More, Thomas

Abstract

Sir Thomas More is one of the luminaries of Tudor England. His fame rests on several pillars: his saintly character, first attested in the letters and biographies of his contemporaries; his best-known work, Utopia; and his imprisonment and eventual martyrdom for refusing to take an oath legitimizing the divorce of Henry VIII from Katharine of Aragon.

More was a lawyer, poet, and humanist. He was pivotal to the revival of Greek studies in England. He belonged to a circle of English humanists including William Grocyn, John Colet, Wiliam Lily, and Thomas Linacre and was also a close friend of Desiderius Erasmus. More was a busy and successful lawyer, and subsequently a statesman, serving as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII. On a domestic level, More was also a significant educational reformer: his household was run as an academy, balancing piety with humane letters. He believed in women’s capacity for academic education, and his daughter Margaret was celebrated for her intellectual accomplishments.

More stands at the threshold between the medieval and early modern age. His career embraces scholasticism and the new learning, inherited Christendom and the radical break of the Reformation. Intellectually, he belonged to a medieval world shaped by the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. These disciplines were absorbed at an early age and polished through study, conversation, writing, lectures, and legal argument. More’s own rhetoric is directed to varying ends, from epigrammatic verse in English and Latin, to the sophisticated wit of Utopia, the intensity of his anti-Lutheran polemics and the devotional character of his prison writings in the Tower of London. Underlying this diverse body of work is the conviction that human order rests in the great impersonal structures sanctioned by tradition, chief among them the body of canonical and common law, and the teachings of the Church. It is this conviction that led to More’s downfall. He could not approve Henry’s declaration that his marriage to Katherine of Aragon had been void, since to do so would have admitted division into the Church and put man’s word over God’s law.