Abstract
This article explores literary utopias transmitted in the course of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century, focusing upon a specific element of humanist fancies: the fiction of Utopian encounters between the Ancient and the New World. In Thomas More’s Utopia, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. These ‘encounters’ are a privileged instance of the articulation of a political imagination that intertwines the realization of a Renaissance humanist project with the recently discovered space of the New World. Montaigne’s echoes in Shakespeare’s Tempest are the starting point for the investigation of controversial aspects of Renaissance humanists’ political imagination about the New World and the European colonization.
Keywords
More; Montaigne; Shakespeare; New World; European colonialism; Renaissance Humanism; Political imagination