The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More

by Edited by George M. Logan

• ISBN13: 9780521888622
• ISBN10: 052188862X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-03-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of a major figure of the modern world. Combining breadth of coverage with depth, the book opens with essays on More's family, early life and education, his literary humanism, virtuoso rhetoric, illustrious public career and ferocious opposition to emergent Protestantism, and his fall from power, incarceration, trial and execution. These chapters are followed by in-depth studies of five of More's major works - Utopia, The History of King Richard the Third, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and De Tristitia Christi - and a final essay on the varied responses to the man and his writings in his own and subsequent centuries. The volume provides an accessible overview of this fascinating figure to students and other interested readers, whilst also presenting, and in many areas extending, the most important modern scholarship on him.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	p. xi
Preface	p. xv
List of abbreviations	p. xix
Chronology	p. xxi
The family tree of Thomas More	p. xxiv
Life, times and work
The making of a London citizen	p. 3
Thomas More as humanist	p. 22
More's rhetoric	p. 46
More's public life	p. 49
Thomas More and the heretics: statesman or fanatic?	p. 93
The last years	p. 116
Five major works
Reading Utopia	p. 141
More on tyranny: The History of King Richard the Third	p. 168
The comen knowen multytude of crysten men': A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the defence of Christendom	p. 191
'In stede of harme inestimable good': A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation	p. 216
The lessons of Gethsemane: De Tristitia Christi	p. 239
Reception
Afterlives	p. 265
Foundational resources for More Studies	p. 288
Index	p. 292
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