Volume 30, Number 1 · February 3, 1983
The Myth of More
By G.R. Elton
Thomas More: History and Providence
by Alistair Fox
Yale University Press, 271 pp., $19.95
Everybody, surely, knows Thomas More—gentle friend to all right-thinking people and enemy to all wickedness, the fairest of judges, modest, witty, done to death by tyrants. A saint, in fact, and so formally declared by the papacy in 1935. That figure, familiar from the stage and the movies (not to mention the standard biographies), bears as much relation to the real Thomas More as hagiography commonly does to the reality of history. A smaller number of people treasure Utopia as a brilliant analysis of the evils of European society and an exciting description of a community freed from sinful temptation by the abolition of private property. That appraisal rides smoothly over a host of unsolved ambiguities revealed by any half-careful reading of the book. Very few have ventured to become acquainted with the relentless persecutor of religious dissidents, the savage polemicist, the teller of rather nasty tales about invariably shrewish women, the authoritarian servant of a dictatorial Church. Thomas More, so regularly treated as transparently understandable, is in fact one of the most complex and difficult characters in history.
Review, 2851 words
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