“Non sum Oedipus, sed Morus,” More tells his daughter, Margaret, while in the Tower, “which name of mine what is signifieth in Greek, I need not tell you.” The word mōrus means “fool,” a joke More made often, and the lines in Latin allude to a stock character Terence depicts, a servant who cannot understand riddles like Oedipus can, for he is too simple for that.¹ A simple or foolish man—this is just one of the ways More parries his daughter’s attempt to convince him to take the Oath of Succession, leave prison, and come home. I mention it...

More’s Life of Pico is a Christian guidebook, a translation of the Latin original Vita Pici, but how and in what ways More found Pico a Christian paradigm remains contested. For some, Pico represents a personal model to More as a brilliant lay scholar; others read the text for insight into More’s own vocational crisis of whether or not to marry in 1504; still others find a statement of the superiority of the contemplative life to action in the world.¹ Such interpretations, though, often pay insufficient attention to the facts that Pico neither marries nor follows a private “inspiration” from...

A. F. Pollard identifies a significant problem of Thomas More’s The History of Richard III, which he calls “the motive of its conception,” a problem that closely allies with the question of More’s intellectual identity.¹ Does More write the History to provide a factual account of Richard’s rise to power, or to practice his skills of declamation, or to dramatize a moral fable? Is More a Tudor propagandist, an early modern historian, a rhetorician, or a poet? Recent critics argue that More did not intend to write a history, but a work of literature. Some contend the History presents a...

Given the political limitations the History demonstrates, the question of More’s ideas of social reform appears best addressed in the debate over counsel from book 1 of Utopia rather than in the revolutionary ideas of an ideal regime like the kind Hythloday describes.¹ Because of the appetite of kings for power, unless a courtier abides in Utopia, reform will be of an incremental and prudential nature, consisting of modest measures like the kind More proposes at the end of book 1. In this crucial part of the text, which J. H . Hexter refers to as the “dialogue of counsel,”...

If Utopia is Thomas More’s most contested humanist text, how More addresses heresy proves the most difficult issue of his controversial writings, a topic that degrades the “man for all seasons” in the minds of some. Jasper Ridley accuses More of turning from a “brilliant intellectual” to “a sycophantic courtier and then into a persecuting bigot,” an “intolerant fanatic.”¹ So, too, David Daniell asserts that More lost his “Erasmian lightness” in writing against heretics because “he was so desperate to destroy heresy that what balance he once had was eaten away.”² Daniell sympathizes with Tyndale and other English reformers who...

Like the war of words between More and Tyndale, disputes between the laity and the Church, especially over how inquisitorial trials functioned in England, involve More in a “battle of the books” with the common law attorney Christopher St. German.¹ More’s part begins with the Apology of Sir Thomas More, Knight, published in 1533, which replies to St. German’s A Treatise Concernynge the Diuision betwene the Spirytualitie and Temporaltie, a text published as early as 1532.² St. German writes with the stated purpose of healing a “division” between laymen and clergy, but he attacks the clergy’s character and the independent...

A “man of singular virtue” and paragon of the “dignity of human conscience” are descriptions of Thomas More whose laudatory tone Robert Bolt captures in his famous play, A Man for all Seasons.¹ So, too, “poet without shame” or “plaster saint created by the worshippers” embody Hilary Mantel’s already influential version of More in Wolf Hall: A Novel.² In other descriptions, William Roper praises More, but William Tyndale labels More a “poet,” a deceiver who juggles words, a “natural son of the father of all lies.”³ With similar variance, Pope John Paul II ’s promulgation of a “patron of statesman”...