The Controversial Sir Thomas More

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the so-called renaissance in Morean studies in recent years has been to provide the historiography with a new focus, namely the phase of More's career that begins in the aftermath of Utopia (1516) and concludes with his imprisonment in 1534. Hitherto, int...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journal of ecclesiastical history
Main Author: Bradshaw, Brendan (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 1985
In: The journal of ecclesiastical history
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
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Summary:Perhaps the most notable achievement of the so-called renaissance in Morean studies in recent years has been to provide the historiography with a new focus, namely the phase of More's career that begins in the aftermath of Utopia (1516) and concludes with his imprisonment in 1534. Hitherto, interest in that period was confined largely to the domestic scene celebrated in Holbein's famous portrait and drawings, the household at Chelsea as a centre of humanist culture, Christian piety and cosy family virtue. Yet this was the period of More's public career in which he served as a councillor to Henry vm and in a number of major administrative posts before his elevation to succeed Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529. It was also the period in which he assumed a leading role in the campaign against the Reformation in England, partly as a prosecutor of heresy on behalf of the Crown, but more spectacularly as a polemicist, specifically commissioned by the Church to defend orthodox doctrine against the challenge of the reformers – a task on which he expended some million words in the period between his tract against Luther in 1523 and the changed circumstances which induced a more devotional literary mode in the much acclaimed Tower Works.
ISSN:1469-7637
Contains:Enthalten in: The journal of ecclesiastical history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0022046900043992