The One Thomas More by Travis Curtright (review)

Travis Curtright does a fine job fusing St. Thomas More’s “humanist credo” and “his later polemical theology” (p. 107). Eamon Duffy and Brendan Bradshaw, nesting in Curtright’s bibliography, have been on that job, but The One Thomas More usefully supplements their luminous article-length efforts. For example, Curtright’s “close reading” of More’s 1518 letter to Oxford has it propose a “harmony of faith and liberal learning,” soldering the former to the latter in ways that Alistair Fox famously overlooked (105–11). Fox subscribed to the “two Mores” thesis, which exaggerated the distance between the Lord Chancellor who terrorized heretics and the younger, kinder, gentler More who was at home with humanists. The latter pointed out the insufficiency of envious, arrogant, ignorant Oxford scholars’ pieties; the former railed against self-sufficiency (against reformers who thought they could tease meaning from sacred texts without consulting a tradition of interpretation otherwise honored always and everywhere in Christendom) as well as against the early Protestants’ impiety. Bradshaw brilliantly sabotaged Fox’s distinctions in the 1980s. Curtright cinches the case.

As Curtright acknowledges, however, popular perception is now shaped by two images of More’s obstinacy. Robert Bolt’s often restaged and replayed A Man for All Seasons has heroic More stubbornly—conscientiously—defend his right to withhold consent when official policy runs counter to his faith. Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed novel, Wolf Hall, portrays More as unfeeling and fanatical. Bolt conjures up his one Thomas More, and Mantel introduces her one Thomas More. Neither gets close to the right one—“the real Thomas More,” Curtright claims, preferring the persistently prudent Christian humanist whose formidable resolve to defend a life of virtue and the Roman Catholic Church made him appear ruthless to contemporaries and to some historians. To Curtright, the “commitment to traditional consensus within a visible, historical, and known ecclesiastical discourse connects More’s humanist letters to his antiheretical tracts” (139).

Without directly dissenting and arguing that More was kind then cruel, or sensible then superstitious, one could prefer multiple Mores. Most of Curtright’s contentions come off as quite conventional. The “ironic and subversive ethos in More’s last letters” (176) is obvious to readers who remember the anecdotes sent to Alice Alington. That his history of King Richard III’s tenure “enacts and undermines” (44) or “enacts and qualifies” (71) ideals expressed in his political epigrams seems incontestable. And the pervasive emphasis on piety—in Hythloday’s huffing and puffing, in the Response to Luther, in More’s Life of Pico, and in More’s life—has long been recognized. Curtright competently chronicles it all. Cramming that along with the book’s fresh perspectives on More’s discretion, humanism, Christianity, and politics into “the one Thomas More” seems conceptually unnecessary and not appreciably less awkward than a doubled-up More. Curtright seems at cross-purposes. His book shows us something of the resourceful self-refashioning that enabled his subject to wear several hats, often in the same work. But Curtright’s urge to unify tends to bottle up an impressively versatile sixteenth-century protagonist, who, to this reviewer, kept and keeps subverting, undermining, and qualifying the efforts of contemporaries and historians to define and confine him.