Sir Thomas More

An English Renaissance humanist and lawyer, catalogued here for the literary facet of his career only: he is the author of Utopia (1516), a work of fiction describing an ideally governed island society whose Greek-derived title puns on both no place and good place, leaving deliberately open whether the society it describes is a genuine blueprint or an irony. Utopia gave its name to the literary genre of utopian fiction and, by later inversion, to its dystopian counterpart; it was written in Latin and circulated among European humanists before being translated into English after More's death. His political career as Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, his religious writing, and his eventual execution and canonization are a facet of his life this atlas does not carry, per its own scope charter.