Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More

Notes

N O T E S Introduction 1. Thomas More, The Correspondence of Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 279. 2. Ibid., 280. 3. John Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 15. 4. For the way in which More’s biography has been mythologized, see John Guy, Thomas More (London: Arnold, 2000). 5. William Roper, “Life of Sir Thomas More,” in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 195–254 (198). 6. Ibid. 7. John Guy comments: “In encouraging radically divergent accounts of the same meagre assortment of facts, the Charterhouse debate is typical of the ways in which interpretations of More’s life are constructed” (Guy, Public Career, 29). 8. Seymour Baker House, “Thomas More,” in New Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19191, 6. 9. R.W. Chambers, Thomas More (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 359–60. 10. For the problematic nature of this model of the medieval period, see David Aers, “Rewriting the Middle Ages: Some Suggestions,” Journal of Medieval 209 and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 221–40, and Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism , Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 87–108. 11. Chambers, Thomas More, 351. 12. For a discussion of the problematic nature of “conscience” as a category in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Paul Strohm, “Conscience,” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 206–26. 13. For an excellent recent discussion of More’s attitude to conscience and why ultimately he went to his death, see G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation : Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 125–51. 14. Richard Marius, Thomas More (New York: Knopf, 1984), 426. 15. Ibid., 42. 16. G.R. Elton, “Sir Thomas More and the Opposition to Henry VIII,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977), 79–91. 17. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1980), 63. 18. Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London: Vintage, 1999), 43. 19. Marius, Thomas More, 66. 20. Guy, Thomas More, 4; Guy, Public Career. 21. Guy, Thomas More, 4. 22. For example, Guy points out that a key area of myth building is More’s domestic life, the available sources on which, a vignette by Erasmus and Holbein ’s family portrait, have been blown out of all proportion (ibid., 5). 23. One of the most important developments in the study of medieval and Tudor literature in recent years has been the growing scholarly interest in critiquing dated views of fifteenth-century culture as drab and a new emphasis on its importance. See Maura Nolan, “The New Fifteenth Century: Humanism , Heresy, and Laureation,” Philological Quarterly 87 (2008): 173–92. 24. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 196–202 (202). 25. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter : University of Exeter Press, 2008), 252. 26. Nicholas Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in The Idea of the Vernacular: Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 331–65 (339). 27. See Nicholas Watson, “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124, and 210 Notes to Pages 4–9 “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in PreReformation England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 145–87. 28. Alistair Fox comments: “More’s use of proverbs, together with his concern to reinforce the proverbial flavour of his Chaucerian borrowings, suggest his belief in the power of everyday experience, especially as illuminated by poetry, to inculcate wisdom” (Alistair Fox, “Thomas More’s Dialogue and the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury: ‘God Mother Wit’ and Creative Imitation,” in Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker, ed. Patricia Bruchmann (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1978), 15–24 (22). 29. Humanism was not new to England in the sixteenth century. For an important recent study of fifteenth-century English humanist writing, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English...