Travels to the Limits of Thought

The Uses of Utopia

Joad Raymond is a writer and historian of early modern Europe who has taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Paris-Sorbonne and Queen Mary University of London. His previous books include The Invention of the Newspaper, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, Milton's Angels and, as editor, Making the News, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1600, News Networks in Early Modern Europe and The Complete Works of John Milton: Latin Defences.

Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy. This book traces utopian ideas across the centuries, from Plato to Margaret Cavendish and Italo Calvino. It reveals the concerns – with the relationship between authority and freedom, law and morality, sex and the sexes, work and the good life – that have animated utopian thinkers from the very beginning. Utopia enabled them to explore the limits of thought, to go beyond what we know and interrogate the very foundations of our societies. 
 
The Uses of Utopia offers a beguiling tour not only of the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also places where those inspired by these visions of perfection attempted to bring them into being, from the humane, egalitarian communities devised by Vasco de Quiroga in colonial Mexico to Étienne Cabet’s disastrous attempt to realise socialism on the Mississippi. It is a book brimming with voices as well as ideas. Luminaries and radicals of all persuasions speak freely with one another – and also to us. Here, in the world utopians reject, utopia still challenges us to reconsider where we stand.

Joad Raymond Wren

Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment

Highly ambitious and impressive …  here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount

Monumental and mesmerising ... Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work

Capacious in structure, monumental in volume

Utopian is the ambition to write a history of news, that most quicksilver of commodities, and Raymond Wren has knowingly attempted the impossible ... The Great Exchange must be counted a triumphant success

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book' 
Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement 
 
News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel. 
 
This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language. 
 
Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

Joad Raymond Wren

Praise for The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment

Highly ambitious and impressive … here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount

Monumental and mesmerising ... Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work

Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment

Highly ambitious and impressive … here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount

Monumental and mesmerising ... Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work

Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment

Highly ambitious and impressive … here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount

Monumental and mesmerising ... Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work

Books by Joad Raymond Wren

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