(9) Document 7	Thomas More, Utopia. trans. by Paul Turner, (London, England: Penguin Books, 1965)
	Thomas More was a leading humanist and privy councillor to Henry VIII of England He was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to renounce his loyalty to the Pope and uphold Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Utopia, written to 1516, is Thomas More's idea of a perfect civilization.
	Girls aren't allowed to marry until they're eighteen - boys have to wait four years longer. Any boy or girl convicted of premarital intercourse is severely punished, and permanently disqualified from marrying, unless this sentence is remitted by the Mayor. The man and woman in charge of the household in which it happens are also publicly disgraced, for not doing their jobs properly. The Utopians are particularly strict about that kind of thing, because they think very few people would want to get married - which means spending one's whole life with the same person, and putting up with all the inconveniences that this involves - if they weren't carefully prevented from having any sexual intercourse otherwise.
	When they're thinking of getting married, they do something that seemed to us quite absurd, though they take it very seriously. The prospective bride, no matter whether she's a spinster or a widow, is exhibited stark naked to the prospective bridegroom by a respectable married woman, and a suitable male chaperon shows the bridegroom naked to the bride. When we implied by our laughter that we thought it a silly system, they promptly turned the joke against us.
	`What we find so odd,' they said, `is the silly way these things are arranged in other parts of the world. When you're buying a horse, and there's nothing at stake but a small sum of money, you take every possible precaution. The animal's practically naked already, but you firmly refuse to buy until you've whipped off the saddle and all the rest of the harness, to make sure there aren't any sores underneath. But when you're choosing a wife, an article that for better or worse has got to last you a lifetime, you're unbelievably careless. You don't even bother to take it out of its wrappings. You judge the whole woman from a few square inches of face, which is all you can see of her, and then proceed to marry her - at the risk of finding her most disagreeable, when you see what she's really like. No doubt you needn't worry, if moral character is the only thing that interests you - but we're not all as wise as that, and even those who are sometimes find, when they get married, that a beautiful body can be quite a useful addition to a beautiful soul. Certainly those wrappings may easily conceal enough ugliness to destroy a husband's feelings for his wife, when it's too late for a physical separation. Of course, if she turns ugly after the wedding, he must just resign himself to his fate - but one does need some legal protection against marriage under false pretences!'