Italian Renaissance Utopias

This book provides the first English study (comprehensive of introductory essays, translations, and notes) of five prominent Italian Renaissance utopias: Donis Wise and Crazy World, Patrizis The Happy City, and Zuccolos The Republic of Utopia, The Republic of Evandria, and The Happy City. The scholarship on Italian Renaissance utopias is still relatively underdeveloped; there is no English translation of these texts (apart from Campanellas City of Sun), and our understanding of the distinctive features of this utopian tradition is rather limited. This book therefore fills an important gap in the existing critical literature, providing easier access to these utopian texts, and showing how the study of the utopias of Doni, Patrizi, and Zuccolo can shed crucial light on the scholarly debate about the essential traits of Renaissance utopias.