Utopia's Moorish Inspiration: Thomas More's Reading of Ibn Tufayl

A promising but neglected precedent for Thomas More's Utopia is to be found in Ibn Tufayl's Ibn Hayy Yaqzan. This twelfth-century Andalusian philosophical novel describing the self-education and enlightenment of a feral child on an island, while certainly a precedent for the European Bildungsroman, also arguably qualifies as a utopian text. It is possible that More had access to Pico de la Mirandola's Latin translation of Ibn Hayy Yaqzan. This study consists of a review of historical and philological evidence that More may have read Ibn Hayy Yaqzan and a comparative reading of More's and Tufayl's two famous works. I argue that there are good reasons to see in Ibn Hayy Yaqzan a source for More's Utopia and that in certain respects we can read More's Utopia as a response to Tufayl's novel.