the Translator to the Reader.”

[15] Boesky observes that “by the 1640s in England the term utopia was increasingly associated with real-life reform” (84). Her analysis focuses on Utopian texts meant to produce ideal societies that should be mimicked in real life. Although these kinds of Utopias show “a clear shift from monarch to the republic as a model utopian government” (90), the pamphlets making use of the Utopia brand-name nearly all focus on the preservation of monarchy and traditional values. For other analyses of Utopian texts written during the Civil War, see “Topsy-Turvy in the English Civil War,” in Utopian Thought in the Western World (2009); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1975); Marie Louise Berneri, Journey Through Utopia (1950); and George Claeys, Restoration and Augustan British Utopias (2000).

[16] It is difficult to know why the false paratexts, which only appear in the earlier versions of Utopia and become less frequent once the brand is established, would become a distinguishing feature for this generic version. The author could be more familiar with an edition that contained the paratexts and felt compelled to add one to his text. In this case, the self-aware aspect of these additions helped expose the true message of the text.

[17] For a commentary on how this text participates in Calvinist Oxthodoxy debates, see Peter Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (2009), 75-80.

[18] Bernard Alsop was among many print agents who were accused of printing seditious pamphlets that announced fake news from Parliament and fake royalist petitions, most famously the Hertfordshire petition (1641), which caused him to be sent for by the House of Commons. He and his partners were later imprisoned in 1643 for printing His Majesty’s Propositions to Sir John Hotham and the Inhabitants of Hell (Plomer 4).

[19] Dunton was a wise capitalist himself, using popular stories or literary trends to boost his publishing career. Michael Mascuch calls him “the maven of (re)invention [whom] catered to the public’s growing hunger from the start” (146).

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Works Cited

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Anon. A Letter Found in Utopia. London, 1675.

Anon. The Loyal City of Bristol Vindicated from Amsterdamism. London, 1681.

Anon. The King of Utopia His Letter to the Citizens of Cosmopolis, the Metropolitan City of Utopia. London, 1647.

Anon. Passes Granted, by the Free-born People of England. London, 1648.

Appelbaum, Robert. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth Century England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Baker, David Weil. Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1999.

Berneri, Marie Louise. Journey through Utopia. London: Routledge, 1950.

Boesky, Amy. Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Brooks, Douglas A., ed. Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.

Burnet, Gilbert, Thomas Burnet, Thomas Ward, Joseph Downing, and Henry Woodfall. Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time. London, 1724.

Cave, Terence. Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008.

Claeys, Gregory. Restoration and Augustan British Utopias. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2000.

Davis, J. C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Dunton, John. The Informer’s Doom: Or, an Amazing Seasonable Letter from Utopia, Directed at the Man in the Moon. London, 1683.

Goldstone, Jack A. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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Greig, Martin. “Gilbert Burnet and the Problem of Nonconformity in Restoration Scotland and England.” Canadian Journal of History 32 (1997): 1-24.

Hailbrunn, Benoit. “Brave New Brands: Cultural Branding between Utopia and A-topia.” Brand Culture. Ed. Jonathan E. Schroeder, Miriam Salzer-Mörling, and Søren Askegaard. New York: Routledge, 2006. 103-18.

Halpern, Richard. “Rational Kernel, Mystical Shelf: Reification and Desire in Thomas More’s Utopia.” The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991. 136-215.

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Holt, Douglas B. How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2004.

Kinney, Arthur F. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-century England. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Kinney, Arthur F. “Utopia’s First Readers.” Challenging Humanism: Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith. Ed. Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinner, and A. J. Hoenselaars. Newark: University of Delaware, 2005.

Lawson, Peter. “Property Crime and Hard Times in England 1559-1624.” Law and History Review 4.1 (1986): 95-127.

Leslie, Marina. Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998.

Levy, Sidney J., and Dennis W. Rook. Brands, Consumers, Symbols, & Research: Sidney J. Levy on Marketing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.

Lupton, Thomas. Siuqila, Too Good to Be True: Herein Is Shewed by Waye of Dialoge, the Wonderfull Maners of the People of Mauqsun. London, 1584.

Manuel, Frank Edward., and Fritzie Prigohzy Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1979.

Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-identity in England, 1591-1791. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996.

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More, Thomas. A Frutefull Pleasaunt, [and] Wittie Worke, of the Beste State of a Publique Weale, and of the Newe Yle, Called Vtopia. London, 1556.

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Thuesen, Peter Johannes. Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Womock, Laurence. The Examination of Tilenus before the Triers; in Order to His Intended Settlement in the Office of a Publick Preacher in the Commonwealth of Utopia. London, 1658.

Yamada, Akihiro. Thomas Creede: Printer to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Tokyo: Mesei UP, 1994.

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Andie Silva is Assistant Professor of English at York College (CUNY) in Jamaica, New York. Her research and reviews have appeared in History of European Ideas, Early Modern Literary Studies, and Early Modern Online Bibliography. Her book project examines early modern print and modern digital cultures, focusing on paratextual materials as unique sites of labor, cultural capital, and maker-consumer relationships. She’s also currently working on a database of non-authorial paratexts.

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APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,

Volume Nine (2016): Texts & Contexts

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