ems to me at least to ignore entirely the carnival aspects of the work that I noted early in this lecture.Let me close by making a point that I implied above. Utopia is part of Thomas More's biography. It is his mirror as well as the mirror of his society. He was a driven man for whom one of the worst sins was to waste time. This was a man who drove his two wives and his children to education and piety with a relentless dedication. He wore a hair shirt under his fine outer garments to mortify his flesh, and according to his son-in-law, William Roper, he beat himself with whips for the same reason.[49] This was a man who waged war with all his power against the incursion of Protestantism into England. He wrote furiously and relentlessly that heretics should be burned at the stake; he rejoiced and joked when some of them did perish in the judicial fires. His last great devotional work, the De Tristitia Christi, radiates hatred towards the heretics, and that same hatred was stamped on the tomb in Chelsea Old Church, a tomb he was destined not to occupy.This was a man of stern temperament, and his Utopia suits the rest of his life. Nothing in Utopia is more like him than the Utopian law that anyone convicted twice of adultery will suffer the penalty of death. He was a man who considered the monastery but decided, as Erasmus said, to be a good husband rather than a bad priest. I have long maintained that the commonwealth of Utopia has the look of a monastic compound where marriage is allowed but strictly controlled so that conjugal relations relieve sexual needs without creating any genuine bonds of intimacy between husbands and wives.Utopia is thus not a program for our society. It is not a blueprint but a touchstone against which we try various ideas about both our times and the book to see what then comes of it all. It helps us see what we are without telling us in detail what we are destined to be. Utopia becomes part of a chain, crossin...
