Reading Utopia in the Reformation of Punishment

MATTHEW RITGER

Recent scholarship on the first English translation of Thomas More s Utopia has asked how its pub- lication in the 1550s fits with the larger agenda of Protestant Reformers who promoted the book alongside their other civic projects. This article argues that the initiatives of greatest relevance were the new house of correction at Bridewell (est. 1553 57) and the infamous Vagrancy Act of 1547 49, which failed to introduce slavery as a punishment in English law. Evidence of user inter- actions with the 1550s editions, including indexing, annotation, commonplacing, and quotation, helps to analyze how the text s complicated ideas about penal labor were received and reemphasized by early English readers. I N TR O D U C T I O N The best known feature of Utopian life is its communism, as Dominic Baker- Smith recently put it, and so one might think the most influential aspect of the original Utopia (1516) by Thomas More (1478 1535) has always been its crit- icism of private property.1 In contrast, this article argues that Utopia s most notable idea, at least in the two earliest editions of Ralph Robinson s (1520 77) first English translation (1551, 1556), was the protagonist Raphael Hythloday s contention that thieves ought to be put to work rather than put to death.2 If, as Miguel Abensour suggests, there are statements that function as genuine insti- tutions, then this might have been the closest thing More s dialogic Utopia had to a singular statement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 This idea has been called by at least one modern historian the More tradition for its influence on English penology, and was frequently marked by early modern