Over the last century, Thomas More has undergone three posthumous transmutations. In 1935 – exactly 400 years after he was executed for refusing to swear that Henry VIII was Supreme Head of the English Church – he was canonised by Pope Pius XI as a holy martyr. This declaration of his sanctity met a frosty reception in Anglican England, where the part More had played in putting Protestants to death for heresy before the break with Rome hadn’t yet disappeared from historical memory. [I'm not sure the linked book reviews have anything to do with her point.]
Then in 1967 came Paul Scofield’s moving performance as More in the film of Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons. Rooted in hagiographical accounts written by members of More’s family, it made him a hero, wise, erudite and humane, a man who chose to die rather than compromise his conscience in the face of tyranny. Yet a twist in the tale remained: the publication in 2009 of Hilary Mantel’s world-conquering Wolf Hall. In Mantel’s exquisite prose it’s Thomas Cromwell, not Thomas More, whose brilliant mind wrestles with the relationship between faith, integrity and power, while More, Cromwell’s opponent, becomes a callous, self-regarding zealot.
In Thomas More: A Life, her absorbing and deeply researched new biography, Joanne Paul sets out to rescue More from these violent swings of the historical pendulum. Her goal is to tell his story “forward”, using sources from More’s own lifetime, rather than “backward”, from texts indelibly coloured by the circumstances of his death. . . .
It seems to me I've heard this song before: in 2016, in fact, when Paul's Thomas More in the Classic Thinkers series was published and she had an article ("Thomas More: Saint or Sinner?"**) in the BBC History Magazine.
**The answer to that question: Yes.
Simon and Schuster, the U.S. publisher call Paul's book the "definitive biography" of More:
Born into the era of the Wars of the Roses, educated during the European Renaissance, rising to become Chancellor of England, and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More was one of the most famous—and notorious—figures in English history.
Was he a saintly scholar, the visionary author of Utopia, and an inspiration for statesmen and intellectuals even today? Or was he the cruel zealot famously portrayed in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall? Thomas More: A Life is a monumental biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning prior interpretations of this titan of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows Thomas More to have been intellectually and politically central to the making of modern Europe.
Based on new archival discoveries and drawing on more than a decade of research into More’s life and work, this is a richly told story of faith and politics that illuminates a man who, more than four hundred years after his execution, remains one of the most brilliant minds of the Renaissance.
Castor's review seems to conflict with the S&S comment above that More was "intellectually and politically central to the making of modern Europe" as she notes that "Paul points out that, in his entire political career, “Thomas More did almost nothing to change the course of English history”. Nor did he want to take a public stand on the issue for which he is venerated as a martyr."
I'm not sure that I'll purchase this biography because although he doesn't call his book a biography at all, Travis Curtright seems to me to have presented an integrated and consistent view of More's life and works in The Controversial Thomas More.
The dichotomy between Bolt and Mantel is wearing thin with me, and I'm really done with the "saint or sinner?" trope. R.W. Chambers wasn't a Catholic and yet he rated More's reputation/fame as high with Englishmen: even Jonathan Swift (born in Ireland of English parents)! For Swift, More “was the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced”.
