A study of European utopias in context from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign to the Restoration, this book assesses the societies projected by utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the political idealism and millenarianism of the mid-seventeenth century. The Renaissance Utopia complements recent scholarly work on early modern communities by providing a thorough investigation of the issues informing a way of modeling a very particular community and literary mode - the utopia.