Temporality and the media of revelation: Utopian literature in the English Reformation (Thomas More)

This project situates Thomas More's Utopia and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the best-known utopian writings of the English Renaissance, within a particular strand of Reformation history. I argue that these texts engage a legacy of conflicts over knowledge transmission and uses of circumspection rooted in the possibilities, facilitated by humanist biblical criticism and philology, of an idealized reception of Christian revelation. The thesis focuses on a comparatively ignored dimension of Reformation dispute: the role of temporality in the unfolding of divine revelation, and the way debates surrounding it became associated with understandings of the material and historical text of Scripture, and enfolded with controversies over the vernacular Bible and the nature of holy writ. In their fictions, More and Bacon had to attend to their utopian societies' relationship to Christian revelation, and the particular ways they figure the revelation event provide insight into to tensions, problems, and fantasies of critical consequence in the Reformation. My analyses of More and Bacon's imaginative responses bookend a consideration of Reformation literature which treats these central concerns more directly. The second chapter focuses on the tensions between the function of the Bible and the historicity of divine revelation in Erasmus's writings. The third chapter addresses More's religious polemics against William Tyndale, in which the temporality of revelation, and attendant concepts of holy writ, become primary arguments against reformist notions of Scripture. I proceed to demonstrate that Bacon draws upon these earlier disputed understandings of Scripture in order to envision new possibilities for scientific advancement. Bacon's depiction of revelation in New Atlantis exemplifies a profound and productive transformation, in which past religious controversies and future aspirations for scientific progress mutually inform and vie against each other. His depiction illuminates the afterlife of pivotal and interrelated subjects of Reformation debate---the issues of the temporality and textual mediation of divine revelation---and reveals their vital role beyond the Reformation in the framing of a modern scientific institution.