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.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Primary Reading
The bibliography of More is extensive. Details of earlier studies are given in more recent academic works.
Works
More, Thomas. 1963–1997. The complete works of St Thomas More, 15 vols. New Haven/London: Yale UP.
Wegemer, Gerard B., and Stephen W. Smith, eds. 2004. A Thomas More source book. Washington: Catholic University of America Press.
Early Lives
Roper, Willliam and Nicholas Harpsfield. 1963. Lives of Saint Thomas More, ed. E.E. Reynolds. Everyman’s library 19. London: J M Dent.
Editions of Utopia
Utopia. 1904. Ed. J. Churton Collins. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Ralph Robynson translation, 1551].
Utopia. 1965. Ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. and J.H. Hexter, Complete works vol. 4. New Haven/London: Yale UP.
Utopia. 2012. Translated, edited and introduced by Dominic Baker-Smith. London: Penguin.
Books
Ackroyd, Peter. 1998. The life of Thomas More. London: Chatto and Windus.
Chambers, R.W. 1935. Thomas More. London: Cape.
Cousins, A.D., and Damian Grace, eds. 2009. A companion to Thomas More. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Guy, John. 2000. Thomas More (Reputations). London: Hodder.
Guy, John. 2008. A daughter’s love: Thomas and Margaret More. London: Fourth Estate.
Guy, John. 2017. Thomas More. London: SPCK.
Kenny, Anthony. 1983. Thomas More. Past masters series. Oxford: OUP.
Lewis, C.S. 1954. English literature in the sixteenth century excluding drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Logan, George M., ed. 2011. The Cambridge companion to Thomas More. Cambridge: CUP.
Ridley, Jasper. 1982. The statesman and the fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More. London: Constable.
Wegemer, Gerard B. 2011. Young Thomas More and the arts of liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Wilde, Lawrence. 2016. Thomas More’s utopia: Arguing for social justice. London: Routledge.
Articles
Baumann, Uwe. 2015. The humanistic and religious controversies and rivalries of Thomas More (1477/8–1535): A typology of literary forms and genres? In Forms of conflict and rivalries in renaissance Europe, ed. David A. Lines, Marc Laureys, and Jill Kraye, 79–108. Bonn: Bonn University Press.
Skinner, Quentin. 1987. Sir Thomas More’s utopia and the language of renaissance humanism. In Anthony Pagden, ed., The languages of political theory in early modern Europe, pp 123-157. Cambridge: CUP. Revised and reprinted as ‘Thomas More’s vision of true nobility’. In Skinner, Q., Visions of politics, 3 vols, Cambridge: CUP, 2002, vol. 2, 213–244.
Skinner, Quentin. 1988. Political philosophy. In The Cambridge history of renaissance philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al., 389–452. Cambridge: CUP.
Online
Association Amici Thomae Mori. http://www.amici-thomae-mori.com/. Accessed 27 Mar 2017.
Baker-Smith, Dominic. 2014. Thomas More. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-more/. Accessed 27 Mar 2017.
House, Seymour Baker. 2004. More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535). In Oxford dictionary of national biography. Oxford: OUP (online edition accessed 27 Mar 2017).
The Center for Thomas More Studies. https://thomasmorestudies.org/. Accessed 27 Mar 2017.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Hebron, M. (2018). More, Thomas. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_615-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_615-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02848-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02848-4
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities