The two books under review reflect a resurgence of interest in the concept of “utopia” in the early modern Spanish empire. Serrano Gassent’s Vasco de Quiroga is an intellectual study of the first bishop of Michoacan (1538–65), whose political thought was utopian in the strict sense: it was directly influenced by a reading of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which Quiroga sought to put into effect in America. (The current book is a companion volume to Serrano’s earlier edited collection of Quiroga’s writings, La Utopía en América [1992].) Morales Folguera’s La construcción de la utopía focuses on the later sixteenth century and addresses Philip II’s goal of controlling social space throughout Spanish America—a more ambiguous utopia.
Quiroga’s career, which Serrano describes in the introduction, is a fascinating case study in the first generation of imperial rule. A lawyer and royal bureaucrat, he went to New Spain as a member of...
