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Thomas More's ‘Utopia’ and Protestant Polemics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rainer Pineas
Rainer Pineas*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College
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Extract

The only references by Reformers to More's Utopia listed in R. W. Gibson's St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography (New Haven, 1961) are two by Tyndale and two by Foxe. Actually Tyndale makes five direct references to Utopia and a large number of indirect references. At least two other Reformers besides the two listed who refer to Utopia are John Frith and William Roy. Each of the direct and indirect references to the Utopia made by Reformers is polemical. The usual point made is that since More has once passed off fiction as truth, he is quite capable of continuing to do so—especially in religious controversy.

Tyndale uses More's authorship of the Utopia to attack both More himself and the Catholic Church in general. For instance, he very conveniently dismisses an entire chapter of More's Dialogue by saying that it ‘is as true as his story of Utopia & all his other Poetrie….’ Here the reference serves as shorthand; it saves Tyndale from the necessity of entering into extended argument.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1964 , pp. 197 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1964

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References

1 The Whole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes (London, 1573), p. 330. Hereafter cited as Whole workes.

2 For Tyndale's penchant for economy in argument, see my ‘William Tyndale: Controversialist,’ SP, LX (April, 1963).

3 For the Hunne case, see Ogle, Arthur, The Tragedy of the Lollard's Tower (Oxford, 1949).Google Scholar

4 Whole workes, p . 318. More himself, of course, avoided the issues of the case by the use of humor. See my ‘Thomas More's Use of Humor as a Weapon of Religious Controversy,’ SP, LVIII (April, 1961).

5 It was so regarded by others in the sixteenth century; see SirSidney, Philip, An Apology for Poetry, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, G. Gregory (Oxford, 1904), 1, 183–186.Google Scholar

6 It is unlikely that Tyndale and Frith call More a poet on the basis of any works other than the Utopia, such as, for instance, More's Dialogue concernynge heresyes, the setting of which is probably fictitious. While Tyndale does remark that More never received an inquiry about Lutheranism such as he mentions at the beginning of the Dialogue (Whole workes, p. 279), he does not make a point of the matter, and he never actually claims that the conversations reported did not take place. Frith does not discuss the subject at all. More did write some poetry in the modern sense of the word, notably some Latin epigrams, as well as a few poems in English. However, it is not probable that this was the type of poetry Tyndale had in mind, for it is quite evident that he is using the term ‘poetry’ as a synonym for fiction generally, rather than to characterize a particular literary form. Furthermore, whenever Tyndale associates the word ‘poetry’ with any specific book of More's, it is always with the Utopia, as in the two quotations given in this paper. In any case, the Utopia was the fiction for which More was best known.

7 See, for instance, Whole workes, p. 66.

8 See n. 6.

9 In The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Rev. Alexander Dyce (Boston, 1852), II, 413-414.