But to return to the main line of our inquiry. It is doubtful that Utopia is still widely read because More was medieval or even because he was a martyr -- indeed, it is likely that these days many who read Utopia with interest do not even know that its author was a martyr. Utopia is still widely read because in a sense More stood on the margin of modernity. And if he did stand on the margins of modernity, it was not in dying a martyr for such unity as Papal supremacy might be able to force on Western Christendom. It was not even in writing Latin epigrams, sometimes bawdy ones, or in translating Lucian from Greek into Latin or in defending the study of Greek against the attack of conservative academics, or in attacking the conservative theologians who opposed Erasmus's philological study of the New Testament. Similar literary exercises were the common doings of a Christian humanist of the first two decades of the sixteenth century. Had More's writings been wholly limited to such exercises, they would be almost as dimly remembered as those of a dozen or so other authors living in his time, whose works tenuously survive in the minds of the few hundred scholars who each decade in pursuit of their very specialized occasions read those works.

More stands on the margins of modernity for one reason alone -- because he wrote Utopia. And the evidence that he does, indeed, stand there derives quite simply from the vigorous interest with which rather casual readers have responded to that book for the past century or so. Only one other contemporary of More's evokes so immediate and direct a response, and only one other contemporary work -- Niccolo Machiavelli and The Prince. Can we discover what it is in Utopia that has evoked this response? Remember that in seeking the modern in Utopia we do not deny the existence of the medieval and the Renaissance there; we do not even need to commit ourselves to assessing on the same inconceivable scale the relative importance of the medieval, the Renaissance, and the modern. The medieval was the most important to Chambers because he sought to place Thomas More, the author of Utopia, in some intelligible relation with St. Thomas More, the martyr. To others whose concern it is to penetrate the significance of Christian Humanism, the Renaissance elements are of primary concern. But here we have a distinctly modern preoccupation; we want to know why that book has kept on selling the way it has; we want to know what is perennially new about Utopia.