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The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages A Reassessment

The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages A Reassessment I The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages A Reassessment* JANET COLEMAN term 'Utopia' cannot be defined in a systematic way to enable 1 it to be applied accurately to the vast number of different charac- teristics of those perfect, happy places that have been imagined · or politically realised in the past. And yet there has been a consistent attempt, certainly from the Greeks to the present day, to think about the possibility of human perfectibility and its limits within a social context, that forces us to include utopianism as a category fundamen- tal to political thinking. The present paper, which is part of a larger study on the notion of perfectibility in the western Christian middle ages, is an attempt to discover a generic order, a continuity in the Christian tradition which links orthodox and heterodox attitudes to the potential for human perfectibility conceived of as communal and therefore, dependent on a social and political order. This study is an attempt to illuminate some of the more radical and so-called unortho- dox views of spiritual and social perfectibility in the later middle ages by examining and contrasting aspects of orthodox texts which offered remarkably similar http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Vivarium Brill

The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages A Reassessment

Vivarium , Volume 20 (1): 23 – Jan 1, 1982

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0042-7543
eISSN
1568-5349
DOI
10.1163/156853482x00053
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

I The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages A Reassessment* JANET COLEMAN term 'Utopia' cannot be defined in a systematic way to enable 1 it to be applied accurately to the vast number of different charac- teristics of those perfect, happy places that have been imagined · or politically realised in the past. And yet there has been a consistent attempt, certainly from the Greeks to the present day, to think about the possibility of human perfectibility and its limits within a social context, that forces us to include utopianism as a category fundamen- tal to political thinking. The present paper, which is part of a larger study on the notion of perfectibility in the western Christian middle ages, is an attempt to discover a generic order, a continuity in the Christian tradition which links orthodox and heterodox attitudes to the potential for human perfectibility conceived of as communal and therefore, dependent on a social and political order. This study is an attempt to illuminate some of the more radical and so-called unortho- dox views of spiritual and social perfectibility in the later middle ages by examining and contrasting aspects of orthodox texts which offered remarkably similar

Journal

VivariumBrill

Published: Jan 1, 1982

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