City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning By Michael J. Lewis

Abstract

Political contestations in the United States over so-called “sanctuary cities,” coupled with deepening social conflicts surrounding expanded religious and cultural diversity in European cities, are consuming issues of our time. This fact makes Michael J. Lewis’s City of Refuge a timely contribution to our understanding of how religious and sectarian outsiders, from the Protestant Reformation through early modern times, sought safe places to practice their beliefs within otherwise hostile environments. Drawing upon the intellectual roots of utopianism, framed by Thomas More’s Utopia, Lewis explores a body of philosophical writings that helped to translate visions of ideal society into blueprints that were implemented. He focuses on the German intellectual traditions advanced by the published works of Johann Valentin Andreae (Christianopolis, 1619) and John Amos Comenius (The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, 1623) and an earlier work by Albrecht Dürer (Comprehensive Treatise on the Fortification of Cities, Castles and Towns, 1527). Dürer’s foundational
city plan, drawn from his interpretation of Utopia, would “establish the square as the canonical form of Protestant urbanism” (p. 55). Dürer’s city scheme “was the first to render the sacred square city of scripture in terms of real architecture—drawn to scale and made buildable—so as to serve as an image of orderliness, purity and holiness” (p. 56).