Abstract

LILLO CASTAN, Víctor. A Utopia for the New World: Vasco de Quiroga and his Translation of Thomas More’s Utopia. Hist. mex. [online]. 2022, vol.72, n.2, pp.615-644.  Epub Sep 14, 2022. ISSN 2448-6531.  https://doi.org/10.24201/hm.v72i2.4505.

This article attributes to Vasco de Quiroga an anonymous Spanish translation of Thomas More’s Utopia, the sole copy of which is held by the Royal Library of Madrid. In the final pages of his Información en derecho (1535), Vasco mentions that he translated Utopia but, as it is not found alongside the manuscript that contains Información en derecho, held by the National Library of Spain, it has been considered lost until now. The translation of Utopia held by the Royal Library, despite being the first complete Spanish edition of this work, has been almost completely ignored by critics. There is no doubt that it was written in the time of Charles V and, as shall be shown herein, that it was the work of Vasco de Quiroga, who had sent it to Juan Bernal Díaz de Luco so that the Council of the Indies would better understand the functioning of the hospital-towns that he had founded in Santa Fe de México (1532) and Santa Fe de la Laguna (1533), which were inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia.

Keywords : Vasco de Quiroga; Thomas More; Utopia; Translation; Hospital-Towns.