The focus of this movement was the need for education and the encouragement of sciences as the key to national prosperity. This became one of the three founding works of Rosicrucianism, which was both a legend and a fashionable cultural phenomenon across Europe in this period.Īndreae was a prominent member of the Protestant utopian movement which began in Germany and spread across northern Europe and into Britain under the mentorship of Samuel Hartlib and John Amos Comenius. Johannes Valentinus Andreä or Johann Valentin Andreae, was a German theologian, who claimed to be the author of an ancient text known as the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (published in 1616, Strasbourg in English Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in 1459). After employing a close reading of the primary sources and secondary works, I argue that these three utopias are intensely political and illustrate that utopias are much more than fictional societies, but places and ideas that were intended to be implemented and incorporated into our world and the political structure that it encompasses.Johannes Valentinus Andreae (17 August 1586 – 27 June 1654), a.k.a. These Renaissance-period utopias are explicitly framed by their authors to make drastic changes to the political culture of their time and to prescribe practical solutions to alleviate political problems that they endured.
This thesis aims to understand the more pragmatic side of utopian writing by determining the political purposes of three specific utopias: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619). More specifically, many scholars argue that utopias are serious and practical, ultimately aimed at re-shaping the entire political structure of a society. While some may perceive the purpose of utopias to be completely fantasy-driven, there is a great deal of scholarly literature that dedicates itself to proving otherwise.
Much like more recent genres including science-fiction novels or movies, utopian works stimulate the mind and ultimately cause its readers to question whether an author’s design of such a place, or society, is possible in the real world. Utopian works have entertained generations throughout history.
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