McWilliams, Saving Place
1
“Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought
Against the murderous alphabet:
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.”
–
Wallace Stevens
1
–
Thomas More discerned, warily, the dawn of a new political age. He could hardly
miss the signs; around him, as Peter Ackroyd has noted, “there can be no doubt that there
was a sense of ‘new learning’ in the air, together with an atmosphere of reform and
renovation.”
2
Central to this general feeling, and to More’s in particular, was the recent
and rapid development of possibilities for travel. The fifteenth century had seen massive
improvements in navigational technique and the science of geography. The emergence
and growth of geographical subdisciplines in More’s England heralded the arrival of “a
new ideology and methodology of science,” which gave to the English a sense of self-
definition in political, economic, and social terms.
3
And the “growing substratum of
maritime skill and geographical knowledge” had enabled the Portuguese, in particular, to
push into and across the Atlantic. “This was the beginning of the age of discovery,” and
with the growing European awareness of the New World and development of travel
routes around the Old World, “an equilibrium which had lasted a thousand years was
dissolving.”
4
More’s age “was as fascinated by these voyages to the edge of the world as
ours is by outer space.”
5
1
Wallace Stevens, “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books,
1990) 179.
2
Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (New York: Anchor Books, 1998) 25
3
Lesley B. Cormack, “‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbors’: Geography as Self-Definition in Early
Modern England,” Isis 82.4 (December, 1991) 661.
4
J.M. Roberts, The History of the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1987) 495-498.
5
Gordon Rupp, Thomas More: The King’s Good Servant (London: Collins, 1978) 20.
Convention