British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
ELIE KEDOURIE MEMORIAL LECTURE
The Crescent and the City of the Sun: Islam and the Renaissance Utopia of Tommaso Campanella
Dr Noel Malcolm FBA
28 May 2003
Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) is one of the most famous works in the early modern Utopian tradition. Scholars have written at length about the various sources and models that lay behind it: Herodotus, Thomas More, Christian monasticism, Renaissance naturalism, accounts of the Incas, and so on. But perhaps the most important influence has gone unnoticed. This lecture explores the role of Islam and the Ottoman system of government and society in Campanella's thinking. In doing so, it puts forward a new interpretation not only of this particular text (and of the abortive revolution of 1599, for which it served as a retrospective manifesto), but also of the whole pattern of Campanella's apocalyptic political theology.
