In an essay "Of Cannibals," Montaigne gives an account of a primitive tribe of South American Indians; while treating their life style in toto, he pays special attention to their choice of leaders, their mode of warfare, and their treatment of captives. This work is a notable contribution to the vogue of fictionalized travel literature, which includes, in addition to More's Utopia, such works as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels and a host of major and minor later documents. Montaigne's philosophical approach to his subject is revealed in his repeated pointing of contrasts between those simple Indians and "civilized" Europeans with their mechanical progress, their gunpowder, and their Christianity. In almost every instance, civilization comes off second best in matters of rational behavior and especially where man's humanity to man is concerned.
The early seventeenth century marks the appearance of several ambitious accounts of utopian societies, the most successful being: The City of the Sun (Civitas Solis, 1623) by Tommaso Campanella, Christianopolis (1619), by Johann V. Andreae, and The New Atlantis (1624) by Sir Francis Bacon.
Campanella's City of the Sun was the earliest of the three works in point of composition if not of publication. He wrote the earliest version of the work in Italian in 1602. A revised and somewhat abbreviated version in Latin was published in 1623. Then the Italian work was published posthumously in 1637, but the Latin version is the better known.
