Mapping Utopia

Abstract In More’s Utopia the influence of theoretical geography of the early sixteenth century met New World exploration narrative, with the result that the excitement of encounter with non-European societies was given a philosophical and scientific veneer. This playful setting of Utopia, in addition to the careful description More gives of its topography, would seem to invite maps of the island. Yet the sixteenth-century cartographic response to Utopia was rather muted: apart from the crude woodcuts which appeared with the first editions, only Abraham Ortelius attempted a detailed representation of the island. It is arguably only the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that has seen a concerted effort to respond to More’s ideas through maps—and this not by cartographers, but by artists. The chapter begins with a discussion of More’s own textual mapping of Utopia. It examines in detail Ortelius’ map of Utopia (an appendix transcribes and translates its toponyms, and adds new information about their sources), before surveying Utopic maps from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The chapter concludes with a consideration of three contemporary artistic ‘maps of Utopia’: Satomi Matoba’s ‘Topographic Map of Utopia’ (1998); Qiu Zhijie’s ‘Map of Utopia’ (2012), and Stephen Walter’s ‘Nova Utopia’ (2013).