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Privacy and Health in Utopia

Is privacy compatible with a healthy society?

Surely so, we might answer. But the question is more complicated than it might seem.

Utopias are generally described as healthy societies. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), people enjoy excellent health. The narrator, Raphael Hythloday, a traveller who claims to have visited Utopia, reports that, ‘nowhere are people’s bodies more vigorous or less susceptible to disease’ (78).[1]

In The History of the Sevarambians (1675–9), the narrator describes the inhabitants as ‘strong’[2]:

[F]or the most part [they] enjoy a great degree of Health, which is owing partly to their Birth and Manner of living, and partly to their Gaiety and Liveliness of Disposition.

Hence, utopians are not automatically healthy. As in the utopia of the Sevarambians, social conditions, and reasonable efforts to exercise and live moderately result in good health.

Utopia is never perfect, but a place where, mainly on account of good governance and circumstances, life is better.

However, many such healthy utopian societies also have limited privacy. In More’s Utopia, both privacy and private property have been abolished:

Every house has a front door to the street and a back door to the garden. The double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand and close again automatically, let anyone come in—so there is nothing private anywhere.

Hythloday himself is an advocate of a communal society without private property. In Book I of Utopia, he debates this issue with More and his friend Pieter Gilles in Antwerp. They consider the impact of the enclosures of common lands—a proto-capitalist example of privatization then taking place in England. The commons were being given to private landholders to graze sheep for profit, leaving many peasants destitute.

During this discussion, Hythloday has this to say about a healthy society:

so long as private property remains, there is no hope at all of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health. While you try to cure one part, you aggravate the wound in other parts.

Hythloday’s statement resonates across 500 years for those concerned about the privatization of public health care in Europe today.

So, is private property (perhaps also privacy) incompatible with a healthy society?

Jennifer Rust has analysed the health-care regime in Utopia in detail. She finds that the Latin word More used for ‘health’, salus, has three senses. It refers to ‘the physical health of the individual body’, ‘the wider welfare of the commonwealth’, and also ‘spiritual salvation’.[3]

More’s understanding of the concept of health then has to do with at least three of the heuristic zones of Mette Birkedal Bruun’s phenomenological approach to privacy: soul/self, body and state.[4]

Appropriately enough: health (like disease) resists the arbitrary borders that humans construct between individual selves, peoples, and countries, as the WHO definition makes clear[5]:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Importantly, Rust also finds More’s thought experiment to contain the ideological seeds of modern public health systems. Drawing on Foucault’s writings on biopolitics, she argues that Utopia dramatizes a sixteenth-century crisis in the notion of the pastoral, which was being challenged by the enclosures. Not only is privatization of the commons making shepherds and sheep the agents of the landlords’ expropriation of the peasants. Abbots of the Church are among the private landholders; so they have abandoned their pastoral duty by participating in the terror of the ‘devouring’ sheep.

In Utopia, the remedy is the transference of pastoral power to the Utopian state which organizes excellent health care for all, with four hospitals provided outside each town, mini-towns of their own that offer excellent care for soul, body and community.

The cost of the state’s assumption of responsibility for health is that there is no privacy nor private property anywhere.

In fact, my reading of Utopia finds that there are some contradictions to the complete elimination of privacy. Those who practise a minority religion are allowed to worship privately in private homes; which suggests that the open doors of houses must sometimes remain closed.

In the hospitals too, there is a regime of private enclosure. The sick are confined to one part of the hospitals with lots of space to keep them from infecting the travellers who also stay there. The space of the hospitals themselves is also private, in the sense that they are located away from the towns to ensure a measure of quarantine against infectious diseases.

Hythloday exaggerates when he claims there is no privacy anywhere in Utopia. It is true that there is a radical limitation on individual privacy. But there is also, by comparison with contemporary England, a rearrangement of the privacy regime. The spaces and borders of privacy between individuals and parts of society have been reorganized.

Privacy is not only about the sole individual. In Bruun’s understanding, it is ‘the practice and experience of withdrawal, boundary drawing, and control of access’[4]. By definition, control implies others from which the individual (or individuals) withdraws, as in when the sick are withdrawn to the hospital.

Utopia warns readers that both private property and privacy might be incompatible with good health and the healthy society, in circumstances where due care has not been paid to their governance.

Utopia is a thought experiment. In practice, there might be a sweet spot between the extremes. It is for readers to think about how regimes of privacy might be renegotiated to ensure a better balance between public and private interests; and better health for individuals as well as for communities.

References

1. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. by George M. Logan, trans. by Robert M. Adams, 3rd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

2. Denis Veiras, The History of the Sevarambians: A Utopian Novel, ed. by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori (State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 261.

3. Jennifer R. Rust, ‘Ad Salutem Publicam: Public Health and Pastoral Government in More’s Utopia’, Textual Practice, 37.5 (2023), pp. 706–24.

4. Mette Birkedal Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy: The Retirement of the Great Condé’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Brill, 2022), pp. 12–60.

5. World Health Organization, ‘Constitution’. https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution.

Tracing Impressions of Privacy in Paratexts

A small group of scholars assembled in the Italian city of Verona on 16 and 17 May 2024 for a symposium dedicated to the study of early modern privacy in paratextual sources. Some twenty interested students in book history from the University of Verona also attended the opening day.

The symposium was organized by Liam Benison (University of Verona) and Jelena Bakić (Free University of Bolzano) with the aim of developing a scholarly conversation between the fields of privacy studies and paratextual studies. The idea for the project grew out of the researchers’ early work on privacy conducted with the support of Mette Birkedal Bruun and colleagues at the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY).

Although paratexts have the highly ‘public’ aim of presenting a written work to its audience, many early modern paratexts include representations of the authorial persona. While these are typically rhetorical, Jelena noticed through her research on sixteenth-century books written by Italian women that the paratexts also recorded social, cultural, gender and emotional expressions that might be considered private. Meanwhile Liam had become aware through his study of privacy in early modern utopianism that the paratexts of utopias also played with the thresholds between private and public. They therefore decided to bring together a small group of experts to explore the synergies of paratext and privacy in more depth.

The symposium was funded by the University of Verona and supported by Federica Formiga, Associate Professor in book history and contemporary publishing in the Department of Cultures and Civilizations at the University of Verona.

Verona, although known today more for the romantic heroes of an early modern English play, was once an important centre of publishing in the Venetian Republic. The city has maintained a long legacy of book culture, being home to what claims to be the oldest, continually active library in the world. The Biblioteca Capitolare was founded beside the cathedral in the fifth century as a scriptorium for writing and copying books on vellum and parchment. Today it houses many important early manuscipt and printed books including incunabuli.

The symposium was divided in two parts. Thursday morning was devoted to four lectures discussing the state of the art and methodologies of the fields of privacy studies and paratextual studies. 

Mette Birkedal Bruun (Director of PRIVACY, University of Copenhagen) presented via Zoom a survey of the work of scholars at PRIVACY who question assumptions about the public and private as being quite separate spheres and purely modern phenomena. She stressed the importance of asking the ‘wh’ questions such as for whom is something private, how, why, where and when?

Federica Formiga discussed the importance of paratexts as sources for interpreting the reception of books. She highlighted the use of rhetorical techniques such as the captatio benevolentiae used in early modern dedicatory epistles to capture the goodwill of readers, negotiate patronage relations and define works for a particular audience.

Michaël Green (University of Łódź and co-founding editor of the Brill book series Studies in the History of Privacy) discussed some important considerations when publishing in the field of privacy studies, including the use of definitions (however loose), a clear structure, and editors’ expectation of the use of multiple or corroborative sources.

Finally, Jelena Bakić looked at how methodologies from the fields of early modern paratext and privacy studies could be combined for a productive study of the meaning of privacy through paratextual sources. Highlighting Maria Terzoli’s view of paratexts as ‘autobiographic public space’, Jelena argued that, while we cannot expect to discover an author’s experience of privacy through the public medium of the paratext, we may discern ideal conceptions of privacy when paratexts are contextualized through an understanding of contemporary social, cultural, gender and emotional expectations. Jelena concluded with the reflection that we can read in paratexts the mechanisms by which people’s private thoughts or feelings were managed or reshaped when communicated in public, and therefore, evaluate the success of social and political regimes in controlling the private.

The programme for Thursday afternoon and Friday morning was dedicated to discussing papers presented by eight researchers.

Federica Formiga considered paratextual traces of the competition between Jewish itinerant printer Gershom Soncino (1460–1534) and his more successful and renowned rival Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–1515). Stefano Cassini (Università Cattolica del Santa Cuore, Milan) compared Manutius’ paratexts and letters to shed light on how he re-presented events of his life in his paratexts.

Valentina Sestini (Sapienza, University of Rome and Editor of the journal Paratesto) discussed the topos of exile and ‘unjust misfortunes’ narrated in the paratexts of Muzio Oddi (1569–1639). Laura Mattioli (University of Durham) examined how Anton Francesco Doni’s ‘Mondo Savio e Pazzo’ (‘Wise and Mad World’) was privatized in expurgated editions published to conform with Counter-Reformation ideology. Finally Alexa Zildjian (University of St Andrews), considering power and secrets in British paratexts, showed how a person’s relative anonymity might be exposed by becoming the subject of a dedicatory epistle.

On Friday morning, Lars Cyril Nørgaard (PRIVACY) examined how private states are made public in the paratexts of early modern Lutheran funeral books from Denmark. Paolo Tinti (University of Bologna) showed examples of the paratexts of early modern academic books that reveal aspects of scholars’ relations. Michaël Green (University of Łódź) examined prefaces of the scholarly books of the French Huguenot Jean Rou (1638-1711) for traces of privacy.

The papers demonstrated a rich variety of ways in which aspects of the private may be perceived as imbricated with the public aims of the paratext. The researchers are now working on a book project.

Utopian privacy

What has utopia to do with privacy?

Nothing at all, according to Raphael Hythloday, the narrator of Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia, first published in Latin in 1516. Hythloday reports what he observed when he travelled to the island of Utopia:

Every house has a front door to the street and a back door to the garden. The double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand and close again automatically, let anyone come in—so there is nothing private anywhere. Every ten years they exchange the houses themselves by lot.[1]

Utopia has neither private property nor privacy. If we take Hythoday at his word, utopian privacy should be an oxymoron. However, early modern travellers were widely regarded as liars, so we might be sceptical of Hythloday’s report. Readers who know Greek might recognize that his name means ‘nonsense peddler’.[2] So how seriously can we take More’s figure of the easily opening doors?

The passage is adapted from no lesser an authority than Plato. In the Republic, the Guardians are forbidden private property ‘beyond the barest essentials … none of them shall possess a dwelling-house or other property to which all have not the right of entry’.[3] More used humour and word games for the serious purpose of imagining what a society might look like with a different balance between private and public interests. His work was experimental, meant for contemplation by fellow humanists, and not to be taken literally as any kind of blueprint. His own views about the positive or negative values of privacy and communism have long been debated, but whatever he thought privately, his evocation of an egalitarian society without private property has been used by both communists and Christians to claim More as one of their own.[4]

Woodcut illustration to the 1516 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia (Public Domain).

Utopian literature is a self-referential, intertextual tradition, in which utopists frequently claim to offer a better vision of utopia than their predecessors. More coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek topos ‘place’. The prefix u- represents the two Greek prefixes eu– and ou-, so that utopia signifies both a good place and a no-place. Utopia’s poet laureate Anemolius explains the pun in a poem which strikes a competitive contrast with Plato’s Republic:

‘No-Place’ was once my name, I lay so far;
But now with Plato’s state I can compare,
Perhaps outdo her (for what he only drew
In empty words I have made live anew
In men and wealth, as well as splendid laws):
‘The Good Place’ they should call me, with good cause (123).

So did More think that privacy was incompatible with a good society? It is clear that he regarded private property as a social problem. His work was inspired in part by the negative effects of incipient capitalism, in which the enclosures of common lands were forcing many rural people to become vagrants, beggars and thieves. As Hythloday observes, England’s sheep ‘that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now … have become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves’ (19).

More goes beyond Plato with the concrete reference to ‘double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand’. The idea of the front door to the home being open for anyone to enter would have troubled More’s readers as much as it does us today. As Daniel Jütte argues, the door to the house in European societies has a long history of being locked and bolted in both the city and countryside.[5] Utopia then presents privacy and private property as a Gordian knot, anathema to social harmony.

What did later utopians make of More’s open doors? Could we trace a history of privacy through representations of doors in utopian literature? Let’s look at a couple of examples.

An interesting example comes from The History of the Sevarambians by Denis Vairasse (1675–79). When the narrator, Captain Siden, sees the viceregal palace in the centre of the utopian city for the first time, he makes an interesting observation about its transparency:

[W]e came to a spacious Square, in the midst of which stood this most magnificent Palace, built all with white Marble, and adorn’d with divers Pieces of Architecture and Sculpture. This Building, like all their others, is a Quadrangle, not less than five hundred Geometrick Paces in the Front, and two Miles round.—A prodigious Bigness for one House! It has twelve Doors in each side of it, which being exactly opposite to each other, one sees quite through the Palace at so many different Places.[6]

The twelve doors are a reference to the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21), signifying that the palace is a microcosm of the utopian society and the universe. That Siden can see into the interior of the building from outside complicates the easy conclusion that such utopian architectures are simple precursors of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. As Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard points out, the twelve doors not only allow the rulers to maintain surveillance over the citizenry, they also enable the citizens to return the gaze.[7] One illustrator’s idea of a Sevarambian palace is suggestive of the idea of their transparency:

Copperplate illustration showing palace with view through large windows, from the 1682 Dutch edition of History of the Sevarambians.

This two-way transparency is not limited to the impressive public buildings of the rulers. Residential buildings, called osmasies, mimic the palace on a smaller scale. They have four doors on each side, opposite each other, and are transected by corridors leading to a central courtyard with a fountain that reminds the narrator of a cloister. This opens up the possibility of space for privacy. Leibacher-Ouvrard remarks that the osmasies are ‘at the same time turned inward on themselves, protecting the intimacy of their green heart, and open to the exterior world’.[8] These architectures are exploited by characters who escape the gaze of the authorities to engage in forbidden sexual encounters, heretical worship or other illicit activities, in the many sub-narratives of Sevarambians.

Hendrik Smeeks’s Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes recounts the observations of utopia by the merchant, Juan de Posos, whose ship is blown off course in a storm en route from Panama to the Philippines. Stranded on the island of Krinke Kesmes, he meets the supervisor of aliens, the Garbon, who informs him about the Kesmians’ political institutions, geography and history. There is no explicit abolition of privacy or private property in Krinke Kesmes, but we can glean something of attitudes to privacy from descriptions of their customs.

On his tour of the City Hall, de Posos is confronted with a custom that he had read ‘in More’s Utopia, yet believed … to have been a fiction’, in which potential marriage partners inspect each other’s naked bodies as a buyer would a horse. More borrowed this idea from Plato’s Laws.[9] In Utopia, the ritual’s aim is to prevent either party to the marriage from deceiving the other about bodily flaws:

Whether she be widow or virgin, the woman is shown naked to the suitor by a responsible and respectable matron; and similarly, some honourable man presents the suitor naked to the woman. … If some disfiguring accident takes place after marriage, each person must bear his own fate; but beforehand everyone should be legally protected from deception. (83–4)

It is not stated where the inspection takes place, but since utopian doors are unlocked, it must be assumed that, whether indoors or outdoors, it can be witnessed by anyone. In Krinke Kesmes, the ritual takes place in a special room of the City Hall called the ‘wedding chamber’. De Posos reports that a male relative of the groom and a female relative of the bride escort the prospective partners inside:

Having arrived in the chamber and closed the doors, these each undress their relation and display them to one another quite naked, who then scrutinize each other behind and in front, moving standing, stooping &c. … if both are well and sound, then the marriage is concluded and must proceed.[10]

De Posos’s visit to the wedding chamber is interrupted by four people who enter ‘covered in silk’ to perform the nuptial inspection, so that he ‘had to depart, the door was closed’ (88).

Copperplate illustration from the 1721 German edition of Krinke Kesmes, Deutsches Textarchiv (Creative Commons licence).

Smeeks’s adaptation is instructive of differences between his and More’s conception of the problem of privacy and its limits. In Krinke Kesmes, the public performance of the ritual is limited to a private room with locked doors, preserving some degree of the marriage partners’ modesty. The ritual’s relative privacy is emphasized in the narrative by allowing de Posos to view the wedding chamber, but making him leave it when the couple arrives, the door closing behind him. The reader’s desire to view the ritual has been titillated but denied. Nonetheless, de Posos says that the custom strikes him as ‘peculiar [and] at odds with honour and modesty’, which suggests that it would violate his sense of privacy. Where the doors to the houses of More’s Utopia can be opened by anyone at anytime, Kesmian doors have locks and someone controls access with a key, providing opportunities and space for some degree of privacy.

Many utopians have pondered the problem of how society might be remade to achieve a more harmonious and egalitatarian balance between public and private interests. More’s figure of the open doors links privacy with private property in an inextricable knot. While privacy is more limited in all of these utopias than we might accept today, in the later works, Vairasse and Smeeks nuance the absence of privacy that Hythloday claims prevails in Utopia, and open up spaces where private experience might be enjoyed. That suggests a marked shift in the conception of privacy between the early sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries that requires more investigation. These few examples offer evidence that utopias are excellent sources for the study of early modern privacy.

References

[1] Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan, trans. by Robert M. Adams, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 48.

[2] More, Utopia, p. xi.

[3] More, Utopia, p. 48, n. 18.

[4] Marie-Claire Phélippeau, ‘Controversial More and Puzzling Utopia: Five Hundred Years of History’, Utopian Studies, 27.3 (2016), 569–85 (575–6).

[5] Daniel Jütte, The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 86.

[6] Denis Veiras [Vairasse], The History of the Sevarambians: A Utopian Novel, ed. by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 93.

[7] Leibacher-Ouvrard, Lise, Libertinage et utopies sous le règne de Louis XIV (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1989), pp. 99–100.

[8] Leibacher-Ouvrard, p. 100.

[9] More, Utopia, p. 83, n. 99.

[10] Smeeks, Hendrik, The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708), ed. David Fausett, trans. Robert H. Leek (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), p. 88.