A Companion to Margaret More Roper Studies: Life Records, Essential Texts, and Critical Essays 0813235448, 9780813235448

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A Companion to

Margaret More Roper Studies ∞

Woodcut frontispiece of A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster (1526). For comment, see the discussion on p. 12n51, p. 145 and note 77, and pp. 160–61.

A Companion to

Margaret More Roper Studies ∞ Life Records, Essential Texts, a n d Cr i t i c a l E s s a y s

Edited by William Gentrup and Elizabeth McCutcheon

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress ISbN 978-0-8132-3544-8

Ta b u l a G ratu l ato r ia This publication is supported by donations from The Thomas More Society of America, Washington, D.C. and the following individuals devoted to scholarship on the Thomas More circle and the memory of Clare M. Murphy: David Brokaw, Albert Geritz, Jason Gluckman, Leslie S. B. MacCoull, Marilyn Malina, and Gordon Rockett.

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Con te n ts

Dedication Preface

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L if e 1. Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, Britanniae Decus: Life Records and Writings of Margaret More Roper

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T exts 2. Richard Hyrde’s Preface to A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster

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3. Erasmus’s Precatio dominica and Margaret Roper’s A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster (facing page texts)

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4. Letter of Alice Alington to Margaret Roper, August 17 [1534]

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5. Letter of Margaret Roper to Alice Alington [August 1534]

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Cr i t ic ism 6. elizabeth McCutcheon, “A Young, Virtuous, and ­Well-Learned Gentlewoman”: Margaret More Roper in the Republic of Letters

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7. Patricia Demers, Margaret Roper and Erasmus: The Relationship of Translator and Source

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8. Anne M. O’Donnell, SND, Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster: Patristic and Linguistic Sources

172

9. Katherine G. Rodgers, Dialogic Imagination in “The Letter to Alice Alington”

205

10. Stephen M. Foley, Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the “Letter to Alington”

222

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11. Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, Margaret More Roper’s Emendation of a Letter to St. Cyprian and Its Textual Afterlife

253

12. David R. Smith, Narrative and Tableau: Reading the Roper Miniatures within Holbein’s Tudor Portrait Career

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Selected Bibliography About the Contributors Index

315 325 329

viii Contents

Dedication

D e d ic at i on

This volume is dedicated to Professor Clare M. Murphy, who initially conceived the idea of the collection and had contacted some of the scholars for contributions before her unexpected passing. Had she lived she would have contributed an essay on Margaret Roper’s afterlife in France: “From Guillaume Budé to Jean Anouilh: The Ropers in the French Tradition.” This volume has developed differently in several ways from her original conception, but it is now completed in her honor. Clare M. Murphy (September 8, 1932–June 22, 2013) passed away on the feasts of St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher, a providential date given her devotion to More studies. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in English from Case Western Reserve and received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. After teaching for three years at Tufts University, she taught at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, from 1964 until 1990, retiring as Professor Emerita. She then joined the Moreanum Center in Angers, France, succeeding Abbé Germain Marc’hadour as editor of the journal Moreana from 1992 until 2002. She continued to live in Angers, publishing and conferencing, until 2010, when she moved to Arizona and joined the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at Arizona State University as an Adjunct Scholar and an active member of ACMRS. Clare Murphy was a specialist of Thomas More and early Tudor humanism, Erasmus, John Fisher, and John Colet. With Henri Gibaud and Mario A. di Cesare, she was editor of Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, 1989 (also published as Moreana 100: Mélanges Marc’hadour). She presented papers at many conferences around the world and wrote articles in such journals as The Catholic Historical Review, Sixteenth Century Journal, Moreana, and Autrement Dire (University of Nancy, France). She was a l­ong-time member of and participant in the triennial conference of the International Association of ­Neo-Latin Studies and published regularly in its proceedings. An indefatigable champion of excellence in More studies, she ­co-organized international conferences on

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Thomas More in Maynooth, Ireland (1998), Fontevrault, France (2001), Santa Fe, Argentina (2004), and Amherst, Massachusetts (2007). She also founded the International Association for Thomas More Scholarship, an official Rennaisance Society of America Associate Organization. Several scholars owe to her their first participation in international conferences, and she is missed by her many Thomas More s­ cholar-friends worldwide and her colleagues and friends at ASU and the All Saints Newman Center.

x Dedication

Preface Preface

Pr e fa c e

The purpose of this volume is to expand the scholarship and critical in­quiry about Margaret More Roper (1505–1544), Sir Thomas More’s eldest daughter. Margaret Roper was known as a highly educated young woman and as a writer since the 1520s, when major intellectual figures wrote about her. In our own time, gender studies have enlarged the focus on her, and the biography by John Guy, published in the U.K. as A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More and in the United States as A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg,1 has awakened new interest. As further evidence, Elizabeth McCutcheon has been commissioned to edit the writings of Margaret Roper (modernized) for the Toronto book series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. The current volume has been conceived to cover the major areas of Roper’s life and career conveniently in one volume: biography, historical and literary contexts, texts and commentary on her major extant writings, textual scholarship, and her portrait miniature by the famous humanist painter Hans Holbein. As with much that has been written about her father, most treatments of Roper have tended to emphasize her English sources and backgrounds. The Renaissance (or early modern period) blossomed internationally, however, and this is particularly true for Roper and her circle. Margaret functioned in her own time within a republic of letters that comprised an intellectual, cultural, and international, rather than merely national, context. In the first section, Eugenio M. Olivares Merino (University of Jaén, Spain) contributes an extensive ­bio-bibliography, providing a chronology of important events in Margaret’s and her family’s lives, as documented in contemporary and later sources. This is followed by a section containing Roper’s main surviving texts. One of the frustrations in studying her work is that while there are references to her writings, including to poetry she composed in Greek and Latin, nothing seems to be extant except the A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster— 1. John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More (London: Fourth Estate, 2008); A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

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her English translation of Erasmus’s Precatio dominica2—the enigmatic “Letter to Alice Alington,” and a few other letters, one written in Latin to Erasmus and two in English to Thomas More while he was imprisoned in the Tower. The English letters are found in Elizabeth Rogers’s definitive edition of The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More.3 Roper’s translation, A Devout Treatise, has been edited in a careful transcription of the Beinecke Library copy in an early issue of Moreana. This text is reprinted here as well as the original preface written by Richard Hyrde, a physician in the More circle, whose introduction to Roper’s translation not only gives an account of her as a learned young woman but is also a noteworthy ­early-modern defense of the importance and value of learning for women in general. In this way, our contributors can cite these texts, and readers can have easy access to them. The “Letter to Alice Alington” has also been transcribed and reprinted here for ease of access to readers (as well as “The Letter from Alice Alington” that prompted it). These texts are provided in their original old spelling. In the final section we offer judicious, u­ p-to-date, scholarly critical essays. Elizabeth McCutcheon (University of Hawaii) discusses several important general contexts for Margaret Roper scholarship: her education and the reputation of women intellectuals in Renaissance England; women as translators; and the role of rhetoric in Roper’s intellectual formation and practice. Specifically, McCutcheon focuses on the relationship of Margaret and Erasmus, including their rich correspondence and Erasmus’s colloquy about her, “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” as well as her English version of his Precatio dominica, a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer—a translation with implications for both religion and politics at the time. The essay by Patricia Demers (University of Alberta), the only previously published article in this volume, is the most recent, detailed, literary treatment of Roper’s Devout Treatise; it was first published in 2005 in Women Writing and Reading, a Canadian online journal, but its expert and sensitive analysis of Roper’s translation and achievement deserves a new readership. Sister Anne O’Donnell (Catholic University of America) has contributed a f­ ull-fledged theological background study of Erasmus’s Precatio, which offers commentary on the seven 2. The Precatio dominica is reprinted here in a ­facing-page format with the Devout Treatise, for ease of access and comparative study. 3. Elizabeth Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947). The Latin letter may be found in P. S. Allen, ed., Opus Epistolarum Des: Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 8, no. 2233 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 299–300.

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petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Sister Anne compares Margaret’s version with his and invites reflection upon the impact of the piety and learning of Erasmian humanism, with its stress on early patristic writers, in the 1520s. Katherine G. Rodgers (American River College) and Stephen M. Foley (Brown University) both provide critical comment on the “Letter to Alice Alington,” a long, fascinating epistle that employs the word “conscience” ­forty-four times. It was written from the Tower of London, where More was imprisoned, to Margaret’s s­ tep-sister, perhaps in collaboration with her father, though which one wrote what is eternally in dispute. Rodgers and Foley, who are editors of separate works in the ­fifteen-volume Yale edition of The Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, treat its complexities in their respective essays. Eugenio M. Olivares Merino contributes a second essay to our volume by exploring another dimension of Roper’s achievement. He provides a full examination of her textual and paleographical skills in a study of her emendation of a crux in a letter from Novatian to the church father Cyprian. Olivares Merino also evaluates the afterlife of this textual emendation in later early modern editions of Cyprian’s works. Finally, rounding out this volume, David Ross Smith (University of New Hampshire) provides a less common perspective on Margaret Roper, emphasizing her as a married woman, which would have been her social identity in the sixteenth century, rather than as a writer or learned woman. Margaret and her husband William are examined through a Tudor portrait lens in the double miniatures painted by Hans Holbein. Few painters have figured as notably in the Republic of Letters as has Hans Holbein, who created portraits of Erasmus, More, and other great humanists of the day, as well as members of the Tudor court. His painting of More in the Frick Collection is well known, as are his sketch and versions of the painting (whose original is now lost) of the More family, where Margaret is brilliantly portrayed. Less well known, though, are the miniature portraits of Margaret and William Roper, probably done between late 1534 and ­mid-1535, which are now located in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Here Smith, a specialist on marriage portraiture among other aspects of art history, contributes a study of them in the context of other Tudor portraits by Holbein and discusses them within the revealing frameworks of “interiority” and irony. The editors would like to thank the anonymous outside readers for their expert advice. The editors are also very grateful for the loyalty shown by the con-

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tributors to the project, which began in earnest in 2014 but was dismayed by the passing of David Smith in 2016, disrupted by a change in editorial policy of the original publisher with whom we had a provisional contract (the press now publishes mainly ideologically focused scholarship), extended by the search for a new publisher, and finally delayed by the pandemic. Such patient collegiality is remarkable even given the protracted pace of much academic publishing. It is hoped that scholars and readers will find this volume a convenient and satisfying collection of information about Margaret Roper’s life and works, together with her major writings and current research on her accomplishments and reputation. The contributors and editors wish to add positively to the volume of scholarship and criticism on this female member of the early modern Republic of Letters.

xiv Preface

LIFE ∞

Life Records and Writings of Margaret More Roper Eugenio M. Olivares Merino

One √

Britanniae Decus Life Records and Writings of Margaret More Roper1 Eu ge ni o M . O li vares M eri no

I: Chronology 1505 Margaret More was born before October 1, in London, at a residence called the Barge (or the Old Barge) in Bucklersbury and Walbrook, the first home of the Mores.2 1. The present study has been completed within the Research Project “Thomas More and Spain (16thand ­17th-centuries): Ideological and Textual Construction” (FFI2017–­83639-P), funded by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain. I would like to heartily thank Elizabeth McCutcheon and William Gentrup for their effort in reviewing this chronology. Their comments and suggestions have helped me all along the way. For other scholarship on Margaret Roper, readers are invited to review the International Thomas More Bibliography, a massive compilation by Romuald I. Lakowski, now hosted by the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas on its Essential Works of Thomas More website; it includes a section on Margaret More Roper. Access the “Margaret Roper” link under the “More’s Family” section at https://essentialmore.org/bibliographies. 2. In Hans Holbein’s draft of the More family portrait (late 1526 to early 1527), Margaret’s age is written below the book she holds as ­twenty-two years old. This points to a birth year of 1504 or 1505. There are also two Holbein miniatures of Margaret and William Roper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Margaret is said to be thirty years old, but unfortunately the painting is undated. For more on the miniatures and Margaret’s birth date, see David R. Smith’s article in the present volume. Richard Hyrde’s preface to Margaret’s translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica is dated October 1,

3

According to her husband, William Roper: “he [Thomas More] was called to the bench [of Lincoln’s Inn], and had read there [twice]. Before which tyme he had placed himself and his wife at Bucklersbury in London, where he had by her three daughters [and one Sonne]”.3 Margaret was baptized at the parish Church of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, and, according to Norrington, she looked like her mother Joanna, née Colt.4 Shortly after her birth, Erasmus of Rotterdam paid his second visit to England and was welcomed at Bucklersbury.5 According to Guy, Margaret was handed over to a wet nurse (Mistress Giggs) after she was baptized; both lived in a small dwelling by the Barge.6

1506–1509 Births of Margaret’s siblings: Elizabeth, Cecily, and John.7 1524. On the cover page of this work we read that the translator is nineteen years old. This and the family portrait caption seem to be rather conclusive about the year of Margaret’s birth as 1505. Thus, E. E. Reynolds, Margaret Roper: Eldest Daughter of St. Thomas More (London: Burns and Oates, 1960), 1, points to 1504 as the year of her parents’ marriage and dates her birth before October 1505. E. V. Hitchcock in her edition of William Roper: The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, knighte, Early English Text Society, o.s. 197 (1935; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1958) says Margaret “was born not later than 1 October 1505” (p. 108). All quotations from William Roper’s biography of More are from Hitchcock’s edition. Alternatively, John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 14, dates Meg’s birth “some time between late August and the beginning of October 1505.” This suggests her parents’ wedding was not later than January 1505. 3. William Roper, The mirrour of vertue in worldly greatnes: Or The life of Syr Thomas More Knight, sometime Lo. Chancellour of England (At Paris [i.e., ­Saint-Omer: Printed at the English College Press], 1626), p. 6/line 24–p. 7/ line 5. Roper composed Thomas More’s first biography before 1557, but it was not published until 1626. Rey­ nolds speculates Margaret might have been born at her grandparents’ house on Milk Street (London), as it was common for newlyweds to live with their parents (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 4). This is not probable, for Roper mentions Bucklersbury as the place (7/4–5). Compare Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 9–14, who adds a long description of the home and its surroundings. 4. Ruth Norrington, In the Shadow of a Saint: Lady Alice More (Waddeston: The Kylin Press, 1983), 36. John Guy states that Joanna named her first daughter after St. Margaret, patron saint of childbirth (Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 14). Without identifying who chose the name, Reynolds implies that it was Thomas More and asks, “Was Margaret More named after the Lady Margaret Beaufort? The name Margaret is not found previously in the More and Colt families. A fanciful conjecture, but a pleasing thought!” (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 19n1). I have discussed this “fanciful conjecture” elsewhere: see Eugenio Olivares Merino, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Margaret More Roper: Similarities and Differences,” “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”: Homenagem a Maria Helena de Paiva Correia, ed. A. Pinheiro de Sousa et al. (Lisbon: Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa, 2009), 227–45. Before comparing Margaret Beaufort and Margaret More Roper as women of letters, I first emphasize More’s relationship with Lady Margaret when he lived at Lambeth Palace in Cardinal Morton’s service and later through his contacts at the London Charterhouse, which the Queen Mother supported. Furthermore, John Fisher, Lady Margaret’s confessor, could also be considered a link between the two. 5. For Erasmus’s second visit to England, see P. S. Allen, ed., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), letters 185–92. 6. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 15. 7. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 110n7/4–5.

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1509 Erasmus and the ­four-year-old Margaret met each other in 1509 when he stayed with the Mores for over a year; his Moriae Encomium, published in 1511, was composed during this visit.8

1511 Margaret’s mother Joanna died sometime after May 19.9 Within a month, Thomas married a widow, Dame Alice Middleton, at St. Stephen’s.10 His new wife brought with her a daughter, Alice.11

1514–early 1516 John Clement arrived at the Barge as the first formal tutor of Margaret More and Margaret Giggs.12 At a very early age More’s children had already been taught 8. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 31. 9. On that date Erasmus describes Joanna as facillima coniuge (a most kind wife) in his letter to Dutch humanist and Carthusian Levinus Ammonius (letter 221; Allen, Opus epistolarum, 1:458/31). Translations from Latin to English, unless otherwise noted, are mine. On September 11, he writes again to Ammonius saying that More is busy with some serious business, probably Joanna’s death (letter 228, Allen, Opus epistolarum, 1:468/11). It is generally believed that she died in childbirth, but Guy claims it was due to sickness, probably influenza (Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 38). 10. As narrated by Father Bouge, the vicar of St. Stephen’s, in a letter to Katheryn Manne, More visited him late at night bringing a dispensation for remarriage; Thomas wanted the priest to marry him the following day. See James Gairdner, “A Letter Concerning Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More,” The English Historical Review 7 (1892): 712–15, esp. 714; Bouge’s letter is reproduced verbatim on pp. 713–15. Ammonius refers to Alice in a letter written ca. October 20, 1511 (letter 236; Allen, Opus epistolarum, 1:476/47–48). Eight years later, Erasmus writes that More’s wedding took place some months after Joanna’s funeral: “Paucis mensibus a funere vxoris viduam duxit” (a few months after his wife’s funeral, he married a widow) (July 23, 1519, letter 999); see P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 19/176–77. 11. By the time Alice Middleton became a widow, she had another daughter, Helen. Since she takes only her daughter Alice with her to the Barge, Helen, who was younger, must have died before that (Norrington, In the Shadow of a Saint, 25–26). 12. In a letter to Erasmus written in London around February 1516 (letter 388), More sends John Clement’s greetings to him: “Clemens, qui literis et Latinis et Graecis ita proficit indies vt non exiguam de eo spem concipiam, futurum eum aliquando et patriae et literis ornamento” (Clement, whose daily progress in Latin and Greek is such that I conceive no small hope about him that in the future he will be an ornament to his country and to learning); see P. S. Allen, ed., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 198/173–175. In May 1515, Clement had accompanied More on his embassy to the Low Countries: in Utopia More refers to him as “puer meus” (40/14–15), which seems to suggest some familiarity between both; see Utopia, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965). Clement might have entered the Barge as page and pupil before More’s mission to the continent (late 1514 or early 1515). In his 1925 biography of John Clement, Ernst Wenkebach stated that Clement had lived at More’s household from 1515 to 1518, but he presented no textual support; see John Clement, ein englischer Humanist und Arzt des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1925), 4. Thomas Merriam goes even further: “By the year 1514 he [John Clement] is reported to have been a



Life Records and Writings of Margaret More Roper 5

to read and write in English, presumably by their father and others. Clement instructed them in Latin and Greek,13 and he later married Margaret Giggs.

ca. 1517 More wrote to Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily, and Margaret Giggs, expressing his delight after receiving their charming letters.14

1518 William Gonnell became the second tutor at Bucklersbury, as inferred from More’s letter to him on May 22.15 Eventually, he would be replaced by Richard Hyrde, who, according to Thomas Stapleton, “nepotes docuit, filiabus iam in matrimonio collocatis” (taught the ­­grand-children after the marriage of More’s children).16 This is confirmed by Cresacre More (1572–1649), More’s ­great-grandson: “after all [the previous tutors] one Richard Hart [i.e., Hyrde]” joined the household.17 Hyrde was also a physician, who cared for the health of the residents of the almshouses that More had established and of which Margaret was in charge.18

member of More’s household”; see “John Clement: His Identity and His Marshfoot House in Essex,” Moreana 25, no. 97 (1988): 145–52, esp. 145. In his edition of Utopia, George M. Logan also gives 1514 as the year of Clement’s arrival but provides no textual support either; see More: Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 5n8. John Guy explicitly states that Clement was appointed as tutor of More’s children “in or about 1514”; see Thomas More (London: Arnold, 2000), 28. 13. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 59. 14. All references in this chronology to More’s letters are to Elizabeth F. Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton University Press, 1947; repr., New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970). Here letter 43, pp. 96–98. 15. Letter 63; Rogers, Correspondence, 120–23. 16. Thomas Stapleton, Tres Thomae: Sev de S. Thomae apostoli rebus gestis. De S. Thoma Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi & Martyre. D. Thomae Mori Angliae quondam Cancellarij vita his adiecta est oratio funebris in laudem R. P. Arnoldi de Ganthois Abbatis Marchennensis (Douai: Ex officina Ioannis Bogardi, 1588), p. 222/19–21. In the section Vita Thomae Mori, Stapleton devoted an entire chapter to Margaret (XI, 237–46). For an English translation of the Latin original, see Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, trans. P. E. Hallett, ed. E. E. Reynolds (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), here 92. 17. Cresacre More, The Life of Sir Thomas More by his great Grandson Cresacre More, ed. Joseph Hunter (London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane, 1828), 138; http://www.archive.org/details/lifeofsirthomasm00moreuoft. This work was originally published in 1631: D.O.M.S. The life and death of Sir Thomas Moore Lord high Chancellour of England. Written by M. T.M. and dedicated to the Queens most gracious Maiestie (Douai: Printed by B. Bellière, 1631?). 18. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 152–52, 303.

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ca. 1518 Letter by Thomas More to Margaret.19 He declares that “nihil est mihi te dulcissima filia charius.”20 Letter from More to Margaret in response to a previous one asking her father for money.21 William Roper (born ca. 1496) entered More’s household.22 He was also admitted to the Society of Lincoln’s Inn.23

1519 July 23: Erasmus’s letter to Ulrich von Hutten, in which he makes explicit reference to More’s children “quorum adhuc supersunt puellae tres, Margareta, Aloysia, Cecilia, puer vnus Ioannes” (whose three girls, Margaret, Alice, Cecily, and one boy, John, are still alive).24

ca. 1519 More sent a letter—or, rather, a poem—to all his children, saying how much he missed them.25

ca. 1520–1524 Margaret corrected a locus obscurus in a letter to Saint Cyprian, as first reported by Nicholas Harpsfield.26

19. Letter 69; Rogers, Correspondence, 134. 20. “. . . none is more dear to me than yourself, my beloved daughter”; see Elizabeth Rogers, ed., St. Thomas More: Selected Letters (1961; repr. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 109, line 13. 21. Letter 70; Rogers, Correspondence, 134–35. 22. P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen point to 1518–1519; see letter 1404, “Erasmus to Margaret Roper,” Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 366n8. For her part, Hitchcock concluded that the “year in which Roper entered Sir Thomas More’s household is not certain, but it must have been some time before he married Margaret” (William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxii). 23. Hitchcock, ed., William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxii. 24. Letter 999; Allen, Opus epistolarum, 4:18/174–19/175. Obviously, Erasmus forgot Elizabeth and added More’s stepdaughter Alice. 25. Letter 76; Rogers, Correspondence, 154–56. 26. Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, o.s. 186 (1932; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 81, lines 13–17. See my other contribution to this volume: “Margaret Roper’s Emendation of a Letter to St. Cyprian and Its Textual Afterlife.”



Life Records and Writings of Margaret More Roper 7

1520 More met the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives and invited him to write a response to Quintilian’s first declamation, Paries Palmatus, so that his children could improve their Latin. Vives initially refused.27

1521 Before February, More sent a letter to Margaret in which he refers to another from her that he had shown to Cardinal Reginald Pole, who happened to be with him.28 More had to convince the cardinal that she had not been helped by any tutor with her skillful Latin composition, as there was none in the household at the time. More sent a letter toti scholae suae (to his whole school) on March 23.29 A certain Drew (“D. Druum”)—possibly Roger Drew—is mentioned as tutor, together with Nicholas Kratzer.30 Margaret married William Roper on July 2, at St Stephen’s.31 Initially, they stayed at the Barge. Roper was a convinced Lutheran at this time; as Harpsfield expressed it, “at what time he maried with mistris Margaret More, [he] was a meruailous zealous Protestant”; furthermore, he “thirsted very sore to publishe his newe doctrine and diuulge it.”32 In September, Erasmus wrote a letter to French humanist Guillaume Budé, mentioning the newly married couple and also Margaret, her siblings, and their education: He has three daughters, of whom Margaret, the eldest, is already married to a young man who is well off, has a most honourable and modest character, and besides that is no stranger to our literary pursuits. All of them from their earliest years he has had properly and strictly brought up in point of character, and has 27. Eugenio Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores: The Meeting of Juan Luis Vives and Margaret More Roper,” English Studies 88, no. 4 (2007): 388–400, esp. 389–90. 28. Letter 128; Rogers, Correspondence, 301. The source of this anecdote is Stapleton (Tres Thomae, 61; Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 106), who joined in this letter excerpts from two different epistles. Since Reginald Pole left England in February 1521 and did not return until 1528, Rogers dates the first part of the letter before Pole’s departure (Rogers, Correspondence, 301); the second part is mentioned in note 44 below. 29. Letter 101, Rogers, Correspondence, 249–51. 30. Rogers, Correspondence, 249n9, 250/9, 250/12. Stapleton offers further confirmation about these two names: “Inuenio etiam que[n]dam Druum & alium Nicolaum liberorum aut nepotum Mori praeceptores fuisse” (Tres Thomae, 222/21–23); “I find also that a certain Drew and a Nicholas were tutors of More’s children or grandchildren” (Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 92). 31. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxii. 32. Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 84/5–7 and 12–13. Though Harpsfield finished his biography of Thomas More in 1557, it was not printed until 1932.

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given them a liberal education. To his three daughters he has added a fourth girl, whom he maintains as a piece of generosity to be a playmate for them. He also has a ­step-daughter of great beauty and exceptional gifts, married for some years now to a young man not without education and of truly golden character. And he has a son by his first wife, now a boy of about thirteen, who is the youngest of his children.33

More met Vives again at Bruges in July, who finally accepted the task of writing a response to Quintilian.34 The result was Declamatio pro Noverca contra Caecum (Louvain, 1521). In the preface Vives describes how More used to narrate the story in Quintilian’s Paries Palmatus to his children so that they could enjoy the eloquence of the author. He refers to them as “the worthy offspring of their father” (dignae illo patre soboli).35 Margaret received another letter from her father.36 He mentions Nicholas Kratzer and sends his greetings to William Roper, “coniugem tuum, filium mihi dulcissimum” (your husband, my most sweet son).37

1522 More was working on his treatise “The Four Last Things,” and he also encouraged Margaret to compose one.38 Her treatise is discussed in section III, below. More wrote to Margaret on September 11 and informed her about a meeting with John Veysey, bishop of Exeter, who was very pleased to read some of her works.39 33. The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1122 to 1251: 1520–1521, trans. R. A. B. Mynors, annot. by Peter G. Bietenholz, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 296/58–68. “Habet filias treis. Quarum maxima natu, Margareta, iam nupta est iuueni, primum beato, deinde moribus integerrimis ac modestissimis, postremo non alieno a nostris studiis. Omnes a teneris annis curauit imbuendas primum cas­ tis ac sanctis moribus, deinde politioribus literis. Filiabus tribus quartam adiunxit puellam, quam benignitatis gratia alit, vt illis sit sodalis. Habet priuignam mira forma raroque ingenio puellam, annos iam aliquot nuptam iuueni non indocto, sed cuius moribus nihil sit magis aureum. Habet filium ex vxore priore, natum annos plus minus tredecim, ex liberis natu minimum” (Letter 1233, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 4:577/57–62). For further discussion of Erasmus’s letter to Budé, see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “ ‘A Young, Virtuous, and ­Well-Learned Gentlewoman’: Margaret More Roper in the Republic of Letters,” in the present volume, pp. 135, 139. 34. Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores,” 390–91. 35. Io. Lodovici Vivis Valentini Opera, in duos distincta tomos (Basileae: per Nic. Episcopium Iuniorem, 1555), I. 252. See also Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores,” 394. 36. Letter 106; Rogers, Correspondence, 254–255. 37. Rogers, Correspondence: Kratzer is mentioned at 254/10, Roper at 255/48–49. 38. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 103; Tres Thomae, 238. “The Four Last Things” can be found in Thomas More, English Poems, Life of Pico, The Last Things, vol. 1 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 39. Letter 108; Rogers, Correspondence, 257–58.



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1523 On the recommendation of the Flemish humanist Frans van Cranevelt, More had arranged for Vives “to be paid to write a book on women’s education.”40 Vives arrived in England on May 12, his manuscript in hand. Margaret played the “surrogate host” to Vives when he visited the Mores some months later,41 as her father was away from London.42 Vives mentions More’s daughters in De institutione feminae Christianae: Then I shall mention the daughters of Thomas More: Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily, and their kinswoman, Margaret Giggs; whose father was not content that they be chaste but also took pains that they be very learned, in the belief that in this way they would be more truly and steadfastly chaste.43

In a letter from More to Margaret written around autumn that year, he mentions that she is pregnant.44 The Ropers’ first baby was born before December 25, for on that date Erasmus congratulated the couple. Along with his letter he sent a commentary on two hymns for Christmas and Epiphany by Prudentius, which he dedicated to Margaret.45 According to Allen and Allen, the ­new-born baby was named Thomas, but John Guy claims that “[i]t was indeed a girl,” who “was 40. Guy claims that Vives’s visit to the Mores took place four or five months after he met Thomas Wolsey and was appointed lecturer at Oxford (Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 140). Vives corrected “the proofs of his book at Bucklersbury and inserted a brief eulogy of Margaret and her sisters” (141). 41. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 140–41. 42. Letters 115–28; Rogers, Correspondence, 275–302. 43. Juan Luis Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, 2 vols., ed. Charles Fantazzi and Constantinus Matheeussen (Leiden: Brill, 1996–98), vol. 1, p. 39. The original Latin is on the previous page (vol. 1, p. 38, paragraph. 26, lines 5–8): “Tum Thomae Mori filias: Margaritam, Elizabetham, Caeciliam atque earum consanguineam Margaritam Gigiam; quas pater non contentus esse castissimas, etiam doctissimae ut essent curavit, sic fore iudicans ut verius firmiusque essent castae.” 44. Letter 128; Rogers, Correspondence, 302/29. This is the second paragraph of the previously quoted letter; see note 28. 45. Erasmus sent to John Botzheim a catalogue of his works (January 30, 1523; letter 1, Allen, Opus epistolarum, 1:1–46), which he updated in 1524—as he himself indicates. There he references “cui adiunximus duos hymnos Prudentianos, alterum γενεθλιακόν, alterum ἐπιφανειακόν pueri Iesu. Quos itidem emaculatos commentariolis enarrauimus in gratiam clarissimae puellae Margaretae Roperae; id factum est Anno 1524” (to which [Ovid’s Nux, addressed to More’s son, John] I added two hymns by Prudentius, one celebrating the birth, the other the epiphany, of the child Jesus. Once these were also cleaned up, I illustrated them with brief comments to honor the young lady Margaret Roper; this was in 1524) (Allen, Opus epistolarum, 1:13/2–4). For the relation between Erasmus and Margaret, see McCutcheon, “ ‘A Young, Virtuous, and W ­ ell-Learned Gentlewoman,’ ” 138–42, as well as Alberto Castelli, Erasmo e Margherita Moro (Milan: Casa Editrice Leonardo, 1943); M.-C. Robineau et al., “Correspondance entre Érasme et Margaret Roper,” Moreana 3, no. 12 (1966): 29–46; and C. Béné, “Cadeau d’Érasme à Margaret Roper: Deux hymnes de Prudence,” Miscellanea Moreana/Moreana 26, no. 100 (1989): 469–80.

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baptized Elizabeth, after her aunt.”46 The child Thomas Roper was born in 1534. Erasmus published at Basel his Precatio Dominica in septem portiones distributa, a work that Margaret began to translate into English shortly after.

1524 In March, Erasmus published his colloquium “Antronius, Magdalia,” later called Abbatis et eruditae. It consists of a dialogue between an ignorant abbot and a learned lady, Magdalia. It is generally assumed that Erasmus modeled the learned female character on Margaret.47 John Roper, Margaret’s f­ ather-in-law, died April 7.48 William initiated a legal dispute with his mother and brothers because he had not been declared principal heir.49 On October 1 Richard Hyrde finished the prologue for Margaret’s translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica.50 Sometime after, Thomas Berthelet published this translation, titled A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster.51 Margaret More 46. P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 366n12; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 138. 47. On this attribution, see Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 256; and Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 39, Colloquies, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 499. Erasmus’s Familiarum colloquiorum formulae were first published by Froben in November 1518 (Erasmus, Collected Works, ed. Thompson, 39: xx). In the first printing of “Antronius, Magadalia” (1524), the learned lady claims that there are other cultivated women in Europe: “sunt in Italia, sunt in Anglia non paucae mulieres nobilissimae, quae cum quovis viro queant contendere” (in Italy and in England there are not a few women of very noble birth who may compete with any man); G. M. Edwards, Altera Colloquia Latina Adapted from Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 44. Only in later editions (1526) does Erasmus include a more precise reference to More’s school and to other literate women in other European countries: “sunt in Hispania, sunt in Italia non paucae mulieres. Adprime nobiles, quae cum quovis viro queant contendere: sunt in Anglia Moricae, sunt in Germania Bilibaldicae et Blaurericae” (In Spain, in Italy, there are not a few women and especially from the nobility, who can rival any man. In England there are the More girls, in Germany the Pirckheimers and the Blarers); L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, R. Hoven, eds., Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. Recognita et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrate, Ordinis primi. Tomus tertius (Amsterdam: N ­ orth-Holland Publishing Company, 1972), 407/154–56. 48. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxi. 49. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 162. 50. In addition to the text in this volume, separate editions of Hyrde’s prologue include “Richard Hyrde on the Education of Women—1524,” in Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, ed. Foster Watson (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912; repr. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971), 159–73; and, Richard Hyrde, “Défense et illustration des humanités féminines, by Richard Hyrde,” ed. Germain Marc’hadour, trans. ­Marie-Claire Robineau, O.P., Moreana 4, no. 13 (1967): 5–24. For combined editions of the preface and Margaret’s translation, see note 208. 51. Margaret Roper, A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster, made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus, and tourned in to englisshe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of. Xix. Yere of age (London: In fletestrete, in the house of Thomas Berthelet, 1526). There are two extant early editions of this work. In entries 10477 and 10477.5 of the Short Title Catalogue



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Roper is the “yong / virtuous and well / lerned gentylwoman of .XIX. / yere of age” referred to on the title page of the translation,52 although her name does not appear anywhere in the work or in the dedicatory letter by Hyrde;53 see section II below. By October 1, the Mores and the Ropers (including Hyrde) had already moved to Chelsea.54 On October 24, Vives returned to England and visited the Mores and the Ropers at their new home.55

(see http://estc.bl.uk, s.v. Margaret Roper), the first one is dated “1526?,” and the second, “1531?.” Dating the publication year of Margaret’s translation is a complex issue. Guy assumes there was another edition in 1524, inferred from Hyrde’s words in his preface about the “printing” (A Daughter’s Love, 303). Elizabeth McCutcheon also states that “the first edition is lost, but it almost certainly appeared in 1524”; in “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England,” Women Writers of the Renaissance and the Reformation, ed. K. M. Wilson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449–80, at 460. As early as 1912, Watson mentions “a first and only edition in 1524 by Wynkyn de Worde” (Vives, xiv). The book was, however, printed by Berthelet, whose title page contained a woodcut that had been used by de Worde (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 141). Reynolds thought that “Margaret’s translation was published at the beginning of 1525” (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 38), and so does Sarah C. E. Ross, “A Poem by Margaret More Roper?,” Notes and Queries 56 (2009): 502–7, here 502. For more on the dating problem, see E. J. Devereux, “Some Lost Translations of Erasmus,” The Library, Fifth Series, vol. 17, no. 3 (1962): 255–59. For some interesting reflections on the relationship between this translation and the woodcut on its title page, see P. Brace, “Speaking Pictures: Margaret Roper and the Representation of Lady Rhetoric,” Moreana 50, no. 193–94 (2013): 93–130; Wayne A. Rebhorn had also reflected on the subversive implications of feminine portraits of rhetoric in The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 140, and Anne E. B. Coldiron, “The Translator’s Visibility in Early Printed Portrait-Images and the Ambiguous Example of Margaret More Roper,” in Thresholds of Translation: Paratexts, Print, and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Britain, ed. M ­ arie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 51–74. 52. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 39. 53. Hyrde addresses his prologue to “the moost studyous and vertuous yonge mayde Fraunces. S.” (Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, in this volume, 53/1–2; Défense et illustration, Marc’hadour, ed., 6). At one time it was believed that this Frances was the “daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk” (Watson, preface to Vives, 160). But further research has concluded that she was Frances Staverton, Margaret’s cousin and a student at More’s schola (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 38; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 66). See also A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, the Rastells, Heywood, and the More Circle (London: Methuen, 1926), chap. 7, 160–187, at 171; a shorter version of this chapter was published as “The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 15 (1918): 157–84. 54. Hyrde finished his prologue at Chelsea: “At Chelcheth / the yere of our lorde god / a thousande fyue hundred.xxiiij. The first day of Octobre” (Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 59/22–24; Défense et illustration, Marc’hadour, ed., 22). 55. John E. Paul, Catherine of Aragon and Her Friends (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), 66; and Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores,” 392.

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1525 By April, Vives was a ­long-time guest at Chelsea.56 William Roper was called to the bar in May.57 In December, Margaret and her sisters Elizabeth and Cecily were invited to Richmond Palace by Henry VIII to have some kind of philosophical debate in his presence.58 A letter from John Palgrave to More concludes “and whan your dowghters disputyd in philosophie afore the Kyngis Grace, I wold yt hadde bene my fortune to be present.”59 At the request of Bishop Tunstall, More raided the Steelyard from the end of the year to the beginning of the next, looking for heretical books.60 Four merchants were taken for trial before Wolsey’s commissaries.61 William Roper was involved in the affair: “for his open talke and companying with diuers of his owne sect, of the Stilliarde and other merchauntes, was with them before Cardi56. While in London, Vives stayed at Chelsea. This is inferred from Vives’s letter to Cranevelt (Epistola 136; H. de Vocht, ed., Literae Virorum Eruditorum ad Franciscum Craneveldium 1522–1528 [Louvain: Uystpuryst, 1928], 369/38–39). Writing to Cranevelt from Oxford on January 25, 1525, Vives stated that he had left most of his belongings in London, where he was planning to return at the beginning of April: “remigraturo quantum spero, primus diebis mensis Aprilis, Christo bene adiuuante” (as I expect to return [to London] in the first days of April, Christ help me so). Furthermore, on April 28 at Hampton Court, Vives was granted a license to import wines into England: see Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 4, 1524–1530, ed. J. S. Brewer (London, 1875), British History Online, http://www.­british-history.ac.uk/­letters-papers-hen8 /vol4, pp. 556–569, no. 1293; accessed January 13, 2016 (hereafter, references to these documents will be abbreviated L&P, Henry VIII). By May 10, 1525, Vives had returned to Bruges, as stated in a letter to Cranevelt dated in that city, on May 27 (Epistola 153; de Vocht, Literae, 423/1–2). Subsequently, More wrote a letter to Cranevelt from London (16 May 1525, Epistola 151; de Vocht, Literae, 418–20) to be delivered to Vives, “to whom More sent this letter, along with a bundle of messages which had arrived for him [Vives] in London, after he left Britain” (de Vocht, Literae, 419). Apparently, correspondence addressed to Vives was still arriving at Chelsea after his departure because he had been a ­long-time guest there: “[T]he time spent with More at Chelsea gave him [Vives] the opportunity not only to become more acquainted with Margaret and her husband William, but also with Richard Hyrde and many of More’s other friends” (Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores,” 392–93). See also Eugenio Olivares Merino, Padre Mío Bueno: Margarita More Roper: perfil biográfico y epistolario (Madrid: Rialp, 2007), esp. 86–97. 57. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxiv. 58. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 155–56. 59. Rogers, Correspondence, 405/76–78. Rogers (403) and T. E. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More (London: Burns & Oates, 1891), 138, date this letter from More to John Palgrave to “1529?” “[B]ut an earlier date [1525] seems to meet the facts,” says E. E. Reynolds, Sir Thomas More (London: Burns and Oates, 1953; republished for the British Council and the National Book League, London: Longmans, Green 1970), 199n1 [page numbers cite the 1970 edition]. Reynolds later dates Margaret’s disputation from late 1524 or 1525 (Margaret Roper, 49), and Guy explains that the Palgrave letter could only have been written between “late June 1525 to February 1526” (A Daughter’s Love, 304). 60. The Steelyard was the main trading base of the Hanseatic League in London and hence of the frequenting of Lutherans. 61. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 163.



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nall Wolsey conuented of heresie.” Thanks to the cardinal’s love for More, Roper “was with a friendly warning discharged.”62 Despite this, he remained a Lutheran, and, as he confessed to Harpsfield, More is he “whom then of all the world he did, during that time, most abhorre.”63 It is reasonable to assume Margaret’s deep concern for her husband would move her to ask her father for help. After trying to win him back to the Catholic faith, More felt unable to do anything but pray for his s­ on-in-law: Megge, I haue borne a long time with thy husbande; I haue reasoned and argued with him in those pointes of religion, and still geuen to him my poore fatherly counsaile; but I perceaue none of all this able to call him home; and therefore, Megge, I will no longer argue nor dispute with him, but will cleane geue him ouer, and gett me another while to God and praye for him.64

1526 Vives arrived again in England at the end of February. 65 In his letter to Cranevelt from London (April 13), he refers to More’s daughters as “filiabus facundissimis & foecundissimis” (most happy and prolific daughters).66 On March 12, Dr. Richard Foxford, the bishop of London’s V ­ icar-General, summoned Thomas Berthelet on suspicion of having printed three translations of Erasmus’s works, among these Margaret Roper’s Devout Treatise, as well as a sermon by John Fisher.67 62. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 86/19–22, 25. 63. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 87/1–2. 64. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 87/18–24. 65. H. de Vocht, “Vives and his Visits to England,” Monumenta Humanistica Lovaniensia 4 (1934): 1–60, at 21. 66. Juan Luis Vives: Epistolario, ed. José Jiménez Delgado (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1978), 431. 67. This episode is dated to 1525 by Reynolds (Margaret Roper, 39–40). However, I have followed Reed, Bennet, and Guy, who place it in 1526; see H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1475 to 1557: Being a Study in the History of the Book Trade from Caxton to the Incorporation of the Stationers’ Company, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 34; and Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 157. Reed claims that Dr. Foxford summoned Berthelet a month after “Fisher preached a second notable sermon on a wet Sunday in February, 1525–6” (Reed, Early Tudor Drama, 169). He means 1526, for at that time the chronological year started in the month of March. Hall places the episode in February of the ­twenty-seventh year of Henry VIII’s reign, that is, 1526: In the monethe of February the. Xi. Daie beyng Sondaie, the Cardinall with greate pompe, came to the Cathedrall Churche of Paules, on whom bishoppes, Abbottes, and a great nomber of doctors, gaue their attendaunce, and there he sat in pontificalibus, vnder his cloth of estate of riche clothe of Golde: and there one Frier Barnes a Frier Augustine bare a fagot, for certain poyntes of heresie, as the Bishoppes saied: and two Merchauntes of the Stilierd bare fagottes, for eating fleshe on a Fridaie, and there the bishop of Rochester Doctor Fisher, made a sermon, reprouyng Martin Luthers Opinion, a Frier of Germany, whiche wrote against the power of the Bishoppe of Rome, and in his sermon he spake So muche honor of the Pope and his Cardinalles, and of their dignitie and preheminence,

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Berthelet was accused of not following the legal procedures established in 1524 to prevent the coming of Lutheran books into England.68 The printer admitted that he had not followed the procedures. III. THE CASE FOR THE ­VICAR-GENERAL AGAINST THOMAS BARTLETT DWELLING AT THE SIGN OF THE LUCRECE IN FLEET STREET: On 12 March, 1525–6 [1526], there appeared before the ­Vicar-General at his residence Thomas Bartlett, who acknowledged that he was present on 12th October in the palace of London before the Bishop when he enjoined, commanded and inhibited, etc., as more plainly appears in the acts recorded; and further, being examined he said that since this injunction and inhibition aforesaid, he had printed a certain work called The Treatise of the Pater Noster, translated as he said by the wife of Mr. Roper. . . . Questioned then as to whether he showed or exhibited the said works to the Lord Cardinal, the Archbishop, or the Bishops of London or Rochester according to the requirements of the acts recorded above, he replied that he had not. And then the ­Vicar-General enjoined him that he should not hereafter sell any copies of the above works, and that he should not print any works without first exhibiting them before him in Consistory; and he warned him to appear on the third day after the feast of St. Monica to see further.69

Berthelet was admonished, and Margaret’s book was withdrawn from sale.70 that he forgat to speake any thyng of the Gospell, whiche he toke in hande to declare, which sermon was muche praised of the Cardinall and bishoppes, wherfore the Cardinall gaue to all the people his benediccion, and thien departed. Hall’s Chronicle, Containing the History of England during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs, to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth . . . (London: printed for J. Johnston, et al., 1809), 708. 68. On October 12, 1524, Bishop Tunstall had warned the London booksellers against “importing into England books printed in Germany or any other books whatever containing Lutheran heresies, or selling or parting with any such books already imported under pain of the law; and further he warned them that should they import new books into England or buy books already imported, provided that these were newly composed and made, they were not to sell or part with them unless first they showed them either to the Lord Cardinal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or the Bishop of Rochester” (Reed, Early Tudor Drama, 165–66; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 157–58). 69. Reed, Early Tudor Drama, 169–70. 70. Reed claims that Berthelet’s fault was “a technical one”; his summoning by Foxford points to the fact “that the Court exercised the wider powers that it possessed . . . and that it was not limited by the terms of Tunstall’s inhibition of 12 October, which dealt only with imported books” (Reed, Early Tudor Drama, 170). Bennett has shown, however, that in autumn 1525 Tunstall made the warning more stringent: “no new book whatsoever was to be printed (except works hitherto approved by the Church) without authority” (Bennett, English Books and Readers, 33). Later critics argue that Erasmus’s writings incurred suspicion from some religious authorities, while authorities more sympathetic to him subsequently intervened, resulting in the eventual republication of the Devout Treatise. In particular, see Jamie Goodrich, “Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: A Case for Rethinking Women’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 4 (2008): 1021–40;



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Hyrde asked for the help of Stephen Gardiner, who at the time was Wolsey’s secretary.71 The second printing (1526) had the cardinal’s imprimatur.72 Margaret was able to bring William Roper back to the Catholic faith.73 Margaret Giggs married Dr. John Clement, a former tutor at More’s household. They moved to the Barge.74 Richard Hyrde left the More household.75 Meg’s second daughter, Mary, was born.76

late 1526–early 1527 In August Erasmus sent to England the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger; before the end of the year, he had been commissioned for two works: a portrait of More and another of the family.77 The f­ amily-group portrait has not survived, only Holbein’s preparatory sketch. Margaret is seated at the right on cushions, holding an open book on her lap. Reverend John Lewis (1697–1743) of Maidstone, who edited Roper’s biography of More in 1729, saw Holbein’s More family portrait at Well Hall, the Roper’s manor in Eltham (Kent), in 1717. Lewis claims that a Latin inscription could be read in Margaret’s open book: “L. An. Senecae Aedipus. Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem zephyro levis,” which is from Seneca’s Oedipus (lines 882–84). On Margaret’s dress was inscribed “Margarita Ropera Thomae Mori filia, anno 22” (Margaret Roper, daughter of More, in her 22nd year).78 and Jamie Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 71. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 157–58. 72. Margaret’s translation ends with “Thus endeth thexposicion of the Pater noster. Imprinted at London in Fletestrete / in the house of Thomas Berthelet nere to the Cundite / at the signe of Lucrece. Cum priuilegio a rege indulto.” See p. 99/12–16 in this volume. 73. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 168. 74. A. W. Reed, “John Clement and His Books,” The Library, Fourth Series, vol. 6, no. 4 (1926): 329–39, esp. 330–31; and Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 168–69. 75. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 169. For notes on Hyrde’s works and life, see Germain Marc’hadour’s comments in Richard Hyrde, “Défense et illustration des humanités féminines,” 4; Diane V. Bayne, “The Instruction of a Christian Woman: Richard Hyrde and the Thomas More Circle,” Moreana 45 (1975): 5–15; and Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 151–52. 76. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 170. 77. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 170–71. 78. Lewis’s description of the portrait was reported by Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More, 147. The original lines are: “Fata si liceat mihi / fingere arbitrio meo, / temperem zephyro levi / vela . . .” (Were it mine to shape fate at my will, I would trim my sails to gentle winds). As Bridgett’s quotation reads levis instead of levi and omits vela, it renders the quotation meaningless. Also see Frank Mitjans’s profusely illustrated and detailed article “Non sum Oedipus, sed Morus: A Paper on the Portrait of Sir Thomas More,” Moreana 43–44, no. 168–70 (2006–7): 12–67.

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1528 Margaret fell gravely ill from the sweating sickness.79 She was so sick “that bothe phisitions and all other there dispaired of her recouerye, and gave her ouer.”80 Stapleton adds that In such a sickness the only hope of life lies in a free flow of perspiration, but in this case, through her own carelessness or the negligence of those around her, the flow was hindered and finally ceased altogether, so that the whole poison of the disease was retained in the body and she became delirious.81

It seems that she could not “be kepte from sleape,”82 and, as Guy claims, an unconscious patient could not sweat properly.83 Sorely grieved, More went to the New Building in Chelsea to pray at his chapel, and it was then that “incontinent came into his mynd that a glister [an enema] shold be thonly way to help her.”84 This was done, and Margaret’s life was saved. More declared that if she had died, “he would neuer haue medled with worldly [matters] after.”85 Holbein returned to Basel in August,86 taking with him the sketch of the family portrait that Margaret wished him to deliver as a gift to Erasmus.

1529 William Roper sat as a member of Parliament.87 William was finally successful in his lawsuit about his father’s will. He received a yearly rent of about 120 pounds as well as Well Hall in Eltham (Kent) and a chapel by St. Dunstan in Canterbury.88 Hyrde’s translation of Vives’s De institutione foeminae Christianae was printed by Thomas Berthelet.89 79. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 28/3. Harpsfield says that this episode took place in 1528 (The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 333n81/18–19). As Hall describes it, “In the very ende of May began in the citie of London the sickenes called the sweating sickenes, and afterward went all the realme almost of the which many died within v. or vi. Hours” (Hall’s Chronicle, 750). 80. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 28/12–13. 81. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 65. Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 89/25–29: “Negligentia autem seu sua seu suorum factum est, vt sudor ille (cuius copiosus fluxus sola salus est) se remitteret penitusque cessaret: ex quo illa vniuerso iam malo intus recepto, mente alienari quasique phrenessi corripi caepit.” 82. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 28/11. 83. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 187. 84. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 28/13–29/3. 85. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 29/17–18. 86. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 176. 87. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxvii. 88. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxvi. 89. A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n], made fyrst in Laten, and



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On September 6, Erasmus sent a letter to Margaret, to whom he refers as “Britanniae tuae decus” (the glory of your Britain), thanking her for the picture he received from Holbein.90 Erasmus also referred to his De vidua christiana, a work that he assumes Margaret has read.91 He sent greetings to Margaret’s sisters, her brother John, and her husband as well. Two days later, in a letter to Lord Mountjoy, Erasmus mentioned his correspondence with Margaret: “ex epistola quam misi Margarete filie Mori” (from the letter that I sent to Margaret, More’s daughter).92 On October 25, Thomas More was appointed Chancellor of England. At the beginning of the month, Quirinus Talesius, a servant and pupil of Erasmus, arrived in London. Erasmus had sent him to England with some of his published works for his friends and also to retrieve his English pension. On his return to the continent, Talesius carried More’s letter telling Erasmus about his appointment as well as Margaret’s answer, dated November 4, to his earlier letter to her. In it, she referred to Erasmus as “praeceptorem nostrum” (our master/teacher).93

1530 The Ropers’ third baby was born, christened Margaret, after her mother. John More, Margaret’s grandfather, died in December.

dedicated vnto the quenes good grace, by the right famous clerke mayster Lewes Vives, and turned out of Laten into Englysshe by Rycharde Hyrd. Whiche boke who so redeth diligently shal haue knowlege of many thynges, wherin he shal take great pleasure, and specially women shall take great co[m]modyte and frute towarde the[in]creace of vertue [and] good maners (Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete, in the house of Thomas Berthelet nere to the Cundite, at the signe of Lucrece, [1529?]). 90. Letter 2212; P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 274/1–2. Included with this letter was another by Johannes Henckel, “probatissimi viri” (a most worthy man) (Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 8:274/15), a friend of Erasmus and court chaplain to Mary of Hungary, the sister of Charles V, from 1524 to 1526 and her confessor from 1528 to 1531. 91. After the death of Mary’s husband, Louis II of Hungary, at the Battle of Mohacs (August 29, 1526), Henckel asked Erasmus to write a work for her comfort and consolation. In March 1529, Froben published at Basel De vidua christiana and dedicated it to her (Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 8:55). 92. Letter 2215; Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 8:277/8–9. 93. See Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 8:286n25 for Talesius as courier. Margaret’s letter is original, autograph throughout, and resides in the archive of the University of Wroclaw (MS. Rehd. 254. 129). For a printed version of Margaret’s letter, see letter 2233, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 8:299–300. Her compliment is not to be taken literally, since Erasmus was not able to give More’s children any systematic instruction (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 55). P. S. Hogrefe claims that Margaret “may have intended a conventional and complimentary, not a literal, meaning for the word praeceptor” (The Thomas More Circle: A Program of Ideas and Their Impact on Secular Drama [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959], 206).

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1531 In August an academic opinion favorable to the king’s divorce arrived from the Faculty of Law at Paris. On September 12, a ceremony took place at the Chelsea Old Church. Henry wanted this document to be registered and sealed for the Parliament and the Vatican precisely there “in the chancel of his recalcitrant Lord Chancellor’s own church,” which was also Margaret’s parish.94

1532 On May 16 More resigned the chancellorship. The king himself let him go “with thancks and prayse for his worthy service in that office.”95 More addressed everyone in his household to tell them that in order to stay together, they would have to endure cutbacks in the household budget.96 Not all the servants were dismissed after More’s resignation. Joan Alleyn, Margaret’s maid, stayed, whom More would refer to as “my good daughter” in his last letter to Margaret.97 In a letter to John Faber, bishop of Vienna, Erasmus recreated what he imagined as the joyous atmosphere at Chelsea, despite More’s resignation from office: He built by the river Thames, not far away from the city of London, a country house, neither poor nor as magnificent as to raise envy, but adequate. He lives there in intimate familiarity with his wife, his son and d­ aughter-in-law, his three daughters and corresponding husbands, and with eleven grandchildren already.98

In fact, Erasmus never witnessed the Chelsea household, and by the time he was writing this letter, only Margaret and her husband (although they already owned the manor in Well Hall) were living with More “in genteel poverty,” as Guy puts it.99 94. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 211. Originally dedicated to All Saints, the church consisted of two chapels (north and south), the nave and tower, and the chancel. After moving to Chelsea, Thomas More rebuilt the south chapel (1528) and made it the private family chapel. Eventually, it came to be known as “The More Chapel” or “Lady More’s Chapel”; see Walter H. Godfrey, ed., Survey of London, vol. 7, The Parish of Chelsea (Part III) (London County Council, London, 1921), 1–3. 95. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 52/5–6. 96. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 52/18. 97. Rogers, Correspondence, no. 218, p. 564; Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 107–8. 98. Letter 2750; P. S. Allen and H. W. Garrod, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 10 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 137/165–69: “Extruxit ad flumen Thamysim haud procul ab vrbe Londino, praetorium nec sordidum nec ad inuidiam vsque magnificum, commodum tamen: illic agit cum intimo sodalitio, vxore, filio et nuru, tribus filiabus et totidem generis, vna cum nepotibus iam vndecim.” 99. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 221.



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1532–1534 William Rastell published Thomas More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532–1533); Apology (1533); Debellation of Salem and Bizance (1533); and Answer to a Poisoned Book (1534). Margaret probably discussed these works with her father or, at least, “she acted as one of his amanuenses.”100

1533 January 24–25: Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn. May 23: Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, declared null the king’s marriage to Catherine; five days later the second union was made valid. More revealed his concern to William and Margaret: “God geeue grace, sonne, that thes matters within a while be not confirmed with othes.”101

1534 As a result of the incident of Elizabeth Barton (1506?–1534), the “Maid of Kent,” More’s name was included in the Bill of Attainder that Thomas Cromwell presented to the House of Lords on February 21.102 On the next day, Cromwell himself communicated to William Roper that his f­ ather-in-law’s name had been removed from the list. Margaret, who had been informed by a messenger sent by her husband, told the good news to her father, but he received the communication with some apprehension: “In faith, Megge . . . quod differtur non aufertur” (That which is postponed is not dropped).103 She must have realized that More was not encouraged by this temporary reprieve; possibly, she also noticed her father’s words are a quotation from Salimbene de Adam’s Cronica.104 100. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 62. 101. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 57/15–16. 102. Elizabeth Barton (ca. 1506–1534), the Holy Maid of Kent, the Nun of Kent, or the Nun of Canterbury, was a Benedictine nun who at the age of nineteen began to experience alleged visions, ­death-trances, and paralysis. At some point, she began to make statements on religious matters and to prophesy future events that she declared were divinely inspired. Gradually, her pronouncements became more and more critical of the King’s Matter, thus provoking the discontent of Henry VIII, though he was originally attentive to her visions. When she and her followers were indicted for high treason, the names of Thomas More and John Fisher were included in the Act of the Attainder. Both had visited the nun (as Henry himself had) and were accused of not “at once having revealed to the king what she had been saying in public” (Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 64). Thomas More had foreseen the risks that her prophecies would bring to her and those in contact with her. Therefore, he wrote her a letter warning against talking about things relating to Henry or to the kingdom. A copy of this letter More later presented as proof of his innocence; see R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (1958; repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 294–300. 103. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 71/15–16. 104. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 226.

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The First Succession Act was passed on March 26. Shortly after, More donated to Margaret and William “as an absolute gift” that “could not be confiscated” the southeast portion of Chelsea estate, the Butts Close, “where the New Building probably stood.”105 The rest of More’s estate was taken by the king.106 Margaret’s fourth child, Thomas, was born sometime in late March.107 On March 30, William Roper, as a member of Parliament, took the Oath of Succession.108 Hitchcock affirms “[h]e took the oath . . . and his public career continued.”109 On April 13, More was summoned to Lambeth to take an oath to the First Act of Succession, the only layman asked to do so. He did not let Margaret, or any other member of his family, follow him beyond the gates of his house. Roper and four servants sailed up the Thames with him towards Lambeth.110 He never returned home. After meeting the king’s commissioners at Lambeth, he was kept in custody at Westminster before being sent to the Tower. Margaret was the addressee of More’s first letter after imprisonment,111 which was possibly written before he was sent to the Tower or, more likely, after he was imprisoned there.112 The let105. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 61. See also Patricia E. C. Croot, ed., A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 12, Chelsea (London, 2004), British History Online, https://www.­british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol12 /­pp14-26#­h3-0007; accessed May 14, 2020: . . . a house and Butts close . . . that More gave outright to William and Margaret Roper in 1534. According to William Roper, More made a settlement of his estates on himself for life with remainders of part to his wife, part as a jointure for his d­ aughter-in-law, and part to his daughter Margaret and her husband William Roper, but shortly afterwards More reinforced this settlement by an outright grant in possession to the Ropers. Before being committed to the Tower in 1534, More granted all his estates in Chelsea to feoffees for uses he had previously indicated, but on his attainder all his estates were taken into the king’s hands except for the portion given to the Ropers. More’s deed of feoffment was annulled by an Act in 1536, following More’s execution in 1535. Roper was listed as a free tenant of the manor in 1543, and in 1547 he was said to hold for life a house and close called Butts close, with houses built there, a barn, and garden r­ ent-free by gift of Sir Thomas More. 106. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 79/1–80/8. 107. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, xviii, 228, 269. 108. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 230, 319. 109. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xxxvii. Stapleton, mistakenly, declares that Roper rejected the oath, providing these details: “But everyone of the men—John More, John Clement, William Roper, Giles Heron, and John Daunce—was cast into prison for refusing the oath,” Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 193; Tres Thomae, 348/5–8: “Viri ad vnu[m] omnes Ioannes Morus, Ioannes Clemens, Gulielmus Roperus, Aegidius Heron, Ioannes [sic; recte Gulielmus] Dancaeus ob iusiurandum reiectum in carceres coniecti sunt.” 110. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 73/2. 111. Dated April 17, letter 200; Rogers, Correspondence, 501–7. 112. Reynolds (Margaret Roper, 67) favors the first occasion, whereas other scholars support the second: Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More, 363–64; Rogers, Correspondence, 501; Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 282 (Tres Thomae, 140); Chambers, Thomas More, 301; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 229.



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ter contains a detailed account of the interview with the commissioners at Lambeth.113 John á Wood, More’s servant in the Tower, delivered to Margaret a short note, written with charcoal, from her father.114 Margaret’s new maid, Dorothy Colley, was married to Wood. In April or May then, Margaret answered her father’s letter, trying to persuade him to take the oath, but her epistle has not been preserved;115 see section III below. More replied to her in May. In his headnote to this letter, William Rastell, Margaret’s cousin, describes her assumed purposes in her preceding letter thus: “she semed somwhat to labour to perswade hym to take the othe (thoughe she nothinge so thought) to winne therby credence with Maister Thomas Cromwell, that she might the rather gette libertye to haue free resort vnto her father (which she onely had for the moste tyme of his inprisonment).”116 It was assumed by More and his correspondents that their letters were read by government agents. Probably also in May, Margaret was granted permission to see her father “when [he] had remained in the Tower a little more than a monethe.”117 Continuing a family custom, which they repeated whenever she visited him, they recited “the seuen psalms and lethany.”118 Rastell adds, “Maistres Margaret Roper, obtained licens of the Kinge, that she might resort vnto her father in the Tower, which she did. And thereuppon he wrote with a cole a letter to all his frendes.”119 In this letter, More asks his friends: “that if my welbeloued doughter Margaret Roper . . . doe anything desire of any of you, of such thinge as I shall happe to need, that it may lyke you no lesse to regarde and tender it, then if I moued it vnto you and required it of you parsonally present my selfe.”120 113. See Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Thomas More’s Three Prison Letters Reporting on His Interrogations,” in Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents, ed. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Louis W. Karlin, and Gerard B. Wegemer (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), 94–110. 114. Dated April or May, letter 201; Rogers, Correspondence, 507–8. 115. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 68. 116. William Rastell, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellor of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge (London: At the costes and charges of Iohn Cawod, Iohn Waly, and Richarde Tottell, 1557), 1431; hereafter cited as Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More. 117. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 75/18–19. 118. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 75/21–76/1. Roper means the penitential psalms (numbered 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, 142 in the Catholic Bible), and the litany of the saints. The Mores used to say these prayers before going to bed (Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 25/16–18). Interestingly, Fisher presented More a copy of his book on the penitential psalms at the time both were in the Tower; see section II. 119. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1432. 120. Letter 204; Rogers, Correspondence, 511/3–8. Guy describes Margaret’s role during the last year of her father’s life as “his main channel of communication with the family and the outside world, . . . his intermediary for relaying information back and forth” (A Daughter’s Love, 229).

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The tone and content of Margaret’s next letter are completely different. She finds comfort in rereading her father’s latest letter, “the faithfull messenger of your very virtuous and gostly minde, rid from all corrupt loue of worldly things, and fast knit only in the loue of God.” Margaret also gains consolation from remembering her father’s “lyfe past and godly conuersacion, and wholesome counsaile, and verteous example.” At the end, Margaret states her wish to be by her father and hopes to meet him again here on earth.121 August 17: Alice Alington, Margaret’s stepsister, sent her a letter reporting a conversation with Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley, who “meruayled that my father is so obstinate in his owne conceite.”122 Margaret showed Alice’s letter to her father when she visited him again, which Rastell glossed thus: “And what communicacion was therupon betwene her father and her, ye shall perceiue by an aunswer here folowing (as writen to the ladye Alington.) But whether thys aunswer wer writen by syr Thomas More in his daughter Ropers name, or by her selfe, it is not certaynelye knowen.”123 In her “aunswer” to Alice Alington, Margaret recounts a meeting with her father and the conversation that followed.124 After citing, for More’s consideration, the examples of “so manye wyse men”125 who had taken the oath, she recalls the words of Henry Patenson, More’s fool, who had claimed “what eyleth him that he wil not sweare? . . . I haue sworn the oth my self.”126 Immediately after, Margaret adds, “And so I can in good faith go now no ferther neither, after so many wyse men whom ye take for no saumple, but if I should say like M. Harry: why should you refuse to swere father? for I haue sworn my self.”127 To this, More laughs and 121. May? 1534, letter 203; Rogers, Correspondence, 510–11. 122. In the current volume, 101/7; Rogers, Correspondence, Letter 205, 512/14–15. 123. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1434; see Rastell’s headnote to the letter to Alice Alington, in this volume, 103/3–7. The question of authorship or collaboration between More and Margaret of this very long and important document remains unsettled. Discussions include R. W. Chambers’s introduction to Nicholas Harpsfield’s The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, clxii; W. M. Gordon, “Tragic Perspective in Thomas More’s Dialogue with Margaret in the Tower,” Cithara 17, no. 2 (1978): 3–12; J. Avery, “ ‘Irony and Charity Are Met Together’: A Puzzle in Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” Moreana 46, no. 176 (2009): 65–76; Thomas Betteridge, Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 2013); Travis Curtright, “Thomas More as Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” Moreana 56, no. 211 (2019): 1–27; see also two essays in this volume: Katherine Rodgers, “Dia­logic Imagination in ‘The Letter to Alice Alington,’ ” 205–221; and Stephen Merriam Foley, “Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the ‘Letter to Alington,’ ” 222–252. Other critical appraisals of this letter are cited in note 215 below 124. August 1534; in the current volume, pp. 103–19; Rogers, Correspondence, letter 206, 514–32. 125. 117/4; Rogers, Correspondence, 529/565–66. 126. 117/8–9; Rogers, Correspondence, 529/571–72. 127. 117/9–12; Rogers, Correspondence, 529/572–76.



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says, “That woord was like Eue too, for she offered Adam no woorse fruit than she had eaten her self.”128 In a side note to More’s comment, Rastell adds, “She [Margaret] toke the othe with this excepcion, as farre as would stande with the law of God.”129 Critics have interpreted differently the circumstances that led Margaret to take the oath. Guy states that Margaret took it voluntarily as her husband had done but slipped the quoted words into a proviso.130 None of the commissioners posed any objection to this: “It was a concession she knew that Cromwell, grudgingly, had already made unofficially, and without telling Henry, to some of the Carthusians.”131 Furthermore, as a married woman under her husband’s authority, this was sufficient, since William had taken the oath “unreservedly, and without blinking.”132 Bridgett confirms this view.133 However, Reynolds claims that it is “inconceivable” that the commission would have allowed anyone to modify the oath, and thus these words “must have been a mental reservation.”134 In other words, Margaret could have been one of those who thought that, in her father’s words, “if they say one thing & thinke the whyle the contrary, god more regardeth their heart than their tonge, & that therfore their oth goeth vpon that they thinke, and not vpon that they say: as a woman resoned once. I trow daughter you wer by.”135 Margaret, Chambers explains, took the oath with the exception and adds that More and Fisher might have chosen to do so as well, “but in their case no compromise was to be allowed.”136 Sometime in August, probably shortly after August 17, Thomas More began writing his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation and continued working on it for most of 1534.137 This dialogue is closely linked to both Alington letters discussed 128. 117/13–14; Rogers, Correspondence, 529/577–78. 129. See 117n13. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1441. 130. The full text of the oath is reproduced in the House of Lords Journal, vol. 1 (30 March 1534), pp. 81–82; available online at https://www.­british-history.ac.uk/­lords-jrnl/vol1/­pp81-82, or at https://www.national archives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/citizen_subject/docs/oath_allegiance.htm. Margaret’s exception is available only in Rastell’s English Workes of Thomas More. 131. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 235. 132. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 236. 133. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More, 369. 134. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 95. 135. 109/32–35; Rogers, Correspondence, 521/260–64. This might be a reference to More’s wife, Lady Alice. 136. Chambers, Thomas More, 312. 137. For the date of composition, see Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 12, ed. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), especially 348–49, 383–84, and 414; for the new version of the beast fable, see 114–18.

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above (the first dated August 17). In the Dialogue of Comfort, More develops further the beast fable that appears in both letters. “Margaret,” Guy claims, “would become central to the new text,” as her “contributions are delivered through the mouth of Vincent, while More plays Antony.”138 On November 3, Parliament opened its seventh session but discontinued it on December 18: “the legislation of those six weeks sealed the fates of Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More.”139 The first legislation created the Act of Supremacy (November 17), and the second the Act of Succession, regularizing the oath that had been required under the first one. Roper recalls More’s words to his daughter: I may tell thee, Megg, they that haue committed me hither, for refusinge of [this] oath not agreeable with the statute, are not by theyr owne lawe able to iustifye my imprisonement. And surely, daughter, it is a greate pitye that any Christian prince should by a flexible Councell ready to followe his affections, and by a weake Cleargie lackinge grace constantly to stand to their learninge with Flatterye be so shamefully abused.140 138. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 237–38. Vincent and Antony are the two main fictional interlocutors of the Dialogue. 139. E. E. Reynolds, The Field Is Won: The Life and Death of St. Thomas More (London: Burns and Oates, 1968), 326. 140. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 78/8–16. Furthermore, More mentions an interesting detail that might help to date the composition of this and the previous letters to late 1534: “this obstynate maner of mine, in still refusinge the othe, shall peraduenture force and driue the Kynges Grace to make a ferther lawe for me. I cannot let such a law to be made” (letter 210; Rogers, 542/81–83). The word “let” meant “stop” or “prevent.” Stapleton includes this letter in his biography and offers this clarification: Sparsus igitur non obscurus rumor est, & ad Mori aures studio perlatus, fore vt si pertinax persisteret, cogatur Rex nouam in eum legem, confidente adhuc Senatu, ferre. De quo rumore & noua te[n]tatione seu terrore potius sic ad filiam suam Margaretam scribit. (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 300/16–21) A rumour, therefore, was industriously spread abroad and zealously brought to More’s ears, to the effect that if he persisted in his obstinacy the King would be forced to take advantage of the continued session of Parliament to pass a new law against him. Of this rumour, and the new temptation or rather threat that it implied, he wrote thus to his daughter Margaret (Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 158). The new law to which More and Stapleton refer was the second Act of Succession, which enforced the first one by requiring an oath; it was passed in the continued session of Parliament mentioned above (­November-December). Letters 209 and 210 must have been written, then, before the sanction of this second Act, i.e., before ­November–December 1534. However, Guy (A Daughter’s Love, 247, 322) dates letters 209, 210, 211, 214 (as enumerated in Rogers’s edition) between January 16 and May 2/3, 1535, while Rogers dates all four letters to 1534. Soon after came the Act of Treason and the Act of Attainder against More. For copies of some of these and other relevant documents, a useful chronology, and extensive bibliography, see Kelly et al., eds., Thomas More’s Trial by Jury.



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Margaret wrote another letter “answeryng to a letter which her father had sent vnto her,”141 but More’s has not been preserved.142 For Margaret, “though it were writen with a cole, [it] is worthy in mine opinion to be written in letters of golde.”143 She also states her wish to follow, with God’s grace, her father’s “fruitfull example of liuing,” and she hopes to achieve this end “thorowe the assistens of your deuoute praiers, the speciall staye of my frayltie.”144 More’s answer to her has been preserved.145 Margaret’s visits were stopped after the Parliament reopened in early November, as inferred by the “close keping” mentioned by More.146 In another letter to his daughter Margaret,147 More quotes a prayer composed by her; see section II below.

1534–1535 William Roper commissioned Holbein to paint miniature portraits of himself and his wife; her age is indicated on the canvas as “Aº AETATIS XXX.”148 Guy’s description of the portrait follows: “She wears an exquisitely embroidered pendant collar to draw our eyes down from her contemplative gaze to her medallion where St. Michael grapples with Lucifer. When Holbein came to draw her, we can see at a glance that he’d caught her while reading her cherished Book of Hours: her left thumb still marks the place for the liturgy of the day.”149

1535 Early in January, Margaret went to visit Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley. He complained to her that her father was “a great deal too . . . ­self-willed” and the only one in the entire realm, together with Fisher, who refused to swear the oath.150 141. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1446. 142. Margaret’s is letter 209; Rogers, Correspondence, 538–39. 143. Rogers, Correspondence, 539/9–10. 144. Rogers, Correspondence, 539/26–29. 145. More’s response is letter 210; Rogers, Correspondence, 540–44. 146. Letter 210, Rogers, Correspondence, 540/7. 147. Letter 211, Rogers, Correspondence, 544–47, unfortunately, not dated specifically. 148. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 54; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 253. Reynolds seems to be dubious about the accuracy of Margaret’s age as indicated in the portrait: “the thirtieth year of her age suggests 1534 or 1535 for the date of the painting, but those were the years of her deep anxiety for her father, and it would seem unlikely that she would consent to sit for her portrait at such a time.” (Margaret Roper, 1) For this reason, he dates the miniature to “about 1536” (Margaret Roper, 112). But William Roper could be rather stubborn and probably had Margaret sit for her portrait despite her worry. For a more extended consideration of this issue, see David R. Smith’s essay in this volume, pp. 278–312. 149. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 234. 150. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 246.

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February 1: the Treason Act “ordained the oath of supremacy . . . and made refusal to comply treason, in accordance with the principle that all denial of the royal supremacy amounted to just that.”151 For four months, approximately from January to the end of April, Margaret was not allowed to visit her father. Yet, they managed to keep their clandestine correspondence, thanks to George Gold, the servant of the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Edmund Walsingham. April 28–29: three Carthusian priors (John Houghton, Augustine Webster, and Robert Laurence), together with Dr. Richard Reynolds of Syon Abbey, went on trial. John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth, and Robert Feron, both Carthusian monks, were also tried after the previous four. Guy claims that William Roper was one of the new jurors who were sworn in: “he was a freeholder in Middlesex, eligible for jury service, so Cromwell made sure he was chosen for this case.”152 Roper did not have to participate in a verdict, however, for both offenders declared themselves guilty.153 May 1: Margaret received a messenger sent by Cromwell, granting her permission to visit her father on May 4. On May 2 or 3, More wrote a letter to Margaret, telling her about several prisoners who had been brought to the Tower; he also reported an interrogation on April 30 conducted by Cromwell, Sir Christopher Hales, Richard Rich, Thomas Bedyll, and Sir John Tregonwell.154 Margaret knew Rich, as he had lodged for many years at Bucklersbury and attended St. Stephen’s church at the time the Mores were still living nearby.155 May 4: Margaret visited More at the Tower. After saying their usual prayers, they heard a noise. Both managed to look through the narrow cell window in time to see Dr. Richard Reynolds and the Carthusians on their way to Tyburn. Roper gives a full account of the episode.156 Margaret told her father she was pregnant. Should it be a boy, she would 151. G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (1972; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 291. 152. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 251. 153. Feron was pardoned; see April 29; L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 8, no. 609, and vol. 8, no. 661n6. 154. Letter 214; Rogers, Correspondence, 550–54. McCutcheon discusses this interrogation in “Thomas More’s Three Prison Letters,” in Kelly et al., Thomas More’s Trial by Jury. 155. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 252. 156. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 80/9–81/15. See also L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 8, no. 661; accessed December 1, 2015.



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name him Antony, “after the hero of the Dialogue of Comfort.” He was born later that year.157 On May 28, Antonio Bonvisi, an Italian merchant and friend of More, sent Margaret a message to pass on to Fisher, in which the bishop is informed that he has been created cardinal by Pope Paul III.158 Margaret then passed on this information to the Tower servant George Gold several days before June 8 (see entry below). June 3: More was again interrogated, and wrote a letter that day to Margaret Roper about it, explaining that “Mr. Secretarie saide that he liked me this daye much worse than he did the laste time, for than he said he pitied me muche and nowe he thought that I mente not well.”159 June 8–11: As stated in the official record of George Gold’s interrogation on June 8: “Heard of Fisher being made cardinal, on Friday or Saturday last, from Mrs. Roper, and the same day told Fisher.”160 Gold adds that “More also wrote four letters to his wife and Mrs. Roper [his dau]ghter.” John á Wood was also questioned on June 11: “[He] never carried any letters or other intell[igence], but bare stewed meat d[ivers times] . . . passed for the which Mrs. Roper did give . . . buying of the same, when she was. . . .” Wood adds that “on the morning after the Council came to the Tower his master [More] told him that his daughter, Roper’s wife, wished to know what had taken place, and he wrote her three letters. Gives the substance of them.”161 June 12: Fisher was questioned. He was asked about four letters that “passed between him and More concerning the matters mentioned in this question since they came to the Tower,” and Margaret’s name was mentioned: “George [Gold], Mr. Lieutenant’s servant, showed him a letter from More to Mrs. Roper, stating that when the Council had proposed to him [More] the matter about which they came, he said he would not dispute the King’s title, and Mr. Secretary gave him good words.”162 On June 14 More was questioned for the last time, specifically about his clan157. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 253. 158. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 255. 159. Letter 216; Rogers, Correspondence, 559/142–44. 160. June 11; L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 8, no. 856, 40. This was further confirmed by Fisher himself on June 12: “George [Gold] brought him [Fisher] word since the last sitting of the Council, that he heard from Mrs. Roper that Fisher was made a cardinal”: L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 8, no. 858, 1. 161. June 11; L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 8, no. 856, 35, 44, 52, respectively. 162. L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 8, no. 858, 1.

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destine communications, since the interrogators heard that he had been sending letters to Margaret. In the official record the following is stated: Also he saith, that he, considering howe it shulde comme to his doughters eare, Mr. Ropers wife, that the Counsaill had ben with hym, and shulde here thinges abrode of hym therupon, that might putt her to a soden flight; and fearing leaste she, being (as he thoughte) with childe, shulde take some harme by that soden flight, and therfor myndyng to prepare her bifore, to take well awoorth, what so ever thing shulde betide of hym, better or worse; did sende unto her, bothe after the first examination, and also after the laste, letters, by the whiche he did signifie unto her, howe that the Counsaill had ben to examyne hym, and had asked hym certain questions touching the Kinges statutes, and that he had answered theym, that he wolde not medle with no thing, but wolde serve God: and what thende therof shulde be, he coulde not tell; but what so ever it were, better or worse, he desired her to take it pacientlye, and take no thought therfor, but onlie praye for hym. And saith, that she had writen unto hym, bifore, divers letters, to exhorte hym, and advertise hym to accomodate hymself to the Kinges pleasure; and specially, in the last letter, she used greate vehemence and obsecration, to persuade this examinat to incline to the Kinges desire.163

July 1: More’s trial at Westminster Hall. Neither Margaret nor any other member of the family was present; as Reynolds explains, “they may not have been allowed . . . as it was not a public trial in our sense of the term,” or More “may have asked them not to come.”164 Roper was informed by three eyewitnesses, Sir Anthony Seintleger, Richard Heywood, and John Webb, about the proceedings.165 After being sentenced to death, More was taken to the Tower. Before entering, he saw Margaret for the last time, as is reported in several sources.166 Here are two: When Sir Thomas Moore came from westminster to the Towerward againe, his daughter, my wife, desirous to see her father, whom she thought she should neuer see in this world after, and also to haue his Final blessinge, gaue attendance aboute the Tower wharf, where she knewe he should passe by, before he could enter into the Tower, There tarienge for his coming home. Assone as she sawe him, after his blessing on her knees reuerently receaued, Shee hastinge towards him, and, without consideracion or care of her self, pressinge [in] amonge 163. State Papers published under the Authority of his Majesty’s Commission, Volume I. King Henry the Eighth, Parts I and II (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1830), II. 434–35. 164. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 104. 165. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 96/19–21. For much more discussion of this trial, a reconstruction of it, and a detailed bibliography, see Kelly et al., Thomas More’s Trial by Jury. 166. See Germain Marc’hadour, “Funiculus Triplex: Margaret Roper and Thomas More,” Moreana 20, no. 78 (1983): 93–97.



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[the middest of] the thronge and company of the garde that with halberdes and bills wente round aboute him, hastely ranne to him, and there openly, in the sight of them all, imbraced him, toke him about the neck, and kissed him. Who, well liking her moste naturall and deere daughterlye affection towardes him, gaue her his fatherly blessinge and many [godly] wordes of comforte besides. From whom after she was departed, she, not satisfied with the former sighte of [him, and like one that had forgotten herselfe, being all ravished with the entire loue of] her deere father, having respecte neyther to her self, nor to the presse of [the] people and multitude that were [there] aboute him, sodainely torned back againe, ranne to him as before, tooke him about the neck, and divers tymes together most lovingly kissed him; and at last, with a full heavy harte, was fayne to departe from him: The beholding whereof was to many of them that were present thereat so lamentable that it made them for very sorowe [therof] to mourne and weape.167 On his way to the Tower one of his daughters, named Margaret, pushed through the archer and guards, and held him in her embrace some time without being able to speak. Afterwards More, asking leave of the archers, bade her have patience, for it was God’s will, and she had long known the secret of his heart. After going 10 or 12 steps she returned and embraced him again, to which he said nothing, except to bid her pray to God for his soul; and this without tears or change of color.168

In the days that followed More’s trial, Margaret sent Dorothy Coley, a maid at her service, every day to try to see her father: “quotidie ad patrem suu[m] Dorotheam mittebat.”169 July 5: More wrote his last letter and addressed it to Margaret.170 Rastell reports that “on the day nexte before [his execution], beynge Mundaye and the fyfte day of July, he wrote with a cole a letter to his doughter Maystresse Rooper, and sente it to her.”171 Dorothy Coley delivered the letter as well as More’s hair shirt. July 6, Tuesday: More requested of Thomas Pope, Cromwell’s messenger, that his daughter be present at his burial;172 he is told that the king has permitted his family to bury him. Margaret was not present at the execution, which had been set before 9 a.m. Maybe she was not allowed, or maybe she could not endure it; or simply—as Guy puts it—More “couldn’t bear the thought of her being 167. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 97/23–99/8. 168. Paris Newsletter; appendix 2 in Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 265. 169. Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 336/18–19; Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 184. 170. Letter 218; Rogers, Correspondence, 563–65. 171. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1457. 172. Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, 101/11–13.

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there.”173 According to Reynolds, Margaret Clement, wife of John Clement, Meg’s first tutor, “was in the crowd that saw Thomas More pass to the scaffold.” Margaret was probably nearby, at All Hallows Barking Church by the Tower. Dorothy Coley was with her, waiting for More’s corpse to come to them, in order to bury it.174 Thomas Stapleton reports Coley’s memories from that day: “His body was buried by Margaret Roper and Margaret Clement in the little Chapel of St. Peter in the Tower.”175 Before this, a strange incident had taken place: Margaret Roper from earliest morning had been going from church to church and distributing such generous alms to the poor that her purse was now empty. After her father’s execution she hastened to the Tower to bury his body. In her hurry she forgot to replenish her purse and found that she had no ­winding-sheet for the body. She was in the greatest distress and knew not what to do. Her maid Dorothy, afterwards the wife of Master Harris, suggested that she should get some linen from a neighbouring shop. “How can I do that,” she asked, “when I have no money left?” “They will give you credit,” replied the maid. “I am far away from home,” said Margaret, “and no one knows me here, but yet go and try.” The maid went into a neighbouring shop and asked for as much linen as was needed; she agreed on the price. Then she put her hand into her purse as if to look for the money intending to say that unexpectedly she found herself without money, but that if the shopkeeper would trust her she would obtain the price of the linen as quickly as possible from her mistress and bring it back. But although the maid was quite certain that she had absolutely no money, yet in her purse she found exactly the price of the linen, not one farthing more nor less than the amount she had agreed to pay. Dorothy Harris, who is still living here in Douai, has told me these details again and again. With this w ­ inding-sheet, so strangely obtained, the two Margarets and Dorothy most reverently buried the body. The shirt in which he died, stained with his blood, Margaret Clement showed me whole and entire, and gave me a large portion of it. I am not sure whether she was allowed by the other Margaret from the beginning to keep it, or whether it only came to her after her death, for Margaret Roper died many years before Margaret Clement.176 173. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 265. 174. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 109. 175. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 191. “Corpus defuncti a Margareta Ropera cum altera Margareta Clementis coniuge in sacello D. Petri quod in ipso Castro Londine[n]si est, sepultum fuit” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 347/ 8–11). Guy claims that “More asked that Giggs [Clement] should be allowed to take his headless corpse to the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, ready for Margaret to bury” (A Daughter’s Love, 266). 176. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 192. “Margareta Ropera eius diei summo mane peragrabat santissimas ecclesias, & eleemosynas pauperibus plena manu distribuebat, iamq[ue] omnibus elargitis, cu[m] post sumptu[m] de patre suppliciu[m] ad carcere[m] properaret paternu[m] corpus



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After the execution, More’s properties were forfeited to the crown: “William and Margaret Roper settled down at Butclose; they no doubt had to adapt the New Building as a residence, but, although it was a small property, they preferred Chelsea to the Roper house at Eltham.”177 Before August 6: Stapleton gives an account of Margaret’s courage regarding her father’s decapitated head: [The head] by order of the king, was placed upon a stake on London Bridge, where it remained for nearly a month, until it had to be taken down to make room for other heads. For the King’s thirst for blood, once gratified, grew apace. The head would have been thrown into the river had not Margaret Roper, who had been watching carefully and waiting for the opportunity, bribed the executioner, whose office it was to remove the heads, and obtained possession of the sacred relic.178 sepultur[a]e ma[n]datura (quod ei custos promiserat sub beneplacito regio, quod facile impetratu[m] fuit) exhaustis iam loculis, prae festinatione nec nouas acceperat pecunias, nec syndonem quo corpus inuolueretur secum tulerat. Itaque mire tristis, ac sollicita quid faceret, monetur ab ancilla Dorothea (Harrisij post uxore) vt de proximo linteu[m] accipiat. Quomodo, inquit, id faciam quum nihil pecuniae reliqui habeam? Credent tibi, ait ancilla. Quanqua[m] (inquit Margareta) longe a domo absim, nec his hominibus nota existam, tu tamen vade & periculum facito. Ancilla prudens, & cata ad vicinam tabernam deflectens postulat quantum sufficere potuit: de precio conuenit. Mox velut qu[a]erendae pecuniae causa manum in peram misit; eo animo vt diceret praeter spem sibi euenisse quo minus adessent pecuniae; sed si crederetur sibi se quam primum id quod conuenerat a domina sua allaturam & reddituram. Ecce autem quum certo ancillae constaret nihil se prorsus pecuniae habere, tamen iam in pera iustum syndonis precium reperit nec vno teruncio plus minusve, quam eo tempore ex pacto solui oportebat. Haec mihi Dorothea ista adhuc superstes, & hic Duaci agens saepius & constanter retulit. Accepto igitur non sine miraculo syndone, duae istae Margaretae cum ancilla alterius Dorothea, corpus sepulturae honestissime mandarunt. Camisia in qua passus est, sanguine eius tincta a Margareta Clementis uxore asseruata est, qu[a]e mihi totam aliquando & integram ostendit, & bonam eius partem dono dedit; fiue illam a principio altera Margareta concesserit, siue quod (ea multo citius defuncta) post eius obitum acceperit” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 346/13–347/20). See also Cresacre More, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 288–89. 177. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 113. 178. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 191. “Caput iussu regis ad pontem Londinensem palo affixu[m] est, vbi per aliquot dies, fere per integru[m] mensem mansit, donec propter alia capita affigenda (Rex enim Henricus vbi semel primos dígitos cruentauerat, vsque ad humeros alieno cruore se intinxit) quum illud deponendu[m], & in flumen subiectum proijciendum erat, Margareta Ropera ad omnem rei bene gerendae occasionem intenta, diligenter ad hoc tempus inuigila[n]s, corrupto pecunia carnifice cujus erat capita deijcere, patris fui Caput quod ipsa cum aliis diligentissime obseruauerat, recuperauit” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 345/17–29). Other reports contradict Stapleton. In November 1535 More’s head is reported to have turned black and been thrown into the river: L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 9, no. 294; accessed December 1, 2015. But Sir Richard Morison, in his Apomaxis (the answer to the German polemicist Johann Cochlaeus, who had written against Henry VIII in 1536), speaks of it as still being displayed on the bridge in that year: “Accede ad nos, uidebis etiam dum utriusq[ue] caput eo loco conspici, quo primo positum fuit. Homines etiam dum eo spectaculo admoneri, ne quid sceleris aut in regem, aut in regni leges moliantur.” (Come to us, you will see that the heads of both are still seen in the place where they were first placed. Men are still admonished by that sight that they will not plot any crime either against the king or against the laws of the kingdom.) See Apomaxis calumniarum, convitiorumque, quibus Ioannes Cocleus homo theologus exiguus artiu[m] professor, scurra procax, Henrici octaui, serenissimi

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August 23: Cromwell sent a letter to Sir John Wallop, Henry VIII’s ambassador in France, instructing him to justify the execution of More and Fisher to King Francis; Margaret is alluded to in the letter: And touching suche words as the saide frensh king spake vnto you concerning how Mr. More dyed and what he saied to his doughter going to his Judgement and also what exhortacions he shoulde gyue vnto the kynges subiectes to be trew and obedient to his grace (assuring you that there was no such thing).179

August 27: Working for Cromwell in Italy, Richard Morison sent him a letter, reporting on the impact of More’s execution there and referring to More’s meeting with Margaret. His source is, I believe, Reginald Pole’s account of the encounter in De unitate ecclesiastica (see the entry for May 27, 1536, below).180 Morison’s rhetoric is poignantly sarcastic: Here, Margaret Roper’s admirable filial piety, the legitimate tears, the silence and the embrace in so much sorrow, the Socratic constancy of the father, the unshakable face, courageous soul, no tears, her face the same constantly, all this happened among wonderful praises. Fortunately, I happened to be present when the Venetians sent the original of these letters from here to a Spaniard. Whoever was the author of that letter, believe me, so much knew how to move hearts that few will stand without crying due to Margaret’s tears and sobbing.181

regis Angliae famam impetere . . . Authore Ricardo Morysino Anglo (London: In aedibus Thomae Bertheleti regii impressoris, 1537), 93r/21–25. Morison’s text was probably composed in 1535 or 1536; as W. G. Zeeveld puts it, the former’s answer to Cochlaeus “was not published until 1537, when it appeared under the title Apomaxis”; see Foundations of Tudor Policy (London: Methuen, 1948), 158; and K. R. Bartlett, “Morley, Machiavelli, and the Pilgrimage of Grace,” in “Triumphs of English”: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court, ed. M. Axton and J. P. Carley, New Essays in Interpretation (London: The British Library, 2000), 77–85, at 85. However, there is no agreement: “Historians,” T. A. Sowerby writes, “have suggested dates ranging from 1536 to 1538 for the composition of the Apomaxis”; see Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison, c. 1513–1556 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56. 179. Cromwell to Wallop, letter 113 in Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, vol. 1 (to 1535), ed. Roger B. Merriman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 416–20; here 417. See also L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 9, no. 157. 180. In fact, Reginald Pole welcomed Morison at his household in Venice, when he had to reside in Padua due to his lack of resources in the summer of 1535; Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England, 28. 181. L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 9. no. 198: “Hinc Margaritæ Roperi præcla[ra in pa]rentem pietas, officiosæ lachrymæ, in tanto l[uctu silentium] inde amplexus, patris Socratica constantia, [vultus im]motus, spiritus ingentes, nullæ lachrymæ, [facies perpe]tuo sui similis, mirificis laudibus efferuntur. [Aderam forte] fortuna, cum harum literarum exemplum ad Hispa[num quendam] a Venetiis huc mitteretur. Mihi crede [ita noverat affectus] concitare, quisquis illius epistolæ [author fuit, ut pauci] sint, qui [sine] lachrym[is] Margaritæ lachrymas gemitusque sustineant.” See also W. G. Zeeveld, Tudor Policy, 94; idem, “Apology for an Execution,” Moreana 4, no. ­15-16 (1967): 353–71; G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1972), especially 57n60.



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August 31: Cromwell wrote down in his notes “To send for Wm. Roper. To send to lady More.”182 Having learned that More’s head had been taken, Cromwell brought Margaret before the king’s council: Margaret Roper was brought before the King’s Council and charged with keeping her father’s head as a sacred relic, and retaining possession of his books and writings. She answered that she had saved her father’s head from being devoured by the fishes with the intention of burying it, and that she had hardly any books and papers but what had already been published, except a very few personal letters, which she humbly begged to be allowed to keep for her consolation. By the good offices of friends she was released. Although there were many women in More’s household, she was the only one to be troubled.183

Cresacre More adds a relevant detail about Margaret: Mine aunt Roper, because she was a woman, was not so hardly dealt withal, but only threatened very sore, both because she kept her father’s head for a relic, and that she meant to set her father’s works in print, yet for all that after a short imprisonment she was at last sent home to her husband.184

1536 In March, Juan Luis Vives published his De conscribendis epistolis. In it he provides a model of a possible epistolary salutation by referring to More and Margaret: When you write to More or find someone to bear a message to him, do not forget to add most attentive greetings to himself and his children on my part, but especially to my dear Margaret Roper, for whom, from the first moment I met her, I bore as much love as for my own sister.185 182. L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 9, no. 218. Reynolds dates this a “month after the execution” (Margaret Roper, 112). 183. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 193. “Margareta Ropera coram Consiliariis Regis co[n]uenitur, accusata quòd caput patris quasi reliquiae loco afferuaret, quodq[ue]; libros & scripta eius adhuc penes se retineret. Qu[a]e respo[n]dit se caput paternu[m] recuperasse sepelie[n]di studio, ne piscib[us] esca foret: scripta & libros vix alia se habere qua[m] quae ia[m] typis excusa essent; exceptis perpaucis familiaribus epistolis, quas ad sui consolationem vt seruare permitteretur, supplex rogavit. Opera amicorum dimissa fuit, quum sola ex faeminis (quæ in familiæ Mori multae erant) vexata fuisset” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 347/26–348/5). 184. Cresacre More, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 293. 185. Juan Luis Vives, De conscribendis epistolis, in Selected Works of J. L. Vives, ed. Charles Fantazzi, vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 121. Juan Luis Vives, De conscribendis epistolis (Basel: per Thomam Platterum et Balthasarem Lasius, 1536), 41/5–11: “Cum ad Morum dabis litteras vel nactus fueris qui eo profiscatur et mandata ad illum miseries, ne obliviscare accuratissimam mea vice salutationem adiungere ipsi et liberis, sed in primis Margaritae Roperae meae, quam ego ex quo primum novi, non amavi minus quam si mihi esset soror germana.” See also Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores,” 395–96.

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May 27: From Venice, Reginald Pole sent his book De unitate ecclesiastica to Henry VIII. In a summary of the book, contained in Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, it “[s]peaks of the execution of Fisher and More, and of More’s character as a judge, of his trial, and of his daughter embracing him on the way to execution [sic], how he was seen looking grey for the first time on coming out of prison, and how even strangers could not refrain from tears on hearing of his fate. Pole himself can hardly write for tears, having known the man as he did.”186 In book 3 of De unitate ecclesiastica the author praises not only Thomas More and John Fisher, but Margaret Roper as well. Pole had once complimented her for her skills in Latin; now he would describe her fortitude in his narration of More’s last meeting with her on July 1, 1535. Contrary to what is said in the summary above quoted, Pole correctly places the incident after More’s trial: [Margaret], a most generous woman, the worthy daughter of such a father, was endowed with all the gifts of her birth, and all the signs of filial piety, those pleasing attributes of children that comfort the hearts of their parents. Exhausted as she was with pain after the announcement of the cruel and unfair sentence against her father, she had gathered so much courage though, that when the judges sent her father back to prison, she came running to meet him right where he was walking surrounded by many lictors and royal officers. Unexpectedly, she broke into the armed retinue (as her daughterly love had given her the strength of many men) and run into her father’s arms. Since pain would not allow her to speak, she showed him her affection with tears on his bosom in an embrace from which she could not be pulled away for some time. . . . What torments and grief in his [More’s] soul when, once taken away from him, for a second time love drove her back to him with the same eager determination, that it was even more difficult to tear her away from him? . . . [More] told her that she had known the secrets of his heart. . . . Therefore, she should accommodate her love to the will of God, and make the best of his father’s case for the benefit of her fortitude.187 186. L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 10 (January to June 1536), no. 975, [Pole’s] Book [de Unitate Ecclesiastica] addressed to Henry VIII; https://www.­british-history.ac.uk/­letters-papers-hen8/vol10/­pp402-420, accessed April 12, 2022. 187. Reginald Pole, De unitate ecclesiastica, “Cum enim generosissima mulier, dignissima tali patre filia, secum omnes naturae dotes afferens, omnia pietatis signa, omnia quae in liberis iucunda esse parentibus, eorumq[ue] animos emollire solent, ad nu[n]tium crudelis & iniquae in patrem sententiae exanimata primum dolore, tantum tamen virium recepisset, ut patri dum a iudicibus in carcetem reduceretur, posset occurrere, properansq[ue] eo advenisset, qua lictorum & satellitum regiorum turba circumseptus pater transibat, statim per medios lictores inter arma satellitum irrumpens femina, cui iam pietas multorum virorum robur addiderat, in parentis complexum accurrit; cumque dolor vocem praeclusisset, lachrimis autem, quibus sinum eius opplebat, animi affectum ostenderet, parentem complexa, ut vix ab eo aliquandiu divelli posset: . . . Quae vero tormenta iam, & cruciatus animi, cum semel avulsa, iterum eadem pietate percita, eodem cum impetu rediit, & vi maiore aegre abstrahi potuit? . . . illam arcana pectoris sui nosse; . . . Proinde suam ipsa pietatem ad Dei uoluntatem accommodaret, & maximo tolera[n]tiae bono in patris casu uteretur.” Reginaldi Poli Cardinalis Britanni,



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1538 On October 26, Geoffrey Pole, Reginald’s brother, was questioned in the Tower. “And further he sayeth that within a twelvemonths he hath heard Mrs. Roper and Mrs. Clement s[ay th]at they liked not this plucking down of abbeys, im[ages an]d pilgrimages, and prayed God to send a change.”188 Subsequently, Cromwell prepared another set of ­sixty-two questions, again focusing on Pole’s communications with these two women:189 47. [Item, how] often within these xij months or ij years you have been [in com] pany with Mrs. R[oper] or Mrs. Clement, and at what places you have met with them? 48. Of what matters you have most often communed when they have wished for this change? 49. What communication you have had with either of them touching the death of Sir Thos. More and others, and the causes of the same? 50. Who has been present at any of your conferences? 51. Have you heard of any letters, writings, or books sent to them or their friends touching that matter? 52. What have been the contents of such letters, &c.190

1540 August 4: Margaret’s ­brother-in-law, Giles Heron, married to her sister Cecily, was executed at Tyburn for treason.

1543 According to Harpsfield, William Roper “was vpon a certain displeasure taken against him in king Henries days sent to the towre”; later on, he adds that he “suffered great trouble and imprisonment in the towre.”191 Official records further confirm this issue: “29 Feb., brought in to the King by Sir Richard Southwell, one of the General Surveyors, ‘for the fine of William Roper being in the Tower of ad Henricum Octauum Britanniae Regem, pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quatuor (Rome: apud Antonium Bladum Asulanum, 1536), xciii r/39–xciiii r/3. I hope to analyze Pole’s admiration for Margaret in a future paper. Stapleton’s narration of this episode in his biography of More “derives actually”—as Germain Marc’hadour mildly puts it—“from Reginald Pole’s De Unitate”; Marc’hadour, “Funiculus Triplex, 95–96. 188. L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 13.2 (August to December 1538), no. 695 (2);https://www.­british-history.ac.uk /­letters-papers-hen8/vol13/no2/­pp263-285, accessed April 12, 2022. An entry of November 14 reports the same episode: “Item, the said Sir Geoffrey saith that he heard the [said] maystress [Roper and maystr]ess Clement say within this xij monythes that [they liked not] thys polyng down of abbeys, images, and pilgrima[ges and prayed God] send a chaunge” (L&P, Henry VIII, 13.2, no. 830). 189. This further set of interrogation questions was probably not administered since the second examination of Sir Geoffrey (November 2) dealt with other issues; see L&P, Henry VIII, 13.2, no. 804. 190. L&P, Henry VIII, 13.2, no. 695 (2). 191. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 79/1–3 and 89/14–15.

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London, £100.’ ”192 Guy adds the names of others from More’s circle who were also sent to the Tower: “William Daunce [Meg’s b­ rother-in-law], Margaret’s brother John, and John Erlyngton, Alice Alington’s son by her first marriage. Others questioned, but freed, included John Clement and Henry Cole.”193 The first was Margaret’s tutor, and the second her children’s. At the time of William Roper’s imprisonment, Harpsfield reports an incident about Margaret: At what time her husbande was vpon a certaine displeasure taken against him in king Henries daies sent to the towre, certaine sent from the king to searche her house, vpon a sodaine running vpon her, founde her, not puling and lamenting, but full busily teaching her children: whom they, finding nothing astonied with their message, and finding also, beside this her constancie, such grauitie and wisedome in her talke as they litle looked for, were themselues much astonised, and were in great admiration, neyther could afterward speak [too] much of her, as partly my selfe haue heard at the mouth of one of them.194

As inferred from a letter from Roger Ascham to Mary Clarke (January 15, 1544), her mother, Margaret, had invited him to be the tutor of her children (see below, under 1544). Reynolds concluded: It is impossible to date this invitation. The reference to Lady Alington adds interest to the letter. The Alingtons at this time may have been at their manor at Horseheath, Cambridge, and not at Halesworth in Suffolk, and the letter implies that Margaret Roper had gone to stay there for a while with her children.195

However, it might also be the case that Margaret was staying at the Alingtons because William Roper was in prison. Therefore, she would have requested Ascham’s services around 1543, right before her death. This date is consistent with Ascham’s attempts at the time to consolidate his position in St. John’s College, Cambridge. In his biography of this English humanist, Lawrence W. Ryan wrote: 192. L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 17 (1542), ed. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (BHO: British History Online, http://www.­british-history.ac.uk), no. 257; accessed December 1, 2015. 193. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 269. William Daunce and John More obtained “pardon of all treasonable words” (Reynolds, Margaret Roper 121); see note 198. Henry Cole (ca. 1500–1580) was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford. He became Dean of St. Paul’s (1556). Under Elizabeth I he was committed to the Tower (May 20, 1560) and finally removed to the Fleet Prison (June 10), where he remained for nearly twenty years until his death. “­Chocke-Colepeper,” in Joseph Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714 (Oxford: Parker and Co., 1891), 274–303, British History Online, http://www.­british-history.ac.uk/­alumni-oxon/1500–1714 /pp274–303; accessed May 25, 2020. 194. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 79/1–12. 195. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 117.



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Yet in 1544 Ascham’s determination not to leave Cambridge on such terms was evidently strong, for about the same time he also declined an offer to instruct the children of Margaret Roper, ­best-loved daughter of Sir Thomas More. He responded to Mistress Roper’s proposal no more satisfactorily than he had to Mountjoy’s, though he did submit to an interview at the home of her kinsman Giles Alington. The interview, however, was apparently a mere courtesy, since some years later he told the Roper’s daughter, lady Anne Clarke [sic], that at the time nothing on earth could have induced him to depart from the University.196

1544 March 7: John Larke, the parish priest at Chelsea from 1530, was executed: “He declared that he was following in the steps of his former parishioner.” Two more were also executed that day: German Gardiner, a layman who “must have been known in the More circle, for a tract of his, an attack on the heresies of John Frith, was published in 1534 by William Rastell”; and John Ireland, “officially described as ‘of Eltham.’ ”197 April 24: William Daunce and John More were pardoned.198 Christmas: Margaret More Roper died. Margaret Hillary, the source of the few details about Meg’s death and funeral, had long served at More’s household; as Chambers puts it, “Margaret Roper and she ‘were very great and familiar together, in so much that they called each other sisters.’ ”199 Guy recreates these details: Her death at the age of t­ hirty-nine, from unknown causes and in the midst of the Christmas celebrations, had been a terrible shock. Carried the short distance to Chelsea Parish Church in a winding sheet through the freezing snow, her body was interred in the family tomb where her father “did mind to be buried,” his 196. Lawrence W. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1963), 40. In an endnote to this episode, Ryan adds: “Margaret Roper’s death in 1544 sets a terminal date for her offer. It is possible, of course, that she had made it several years earlier, when the young Ascham’s reputation was rising spectacularly at Cambridge” (ibid., 302n27). 197. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 122 passim. 198. “Wm. Daunce, of Cayshobere, Herts, alias late of Cannons, Midd., alias of London. Pardon of all treasonable words against the King’s supremacy, concealments of treason, and treasonable conversations with John More or others concerning the King, the kingdom and certain prophecies; with restoration of goods. Greenwich, 24 April.” “John More of Chelsith, Midd., alias of Bamburgh, Yorks., alias of London. Pardon of all treasonable words with the detestable traitors, John Eldryngton, Germain Gardyner, John Bekynsale, John Heywood, Wm. Daunce, John Larke, clk., John Irelande, clk., Roger Irelande, clk., and any others, in wishing ill to the King and arguing against the King’s supremacy, and all concealments of treasons, of which he has been accused; with restoration of goods. Greenwich, 24 April”: L&P, Henry VIII, vol. 19.1 (January to July 1544), no. 444 (5)(6); https://www.­british-history.ac.uk/­letters-papers-hen8/vol19/no1/­pp261-287; accessed April 12, 2022. 199. Chambers, Thomas More, 187.

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skull resting beside her. A ­candle-lit requiem followed, but it must have been the bleakest of occasions.200

1550 In The Debate Between the Heraldes of Englande and Fraunce, John Coke, “clarke of the Kynges recognysaunce,” as described in the book’s full title, illustrated England’s superiority over France by naming several cases in a debate chaired by Lady Prudence: “Also we haue dyuers gentylwomen in Englande, whiche be not onely well estudied in holy Scrypture, but also in the Greke and Latyn tonges. As maystres More, maystres Anne Coke, maystres Clement, and other beynge an estrange thing to you & other nacions.”201

1552 John Coster refers to Margaret in his Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, pro Catholicae fidei antiquitate et veritate. Referring to John Clement, he wrote: “And then he [Clement] also remembered about Margaret, More’s daughter, whose talent and learning he praised wonderfully.”202

200. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 270. The place of Margaret’s burial seems to be confirmed by her husband’s will (January 10, 1577). He explicitly states: “And my body to be buried at Chelsea in the County of Middlesex in the vault with the body of my dearly beloved wife (whose soul our Lord pardon), where my ­father-in-law Sir Thomas More (whose soul Jesus bless) did mind to be buried” (quoted in Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 140). However, he was instead buried in the Roper vault at St. Dunstan’s Canterbury (Hitchcock, William Roper: The Lyfe, xlii). Strangely, his epitaph claims that Margaret is buried with him: “Hic jacet venerabilis vir Gulielmus Roper armiger filius & heres quondam Iohannis Roper armigeri & Margaretæ uxor. ejusdem Gul. filia quondam Thomæ Mori militis summi olim Angliæ Cancellarii Græcis Latinisque literis doctissima.” See William Somner, The Antiquities of Canterbvry, Or a Svrvey of That Ancient Citie, with the Svbvrbs, and Cathedral (London, Printed by I. L. for Richard Thrale, 1640), 342. (Here lies the venerable man William Roper, esquire, the son and heir of John Roper, esquire, and Margaret, the wife of the said William, the daughter of Thomas More, the greatest knight of the English Chancery, and a most learned woman in Greek and Latin). In light of this, Hugh O. Albin, Vicar of St. Dunstan’s, concludes: “I would say that Margaret was probably buried in Chelsea in 1544 and ­re-interred in St. Dunstan’s sometime after 1578, when William Roper died and the Roper family was refused permission for his burial in Chelsea”: H. O. Albin, “Opening the Roper Vault in St. Dunstan’s Canterbury,” Moreana 16, no. 63/Gazette 2 (1979): 29–35, at 35. 201. John Coke, The debate betwene the heraldes of Englande and Fraunce, compyled by Iohn Coke, clarke of the kynges recognysaunce ([London]: Imprynted by me [Robert Wyer, for] Rycharde Wyer, [1550]), K.i/7–13. See also Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 40. 202. “meminit quoque subinde Margaretae Mori filiae: cuius ingenium atque doctrinam mirifice praedicabat”: John Coster, Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, pro Catholicae fidei antiquitate et veritate, adversus prophanas omnium haereseon novationes liber elegantissimus (Leuven: Bergagne, 1552), L/13–15. Also see Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 41. Coster is discussed further in my second contribution to this volume, on Margaret’s emendation of a letter to Cyprian.



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1554 On January 15, Roger Ascham wrote a letter to Mary Clarke, Margaret’s daughter, who later married James Basset.203 Margaret had asked him to be her children’s tutor, but he refused.204 It was I whom your mother Margaret Roper (a lady most worthy of the said great father, and of you, such a daughter) some years ago called to her from the University of Cambridge, to the house of your kinsman, Lord Giles Alington, and she asked me if I would teach you and her other children the Greek and Latin tongues. However, at that time I would not allow myself under any circumstances to be separated from the University [Cambridge]. I have this very agreeable recollection of your mother’s request at that time.205 203. For further information about Mary, see Eugenio Olivares Merino, “Mary Roper Clarke Bassett and Meredith Hanmer’s ‘Honorable Ladie of the Lande,’ ” SEDERI 17 (2007): 75–91; Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, “Some Notes about Mary Roper Clar(c)ke Bassett and her Translations of Eusebius,” Moreana 46, no. 177–78 (2009): 146–80; Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 79–81, 161–166; Jaime Goodrich, “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clarke Basset’s Translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History,” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 3 (2010): 301–28; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 271–73; and Goodrich, Faithful Translators, 29–66. 204. George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts, and sciences (Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752), 38–61; https://archive.org/details/ memoirsofseveral00ball/page/38/mode/2up, accessed April 12, 2022. Ballard also includes a brief account of Mary Roper (Ballard, Memoirs, 152);https://archive.org/details/memoirsofseveral00ball/page/152/mode/2up, accessed April 12, 2022. Ballard states that, after Ascham’s refusal, Margaret managed to find other tutors for her children (Ballard, Memoirs, 52–53, 152): a certain Doctor Cole, i.e., Henry Cole (see note 193); John Christopherson, later master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1553–1558), and bishop of Chichester (1557–1558); and finally, Mr. John Morwen (fl. 1533–1560) of Corpus Christi College (Oxford). Morwen’s name is also included in “Bassett [née Roper], Mary,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In his Athenae Oxonienses Anthony à Wood mentions that Morwen wrote letters to William Roper: “Epistolae ad D. Will. Roperum”; Wood further adds that in one of his letters, Morwen made reference to Mary Basset, since he “also translated into English several of the Greek and Latin Orations, made by the said Daughter of Will. Roper, as by his Epistles it appear”: Athenae Oxonienses. An exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford, vol. 1 (London: Printed for Tho. Bennet, 1691), entry 91, p. 67. Goodrich points out that Margaret “created a home school along Morean lines for her own children” and mentions the names of these three tutors (Cole, Christopherson, Morwen). She also focuses on Morwen’s familiarity with Margaret’s husband, to whom he sent four Latin translations of Greek works: one homily by Cyril of Alexandria (from a Greek edition Mary Basset had provided) and three letters by Basil the Great. These documents are kept in the Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 349 (Goodrich, Faithful Translators: 50, 52, 204n77). A certain John Charrice could also be added to the list. His name appears in Mary Basset’s will as her o­ ne-time schoolmaster, to whom she bequeathed twenty pounds (Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Birth of Feminism, 80, 339). I have reviewed the will (April 19, 1572), and Charrice’s name is difficult to transcribe: “[I] bequeath to John Charrice that was once my scole M[aster]”: The National Archives PROB 11/54/149, r/49–50; https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r /D959498 (Will of Mary Bassett, Widow | The National Archives), accessed April 12, 2022. 205. Edward Grant, ed., Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami, Angli, Regiae maiestati non ita pridem a Latinis epistolis, familiarium epistolarum libri tres magna orationis elegantia conscripti (London: Impensis Francisci Coldocki, 1576), 134r–v: “Is enim ego sum, quem ante aliquot annos, mater tua Margareta Ropera foemina & illo tanto Patre, & te tali filia dignissima, ex Academia Cantabrigiensi accersiuit ad se, ad edes D. Aegidis Alingtoni

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1568–1569 William Roper got into trouble in the time of Elizabeth I for helping religious (Catholic) exiles.206

1578 January 4: William Roper’s death.

1589 John Leland, Henry’s poet laureate, published his Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum. Two epigrams were devoted to praising Thomas More’s daughters: CXXXII: Filiae Thomae Mori, charitea corona Tres numero Charites Graeci finxere poetae, Aemula quas toties carmine Roma sonat. Hactenus at numquam res est haec credita vera, Vt neque de Musis fabula vana nouem. Nos tamen intrantes facundi limina Mori Attoniti Charites tres nouitate rei Vidimus. Et quid enim est oculis (rogo) certius? Ergo Accipiat plenam fabula prisca fidem. CLXXXV: Moriades, charitea corona Desine facundas nimium laudare diserti Natas Hortensi (maxima Roma) tui. Candida tres Charites nam Mori cura politi Obscurant multis nomina vestra modis. Non illis studium Milesia vellera dextra Carpere, non facili ducere fila manu. Sed iuuat eloquii crebro monumenta latini Versare, et doctis pingere verba notis. Nec minus authores Graecos euoluere, Homerum Et quem dicendi gloria prima manet. Vt nec Aristotelis dicam quo pectore libros

necesarij vestri rogauit q[ue] ut te reliquosq[ue] suos liberos graeca latinaq[ue] lingua instituerem. Sed tu[m] ego nullis conditionibus ab Academia diuelli me patiebar. Hanc matris tuae tu[m] postulati memoriam mihi periucu[n]dam. . . .” For a recent English edition of Roger Ascham’s correspondence, see Letters of Roger Ascham, ed. Alvin Vos, trans. Maurice Hatch and Alvin Vos (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). 206. Hitchcock, ed., William Roper, The Lyfe, xxxviii.



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Scrutentur, Sophiae mystica dona deae. Turpe viris posthac erit ignorare Mineruae. Artes, grex adeo quas muliebris amet.207

II: The Extant Works of Margaret More Roper • A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster (1524?), Margaret Roper’s English translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica in septem portiones distributa, published in Basel in 1523.208 On October 1, 1524, Richard Hyrde finished his prologue, which defends higher learning for women, for Roper’s translation. Thom207. John Leland, Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum: encomia, trophaea, genethliaca, et epithalamia . . . (London: Apud Thomam Orwinum, typographum, 1589), 51, 67–68. I am grateful to Prof. Dana F. Sutton (University of California, Irvine) for his kindness in the clarification of some doubts I had about these epigrams. The following translations are his: CXXXII. The Daughters of Thomas More, a Bevy of Graces: The Greek poets pretended there were three Graces, the same number of which their imitator Rome sang in its verse. Until now this thing has never been regarded as true (like the vain tale of the nine Muses). And yet when I entered More’s learned household, I was astonished by the novelty of the thing when I saw three Graces. And what, I ask, is surer evidence than one’s eyes? Therefore, let this old fable gain full credit. CLXXXV. On the Daughters of Thomas More, That Bevy of Graces: Cease admiring your eloquent daughters of Hortensius, great Rome. For in many a way these three Graces, the darlings of polished More, put your great names in the shade. Their delight is not to card Milesian wool, nor to spin thread with a ready hand. Rather, their pleasure is to plunge themselves into reading the monuments of Latin eloquence and to adorn its words with their learned annotations, and no less to read Greek authors, Homer, and he to whom attaches the first glory for speaking, not to mention the enthusiasm with which they study the books of Aristotle, those mystic gifts of the goddess of wisdom. Ignorance of the arts of Minerva will henceforth be disgraceful for men, since a crew of women so adore them. http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/lelandpoems/ (accessed March 28, 2020). Ballard also knew this second epigram: “the celebrated antiquarian poet Mr. John Leland was a very great admirer of her [Margaret’s] extensive learning, and extraordinary abilities, as also of her learned sisters’; whose erudition, and merit, he justly applauds in the following Latin epigram.” Ballard’s translation comes after the Latin original: “Forbear too much t’extoll, great Rome, from hence, / Thy fam’d Hortensius’ Daughters Eloquence: / Those boasted Names are now eclips’d by Three / More learned Nymphs, Great More’s fair Progeny; / Who ­over-pass’d the Spinster’s mean Employ; / The purest Latin Authors were their Joy; / They lov’d in Rome’s politest Style to write, / And with the choicest Eloquence indite. / Nor were they conversant alone in these, / They turn’d o’er Homer and Demosthenes; / From Aristotle’s Store of Learning too / The mystic Art of reas’ning well they drew. / Then blush, ye Men, if you neglect to trace / Those Heights of Learning, which the Females Grace” (Ballard, Memoirs, 49–50). Guy claims that in this second epigram Leland compares Margaret “to a second Hortensia” (Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 270). But Leland praises all three of More’s daughters, because of their devotion to Greek and Latin authors, as superior to the daughters of Hortensius. 208. Earliest known editions: A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster, with a Preface by Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1526; repr., London: Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1531). Facsimile edition: Lee C. Khanna, ed., Early Tudor Translators: Margaret Beaufort, Margaret More Roper, and Mary Basset, Facsimile Library of Essential Works, 1st series, vol. 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

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as Berthelet subsequently published three editions of the work, but the circumstances and their dates of publication are not altogether certain, though there is some evidence that the first edition came out in 1524.209 Margaret is the “yong / vertuous and well / lerned gentylwoman of .xix. / yere of age” referred to on the title page of the translation,210 although her name is not mentioned anywhere in the text. Reynolds includes a photograph of the second edition (1526) between pages 38 and 39. • A Latin letter. Addressed to Erasmus, it was composed on November 4, 1529.211 It is autograph throughout and is preserved in the University Library of Wroclaw, Rehdiger Collection, MS. Rehd. 254. 129. Online editions are available at The Early English Books Online (EEBO): the 1526 edition (STC 10477), https://www.proquest.com/eebo/docview/2240913868/99844956/1?accountid=4485; and the 1531 edition (STC 10477.5), https://www.proquest.com/eebo/docview/2240914625/5357F96625D34F7CPQ/1?accountid= 4485&imgSeq=1, both accessed April 12, 2022. See also Women Writers Online (WWO) formerly at Brown University, but supported by Northeastern University since 2013: https://wwp.northeastern.edu/wwo/ (subscription required), accessed April 12, 2022. Other editions, besides the one included in this volume: M ­ arie-Claire Robineau, O.P., “A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster” [modernized English version with French translation; notes by Germain Marc’hadour], Moreana 3, no. 9 (1966): 65–92; no. 10 (1966): 91–110; no. 11 (1966): 109–18; Richard DeMolen, ed., “A Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster . . . by Desiderius Erasmus, Translated by Margaret More Roper,” in Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Quincentennial Symposium (New York: Twayne, 1971), 93–124, with a short bibliography of Hyrde’s preface and Roper’s Devout Treatise, 139–40. Criticism: J. A. Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica and the Apprenticeship behind Early Tudor Translation,” Review of English Studies 13 (1937): 257–71; E. M. Nugent, ed., “A Treatise upon the Pater Noster,” in The Thought and Culture of the English Renaissance: An Anthology of Tudor Prose, 1481– 1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 428–33; G. Marc’hadour, “Erasmus Englished by Margaret More,” Clergy Review 43, no. 2 (1958): 78–91; Rita M. Verbrugge, “Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. M. P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985), 30–42, 260–64; Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 3–28; Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England,” 449–80, and “Margaret More Roper’s Translation of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica,” in Acta Conventus ­Neo-Latini Guelpherbytani, ed. Stella P. Revard, F. Radle, and M. A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1988), 659–66; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project, and the Problem of Agency,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, ed. Peter C. Herman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999); Patricia A. Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 69–73; Goodrich, Faithful Translators, 29–66. Also see the essays by Elizabeth McCutcheon, Patricia Demers, and Anne M. O’Donnell, SND, included in this volume. For some interesting comments on editorial procedures, see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Life and Letters: Editing the Writing of Margaret Roper,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, ed. W.S. Hill, MRTS 107 (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), 111–17. 209. See note 51. 210. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 38–39. See frontispiece in this volume. 211. Letter 2233, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8: 299–300. For an English translation, see The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 2204 to 2356: August 1529–July 1530, trans. Alexander Dalzell, annot. by James M. Estes, vol. 16 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), no. 2233, 87–88.



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• T hree complete English letters: letter 203 (May 1534);212 letter 206, with her father to Alice Alington (August 1534);213 and letter 209 (1534);214 and two excerpts from an otherwise lost letter of hers, cited by Thomas More in a letter to her.215 See the following entry. • P leas and a prayer. In a letter written by More to Margaret in 1534, he quotes a prayer composed by her: of his tender pitie so firmely to rest our loue in hym, with litle regard of this worlde, and so to fle sinne and embrace vertue, that we may say with S. Paule, Mihi viuere Christus est et mori luchrum. Et illud, Cupio dissolui et esse cum Christo. . . . But good father, I wretch am farre, farre, farthest of all other from such poynt of perfection, our Lorde send me the grace to amende my lyfe, and continually to haue an eie to mine ende, without grudge of death, which to them that dye in God, is the gate of a welthy lyfe to which God of his infinite mercie bringe vs all. Amen. Good Father strenght my frayltie with your deuoute prayers.”216

• A  n English poem? In 1851, a contribution to Notes & Queries by “S. H.” called the attention of readers to a book published in 1508 by John Fisher, Treatise concernynge the fruytful Saynges of David the King and prophete in the seven penytencyall psalms, which the author sent to More when both were prisoners 212. Rogers, Correspondence, 510–11. 213. Included in this volume, pp. 103–19; Rogers, Correspondence, 514–32. 214. Rogers, Correspondence, 538–39. 215. These letters were first published in Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1432, 1434–43, and 1446). For several approaches to Margaret’s epistolary writings, see Mildred Campbell, ed., “Letters of More and His Daughter Margaret,” in The “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More (Toronto: Van Nostrand, 1947), 283–312; Henri Meulon, “La pensée du ciel chez Thomas More,” Moreana 7, no. 27–28 (1970): 5–13; W. M. Gordon, “Tragic Perspective in Thomas More’s Dialogue with Margaret in the Tower,” Cithara 17, no. 2 (1978): 3–12; R. S. Sylvester, “Conscience and Consciousness: Thomas More,” in The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, ed. L. L. Martz and A. Williams (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 163–74; Peter I. Kaufman, “Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and ‘Well Learned’ Men,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 3 (1989): 443–56; Louis L. Martz. “Last Letters and A Dialogue of Comfort,” in Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 55–64; N. E. Wright, “The Name and the Signature of the Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. D. Quint, M. W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, W. A. Rebhorn (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1992), 239–57; Stephen M. Foley, “Scenes of Speaking and Technologies of Writing in More’s Tower Letters,” Moreana 35, no. 135–36 (1998): 7–24, esp. 19; Lamb, “Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project, and the Problem of Agency,” 83–108; Marion ­Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (Houndmills: Basingstoke, 2007), esp. 19; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 239–42; and J. Avery, “ ‘Irony and Charity Are Met Together,’ ” 65–75. See also two essays in this volume: Katherine Rodgers, “Dialogic Imagination in ‘The Letter to Alice Alington,’ ” 205–221, and Stephen Merriam Foley, “Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the ‘Letter to Alington,’ ” 222–252. 216. Letter 211, Rogers, Correspondence, 544/10–545/35. Guy (A Daughter’s Love, 249) edits and rewrites the prayer to imitate the liturgical collects Margaret included in her Devout Treatise.

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at the Tower.217 We can read, at the beginning of this book, and “written in a very neat hand,” ten lines, which the author describes as “the profession of faith of Thomas Morus and of his friend John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester”:218 The surest meanes for to attaine the perfect waye to endlesse blisse are happie lief and to remaine within that Church where virtue is: And if thy conscience be soe sounde to thinke thy faith is truth indeede beware in thee noe Schisme be founde that Unitie may have her meede; If Unitie thow doe embrace in heaven enioy, possesse, thy place. Qui non recte vivit in vnitate Ecclesiæ catholicæ, salvus esse non potest. Thomas Morus dominus cancellarius Angliæ Johannes ffisher Episcopus Roffensis.219

Meulon claims that, despite this poem being traditionally attributed to Thomas More, the comparison of the handwriting with Margaret’s autograph letter to Erasmus suggests that she could be the author.220 He concludes, “Attribuer les vers de Douai à Margaret Roper n’est qu’une présomption.” 221 The form of the poem, a “dizain”,222 “is made up of two English alternating iambic tetrameter quatrains and a final rhyming couplet, a rhyme scheme that More himself never uses, together with a concluding note in Latin.”223 Meulon also suggests 1529 as the terminus a quo for the writing of the lines.224 217. S. H., “Thomas More and John Fisher,” Notes and Queries 4, no. 109 (November 29, 1851): 417–18. Treatise concernynge the fruytful Saynges of David the King and prophete in the seven penytencyall psalmes, devyded in ten sermons, was made and compyled by the ryght reverente fader in god Johan Fyssher, doctour of dyvinyte and bysshop of Rochester, at the exortacion and sterynge of the most excellent pryncesse Margarete, Countesse of Richemount and Derby, and moder to our souverayne Lorde Kynge Hēry the VII (London: by Wynkyn de Worde, 1508). This copy is preserved at Douai, Bibliothèque Marceline ­Desbordes-Valmore. 218. S. H., “Thomas More and John Fisher,” 417. 219. Henri Meulon, “Un poème inédit de Thomas More?,” Moreana 6, no. 23 (1969): 66–68; here 66. 220. Meulon, “Un poème inédit,” 66–67. For Margaret’s letter to Erasmus, see letter 2233, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum 8:299–300. 221. Meulon, “Un poème inédit,” 68. 222. Meulon, “Un poème inédit,” 67. 223. Romauld Ian Lakowski, “Two Neglected Poems of Thomas More and a Poem of Margaret Roper’s,” Moreana 50, no. 191–92 (2013): 285–290, here 289. 224. Meulon, “Un poème inédit,” 67.



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• A  nother English poem? A poem preserved in a manuscript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University was attributed to Margaret Roper in an e­ ighteenth-century miscellany by Elizabeth Bruce Boswell (1673–1734), as “’Verses Writt by Sir Thomas Moore his Daughter when he was in prison, in Henry the 8s time.’ ”225 Ross reproduces the entire poem and claims that it is “clearly embedded” in Margaret’s biographical circumstances at the time of More’s execution.226 It “opens as a relatively impersonal devotional complaint, and continues as an affecting meditational piece, in which the female speaker consoles herself against the trials she is experiencing.”227 Lakowski describes its structure as follows: “The poem is composed in the ballad meter, basically in double ballad or c­ ommon-metre double stanzas, and consists of thirteen e­ ight-line stanzas, whose even lines rhyme (xaxaxbxb), for a total of one hundred and four lines.”228

III. Missing Works by Margaret More Roper Stapleton’s testimony is crucial for references to other works reputedly composed by Margaret that have not survived. She wrote very eloquently prose and verse both in Greek and Latin. Two Latin speeches written as an exercise, which I have myself seen, are in style elegant and graceful, while in treatment they hardly yield to her father’s compositions. Another speech, first written in English, was translated by both the father and the daughter separately with such great skill that one would not know which to prefer. When More wrote his book on the Four Last Things, he gave the same subject to Margaret to treat, and when she had completed her task, he affirmed most solemnly that that treatise of his daughter was in no way inferior to his own.229 225. Cited in Sarah C. E. Ross, “A Poem by Margaret Roper?,” 502. 226. Sarah C. E. Ross, “A Poem by Margaret Roper?,” 503–4. 227. Sarah C. E. Ross, “A Poem by Margaret Roper?,” 504. 228. Romuald Lakowski, “Another Poem by Margaret More Roper?” Moreana 53, no. 203–204 (2016): 293–294, here 293. 229. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdon of Sir Thomas More, 103; my emphasis. “Composuit Graece Latineque, soluta & pedestri oratione elega[n]tissime. Vidi ego duas eius declamationes Latinas exercitij causa scriptas, quae vt stilo quidem ornat[a]e & facundae erant, sic inuentione no[n] ita multum patri cedebant. Et altera quidem declamatio quum Anglice primum scripta esset, ab vtroque Latine versa, a patre & filia ea elegantia ab vtroque vertitur, vt nescias vtra alteri sit praeferenda. Certe quum Thomas Morus librum fuum de 4. novissimis scriberet, dedit idem argumentum Margaretae tractandum: quod quum fecisset, affirmabat sancte filiae tractatum nulla ex parte suo ese inferiorem” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 237/26–33).

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Thus, we may include in her writings: • A treatise on The Four Last Things. Margaret finished her text on the novissimi, but More did not. Cresacre More adds that “her father sincerely protested that it was better than his, and therefore, it may be, never finished his.”230 • Latin letters. Margaret wrote more letters in Latin than are preserved, as can be deduced from the allusions to them in More’s or Erasmus’s letters: “elegantes epistolae vestrae”;231 “literae tuae”;232 “tali . . . epistola”;233 “tuae . . . epistolae,” “istae . . . tuae tam elegantes, tam politae”;234 “Epistola tua,” “epistolam tuam”;235 “elegantissimae literae tua . . . tam longam . . . epistolam”;236 “tuis sororumque tuarum literis.”237 • E nglish letters. It is reasonable to assume Margaret wrote letters to her father in English when he was a prisoner in the Tower other than those that survive. A clear instance of this is the letter, to which More alludes, that she wrote trying to convince him to take the oath or pretending to do so in order to get Cromwell’s permission to visit him. Rastell reports that “Within a while after Sir Thomas More was in priso[n] in the Towre, his doughter Maistres Margaret Roper wrote and sent vnto hym a letter.”238 From More’s answer, we catch a glimpse of the mood of her letter, which he describes as “lamentable.”239 Margaret apparently questioned her father in the missing letter about the reasons behind his refusal to take the oath, since he defended himself in his reply: “Wherein as towchinge the pointes of your letter, I can make none answere, for I doubt not you well remembre, that the matters which moue my conscience . . . I have sondry tymes shewed you that I will disclose them to no man.”240 Margaret also reminded her father of the difficult position in which his refusal put his family, something of which 230. Cresacre More, Life of Sir Thomas More, 154. 231. Letter 43, Rogers, Correspondence, 97/2. 232. Letter 69, Rogers, Correspondence, 134/1. In this letter More stated that everything Margaret writes is pleasant for him (Rogers, Correspondence, 134/6). 233. Letter 70, Rogers, Correspondence, 134/2. 234. Letter 106, Rogers, Correspondence, 254/6–7. 235. Letter 108, Rogers, Correspondence, 257/1, 7. This letter delighted John Veysey, bishop of Exeter. 236. Letter 128, Rogers, Correspondence, 301/2–3, 8. This letter was admired by Reginald Pole. 237. Letter 1404, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 5:366/1. 238. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1431. 239. Letter 202, Rogers, Correspondence, 508/3. 240. Letter 202, Rogers, Correspondence, 508/10–509/14.



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More is obviously aware in his response. What caused him more pain, he says, is that his family and friends are “in great displeasure and daunger of great harme therby.”241 Letter 210242 has this headnote by Rastell “answering her letter here next before [Letter 209].”243 Many times, More referred to her letters in the plural, e.g., “your daughterlye louing letters.”244 Letter 211 by More also mentions a previous one by Margaret: “Your doughterly louyng letter.”245 • Latin Poems. In his letter of September 11 (1522?), More remarks that the bishop of Exeter, John Veysey, examined a Latin letter by Margaret (“epistolam tuam”), that had accidentally fallen out of his pocket.246 When More saw how delighted he was, he presented him with Margaret’s poems, “carmina,” presumably also in Latin.247 • L atin speeches. Stapleton first mentions “[t]wo Latin speeches written as an exercise . . . in style elegant and graceful, while in treatment they hardly yield to her father’s compositions.”248 Furthermore, he states that he has in his “possession a speech of hers”249 (which I assume to be one of these two) that he praises in the following terms: It is eloquent, clever, and perfect in its use of oratorical devices. It is in imitation, or rather in rivalry, of Quintilian’s declamation on the destruction of the 241. Rogers, Correspondence, 509/24–25. 242. Rogers, Correspondence, 540–44 243. Rastell, English Workes of Thomas More, 1446. 244. Rogers, Correspondence, 540/2–3. 245. Rogers, Correspondence, 544–547, at 544/1. 246. Letter 108, Rogers, Correspondence, 257–58, at 257/7. “He took it into his hand with pleasure and examined it. When he saw from the signature that it was the letter of a lady, he was induced by the novelty of the thing to read it more eagerly. When he had finished he said he would never have believed it to have been your work unless I had assured him of the fact, and he began to praise it in the highest terms (why should I hide what he said?) for its pure Latinity, its correctness, its erudition, and its expressions of tender affection” (Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdon of Sir Thomas More, 106). “Delectatus manu coepit inspicere: vbi ex salutatione depraehendit esse mulieris, legere coepit auidius. Sic eum inuitabat movitas. Sed quum legisset & (quod nisi me affirmante nom erat crediturus) tuam ipsius manum esse didicisset, epistolam, vt nihil dicam amplius talem: (quanquam cur non dicam quod dixit ille?) tam Latinam, tam emendatam, tam eruditam, tam dulcibus refertam affectibus, vehementer admiratus est” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 241/28–242/6). 247. Letter 108, Rogers, Correspondence, 257/15. For some interesting comments on this letter, see Marc’hadour’s conclusions in M.-C. Robineau, et al. “Correspondance entre Érasme et Margaret Roper,” Moreana 3, no. 12 (1966): 29–46, 31, and 121. 248. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 103. 249. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 107.

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poor man’s bees through the poison that had been sprinkled upon the flowers in the rich man’s garden. Quintilian defends the cause of the poor man: Margaret of the rich. The more difficult such a defence is, the greater the scope for Margaret’s eloquence and wit. If it were not that I fear to be tedious and to digress too much from the task I have undertaken of writing More’s life, I would print the speeches both of Margaret and Quintilian, either in this place or in an appendix.250

In the already cited letter of September 11 (1522?), More says that he also showed Veysey a Latin speech by Margaret, alluded to as “declamationem.”251 • A speech written in English and translated into Latin. Margaret and her father translated separately a speech “first written in English” into Latin.252 Cresacre More augments what Stapleton says: “She wrote two declamations in English, which her father and she turned into Latin so elegantly, as one could hardly judge which was the best.”253 • Translations from Eusebius of Caesarea? Cresacre More stated that Margaret “translated Eusebius out of Greek, but it was never printed, because Christopherson at that time had done exactly before.”254 Thomas Fuller in his The Worthies of England (1662) follows Cresacre More almost verbatim: “she translated Eusebius out of Greek; but it was never printed because I. Christopherson had done it so exactly before.”255 It is well known that it was Mary (Margaret’s daughter) who translated Eusebius.256 Cresacre More might simply be 250. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdon of Sir Thomas More, 107. “Est penes me declamatio quaedam huius Margaretae eloquentissima, & ingeniosa admodum, omnibusque veri oratoris numeris absoluta, qua Quintilianum imitata, vel aemulata potius respondet illi eius orationi, quae est de pauperis apibus in horto diuitis veneno floribus asperso necatis. Pauperis causam defendit Quintilianus. Diuitis tuetur Margaretae. Quae sane causa quanto ad defendendum difficilior, tanto ars & eloquentia Margaretae excellentior videri debet. Nisi prolixitatis hic taedium aut nimiam a proposita Thomae Mori vita digressionem metuerem, vtramque declamationem Quintiliani, & Margaretae vel hoc loco vel huic operi subiecissem” (Stapleton, Tres Thomae, 242/27–243/9). See also Cresacre More: “She made an oration to answer Quintilian, defending that rich man which he accused of having poisoned a poor man’s bees, with certain venomous flowers in his garden, so eloquent and witty, that it may strive with his” (The Life of Sir Thomas More, 158). I have elsewhere suggested Vives’s influence on this ­Quintilian-like declamatio by Margaret (Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores,” 398). 251. Rogers, Correspondence, 257/15. 252. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdon of Sir Thomas More, 103. 253. Cresacre More, Life of Sir Thomas More, 154. 254. Cresacre More, Life of Sir Thomas More, 158. 255. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. J. Freeman (1662; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), 358. In his Memoirs, Ballard reached the same conclusion (152). This opinion has also found an echo in recent scholarship; see Olivares Merino, “Some Notes about Mary Roper Clar(c)ke Bassett,” 157n33. 256. For a full discussion of these translations, see Olivares Merino, “Some Notes about Mary Roper



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wrong, or there might be some truth to his account: perhaps Margaret had started translating Eusebius from Greek, and then Mary used or incorporated her mother’s translation. In any case, the reference to Christopherson’s work must necessarily be applied to Mary, rather than to Margaret, as his work was published in 1569.257 Clar(c)ke Bassett,” and Jaime Goodrich, “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clarke Basset’s Translation of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History,” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 3 (2010): 301–28. 257. Eusebius, Historiae ecclesiasticae pars prima [-tertia], trans. John Christopherson (Louvain: Seruatius Sassenus, 1569).

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TEXTS ∞

Richard Hyrde’s Preface A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster

Two √

Richard Hyrde’s Preface to A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster [a2] Richarde Hyrde unto the moost studyous and vertuous yonge mayde Fraunces. S.[taverton] sendeth gretynge and well to fare. [1524] 1

I

Have herde many men put great dout whether it shulde be expedyent and requisite or nat / a woman to haue lernyng in bokes of latyn and greke. And some vtterly affyrme that it is nat onely / nother necessarye nor profytable / but also very noysome and ieoperdous: Allegyng for their opinion that the frayle kynde of women beyng enclyned of their owne corage vnto vice / & mutable at euery newelty / if they shulde haue skyll in many thinges / that be written in the latyn and greke tong / compiled and made with great crafte & eloquence / where the

1. This ­original-spelling text of Hyrde’s preface is reproduced from the transcription printed in Moreana 4, no. 13 (1967): 6–22, edited by Fr. Germain Marc’hadour, which is based on A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster, with a Preface by Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1526) in the British Library C.37.e.6.(1.). The transcription is reprinted here with the kind permission of ­Marie-Claire Phélippeau, former e­ ditor-in-chief. See the Moreana issue for variants in Hyrde’s preface between the British Library and John Rylands Library (1531) editions. Moreana issues are accessible online via subscription. Thanks go to Sr. Anne O’Donnell for pinpointing the signature pages (only lineated in the Moreana edition) from the Beinecke Library copy. Printing in the early Tudor period was transitional, and in some cases (as here) the forward slash (or virgule) was used as a punctuation mark, often to represent a comma. Italic letters indicate expanded abbreviations. Unexpanded abbreviations include ye (the), yt (that), and yu (thou). Frances Staverton was a cousin of Margaret Roper. Richard Hyrde was a physician connected to the More circle and a translator of Vives’s work on the education of women. See commentary about them and this preface in Elizabeth McCutcheon, “ ‘A Young, Virtuous, and Well-Learned Gentlewoman’: Margaret More Roper in the Republic of Letters” in the present volume. See also Eugenio Olivares’s chronology for the years 1518, 1524, and 1525 (note), in “Life Records” in this volume.

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5

1

5

10

15

20

25

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mater is happely somtyme more swete vnto the eare / than holsome for ye mynde / it wolde of lykelyhode / bothe enflame their stomakes a great deale the more / to that vice / that men saye they be to moche gyuen vnto of their owne nature alredy / and enstructe them also with more subtilyte and conueyaunce / to sette forwarde and accomplysshe their frowarde entente and purpose. But these men that so say / do in my iugement / eyther regarde but lytell what they speke in this mater / or els / as they be for ye more parte vnlerned / they enuy it / and take it sore to hert / that other shulde haue yt precious iewell / whiche they nother haue theym selfe / nor can fynde in their hertes to take [a2v] the payne to gette. For fyrste / where they reken suche instabilite and mutable nature in women / they saye therin their pleasure of a contensyous mynde / for the mayntenaunce of their mater / for if they wolde loke theron with one euyn eye / and consydre the mater equally / they shulde fynde and well perceyue / that women be nat onely of no lesse constancy and discrecion than men / but also more stedfast and sure to truste vnto / than they. For whether I praye you was more light and more to be discommended / Helen that with moche labour and sute / and many craftye meanes / was at the last ouercome and inticed to go away with the kynges sonne of Troye? Or Parys / whiche with ones2 syght of her / was so doted in her loue / that neyther the great chere and kyndenesse shewed vnto hym of her husbande kyng Menelaus / nor shame of the abomynable dede / nor feare of the peryll that was lyke to come thervpon / nor the drede of god / myght let hym to conuey her awaye / contrary to all gentylnesse / contrary to all ryght / all lawes and conscience? Nor the woman casteth her mynde neyther to one nor other of her owne proper wyll / whiche thyng is a sure token of an vpryght and a stedfaste mynde / but by the sute and meanes of the man: whan he with one loke of her / is rauisshed of all his wyttes. Nowe if here parauenture a man wolde saye / yes / they be moued aswell as men / but they dissemble / forbeare / and wyll nat vtter theyr stomakes / nother it is so conuenyent the woman to speke as the man: [a3] that shall nat helpe his excuse / but rather hyndre it / for they be the more worthy to be allowed / that wyll nat be so farre ouersene in that affection / whiche is so naturally gyuen to all thynges lyuyng / but that they can remembre theyr duetie and honestie / where the man is many tymes so farre beside his reason / yt he seeth nother where nor whan / nother to whom / nor howe to behaue hym selfe / nother can regarde / what is comely and what is nat. For verily / it is as vnconuenient for the man to de2. Sic; i.e., one.

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maunde that thynge that is vnlaufull / if he coude perceyue / as for the woman. And if bothe theyr vyces were all open and shewed / the man shulde haue moche more that he ought to be ashamed of / sauyng that he is also in that poynt worse than the woman in as moche as she is ashamed of her faute / be it neuer so small: and he is so farre from that vertue / yt whan he hath done nought he reioyseth of it & auaunceth hymselfe / as though it were well done. And yet he is so vnreasonable in iugyng the woman / that as Isocrates saythe wherin he hathe no consyderation / howe ofte or howe sore he offende his wyfe: He wyll nat suffre ones to be offended hym selfe by her neuer so lytell: where he wolde that she shulde take his dedes all well in worthe. Wherfore in dede / women be in gaye case and happy / if their honestie and prayse must hange at the gyrdelles of suche people. Nowe as for lernyng / if it were cause of any yuell as they say it is / it were worse in the man than in the woman bicause (as I haue said here before) [a3v] he can bothe worse staye and refrayne hym selfe / than she. And moreouer than that / he cometh ofter and in mo occasyons thanne the woman / in as moche / as he lyueth more forthe abrode amonge company dayly / where he shalbe moued to vtter suche crafte as he hath gotten by his lernynge. And women abyde moost at home / occupied euer with some good or necessary busynesse. And the latyn and the greke tonge / I se nat but there is as lytell hurt in them / as in bokes of Englisshe and frenche / whiche men bothe rede them selfe / for the proper pastymes that be written in them / and for the witty and craftie conueyaunce of the makynges: And also can beare well ynoughe / that women rede them if they wyll / neuer so moche / whiche commoditeis be farre better handeled in the latyn & greke / than any other langage: and in them be many holy doctours writinges / so deuout and effectuous / that who soeuer redeth them / muste nedes be eyther moche better or lesse yuell / whiche euery good body bothe man and woman wyll rede and folowe / rather than other. But as for that / that I here many men ley for the greattest ieoperdy in this mater / in good faythe to be playne methynke it is so folysshe / yt scantly it is worthy / eyther to be rehersed or answered vnto. That is / where they saye / if their wyues coulde Latyn or greke / than myght they talke more boldely with preestes and freres / as who sayth / there were no better meanes (if they were yll dysposed) to execute their purposes / than by spekynge Latyn or [a4] greke / outher els / that preestes and freres were commenly so well lerned / that they can make their bargeyne in latyn & greke so redily / whiche thing is also farre contrary / yt I suppose nowe a dayes a man coude nat deuyse a better waye to kepe his wyfe safe from them / than if he teche her the latyn and greke tonge / and suche good scien­ ces as are written in them: the whiche nowe most parte of preestes / and specially



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suche as be nought / abhorre and flye from: ye / as faste in a maner / as they flye from beggars / that aske them almesse in the strete. And where they fynde faute with lernyng / bycause they say / it engendreth wytte and crafte / there they reprehende it / for that that it is moost worthy to be commended for / and the whiche is one singuler cause wherfore lernyng ought to be desyred for he that had leuer haue his wyfe a foole than a wyse woman / I holde hym worse than twyse frantyke. Also / redyng and studyeng of bokes so occupieth the mynde / that it can haue no leyser to muse or delyte in other fantasies / whan in all handy werkes / that men saye be more mete for a woman / the body may be busy in one place / and the mynde walkyng in another: & while they syt sowing & spinnyng with their fyngers / maye caste and compasse many peuysshe fantasyes in their myndes / whiche must nedes be occupyed / outher with good or badde / so long as they be wakynge. And those yt be yuell disposed / wyll fynde the meanes to be nought / though they can neuer a letter on the booke / and she that wyll be good / [a4v] lernyng shall cause her to be moche the better. For it sheweth the ymage and wayes of good lyuynge / euyn right as a myrrour sheweth the symylitude and proporcion of the body. And doutlesse / the daylye experyence prouethe / that suche as are nought / are those that neuer knewe what lernyng ment. For I neuer herde tell / nor reed of any woman well lerned / that euer was (as plentuous as yuell tonges be) spotted or infamed as vicious. But on the other side / many by their lernyng taken suche encreace of goodnesse / yt many may beare them wytnesse of their vertue / of whiche sorte I coulde reherse a great nombre / bothe of olde tyme and late / Sauynge that I wyll be contente as for nowe / with one example of oure owne countre and tyme / that is: this gentylwoman / whiche translated this lytell boke herafter folowyng: whose vertuous conuersacion / lyuyng / and sadde demeanoure / maye be profe euydente ynough / what good lernynge dothe / where it is surely roted: of whom other women may take example of prudent / humble / and wyfely behauour / charitable & very christen vertue / with whiche she hath with goddes helpe endeuoured herselfe / no / lesse to garnisshe her soule / than it hath lyked his goodnesse with louely beauty and comelynesse / to garnysshe and sette out her body: And vndouted is it / that to thyncrease of her vertue / she hath taken and taketh no lytell occasyon of her lernyng / besydes her other manyfolde and great commodyteis taken of the same / amonge whiche commody [b1] teis / this is nat the leest / that with her vertuous / worshipfull / wyse / and well lerned husbande / she hath by the occasyon of her lernynge / and his delyte therin / suche especiall conforte / pleasure / /and pastyme / as were nat well possyble for one vnlerned couple / eyther to take togyder or to conceyue in their myndes / what pleasure is therin. Therfore good

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Fraun­ces / seyng that suche frute / profite and pleasure cometh of lernyng / take no hede vnto the leude wordes of those that dispreyse it / as verily no man dothe / saue suche as neyther haue lernyng / nor wotteth what it meaneth / which is in dede the moost parte of men / & as the moost parte and the best parte be nat alwaye of one mynde / so if this mater shulde be tryed / nat by wytte and reason / but by heedes or handes / the greater parte is lyke as it often dothe / to vanquisshe and ouercome the better / for the best parte (as I reken) whom I accompte the wysest of euery age / as among the Gentyls the olde philosophers / and among the christenmen / the auncient doctors of Christes churche / all affyrme lernyng to be very good & profitable / nat onely for men but also for women / ye whiche Plato the wyse philosopher calleth a bridell for yonge people agaynst vice. Wherfore good Fraunces / take you the best parte and leaue the moost / folowe the wyse men and regarde nat the folysshe sorte / but applye all your myght / wyll / & dilygence to optayne that especiall treasure / whiche is delectable in youthe / comfortable in age / and profytable at all seasons: Of whom without doute / [b1v] cometh moche goodnesse and virtue. Whiche vertue who so lacketh / he is without that thing that onely maketh a man: Ye and without the whiche a man is worse than an vnreasonable beest / nor ones worthy to haue the name of a man. It maketh fayre and amyable / that that is of nature deformed: as Diogynes the philosopher / whan he sawe a yong man foule and yuell fauoured of persone / but very vertuous of lyuenge: thy vertue sayd he / maketh the beautifull: And that that is goodly of itselfe alredy / it maketh more excellent and bright. Whiche as Plato ye wyse philosopher saythe / if it coude be sene with our bodily eyes / it wolde make men wondersly enamored and taken in the loue of it. Wherfore vnto those especiall giftes of grace that god hath lent you / and endewed you with all / endeuer youre selfe that this precyous diamonde and ornament be nat lackyng / whiche had / shall florisshe and lyghten all your other giftes of grace / and make them more gaye: and lacked / shall darke and blemysshe them sore. And surely the beautie of it / though ye had none other / shall gette you bothe greatter loue / more faithfull and lengar to contynue of all good folkes / than shall the beautie of the body / be it neuer so excellent / whose loue decayeth togyder / with it yt was the cause of it / and moost commenly before / as by dayly experyence we maye se / them that go toguyder for the loue of the bodily beautie / within a small whyle whan their appetyte is satisfyed / repent them selfe. But the loue that cometh by the [b2] meanes of vertue & goodnesse shall euer be fresshe and encrease / ryght as dothe the vertue it selfe. And it shall you come by non otherwise so redily / as if you contynue the study of lernyng / whiche you be entred well in allredy: And



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for your tyme and age / I wolde saye / had greatly profyted / sauynge that chyldes age is so frayle accompted / that it nedeth rather monicion and contynuall callynge vpon / than the deserued prayse. Howe be it I haue no doute in you / whome I se naturally borne vnto vertue / and hauyng so good bringyng vp of a babe / nat onely among your honourable vncles chyldren / of whose conuersacion and company / they that were right yuell / might take occasyon of goodnesse and amendement / But also with your owne mother / of whose preceptes and teachyng / and also very vertuous lyueng / if you take hede / as I put no feare you wyll and also do / you can nat fayle to come to suche grace and goodnesse as I haue euer had opynion in you that ye shulde. Wherfore I haue euer in my mynde fauored you / and forthered to my power your profite / and encrease thervnto / and shall as long as I se you delyte in lernynge and vertue / no kynde of payne or labour refused on my partie / that maye do you good. And as a token of my good mynde / and an instrument towarde your successe and furtheraunce I sende you this boke / lytell in quantite but bigge in value / tourned out of latyn in to englysshe by your owne forenamed kynswoman / whose goodnesse and vertue / two thynges there [b2v] be that let me moche to speke of. The one / bicause it were a thyng superfluous to spende many wordes vnto you about that mater / which your selfe knowe well ynough / by long experience and dayly vse. The other cause is / for I wolde eschewe the sclaundre of flatery: howe be it I count it no flatery to speke good of them that deserue it / but yet I knowe that she is as lothe to haue prayse gyuyn her / as she is worthy to haue it / and had leauer her prayse to reste in mennes hertes / than in their tonges / or rather in goddes estimacion and pleasure / than any mannes wordes or thought: and as touchynge the boke it selfe / I referre and leaue it to the iugementes of those that shall rede it / and vnto suche as are lerned / ye onely name of the maker putteth out of question / the goodnesse and perfectyon of the worke / whiche as to myne owne opinyon and fantasye / can nat be amended in any poynte: And as for the translacion therof / I dare be bolde to say it / that who so lyst and well can conferre and examyne the translacyon with the originall / he shall nat fayle to fynde that she hath shewed her selfe / nat onely erudite and elegant in eyther tong / But hath also vsed suche wysedom / suche dyscrete and substancyall iudgement in expressynge lyuely the latyn / as a man maye parauenture mysse in many thynges / translated and tourned by them that bare ye name of rightwise & very well lerned men: & the laboure that I haue had with it about the printing / I yelde holly and frely gyue vnto you / in whose good maners and [b3] vertue / as in a chylde / I haue so great affection / and vnto your good mother / vnto whom I am so moche beholden / of

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whose company I take so great ioye and pleasure / in whose godly communycacion I fynde suche spyrituall frute and swetnesse / that as ofte as I talke with her / so ofte me thynke I fele myselfe the better. Therfore nowe good Fraunces folowe styll on her steppes / looke euer vpon her lyfe / to enfourme your owne therafter / lyke as ye wolde loke in a glasse to tyre your body by: ye / and that more diligentlye / in so moche as the beautie of the body though it be neuer so well attended / wyll soone fade and fall awaye: good lyuyng and vertue ones gotten tarieth styll / whose frute ye shall fele / nat onely in this worlde whiche is transytorie and of shorte contynuaunce / but also in another: And also it shulde be great shame / dishonestye / and rebuke vnto you borne of suche a mother / and also nourysshed vp with her owne teate / for to degenerate and go out of kynde. Beholde her in this age of hers / in this almost contynuall disease and syckenesse / howe busye she is to lerne / and in the small tyme that she hath had / howe moche she hath yet profited in the latin tonge / howe great comforte she taketh of that lernynge that she hath gotten / and consydre therby what pleasure and profite you maye haue here after (if god lende you lyfe / as I praye he do) of the lernyng that you may haue or you come to her age / if you spende your tyme well: whiche doyng you shall be able to do youre selfe good / and be great [b3v] ioye and conforte to all your frendes / and all that euer wolde you well / among whom I wolde you shulde reken me for one / nat amonge the leest yf nat amonge the chefe: and so fare you well / myne owne good / gentyll / and fayre Fraunces. At Chelcheth / the yere of our lorde god / a thousande fyue hundred.xxiiij The first day of Octobre.



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Erasmus’s Precatio dominica Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

Three √

Erasmus’s Precatio dominica [a4] PRECATIO DOMINICA DIGE /

sta in septem parteis, iuxta septem dies, per D. Erasmus Roterodamum.1

Die Do mini co

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pater.

VDI pater in coelis habitans uota filiorum tuorum, corpore quidem hoc mortali adhuc in terris haerentium, caeterum animis ad coelestem patriam ac domum paternam anhelantium, ubi intelligunt sibi repositum thesaurum aeternae felicitatis, haereditatem uitae immortalis. Agnoscimus tuam sublimitatem, conditor, seruator, ac moderator omnium quae in coelis sunt, & quae in terris: agnoscimus nostram humilitatem. Nec auderemus te patris uocabulo compellare, indigni qui serui dicamur tui: nec honorificentissimum nomen filiorum nobis uindicare, quo nec

1. This text is kindly reprinted, with the permission of the former e­ ditor-in-chief ­ arie-Claire Phélippeau, from the transcription published in Moreana 2, no. 7 (1965): 10– M 62, edited by Fr. Germain Marc’hadour. His source text was an editio princeps held in the British Library: Precatio Dominica in septem portiones distributa per D. Erasmum (Basel: Joan. Frobenius, 1523). See the Moreana edition for two textual variants. The editors are grateful for the generous sharing by Anne M. O’Donnell, SND, of her personal typescript of the Moreana transcription of Precatio Dominica, which she collated with a British Library copy of the work (shelf number 700.b.37), proofread, and provided the exact positions of the signature pages (only lineated in the Moreana edition). Her editorial help with this text is appreciated. Italics within the text indicate expanded abbreviations.

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Margaret Roper’s A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster Here after folowe the seuyn peticions of the Pater noster / translated out of Latyn in to Englysshe.2

P

the fyrst peticion.

ater noster qui es in celis / sanctificetur nomen tuum. Here O father in heuyn the petycions of thy chyldren / whiche thoughe they be as yet bodily in erthe / natwithstandynge / in mynde euer they desyre and long to come to ye countre celestiall / & fathers house / where they well knowe and vnderstande / that the treasure of euerlastyng welthe and felycite / that is to saye / the inherytaunce of lyfe immortall / is ordained for theym. We aknowledge thyne excellency / O maker / sauyour / and gouernour of all thyng / conteyned in heuen & in erthe / And agayne we aknowledge & confesse our owne vylenesse / & in no wyse we durst be so bolde to call the father (whiche are farre vnworthy to be thy bondemen) ne take vpon vs the most honorable name of thy children / whiche vnneth

2. This ­original-spelling text is gratefully reprinted from Moreana 2, no. 7 (1965): 11–63, by the kind permission of the former ­editor-in-chief ­Marie-Claire Phélippeau. It was transcribed and edited by Fr. Germain Marc’hadour from the Yale Beinecke Library copy (If M81 Z526) of A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster, with a Preface by Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1526). See Moreana issue no. 7 for some textual corrections. Thanks go to Sr. Anne O’Donnell for bringing attention to other variants silently changed or missed in the Moreana edition and for pinpointing the signature pages (only lineated in the Moreana edition). Her editorial assistance with this text is appreciated. Printing in the early Tudor period was transitional, and in some cases (as here) the forward slash (or virgule) was used as a punctuation mark, often to represent a comma. Italic letters indicate expanded abbreviations. Unexpanded abbreviations include ye (the), yt (that), and yu (thou).

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ange[a4v]los tuos dignatus es, nisi tua gratuita bonitas nos in huius nominis honorem adoptasset.Eramus serui peccati, infeliciter geniti ex Adam: eramus filij satanae, cuius spiritu ad omne flagiti­ orum genus agebamur. Sed tu nostri misertus per unigenitum fili­um tuum Iesum exemisti nos à seruitute peccati: emancipasti à patre diabolo: uindicasti ab aeterni ignis haereditate: & ac per fidem & baptismum in filij tui corpus insitos, adoptare dignatus es, & in nominis, & in haereditatis consortium. Ac ne quid diffideremus tuae erga nos pietati, ueluti pignus quoddam tua erga nos charitatis, coelitus immisisti in animos nostros spiritum filij tui, qui propulsato timore seruili, non ueretur in cordibus nostris assidue clamare: Abba pater. Docuit et hoc nos filius tuus, per quem nobis largiris omnia, ut iam tuo spiritu renati, posteaquàm in baptismo renunciauimus patri diabolo, posteaquàm desijmus habere patrem in terris, solum patrem coelestem agnosceremus, cuius potentia conditi sumus, quum nihil essemus: cuius bonitate restituti sumus, quum perissemus: cuius sapientia gubernamur et conseruamur, ne reuoluamur in exitium. Addidit ille tui compellandi fiduciam: praescripsit precandi formulam. Agnosce filij tui precationem: agnosce filij tui spiritum, te pro nobis per nos interpellantem. Non dedignaberis ab his appellari pater, quos filius tuus, tui simillimus, dignatus est appellare fratres. Non est quur nobis placeamus, sed est quur tuam filijque tui benigni[a5]tatem glorificemus, quum nihil hic sibi uindicare possint nostra merita, sed totum hoc tuae gratuitae sit liberalitatis. Placuerunt tibi magis charitatis et pietatis uocabula, quàm timoris: pater audire mauis, quam dominus. Redamari praeoptas à filijs, quàm à seruis timeri. Amasti prior, & hoc ipsum tui muneris est, quod te redamamus. Audi pater spirituum, filios tuos spirituales, te in spiritu adorantes. Talibus enim adoratoribus delectari te, docuit nos filius tuus, in hoc abs te missus in

62 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

thou vouchsauest thyne angelles / except thy mere goodnesse hadde: by adoptyon receyued vs in to the great honour of this name. The tyme was / whan we were seruauntes to wyckednesse and synne / by the miserable generacion of Adam: we were also children of the fende / by whose instinction and spyrite we were driuen and compelled to euery kynde of myschefe and offence. But that thou of thyne infi[b4v]nite mercy / by thyne onely begoten sonne Iesus / made vs free from the thraldome of synne / & delyueredest vs from the deuyll our father / & by violence riddest vs from thinheritaunce of eternall fyre / & at the last / yu vouchsaffest to adopt vs by faythe and baptyme / as membres in the moost holy body of thy sonne: nat onely in to the felowshyppe of thy name / but also of thyne inheritaunce. And bycause we shulde nothyng mystrust in thy loue towarde vs / as a sure token therof / thou sendest from heuen downe in to oure hertes / the moost holy spyrite of thy sonne: whiche (all seruauntlye feares shaken of) boldely cryeth out in our hertes without cessyng / Abba pater / whiche in Englysshe is as moche to saye / as O father father: & this thy sonne taught vs / by whome (as mynister) thou gyuest vs all thynge: That whan we were as it were borne agayne by thy spyrite / and at the f­ ont-stone in baptyme / renounced and forsaken our father ye deuyll / and had begon to haue no father in erthe / than we shulde aknowledge onely oure father celestyall: By whose marueylous power we were made somwhat of ryght nought: by whose goodnesse we were restored / whan we were loste: by whose wysedome incomparable / euermore we are gouerned & kepte / that we fall nat agayne in to distruction. This thy sonne gaue vs full truste to call vpon the / he assigned vs also away of prayeng to the aknowlege therfore the desire & prayer of thy sonne / aknowlege the spirite of thy sonne whiche prayeth to thy maiestie for vs by vs: Do [c1] yu nat disdayne to be called father of those / whom thy sonne moost lykest thy ymage / vouchesafe to call his brethern / and yet we ought nat hervpon to take lykyng in our selfes / but to gyue glorie to the and thy sonne for that great gentylnesse: sithe no man can here of hym selfe ought deserue / but that thyng whatsoeuer good it be / cometh of thy onely and free lyberalite. Thou delytest rather in names louyng and charitable / than terrible and fearefull: Thou desyrest rather to be called a father / thanne a lorde or maister: Thou woldest we shulde rather loue the as thy children / than feare the as thy seruauntes and bondemen: Thou fyrst louedest vs / and of thy goodnesse also it cometh / and thy rewarde / that we do loue the agayne. Gyue eare / O father of spyrites to thy chyldren spyrituall / whiche in spyrite praye to the: For thy sonne tolde vs / that in those that so prayed thy delyte was / whom therfore yu sendest in to the

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mundum, ut doceret nos omnem ueritatem. Audi uota concordiae. Non enim conuenit, ut inter fratres, quos tua bonitas aequauit in honore gratuito, ambitione, contentione, odio, liuore inter sese dissideant. Omnes ex eodem patre pendemus, omnes eadem petimus. Nec sibi quisque peculiareter rogat aliquid, sed uelut unius corporis membra, eodem animata spiritu, quod in commune omnibus expediat, postulamus. Nec enim auderemus aliud abs te petere, quàm quod iussit filius tuus: nec auderemus aliter petere, quàm ille praescripsit. Sic enim petentibus promisit filius tuus fore, ut quicquid peteremus in ipsius nomine, impetraremus. Quoniam autem quum dominus noster Iesus filius tuus ageret in terris, nihil ardentioribus uotis exoptauit, quàm ut nomen sanctum tuum non solum in Iudaea, sed per uniuersas orbis nationes inclaresceret: nos quoque huius & hortatu & exemplo flagrantibus desiderijs optamus, ut adorandi nominis tui gloria coelum ac terram impleat, ut omnis creatura tremat tuam ine[a5v]uitabilem potentiam, ueneretur aeternam tuam sapientiam, amet ineffabilem bonitatem. Tua quidem gloria ut immensa, ita nec initium habens, nec finem habitura, semper florens in sese: neque crescere potest, neque decrescere: sed humani generis refert, ut illa cunctis innotescat. Nobis enim uita aeterna est, nouisse te solum uerum deum, & quem misisti, Iesum Christum. Tui nominis splendor obscuret & extinguat in nobis omnem humanam gloriam. Ne quisquam sit, qui sibi uel minimam aliquam gloriae portionem ausit usurpare. Nam gloria quae est extra te, uera est ignominia. Efficit hoc pietas naturae in filijs iuxta carnem progenitis, ut ingenti affectu desiderent honestam famam parentum suorum. Videmus quàm gestiant gaudio, quàm exultent, quàm sibi placeant, si contingat aliquis egregius honos his unde prognati sunt: puta si triumphus, si statua in foro cum honorifica inscriptione, si principatus. Parentis enim gloriam pro sua ducunt. Rursum quàm moerent, quàm deijciuntur animo, si quid ignominiae contingat inuri nomini paterno. Adeo penitus inseuit hoc animis hominum naturae affectus, ut parentes in filijs, & filij glorientur in parentibus.

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worlde that he shulde teache vs all veryte and trouthe. Here nowe the desyres of vnyte and concorde / for it is nat fytting ne agreeable / that bretherne whom thy goodnesse hath put in equall honoure / shulde disagre or varry among themselfe / by ambicious desyre of worldely promocion / by contencious debate / hatered or enuy / all we hang of one father / we all one thyng praye for and desyre / no man asketh ought for hym selfe specially or a parte / but as membres of one body / quyckened and releued with one soule: we requyre and praye in commen / for that whiche indyfferently shalbe expedient and [c1v] necessary for vs all. And in dede / we dare none other thyng desire of the / than what thy sonne commaunded vs / ne otherwise aske / than as he apoynted vs / for in so askyng / his goodnesse promysed we shulde optayne / what soeuer we prayed for in his name. And for as moche as whan thy sonne was here in erthe / he nothyng more feruently desyred / than that thy moost holy name shulde appere and shyne / nat onely in Iudea / but also thorowe all the worlde / besyde we also / bothe by his encoragyng and ensample / this one thing aboue all desyre / that the glorie of thy most holy name / maye replenisshe and fulfyll bothe heuen & erthe / so that no creature be whiche dredeth nat thy hye power and maieste / whiche do nat worshippe and reuerende also thy wysdome eternall and marueylous goodnesse / for thy glorie as it is great/ so neyther hauyng begynnyng nor endyng / but euer in it selfe florisshynge / can neyther encreace nor decreace / but it skylleth yet mankynde nat a lytell / yt euery man it knowe and magnifye / for to knowe and confesse the onely very god. And Iesus Christ whom thou sendest in to ye worlde / is as moche to vs / as lyfe eternall. Let the clere shynyng of thy name / shadowe & quenche in vs all worldly glory. Suffre no man to presume to take vpon hym selfe any parte of glory / for glory out of ye is non / but very sclaundre & rebuke. The course of nature also in carnall children this thyng causeth / that they greatlye desyre the good fame and honest reputacion of their father: for we maye se howe glad they be / & [c2] howe they reioyce / howe happy also they thynke them selfe / if happen their fathers any great honoure / as goodly tryumphe / or their ymage and picture to be brought in to ye court or commen place with an honourable preface / or any other goodly royalte what soeuer it be. And agayne we se how they wayle / and howe agast & astonyed they be / if chaunce their fathers sclaundre or infamy. So depely hath this thyng naturall affection routed in mannes hert / that the fathers reioyse in their childrens glory / and their children in the glorie of their fathers.

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At nos, quo uehementior est pietas diuina, quàm affectus humanus, hoc ardentius sitimus tui nominis gloriam, ac discruciamur unice, si, cui soli debetur omnis gloria, ignominia afficiatur. Non, quod ullo probo possit inquinari tuae gloriae splendor, sed quod ad nos attinet, quodammodo [a6] fit iniuria tuo nomini, quum gentes uel ignorato uel contempto rerum omnium conditore, uenerantur & adorant contemptissimas etiam creaturas, ueluti saxeas aut ligneas, aut coloribus fucatas imagines, boues, arietes, simias, porrum, cepe, & in his omnibus impuros daemones. His ueluti dijs canuntur hymni, immolantur uictimae, incenduntur thura. Haec uidentes filij tui, discruciamur duplici nomine: & quod tu fraudaris debita gloria, & quod illi miseri pereunt sua dementia. Quin & Iudaei non desinunt in synagogis suis filium tuum unicum abominandis probris afficere. Quicquid autem probri confertur in filium tuum unicum Iesum, qui splendor est tuae gloriae, in te confertur. Nobis probri loco impingunt gloriosum cognomen filij tui, ignominiosius ducentes, appellari Christianum, quàm furem aut homicidam: nobis exprobant crucem filij tui, quae nostra est gloria. Nos hoc tuae debemus misericordiae, quod te salutis omnis autorem agnoscimus, quod tibi aequalem filium tuum adoramus, quod utriusque spiritum hausimus. Misereatur & istorum tua clementia pater coelestis, ut gentes relicto simulacrorum cultu, te solum uenerentur: Iudaei relicta superstitione legis, spiritu tuo docti, si agnoscunt deum, ex quo omnia: agnoscant et dei filium, per quem omnia: agnoscant & spiritum sanctum, diuinae naturae consortem: in tribus personis adorent eandem maiestatem, & in simplici essentia agnoscant triplicem personarum proprietatem: ut omnis na[a6v]tio, omnis lingua, omnis sexus, omnis aetas ubique consentiat in gloriam & laudem tui sanctissimi nominis. Vtinam autem & nos,

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But for asmoche as ye gostly loue & affection of god / farre passeth and excedeth ye carnall affecion of man: therfore we thy spirituall children / moche more fer­uently thurst and desyre the glory and honour of thy most holy name / & greatly are vexed and troubled in hert / if he / to whom alone all glorye is due chaunce rebuked or sclaundred to be / nat that any sclaundre or rebuke can mynisshe or defoule the clerenesse of thy glory / but that we / as moche as lyeth in vs / in a maner do wronge and iniury to thy name / whan soeuer the gentyls eyther nat knowyng / or elles dispisynge the maker and originall of all / do worshippe & homage to creatures most vyle / as made of tymbre or stone: or other peynted images / some also to oxen some to bulles and suche other lyke: And moreouer / in all these foule and wycked deuylles / in honour of them they sing hymnes: to these they do sacrifyce / before these they burne ensence and other swete sauours / than we thy spirytuall chyldren / [c2v] seyng all this / doubly are agreued / bothe yt thou hast nat that honour whiche is due to the / & that these wretches perisshe by their owne madnesse & follye. The iewes also neuer cesse in their sinagoges and resorte of people / from dispitefull and abominable bacbytinge of thy onely sonne / wherby in the meane tyme they sclaundre the / sithe it can nat be chosen whan thy sonne is misfamed (whiche is ye very clerenesse of thy glorie) but that infamy also must redounde in the. They cast eke in our tethe / as a thyng of great dishonestie / ye most glorious name of thy chyldren / saying / yt it were better to be called theues or manquellers thanne christen men and folowers of Christ. They ley agaynst vs also that thy sonne was crucified / whiche is to vs great glorie and renoume / We maye thanke thy mercy father of all this thyng that we haue / and aknowledge the as originall and causer of all oure helthe / that we worshyppe also thy sonne in egall authorite with the / & that we haue receyued in to our hertes the spirite of you bothe. But yet good father in heuen / we pray ye to shewe thy mercy to those also / that bothe the gentyls leauyng and forsakyng the worshippyng & homage of counterfaite ymages: maye do all honour and reuerence to thy maiestie alone / and the iewes releued with thy spyrite / renounsing their supersticious vsyng of the lawe maye confesse god / from whom all thyng so abundantly cometh / may confesse the sonne of god / by whome we receyue all: maye confesse the holy gost / parttaker and felowe [c3] of the diuyne nature / Let them worshippe in thre persons / one and egall maiestie / and aknowledge thre persons as one proper persone / so that euery nacyon / euery tonge / euery secte3 / euery age / as well olde as yong / maye with one assent auaunce and praise thy moost holy name. And I wolde to god that we also / whiche beare the name of thy 3. Oxford English Dictionary [OED]: “sect, n., 1.d., male or female sex.” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University, 2016), accessed March 31, 2022, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/1745765.

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qui filij tui uocamur, apud hos qui te ignorant, non simus dehonestamento tuae gloriae. Quemadmodum enim gloria patris est filius sapiens, ita filij degeneres ignominiam conciliant parentibus suis. Non est autem germanus filius, qui pro sua uirili non imitatur ingenium ac mores patris sui. Filius tuus Iesus germanissimus est filius: quia perfectissima est imago patris, quem totum refert ac repraesentat. Nos qui adoptione, non natura filij sumus, conformantes nos ad exemplum filij tui, pro uiribus accedere conamur ad aliquam tui similitudinem: ut quemadmodum perfectissime glorificatus es in filio tuo, ita pro modulo nostrae imbecillitatis glorificeris & in nobis. Glorificaris autem, si mundus conspiciat nos iuxta filij tui doctrinam uiuentes, te super omnia diligentes, si proximum perinde ut nosipsos diligimus: diligentes, si bene uolentes qui nobis uolunt male: bene facientes, qui nobis male faciunt. Haec enim nos docuit filius tuus, prouocans ad imitationem patris coelestis, qui solem suum iubet oriri super bonos ac malos. Quantum autem dedecus inuehunt gloriae tuae, qui quum Christiani uocentur, furantur, moechantur, litigant, belligerantur, ambiunt, ulciscuntur, frau­dant, peierant per adorandum nomen tuum, nonnunquam & blasphemijs incessunt: uentrem habent pro deo: te contempto, Mammonae seruiunt. Nam hominum [a7] uulgus deum ex ipsius cultoribus aestimat. Etenim quum uident tui nominis professores impie uiuentes, dicunt: Valeat ille deus, qui tales habet cultores: ualeat ille dominus, qui tales habet seruos: ualeat ille pater, qui tales habet filios: ualeat ille rex, qui talem habet populum. Eoque filius tuus nos docuit, ut quemadmodum ipse & uiuens & moriens glorificauit nomen tuum, ita nos quoque pro nostro modulo castis & inculpatis moribus gloriam tui nominis illustremus. Luceat, inquit, lux uestra coram hominibus, ut uideant opera uestra bona, & glorificent patrem uestrum, qui in coelis est. In nobis ò pater coelestis nihil est lucis, nisi fuerit abs te profectum, qui perennis es fons omnis luminis: nec ex nobis quicquam proficisci potest bonorum operum.

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children / were nat dishonestie to thy glorie / amongest those yt knowe the nat: for lyke as a good and wise sonne is the glorie and honour of his father / so a fol­isshe & vnthrifty childe / getteth his father dishonestie and shame / & he is nat a naturall and proper chylde / whosoeuer do nat labour all that he can to folowe and be like his father in wytte & condicions: But thy sonne Iesus is a very kynde and naturall childe / for he is a very full and perfect ymage & similitude of the / whom holly he is lyke & representeth. We whiche are become thy children by adopcion and nat by nature / confermyng our selfes after his ensample / endeauer as moche as lyeth in vs / to come to some maner lykenesse of ye: that lykewise as thou waste moost parfitely exalted and glorified in thy sonne Iesus: so as farforth as our weakenesse wyll suffer / thou mayst be glorified also in vs / but the wayes howe thou mayst be glorified in vs / is if the worlde perceyue that we lyue after ye teaching and doctrine of thy sonne that is to say / if they se that we loue the aboue all thyng / and our neighbour & brother no lesse than our owne selfes / & that we euer beare good mynde and loue to our ennemy and aduersary / also well [c3v] doing and profyting those whiche do vs iniury & wrong: For these thynges thy sonne badde vs we shulde do / whan he prouoked vs to the folowyng and likenesse of our father in heuen / whiche commaundeth his sonne to shyne vpon good and yuell: And howe great a shame and dyshoneste are they to thy glorie / whiche whan they haue professed & taken vpon them thy name / natwithstand­ynge / do robbery and thefte: commyt aduoutrie: chyde and braule: study to reuenge: go about to disceyue: forswere theym selfe by thy moost holy name: amonge also sclaundre and backebyte: haue their belly as their god: dispyce the / and do seruice and homage to worldely richesse. And truely the commen sorte of people for the moost parte / esteme god after the lyueng and condicions of his seruauntes. For if they may parceyue that they whiche haue professed thy name / lyue viciouslye & thanne they crye out and saye. What a god is he / that hath suche maner of worshippers: Fye on suche a mayster that hath so vnrewly seruauntes: Out vpon suche a father / whose children be so leude: Banisshed be suche a kyng / yt hath suche maner of people and subiectes. Thy sonne therfore con­sydring this / taught vs / that lykewise as he bothe lyueeng and dyeng euer glorified thy name / so we also all that we might / shulde endeuer by chast and blamelesse condicions / to auaunce and preyse the clerenesse of thy glorie / sayeng vnto vs. Let your light shine in the sight of men / that they maye se your good workes / & in those glorify your father [c4] in heuen. But in vs O good father / there is no lyght at all excepte it wyll please the to sende vs any / whiche arte the contynuall and euerlastyng spring of all lyght: nor we of our selfes can bring forthe no good workes.

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Itaque tua bonitas in nobis operetur, tua lux in nobis luceat, quemadmodum lucet in rebus omnibus abs te conditis, aeterna tua potentia, inscrutabilis sapientia, inaestimabilis benignitas, quam praecipue tamen erga genus humanum declarare uoluisti. Itaque quocunque uertimus oculos, omnia canunt nominis tui gloriam. Aetherei spiritus die noctuque regem suum laudibus celebrant. Iam haec tam admiranda coelorum fabrica quam suspicimus, elementorum discors concordia, stati maris accessus ac decessus, fontium scatebrae, perennes amnium cursus, tot rerum, tot arborum, herbarum & animantium species, ac singulis quibusque sua quaedam uis insita, ut magnes ferrum attrahat, herbae morbis praesens remedium ad[a7v]ferat. Haec, inquam, omnia quid aliud nobis loquuntur quàm nominis tui gloriam? te solum esse uerum deum, solum aeternum, solum immortalem, solum potentem, solum sapientem, solum bonum, solum misericordem, solum iustum, solum ueracem, solum admirabilem, solum amabilem, solum adorandum, Iniuriam facit tuo glorioso nomini pater, qui ex his titulis, qui tibi soli debenture, quicquam sibi decerpit. Nam si quid harum uirtutum in nobis est, id omne abs tua proficiscitur munificentia. Da igitur pater, ut undiquaque glorificetur nomen tuum. Reluceat & in moribus nostris, non minus quàm in angelis caeterisque rebus abs te conditis, tui nominis gloria: ut quemadmodum qui mundum hunc contemplantur, ex admirabili opificio colligunt opificis magnitudinem: ita qui te non norunt, exemplo nostro commoti, & su am agnoscant turpitudinem, & tuam admirentur be nignitatem: & hac ra tione conuer si, simul nobiscum glorificent sanctissimum nomen tuum, ac filij tui Iesu, & ab utroque proficiscentis spi ritus sancti, quibus ex aequo debetur omnis gloria per omnia secula. Amen.

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Therfore good lorde we praye the / lette thy goodnesse worke in vs / & thy clere lyght shine in vs: as in all thynge that thou hast created / dothe shine thy eternall and endlesse power / thy wysdome vnable to be expressed & thy wonderfull goodnesse whiche moost specially / yet thou vouchsafest to shewe to mankynde. Nowe than whyder soeuer we loke / all thynges glorifye thy name: the erthely spirites bothe day & nyght neuer lynne4 pray[s]eng their lorde and kyng: ye wonderfull also & heuenly ingen that we beholde: the disagreyng concorde moreouer of the elamentes: the flowing and ebbyng of the see: ye bublissh­yng of ryuers: the enduring courses of waters: so many dyuers kyndes of thynges / so many kyndes of trees and of herbes / so many of creatures / and to euery thyng the proper apoynted and sette nature: As in ye Adamant stone to drawe yron / ye herbes to cure and heale diseases and sickenesse: All these thynges I saye / what other thyng do they shewe to vs than the glorie of thy name / & that thou arte onely very god / onely immortall / onely of all power and might / onely wyse / onely good / onely mercyfull / onely Iuste / onely trewe / onely marueylous onely to be loued & had in reuerence. Than father / we may well se that he doth wrong to thy glorious name / who soeuer take vpon him [c4v] self to be called by any of these names / for though there be in vs any of these rehersed vertues / yet all that cometh to vs from thy liberall goodnesse. Graunt nowe therfore father / that thy name on euery side be glorified / and that the light and glory of thy name / maye no lesse appere and shyne in our maners and lyuenge / than it shyneth in thy Angels / and in all thynge that thou hast created and made: that in lykewise as they / whiche beholde and loke vpon this worlde of the wonderfull and marueylous workemanshippe / do guesse the excellency of the maker therof: so they that knowe the nat / moued and stered by our example / maye bothe confesse their owne misery and wretchednes and marueile thy liberall goodnesse / and by these meanes turned and conuerted / may togyder with vs glorify the most holy name of the / of thy sonne / and of the holy gost / to whom indifferently all honour and glorie is due for euer. Amen.

4. “stop.” See OED, s.v. “lin, v.”

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Die lunae.

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[a8] adueniat regnum tuum.

ATER coelestis, autor, conditor, conseruator, instaurator, & gubernator omnium quaeque in coelis sunt, quaeque in terris: a quo uno manat omnis autoritas, pote [a8v] stas, regnum, imperium, & conditis & non conditis, uisibilius pariter & inuisibilibus: cui coelum thronus est, cui terra scabellum pedum, cui sceptrum aeterna atque immobilis uoluntas, cui nulla potentia potest resistere: olim per prophetas tuo spiritu afflatos pollicitus es tuis ad salutem humani generis regnum quoddam spirituale, quod in te renatos assereret in libertatem, exemptos à tyrannide diaboli, qui iam pridem regnabat in hoc mundo peccatis obnoxio: & ad hoc regnum asserendum filum tuum unigenitum è coelis in terras mittere dignatus es, qui nos morte sua redemptos, è seruis diaboli, redderet filios dei. Nam & Euangelicam doctrinam suam, dum in terris esset, solitus est appellare regnum coelorum: & regnum dei, quod occultum & inter nos abditum esse docuit: optant & illud tui filij, uotisque ardentibus flagitant: ut hoc regnum quod dominus noster Iesus coepit tibi uindicare, indies magis ac magis sese proferat: & quotidie latius propagetur in terris, donec illud tibi plenum & integrum tradat idem filius tuus, subiectis omnibus quos aeterna tua uoluntas huic regno destinarat: sublataque iam omni rebellione spirituum ac malarum cupiditatum, quae nunc quoque militant aduersus maiestatem tuam, tuaeque reipublicae tranquillitatem infestant, undique pacatum ac tranquillum sit regnum tuum. Adhuc enim mundus hic omnibus machinis oppugnat filios tuos, mortali corpore onustos: adhuc humanae cupiditates, ueterisque peccati [b1] reliquiae rebellionem moliuntur aduersus spiritum, adhuc noxij spiritus, quos tu è ciuitate tua coelesti deturbasti, è sublimi aëre telis igneis impetunt, quos tu gratuita tua bonitate ex huius mundi regno selectos, cooptasti in regnum tuum filij tui cohaeredes. Da pater omnipotens, ut quos tua pietas semel à peccati tyrannide liberatos, tuoque regno asscriptos esse uoluit,

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Dueniat regnum tuum. O father in heuen / whiche arte the onely causer / maker / sauiour / restorer / & gouernour of all / bothe in heuen and in erthe / out of whom cometh & procedeth all authorite / power / kyngdome / and rule / aswell to thynges vncreated as created / aswell to thinges invisible as visible / whose trone and seate of maiestie is the heuen: & the erthe as fotestole: whose kyngly septre & mace / is thyne eternall and most [d] establisshed wyll / whom no power is able to withstande. Ones thou promisest thy people by ye mouthes of thy prophetes / for the helth of mankynde / a certayne spirituall realme / whiche shulde bryng into liberte / those that were thyne & borne anewe in the / and shulde delyuer them out of the tyrannous handelyng of the fende / whiche in tyme past raigned as prince in the worlde / sore entangled & combred with synne. And to the gettyng & optaynynge of this realme / thou vouchsauest to sende from heuen downe into the erthe thy onely sonne / whiche with the losse of his owne lyfe / redemynge vs where we were afore seruauntes of the deuyll / shulde make vs the children of god: and verily thy sonne / while he lyued here in erthe / was wont to call his gospell / the heuenly kyngdome & the realme of god: whose knowlege yet he sayde / to be hydde and kepte secrete from vs / but nat withstandyng / thy children humbly require / and with feruente desyre / beseke the that this realme / whiche our lorde Iesus chalenged for the / myght daylye more and more be disclosed and opyned here in erth / vntyll that tyme come / in whiche that same thy sonne shall restore and rendre it vp to the full and hole / whan all those haue subdued themselfe / whom thy goodnesse or the begynnyng of ye worlde hath apoynted to dwell in this realme. And whan all obstinate and rebelleous spirites / and all malycious and yuell desyres be fully quenched & wyped away / whiche hiderto and at this day / make warre and insurrection agaynst thy maieste / whiche [d1v] vexe and vnquiete thy communalte / what time thy royalme shalbe in sure peace and tranquillite: For verily as yet the worlde / by all the meanes & subtilties it can / oppresseth thy children / wandryng here bodily in erth as yet: also corrupt & vnclene affections / and olde original synne / rebell & striue ayenst the spirite: as yet noyous and wycked spirites / whiche thou bany­ ssheddest / and put out of the heuenly cite / do assaut with fyrely dartes from aboue those / whom thou of thy mere goodnesse hast deuyded from this worlde / and as chosen folke and parttakers of thy sonne / hast apoynted to thy royalme. Graunt father of all myght / that they / whom thy goodnesse ones hath delyuered from the tyranny of synne / and assygned to dwell in thy royalme / maye by the

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eiusdem tuae pietatis beneficio persistant in libertate sua: neque quisquam abs te filioque tuo deficiens, reuoluatur in diaboli tyrannidem. Ita fiet, ut & nos feliciter per filium tuum regnemus in te, & tu ad nominis tui gloriam regnes in nobis. Tua enim gloria, nostra erit felicitas: & nostra felicitas, tua erit benignitas. Docuit nos filius tuus Iesus huius mundi regnum contemnere, quod opibus, quod satellitio, quod copijs & armis constat, quod fastu uiolentiaque geritur, quod crudelitate & paratur & defenditur. Nam ille spiritu coelesti uicit impium spiritum huius mundi principem, innocentia superauit peccatum, mansuetudine uicit ferociam, per summam ignominiam recuperauit aeternam gloriam, per mortem restituit uitam, per crucem de spiritibus impijs egit triumphum. Sic mirabiliter bellasti, sic uicisti, sic triumphans ac regnas pater in filio tuo Iesu, per quem nos in huius regni consortium allegisti. Sic regnans ac triumphas in sanctis martyribus tuis, in castis uirginibus tuis, in incorruptis confessoribus tuis. Nec enim illi suis uiribus aut praesidijs uicerunt tyrannorum sae [b1v] uitiam, aut carnis lasciuiam, aut huius mundi maliciam: sed tuus spiritus, quem illis impertire dignatus es, ad tui nominis gloriam, & ad humani generis salutem haec omnia coepit, prouexit, ac perfecit. Optamus ut in nobis quoque semper efflorescat regnum tuum, qui tametsi non aedimus miracula, quoniam tempus aut res non exigit, si non includimur, excruciamur, secamur, urimur, suffigimur in crucem, demergimur in mare, aut decollamur: tamen illustrabitur et in nobis uis ac splendor tui regni, si mundus conspexerit nos tui spiritus praesidijs inuictos aduersus omnes insultus satanae, adueresus carnem ad ea quae sunt inimica spiritui solicitantem, aduersus mundum omni machinarum genere prouocantem, ut deficiamus à fiducia, quam semel in te fiximus. Quoties amore tui spreto huius mundi regno, sequimur promissa regni coelestis, quoties reiecto mammona, unicum illud margaritam Euangelicum amplectimur:

74 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

benifitte of the same benygne goodnesse contynue / and stedfastly abyde in theyr liberte and fredome: and that none leauynge and fayling from the and thy sonne / retourne agayne in the tyrannous seruice of the deuyll: & so bothe we by thy sonne shall raigne in the to our welthe / and thou in vs to thy glorie: for thou art glorified in our blysse / and our blysse is of thy goodnesse. Thy sonne Iesus taught vs we shulde dispice the realme of this worlde / whiche standeth all by rychesse / and is holde vp by garrisons of men / by hostes and armour / which also what soeuer it doth / dothe by pryde and violence / and is both gotten / kept / & defended by fierse cruelnesse: & he with the holy goost / ouercame ye wycked spirite that ruled as chefe and heed in the worlde afore he by inno[d2]cency and purenesse of lyuyng / had the victorie of synne / by mekenesse venquesshed cruelnesse / by suffraunce of many dispitefull rebukes / recouered euerlastyng glory / by his owne deth restored life / and by his crosse had triumphe vpon the wycked spirites. Thus wonderfully hast thou father warred and ouercome: after this maner thou both triumphest & reignest in thy sonne Iesus / by whom it hath pleased the of thy goodnesse / to take vs in to the congregacion of the dwellers in thy royalme. Thus also thou tryumphest and reignest in thy holy martyrs / in thy chast virgins and pure confessours / whiche yet neyther by theyr owne strength nor power / dyde ouercome the fiersenesse and displeasure of tyrantes / ne the raging or the wantonnesse of the flesshe / ne the maliciousnosse of this worlde. But it was thy spirite father / whiche it pleased the to gyue them to ye glorie of thy name / and the helthe of mankynde / that was bothe the begynner and ender of all this in them: And we father / hertely desire the / that thy realme may florisshe also in vs: whiche all though we do no myracles / for asmoche as neyther tyme nor mater requireth: albeit we be nat imprysoned nor turmented: though we be nat wounded nor brent / althogh we be nat crucified nor drowned: thoughe we be nat beheeded: yet natwithstandyng / the strength and clerenesse of thy realme: may shine and be noble in vs / if the worlde perceyue / that we by the helpe of thy spirite / stande stedfast & sure agaynst all assautes of the deuyll / and agaynst the flesshe: [d2v] whiche alwaye stereth and prouoketh vs to those thynges / that be contrary to the spirite & agaynst the worlde / whiche by all the wayes it can / moueth vs to forsake and leaue the trust that we haue ones put in the / As often so euer as for thy loue we despice and sette nought by the realme of this worlde / and with full trust hange vpon the heuenly kyngdome / that thou hast promysed vs: as often also / as we forsake and leaue honourynge of erthely richesse / and onely worshyp and enbrace ye precious and gostly lernyng of the gospell / as often

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quoties repudiatis omnibus, quae iuxta carnem ad tempus dulcia uidentur, aeternae felicitatis spe, omnia quamuis dura, fortiter perpetimur: quoties uehementissimos naturae affectus, & ea quae nobis sunt charissima, ueluti parentes, liberos, uxorem, cognatos amore tui negligimus: quoties comprimentes aestus iracundiae, pro conuicio sermonem amicum, pro maleficio beneficium tui respectu rependimus: toties debellas in nobis regnum satanae, ac tui regni potentiam aperis. Sic [b2] uisum est pater tuae sapientiae, ut hac graui perpetuaque colluctatione uirtutem tuorum & exerceres & confirmares. Auge uires filijs tuis, ut semper è praelio discedant firmiores, ac paulatim imminutis aduersariorum opibus, tu indies magis ac magis regnes in nobis. Sed nondum tuo iugo pater optime totus mundus ceruicem submisit. Multas nationes adhuc occupat tyrannus ille satanas. Nondum est unum ouile, & unus pastor, quod futurum expectamus, Iudaeis etiam in regnum Euangelicum sese aggregantibus: multis adhuc ignotum est, quanta libertas sit, quanta dignitas sit, quanta felicitas, tuo coelesti regno subijci: & ideo malunt esse mancipia diaboli, quàm filij tui, cohaeredes Iesu, consortes regni coelestis. Et inter hos quoque qui nunc intra ecclesiae tuae moenia uersantur, tuique regni insigne prae se ferunt, heu non parum multi sunt, qui conspirant cum aduer­ sario: regnique tui gloriam, quod in ipsis est, dedecorant, ac robur labefactant. Optamus igitur unice tempus illud, quod tibi soli notum esse uoluisti, quo iuxta filij tui promissum, missi angeli tui purgabunt aream ecclesiae tuae, ac sublatis zizanijs purum triticum colligent in horreum, ac de regno tuo tollent omnia scandala, quum iam nec erit fames, nec pauperitas, nec nuditas, nec morbus, nec mors, nec persequutor, nec ullum omnino malum, aut mali metus, sed totum

76 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

as we refuse those thynges / that for the season seme swete and pleasaunt to the flesshely & carnal appetite / and in hope and trust of eternall felicite we suffre paciently and valiantly all thynge / be it neuer so harde: as often also as we can be content to forsake our naturall affections / and that whiche we haue moost dere / as our fathers and mothers / wyues / chyldren / and kynsefolke / for the loue of the: Likewise as often as we oppresse and refrayne ye furious and fiersely braydes5 of angre / and gyue mylde & meke wordes / to those yt chyde and braule with vs / and do good to them / whiche do vs iniury and wronge: and all for thy sake. So often father thou warrest in vs / and ouercomest the realme of the deuyll / & openyst ye myght and power of thy realme. Thus it hath pleased and lyked thy wysdome father / by continuall and greuous batayle / to exercise / confyrme / and make stedfaste the vertue and strengthe of thy people. Encrease suche strengthe in thy children / that they [d3] maye euer retourne stronger from their batayle / and that whan by lytell and lytell / their enemies and aduersaries myght is minysshed and broken thou mayest euery day more and more raygne in vs: But the tyme is nat yet come good father / in whiche all the worlde haue subdued them selfe to thy yoke: For as yet / that tyrannous fende hath a do with many and diuers nacions: There is nat yet one herde / and one herde mayster / whiche we hope shalbe / whan the iewes also shall bryng and submyt them selfe to the spirituall and gostely lernyng of ye gospell: for yet many knowe nat howe great a liberte it is / and what a dignite / and how great a felicite / to be subiectes to the heuenly realme: and that is the cause why they had rather be the seruauntes of the deuyll / than thy children inheritours with Iesu / and parttakers of ye kyng­dome of heuen / and amongest those two father / that walke within the cloyster of thy churche / & seme as chefe in thy realme / there are nat a fewe / (alas) which holde on their aduersaries side: and as moche as lyeth in them / abate / shame / & dishonest the glory of thy realme. Werfore we specially desyre and wisshe for that tyme / whiche thou woldest none to knowe but thy selfe alone / in whiche / acordyng to the promyse of thy sonne / thy angels shall come and make clene the floore of thy churche / and gader to guether into thy barne the pure corne / deuyded and seuered fro the cockle / & plucke out of thy realme / all maner occasyon of sclaundre / What tyme there shall neyther be hun[d3v]ger nor pouerte: no necessite of clothing: no disease: no dethe: no pursuer: no hurt or yuell at all / ne any feare or suspicion of hurte / but than all 5. Different meanings may apply: (1) twists or knots, as in braiding hair, connoting snares or entanglements; (2) a sudden assault or attack, an outburst of passion or anger (OED, s.v. braid, n.I.1.b,d); (3) a “sudden, jerky motion,” as in brandishing a sword or dealing a blow (OED, s.v. braid, v.1.)

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corpus unigeniti tui simul agglomeratum capiti [b2v] suo, regni coelestis felicissimo consortio perfruatur. Qui uero interim diabolo tyranno seruire maluerint, cum suo domino supplicijs aeternis addicentur. Nimirim hoc est regnum Israël, quod Iesu Christo filio tuo relicturo terras, & ad te redituro discipuli mature restitui postulabant. Reddidisti coelum ab omni rebellione tranquillum eiecto Lucifero cum sua factione. Sic olim resuscitatis in uitam corporibus hominum, separabis oues ab hoedis: & qui regnum Euangelicum hic pro sua uirili sunt amplexi, ad aeterni regni possessionem inuitabuntur, quod illis destinarat tua bonitas ante contidum mundum. Hunc diem à filio tuo Iesu promissum, optamus pater in coelis habitans ac regnans, filij tui in terris, hoc est, in exilio habitantes, grauati hoc domicilio terreni corporis, & ingemiscentes, quod interim obnoxij multis incommodis distrahimur à tuo consortio: unde nobis tum denique perfecta felicitas proficiscetur, quum aperta iam facie uidebimus regem ac patrem nostrum in decore gloriae suae. Hanc fiduciam non nobis praebent nostra merita, quae scimus esse nulla: sed tua benignitas, quae filium totum nobis impendit, quae spiritum coelestem uelut ara­bonem huius haereditatis impartit. Quod si dederis, ut constanter perseueremus in filio tuo Iesu, non poteris nos à regni tui consortio seiungere: cui cum eodem filio & spirituo sancto debetur omnis honor, decus, & gloria in aeterna secula. Amen.

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[b3] fiat uoluntas tua.

ater altor ac moderator omnium, quos tuus filius agnoscit fratres: agnoscit autem quicunque syncera fide nomen ipsius in baptismo professi sunt, clamant è terris filij tui ad te coe [b3v] los inhabitantem, & ab omni rerum conditarum mutabilitate procul semotum: optantes quidem uenire in consortium regni tui coelestis, quod nullo malorum admixtu uitiatum erit: sed intelligunt ad eam tranquillitatem non recipiendos,

78 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

the body of thy dere sonne heaped togyder in theyr heed / shall take fruicion and pleasure of thy blessed company of heuen. & they whiche in the meane tyme had rather serue the tyrannous fende / shall togyther with their maister be banysshed and sente awaye to euerlastyng punisshement: And trewely this is the realme of Israell / whiche whan Iesus Christ forsoke the erthe / & retourned agayne to his disciples / desyred myght shortely be restored. Than thou madest heuen free and rydde from all rebellion / what tyme Lucifere with his company was caste out. So ones in the day of dome and iugement whan the bodyes shall aryse / thou shalte departe the sheepe from the gottes: & than who so euer hath here with all diligence embrased the spirytuall and goostely realme of the gospell / shalbe desyred and brought to the / to the inherytaunce of the euerlastynge kyngdome / to ye whiche thy goodnesse had apoynted theym or the worlde was made. This fortunate and happy day whiche thy sonne Iesus promysed shulde come / we thy children good father / greatlye desire whiche dwelle here in erthe as outlawes in exyle / sore lodened with the hugenesse of the erthely body / suffryng in the mean tyme / many greuous displeasures / and sorowyng that we be withdrawen from thy company / wherof than we shall haue perfite pleasure and fruycion / whan face to face we shall [d4] se and beholde our kyng and father / raignyng in his great glorie. And yet we haue nat this hope & truste of our owne merites and desertes / whiche we knowe verily as non / but onely of thy liberall goodnesse: Wherby it lyked the to bestowe thyne owne sonne holly for vs / and to sende vs the holy goost as pledge and token of this inheritaunce: & if it wyll please the also to graunt / that we maye stedfastly and without any waueryng / contynue in thy sonne Iesus: than thou canst nat departe vs from the company of thy realme: To whome with that same thy sonne and the holy goost all renome / honour / and glorie is due worlde without ende. Amen.

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the thyrde peticion

Iat voluntas tua sicut in celo et in terra. O father whiche art the norysshor and ordrer of all / whom it pleaseth thy sonne to aknowlege as his bretherne / and he so aknowlegeth all those / yt in pure faythe professeth his name in baptysme: Thy children here in erthe call and crye to ye dwellyng in heuen / a place farre out of all chaungeable mutabilite of thynges created / desyryng in dede / to come to thy heuenly and celestiall company / whiche is defouled with no maner spotte of yuell / sauyng they knowe well that non can be taken and receyued in

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nisi qui hic interim pijs studijs meditantur esse, quod illic futuri sunt. Idem enim regnum est, eadem ciuitas coelestium ac terrestrium, nisi quod hic interim colluctatio grauis est cum carne, cum mundo, cum satana. Et isthic tametsi non est quod cruciet, aut contaminet felicitatem beatorum spiritum, est tamen quod ad consummationem felicitatis desideretur: nimirum ut omnia filij tui membra colligantur in unum, totumque corpus purum & integrum suo iungatur capiti. Itaque fiet, ut neque Christus ullum suorum membrorum desideret: nec animae piorum desiderent sua corpora, quae ut in terris habuerant consortia afflictionum: ita cupiunt in coelis à gaudiorum consortio non separari. Porrò regni coelestis concordiam hic in terris meditantur, qui quandiu uersantur in mortali corpore, uelut germani & obedientes filij, student [sic] ea facere, quae tua dictat uoluntas, non ad quae solicitat cupiditas: non dijudicantes quare tu hoc aut illud uolueris, sed satis habentes quod ita sit tua uoluntas, quem sibi persuasem habent nihil uelle, nisi quod est optimum. Quae sit autem uoluntas tua, ex unigenito filio tuo didicimus. Ille uoluntati tuae fuit obediens usque ad mortem, & hanc uocem nobis deprompsit: Pater, si fieri [b4] potest, transfer [sic] à me poculum hoc: ueruntamen fiat quod tu uis, non quod ego: ut iam pudeat quemuis hominem suam uoluntatem praeferre tuae. Habet caro uoluntatem suam, quam tenere deamat homo: habet mundus uoluntatem suam, habet satanas uoluntatem suam à tua multum diuersam. Caro enim conscupiscit aduersus spiritum, quem nobis impertisti: & mundus solicitat ad amorem rerum fluxarum: & satanas uult ea, quae pertrahunt homines in aeternum exitium. Non satis est in baptismo nos esse professos fore dicto audientes tuis iussis, ac renunciasse imperio satanae, nisi per omnem uitam constanter id praestemus, quod sumus professi. Sed hoc praestare non possumus, nisi tu uires addideris conantibus: ut iam non nostra uoluntas, sed tua pater in nobis operetur, quod tua sapientia iudicauit esse optimum. Qui carni uiuunt,

80 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

to so great a tranquillite & quietnesse / but onely they / whiche with busye studye / whyle they lyue here / labour to be such as ther must be: [d4v] Therfore it is all one realme / bothe of heuen and erthe / sauyng this difference / that here we haue sore & greuous conflicte with the flesshe / the worlde / and the deuyll: and there all though there is nothyng that might minysshe or defoyle the welthe of blessed soules: Yet as touchynge the full perfection of felicite / there is some maner mysse / whiche is / that all the membres and partes of thy sonne be gathered together / and that the hole body of thy sonne / safe and sounde be ioyned to his heed / Wherby neyther Christe shall lacke any of his partes and membres / nor good mennes soules theyr bodyes: whiche lykewise as they were euer here in erthe parttakers of theyr punisshementes and afflictions: so their desyre is to haue them companions of their ioye in heuen. And they finally in this worlde / go about to folowe the vnite and concorde of the heuenly kyngedome / whiche all the tyme they lyue bodily in erthe / as it becometh naturall and obedient children / studye with all diligence to fulfyll those thynges / whiche they knowe shall content thy mynde & pleasure / and nat what their owne sensuall appetite gyueth them / ne iugyng or disputyng why thou woldest this or that to be done / but thynkyng it sufficient / that thus thou woldest it / whom they knowe surely to wyll nothing / but that that is best. And what thy will is / we lerned sufficiently of thy onely begotton & moost dere sonne. He was obeydient to thy wyll / euyn to his owne dethe / and thus he sayd / for our lernyng and instruction. Father / if it may conue [e1] nyently be / suffre this drynke of my passyon to be withdrawen from me / howe be it / yet thy wyll be fulfylled and nat myne. So that than nedes must man be a shamed / to preferre & set forth his owne wyll / if Christ our maister was content to cast his owne wyll awaye / and subdue it to thyne. The flesshe hath his propre wyll and delyte / whiche man naturally desyreth to kepe and folowe. The worlde also hath a wyll by it selfe / and the deuyll his wyll / farre contrarye to thyne. For the flesshe coueteth agaynst the spirite whiche we haue receyued of the: and the worlde entyseth vs to sette our loue on frayle and vanysshyng thynges: and the deuyll laboureth about that / that might bring man to euerlasting distruction. Nor it is nat inough / yt in baptyme we haue professed / yt we wyll be obedient to thy preceptes / and there to haue renounced the deuyls seruice / excepte we labour all our lyfe / to perfourme stedfastly that / whiche we haue professed: But that we can nat perfourme / but if thou gyue vs strengthe / to helpe forthe our purpose: so that our wyll haue no place in vs / but let thy wyll father worke in vs that / whiche thy wysdome iudgeth and thynketh best for vs. Who so euer lyueth after the flesshly

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tibi mortui sunt, & iam filij tui non sunt. Quin & filijs tuis quandiu corpus hoc terrenum circumferimus, subinde negocium facessit carnis uoluntas, tuae praeire gestiens. Da ut semper tua uincat uoluntas, siue mori nos uis, siue uiuere, siue affligi, ut corrigamur: siue subleuari, ut tuae benignitati gratias agamus. Satanae uoluntatem sequuntur, qui sacrificant idolis: qui conuicijs incessunt adorandum filium tuum Iesum: qui diffidunt illius promissis: qui rebellionem parant Euangelio: qui per inuidiam exitium moliuntur proximo: qui per fas, per nefas in hoc mundo properant ditescere: qui foedis uoluptatibus iniqui [b4v] nantur. At tua uoluntas est, & corpus & animum habere purum & castum ab omnibus inquinamentis huius seculi: tuum, filijque tui honorem anteponere caeteris omnibus: nemini irasci, nemini inuidere, neminem ulcisci, sed pro malefactis rependere beneficium: denique famem, exilium, carcerem, cruciatus, mortem perpeti citius, quàm à tua sancta uoluntate discedere. Hoc ut indies magis ac magis praestare ualeamus, adiuua pater coelestis, ut indies caro minus reluctetur spiritui nostro, ut spiritus noster magis ac magis unanimis fiat spiritui uo. Et quemadmodum nunc multis in locis parent uoluntati tuae, qui obediunt Euangelio filij tui, ita idem fiat per uniuersum terrarum orbem, ut omnes intelligant te solum esse rerum omnium monarcham, tuisque diuinis legibus uolentes ac lubentes obediant in terris, quemadmodum in coelis nullus est, qui tuae uoluntati repugnet. Nec possumus efficaciter uelle quod tu uis, nisi tua diuina uoluntas nos attraxerit. Iubes ut tuae morem geramus uoluntati: neque enim filiorum nomen promerebimur, nisi paternis iussis per omnia fuerimus obsequentes, Sed tua pietas, quae nos nihil promeritos ad hoc honoris adoptare dignata est, eadem dignabitur & promptam & constantem largiri uoluntatem, ne qua in re diuinae uoluntatis tuae praescriptum praetergrediamur: sed mortificata carne nostra tuo spiritu agamur ad omnia quae pia sunt, grataque

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& carnall appetite they are deed to the / and than nat as thy children. Ye / and we thy children also / as longe as we are here bodily in erthe / haue among nat a litell businesse and a do / in venquesshyng the flesshly delite: whiche laboreth to preuent thy wyll: but graunt good father / that thyne euer ouercome & haue ye [e1v] better / whether it lyke the we lyue or dye / or to be punisshed for our correction / or be in prosperite / to the entent we shulde gyue the thankes for thy liberall goodnesse. And they folowe and obeye the wyl of the deuyl / whiche do sacrifice and homage to idols / whiche sclaunderously backebite thy most honorable sonne / and for enuy and yuell wyll / go about to brynge theyr neyghbour in to perill and distruction: and so they may shortly waxe ryche / care nat whether they do ryght or wrong / and are al fulfylled with corrupt and vnclene thoughtes / But this is thy wyll father / that we shulde kepe both our body and mynde chast and pure from al vnclenesse of the worlde / and that we shulde preferre and set more by thyne honour & thy sonnes / than all other thynges beside. And that we shulde be angry with no man / ne enuye or reuenge any man / but alway be redy to do good for yuell: ye / & to be content rather with turmentes / hunger / imprisonement / ban­ ysshement / and dethe / than in any thynge to be contrarye to thy pleasure: And that we may be able euery day more and more / to perfourme all this / helpe vs O father in heuen / that ye flesshe may euer more and more be subiect to the spirite / and our spirite of one assent / and one mynde with thy spirite. And likewyse as nowe in dyuerse places thy children / whiche are obedient to the gospell / obey and do after thy wyll: so graunt they may do in all the worlde besyde / that euery man may know and vnderstande / that thou alone art the onely heed and ruler of al thyng / and that [e2] in lyke wyse as there are none in heuen / whiche mutter and rebell agaynst thy wyll / so let euery man here in erthe / with good mynde and gladde chere obey thy wyll and godly preceptes. Nor we can not effectually and fully mynde what yu good lorde wyllest / excepte it wyll please the to plucke & drawe vs therto. Thou commaundest vs to be obedyent to thy wyll and pleasure / and in dede they are nat worthy to be called children / but if in all poyntes they folowe and obey theyr fathers byddyng: but sithe it hath liked thy goodnesse to take vs / although farre vnworthy into so great an honour of thy name: let it please the also of thy gentylnesse to gyue vs a redy and stedfast wyll / that in nothyng we ouerhippe6 or be agaynst that / whiche thy godly and diuine wyll hath apoynted vs / but that we kyll and mortifye our flesshly and carnall lustes / and by thy spirite be ledde to ye doyng of all good workes / and al thyng that is pleasaunt vnder thy 6. “pass over, omit, leave something undone, skip over something.” See OED, s.v. “overhip, v.”

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oculis tuis: ut & tu pater agnoscas filios non degeneres, & fi[b5]lius tuus agnoscat fratres germanos, hoc est, uterque suum in no bis agnoscat beneficium, quibus est, communis cum spiritu sancto gloria in aeterna se cula. Amen.

Die Mercurij

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panem nostrum. [b5v]

ater noster coelestis, qui tua ineffabili benignitate largiter pascis omnia, quae mirabiliter condidisti prospice & nobis tuis filijs in coelestem familiam selectis, & ex te pendentibus, spiritualem ac coelestem alimoniam: ut tuae uoluntati seruientes, adolescamus et grandescamus quotidianis uirtutum auctibus, donec iuxta naturae nostrae modulum perueniamus ad perfectum robur plenitudinis, quae est in Christo Iesu. Filij huius mundi quandiu non sunt abdicati, sed parentibus utuntur propicijs, non sunt soliciti de uictu, nimirum prospiciente ipsis benignitate paterna. Nos autem multo minus solicitos esse conuenit, quos Iesus filius tuus docuit abijcere omnem solicitudinem crastini: confirmans patrem tam opulentum, tam benignum, tam amantem, cui tantopere curae sumus, non commissurum, ut quum passerculis etiam uagis de uictu prospiciat: quum lilia pratensia tanto decore uestiat, nobis ad filiorum honorem cooptatis uestis desit aut cibus corporis. Sed illa potius omnibus neglectis quaerenda, quae pertinent ad regnum tuum, eiusque iusticiam. Neque enim tibi placet iusticia Pharisaeorum, quae carnalis est, quum tui regni iusticia spiritualis syncera fide constet, & charitate non ficta. Non magnum est tuae largitati corpusculum hoc pane frumenticio pascere, quod etiamsi non pereat fame, tamen morbo, senio, alióue casu breui sit periturum: sed filij spirituales à patre spiri[b6]tuum spiritualem illum ac coelestem panem flagitamus, per quem uere uiuimus omnes, qui filij tui uere nominamur. Is est sermo tuus omnipotens uitae largitor & altor, quem nobis de coelo mittere dignatus es fame pereuntibus. Non enim explebat animum nostrum panis

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sight. Wherby yu father mayst aknowledge vs as thy children naturall / and nat out of kynde / and thy sonne as kynde & good bretherne: that is to saye / that bothe twayne maye aknowledge in vs his owne propre benefyte / to whome with the holy goost equall and indifferent / glorie is due for euer. Amen.

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1

the fourthe peticion.

Anem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. O father in heuen / whiche of thy excedyng goodnesse / moost plentuously fedest all thynges yt thou [e2v] hast so wondersly created / prouide for vs thy children / whiche are chosen to dwelle in thy celestiall and heuenly house / and that hang holly and onely of thy sonne / some spirituall and goostly fode / that we obeyng thy wyll and precepts / may dayly encrease and waxe bigger in vertue / vntyl after the course of nature we haue optayned and gathered a full and perfyte strength in our lorde Iesu Christ. The children of this worlde / so longe as they are nat banysshed ne out of theyr frendes fauour / all that tyme they take lytell care of their meate and drynke: sithe their fathers of their tendre loue towarde them / make sufficient prouision for them. Than moche lesse ought we to be carefull or studious / whom thy sonne Iesus taught shulde caste away all care of the morowe meale / perswadyng and assuring vs / that so riche a father / so gentyll / so louynge / and that had so great mynde of vs / & whiche sente meat to the lytell byrdes / and so nobly clotheth ye lyles in the medowe / wolde nat suffre his children / which he hath endued with so honourable a name / to lacke meate and bodily apparayle: but all thyng sette asyde that belongeth to the body / we shulde specially and aboue all / seke and labour about those thynges / whiche pertayneth and belongeth to thy realme / and the iustice therof. For as touching the iustes of the pharises that sauereth all carnally / thou vtterly dispysest and settest nought by: For the spirituall iustes of thy realme / standeth by pure faythe and vnfayned charyte. And it were no great mater or shewe of [e3] thy plentye / to fede with breed made of corne the body / whiche althoughe it perisshed nat for hunger / yet it must nedes dye & perysshe within short space / eyther by syckenesse / age / or other chaunce / but we thy spirituall and goostly children / desyre and craue of our spirituall father / that spirituall & celestiall breed / wherby we are verily relyued / whiche be verily and truely called thy children: yt breed is thy worde full of all power / bothe the gyuer and norissher of lyfe: whiche breed yu vouchesauest to sende vs downe from heuen / what tyme we were lyke to haue perisshed for hungre. For verily / the breed

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philosophorum aut pharisaeorum: sed panis ille tuus, quem nobis misisti, uitam reddedit mortuis: de quo quisquis ederit, non morietur in aeternum. Per hunc panem reuiximus, per hunc alimur ac saginamur, et adolescimus ad perfectum robur spiritus. Hic nobis quotidie traijciendus in animae uiscera: nec salutaris est, nisi tu pater quotidie dederis. Corpus unigeniti tui panis est, cuius participes sunt omnes, qui uersantur in magna domo tua, quae est ecclesiae. Vnus panis est, omnium communis, quemadmodum et nos unum corpus sumus, constans ex membris diuersis, sed eodem spiritu uegetatis. Verum hic quamquam ab omnibus sumitur, multis tamen adfert mortem. Non enim adfert uitam, nisi tu dederis quotidie, addens tuae gratiae coelestis condimentum, ut sumentibus sit salubris Veritas est filius tuus, & ueritas Euangelica panis est, quem nobis reliquit in alimoniam spiritualem. Et hic panis multis amarus est, qui animi palatam febri malarum cupiditatum habent infectum. Quod si tu pater eum porrexeris, suauis erit, refidet afflictos, eriget collapsos, robur addet infirmis, eriget pusillos, denique & uitam conferet aeternam. Quoniam autem infirmitas humanae naturae semper in deterius prolabitur: quoniam animus quotidie [b6v] multis impetitur arietibus: quotidie tuo pane filios confirmes oportet, impares alioqui futuros tot tam ualidis hostibus, tot assultibus, tot terriculamentis. Quis enim ferat esse mundi ludibrium, relegari, protrudi in carcerem, uinciri, damnari, torqueri, exui facultatibus spoliari uxore charissima ac dulcissimis liberis: denique crudeli morte perimi, nisi fuerit tuo coelesti pane subinde confirmatus? Qui docet Euangelicum sermonem, porrigit nobis hunc panem: sed frustra porrigit, nisi tu dederis. Complures sumunt corpus filij tui: complures audiunt sermonem Euangelicum, sed nihilo uegetiores discedunt, quàm uenerant: propterea quod non promerentur, ut tu pater illis porrigas inuisibiliter.

86 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

and teachynge of the proude philosophers and pharises / coude nat suffice and content our mynde: But that breed of thyne / whiche thou sendest vs / restored deed men to lyfe / of whiche who soeuer dothe eate shall neuer dye. This breed relyued vs: by this breed we are norysshed and fatted: and by this we come vp to the perfite and full strength of ye spirite. This breed though day by day it be eaten and distributed to euery bowell of the soule / yet but if thou father doest gyue it / it is nat holesome nor any thyng auayleth. The blessed body of thy dere sonne is the breed / wherof we be all parttakers / yt dwell within thy large house of the churche. It is one breed that indifferently belongeth to vs all / lykewyse as we are but one body / made of sondrye and diuers membres / but yet quickened with one spirite: and though al take of this breed / yet to many it hath ben dethe and distruction / for it can nat be relefe / but to su[e3v]che as thou reachest it vnto / mynglynge it with thy heuenly grace / by the reason wherof it maye be holesome to the receyuours. Thy sonne is verite and trouth / trouth also is the breed and teachyng of the gospell / whiche he lefte behynde hym for our spirituall fode / and this breed likewise to many hath ben vnsauery / which haue had ye mouth of theyr soule out of taste / by the feuer of corrupte affections. But and it wyll please the good father to gyue forthe this breed / than it must of necessite be swete & pleasaunt to the eaters: than it shal confort those that be in tribulation / and plucke vp those that be slydden & fallen downe / and make stronge those that be sicke and weake / and finally brynge vs to euerlasting lyfe. And for asmoche as the imbecilite and weaknesse of mannes nature / is euer redy & apt to declyne into the worse / & the soule of man so contynually assauted & layde at with so many subtile ingyns / it is expedient and necessary / that thou dayly make stronge & hert thy children with thy breed / whiche elles are farre vnable to resyst so many and so stronge ennemyes / so many assautes / and so many fearefull & terrible dartes. For who father might abyde to be had in derision of the worlde / to be outlawed and banisshed / to be putte in prison: to be fettred and manacled: to be spoyled of all his goodes / and by stronge hande / be depriued of the company of his moost dere wyfe and welbeloued children / but if nowe and than / he were hertened with thy heuenly and gostly breed: He that teacheth the lernyng of the gospell / he is [e4] he / yt gyueth vs forthe this breed / whiche yet he gyueth all in vayne / except it be also gyuen by ye. Many there are / whiche receyue the body of thy sonne / and that here the worde and doctryne of the gospell / But they departe fro thence no stronger than they came / bycause they haue nat deserued that thou good father / shuldest priuely and inuisibly reache it forthe vnto them.

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Hunc igitur panem benignissime pater imparti filijs tuis quotidie, donec eo uesci continget in mensa tua coelesti, quae regni filios feliciter explebit perenni copia ueritatis aeternae, qua perfrui perfecta felicitas est, nesciens desiderium alterius rei, siue quae in coelis est, siue quae in terris. In te enim uno sunt omnia, & extra te nihil est, quod sit expetendum, qui cum filio tuo Iesu, cumque spiritu sancto uiuis & regnas in omnia secula. Amen.

E

[b7] et remitte nobis.7

st quidem illud tuae uoluntatis pater coelestis, autor pacis, & amator concordiae, ut filij tui quos tua bonitas tot unani­ mitatis uinculis copulauit, quos eodem animas spiritu, eodem [b7v] baptismo purgas, in eadem domo quae est ecclesia socias communibus ecclesiae sacramentis foues, ad eandem haereditatem regni coelestis ex aequo uocasti, quo sint firmiores: in tua familia uiuant unanimes, neque quicquam dissidij sit inter eiusdem corporis membra, sed mutua charitate copulentur: tamen quoniam adhuc mortale corpus circunferunt, fieri uix potest, quin per im becillitam naturae quaedam incidant offensae, quae fraternae concordiae serenitatem, si non extinguant, certe obnubilent extincturae tandem ni tua clementia quotidie condonet, quotidie peccantibus. Quoties autem fratres nostros offendimus, offendimus & te pater, qui iussisti, ut proximum nostrum non secus diligamus, quàm nosipsos. Sed filius tuus non ignorans imbecillitatem membrorum suorum, & huic malo conmonstrauit remedium, in certam spem uocans nos, fore ut tua clementia remittat nobis peccata nostra, si nos uicissim ex animo condonauerimus, quod frater peccauit in nos.

7. Erasmus chose remitte instead of the traditional dimitte wording. Germain Marc’hadour, the transcriber of Precatio dominica for the edition reprinted here (Moreana 2:7 [1965]), silently replaced Erasmus’s remitte with the Vulgate’s dimitte. Et remitte nobis. Please see the historical discussion of the dimitte/remitte translation of this phrase of the Pater Noster in the essay by Sr. Anne O’Donnell, “Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster: Patristic and Linguistic Sources,” in this volume, pp. 188–89 and 188 n89.

88 Erasmus’s Precatio dominica

This breed / O most benigne father / gyue thy children euery day / vntyll that tyme come / in whiche they shall eate of it / at thy heuenly and celestiall table: wherby the children of thy realme shalbe fulfylled with ye plentuous abundancye of euerlastynge trouthe. And to take fruicion therof / it were a marueylous felicite and pleasure / whiche hath nede of none other thyng at all / neyther in heuen nor erthe: For in the O father alone is all thynge / out of whom is right nought to be desyred / whiche toguyther with thy sonne and the holy gooste / raygnest for euer. Amen.

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the fyfte peticion

T dimitte nobis debita nostra / sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. This is thy wyll and mynde O father in heuen / whiche art the maker of peace and fauourer of concorde / that thy chyldren / whom it hath pleased thy goodnes to couple and ioyne in the bondes of one assent: & whom thou quickenest with one spirite / & with one baptysme purgest and makest clene / and in one house [e4v] of the churche acompanyest / and with the commen sacramentes of the churche doest norisshe: & whom thou hast indifferently called to the inheritaunce of the kyngedome of heuen / bycause they shulde be of more strength / and shulde lyue toguyder in thy house of one mynde: and that there shulde be no stryfe or contencion amongest the partes and membres of one body / but eche to lyue in charite with other: Yet in so moche as they are fayne to kepe styll theyr mortall body / it can nat be chosen / but by reason of the weakenesse and frailte of nature amonge / displeasure & offences shall chaunce / wherby though the clerenesse of brotherly loue & concorde be nat vtterly extinct and quenched / yet it is made all faynt and colde / and lyke in conclusion to be quenched: Except yu father of thy great gentylnesse & mercy / shuldest dayly forgyue those that euery day offended the: for as often as we offende our brother / so often also we offende and displease ye father / whiche commaundeddest we shulde loue our brother as our owne selfe / but thy sonne knowyng well inough the imbecilite and weakenesse of this membre / shewed vs a remedy therfore / gyuyng vs sure hope yt thy goodnesse wolde remytte and forgyue vs all our offences / if we on the other side with all our hert wolde forgyue our brother / what so euer he trespaceth agaynste vs

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Est autem aequissima impetrandae ueniae conditio, quam praescripsit filius tuus Iesus. Etenim qua tandem fronte deprecamur uindictam patris, qui leuem offensam in fratre suo parat ulcisci? Quo tandem ore tibi dicit: remitte iram, quum ipse perseueret irasci proximo? Qua fiducia se iactat membrum filij tui, qui quum immunis esset ab omni delicto, te pro parricidis in cruce deprecatus est, ut ignosceres, qui ipse peccatis obnoxius non uult ignoscere fratri, in quem & ipse subinde peccat: [b8] ut hic sic potius mutua ueniae permutatio, quàm ignoscentia? Ingratum est oculis tuis sacrificium, quod offert irae memor, & concordiae sarciendae negligens. Ita nos docuit filius tuus, etiam ad altare relicto munere, properandum ad fraternae pacis reconciliationem. En pater optime, sequimur quod tuus docuit filius: imitamur quod ille praestitit, si agnoscis à filio praescriptam conditionem (nec dubium est quin agnoscas) largire quaesumus cuius ille spem certam nobis praebuit. Sic ille nos iussit orare, neque semel confirmauit nos exoraturos, quicquid abs te in ipsius nomine peteremus. Praebuit ille petendi fiduciam, tu per illum largire petentibus ueniam. Agnoscimus imbecillitatem nostram, & hinc intelligimus quò turpitudinis essemus prolapsuri, nisi tua custodia nos arcenet à uitijs grauioribus. Et hanc ipsam infirmitatem tua pietas reliquit in nobis aduersus insolentiae periculum, remedium. Quotidie labimur, ut quotidie tuam glorificemus clementiam. Da pater ut possimus ex animo condonare fratribus nostris, ut concordes inter nos te semper habeamus propicium: & si quid offendimus, sicut offendimus frequenter in multis, emendet nos tua paterna correctio: modo ne abdices, modo ne exhaeredes, modo ne conijcias in gehennam. Semel in baptismo condonasti peccata omnia, non erat isthuc satis tuae erga nos pietati,

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/ and this is a very equall and indifferent waye to optayne pardon and forgyuenesse / whiche thy sonne Iesus hath assigned: For howe can any man be so bolde to desyre his father to withdrawe his reuen[f1]gynge hande from hym / if he hym selfe go about to reuenge a lytell offence in his brother / or who is of so shamelesse boldenesse / that wolde nat be a frayde to saye to the / Slake thy angre / whan he contynueth in rancoure and malyce styll towarde his brother? And howe can he surely boost and auaunce hym selfe as a membre of thy sonne / whiche beyng fre from all synne hym selfe / prayde the to forgyue the theues on the crosse / if he all entangled with synne / and a synner coulde nat fynde in his hert to forgyue his brother / agaynst whome nowe and than he offendeth? so that amongest vs it maye be called rather as mutuall chaunge of pardone / than very forgyuenesse: that sacrifice is impleasaunt in thy sight / whiche is offred in remembraunce of displeasure or neglygence / of reconcylyng his brothers good wyll. Therfore thy sonne gaue vs this in commaundement / that we whulde8 leaue our offring euyn at ye auter / & hye vs a pace to our brother / and labour to be in peace with hym / and than returne agayne & offre vp our rewarde: Lawe nowe / we folowe yt thy sonne hath taught vs / we endeuer to performe that he hath done / if thou aknowlege the couenant & bargayne made of thy sonne / as we dout nat but thou doest / graunt vs we beseke the / that thyng wherof we had full hope & trust by thy sonne: Thus he bad vs praye whan he answered nat a fewe tymes / yt we shulde optayne what soeuer we desyred of ye in his name he made vs bolde to pray to the / vauchesafe9 thou by him / to forgyue those that call vpon the: We a[f1v]knowlege our owne imbecilite & feblenesse / wherby we well perceyue / in to howe shamfull and abhomynable offences we were lyke to fall in to / except we were preserued by thy goodnesse from gretter synnes: and the same mekenesse10 thou leftest in vs / as a remedy against ye pride which we shulde haue ben in ieopardy to haue fallen in dayly: we offende and fall / to the entent that euery daye we might glorify thy gentylnesse: Graunt father that we may hertely forgyue our bretherne / that whan we be in peace and vnite amongest our selfes / we may haue the alway mercyfull vnto vs / and if in any thyng we offende the / amende vs with thy fatherly correction / so that thou vtterly forsake vs nat / nor disinherite vs / ne cast vs in to hell: ones in baptyme thou hast remytted vs all our synnes / but that was nat inoughe / for thy tendre loue towarde vs / but thou hast also 8. Beinecke: shulde 9. Beinecke: vouchesafe 10. Latin: infirmitatem; possible typographical error for “wekeness”

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quotidianis etiam filiorum tuorum delictis ostendisti certum ac paratum remedium. Pro quo tuae beni[b8v]gnitati gratias agimus, qui per filium tuum ac spiritum sanctum tantis beneficijs nos dignaris in gloriam sanctissimi tui nominis perennem. Amen.

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[c1] et ne nos inducas in tentationem.

ater noster coelos inhabitans quanquam nihil est quod te propicio uehementer extimescimus, & mutua charitas nos filios tuos firmiores reddit aduersus omnem malorum incursum: tamen considerantes humanae naturae imbecillitatem, & incerti, quos tua bonitas dignos iudicet, ut ipsos in amore tui confirmet usque ad huius uitae finem, in qua quandiu uersamur, mille modis solicitamur ad ruinam, non possumus esse securi. Tota haec uita undique diaboli laqueis est plena. Nusquam cessat tentator ille, qui non ueritus est & filium tuum Iesum technis suis aggredi. Reputamus quot satanae machinis impetitus sit seruus tuus Iob. Recordamur Saulem prius electum, post reiectum à conspectu tuo. Neminimus Dauid, qui dictus erat uir secundum cor tuum, eò turpitudinis pertractum, ut adulterium homicidio copularet. Videmus Solomonem, cui in principio regni dederas sapientiam ultra mortales omneis, eò dementiae perductum, ut peregrinis simulacris immolaret. Venit in men tem, quid acciderit apostolorum tuorum principi, qui fortem usque ad mortis societatem animum professus ter dominum suum abiurauit.Haec atque huiusmodi multa cum consideramus, non possumus non horrescere tentationis periculum. Atque in hoc metu nos tua paterna pietas [c1v] esse perpetuo uoluit, ne dormitantes & scitantes inciperemus nostris praesidijs fidere: sed iugiter aduersus tentatoris assultus, sobrietate, uigilantia, precatione nos muniremus, ut nec hostem prouocaremus, memores imbecillitatis uirium nostrarum, & tamen aduersus ingruentem tentationis procellam infractis animis consistamus, tuo freti praesidio, sine quo nihil possumus. Pateris tu quidem nonnunquam incidere tentationes, uel ut explores, spectatamque reddas tuorum tolerantiam,

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shewed a sure & redy remedy / for the dayly offences of thy children / for the whiche we thanke thy great gentylnesse / whiche vouche sauest by thy sonne and the holy gost / to endewe vs with so great benifytes / to the euer lastyng glorie of thy moost holy name. Amen.

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the sixte peticion

T ne nos inducas in tentationem. O good father in heuen / albeit there is nothing that we greatly feare / hauyng the mercyfull vnto vs / and whyle mutuall loue and charyte eche with other / maketh vs thy children of more strength a[f2] gaynst euery yuell assaut / yet whan we consydre howe weake and fraile the nature of man is / and howe ignorant also we be / whome thy goodnesse wyll iudge and thynke worthy the contynuaunce in thy loue / to the ende of this lyfe / in whiche as long as we are / a thousande maner of wayes we be stered to fall and ruyne / therfore we can nat be vtterly seker and carelesse: all this lyfe is rounde about besette with the dyuelles snares / he neuer ceaseth temptynge vs / whiche was nat a frayde with craftie subtylteis to sette vpon thy sonne Iesus / We call to mynde howe greuously the fende assauted thy seruaunt Iob: we remembre howe Saull was fyrst thy electe and chosen seruaunt / & within a while after cast out of thy sight: We can nat forget howe Dauyd whom yu calleddest a man euyn after thyne owne appetyte / was drawen to that great villany of synne / that he mengled aduoutre with manslaughter: We consydre howe Solomon whom in the begynnyng of his rule / thou gauest wysedome aboue all men / was brought to that madnesse and folly / that he dyde sacrifyce to strange & vtter goddes: We remembre also / what befell the chefe and heed of thyne apostles / whiche after that he had so valyantly professed / that he wolde dye with his mayster / natwithstandyng thrise forsware his maister. These and suche many other / whan we consydre / we can nat but feare and aborre the ieopardy of temptacion: and thy fatherly loue wolde vs alway to be in this feare / bycause we shulde nat sluggisshely & slouthfully [f2v] begyn to trust in our owne helpe / but defende and arme our selfe agaynst euery faute11 of temptacion with sobre temperaunce / watche / & prayer: wherby we shulde neyther prouoke our ennemy / remembring our owne feblenesse / nor be ouerthrone in ye storme of temptacion trustyng to thy ayde / without whiche we are able to do right nought / yu suffrest among temptacion to fall / eyther to proue and make stedfast the suffraunce & pacience 11. Beinecke: saute (i.e., assault)

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quemadmodum tentatus est Iob & Abraham: uel ut huiusmodi flagellis castiges & emendes delicta nostra: sed quoties id pateris, rogamus, ut idem tentationis facias felicem exitum, ac uires impartias ponderi malorum irruentium pares. Ingens periculum est, quoties intentatur bonorum direptio, exilium, probra, carcer, uincula, diri cruciatus corporum, mortes horrendae. Sed non minus discriminis est à prosperitate blandiente, quàm ab aduersis terrorem ingerentibus. Cadunt à dextris pariter ac sinistris innumeri. Alij metu poenarum territi sacrificant daemonijs: alij fracti malis, blasphemijs afficiunt adorandum nomen tuum. Rursus alij uenenato poculo felicitatis mundanae inebriati, spretis tuis dotibus, reuoluuntur in uolutationem coeni prioris: uelut Euangelicus ille filius, qui prodacta cum scortis omni paterna substantia, eò miseriae perductus est, ut porcis etiam suas siliquas inuideret. Scimus [c2] aduersarium nihil in nos posse, nisi tu permiseris. Proinde non recusamus obijci quibuscunque periculis, modo tua clementia, & aduersatij insultum, & nostras uires modereris. Sic enim fiet, ut etiam siquando fuerimus inferiores in congressu, tamen hoc tua sapientia uertat in bonum nostrum. Sic uicit filius tuus semper ado randus satanam, sic carnem, sic mundum, ut quum maxime uide retur op pressus, trium pharet maxime. Ac no bis ille pugnauit, nobis uicit, nobis triumphauit. Vincamus & nos illius exemplo, tuo praesidio per spiritum sanctum ab utroque prodeuntem in omnia secula. Amen.

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of thy children / as Iob and Abraham were tempted / or els by suche scourges to correcte and chasten our offences: but howe often soeuer thou suffrest this / we praye the thou wylt bring that same temptacion to good and lucky ende / & gyue vs strength egall to the mountenaunce & weight of the yuels yt come vpon vs / it is no lytell ieopardy whan soeuer we be thretned with losse of our goodes / with banysshement / rebukes / imprisonment / with bandes and bodily turmentyng / & horrible and fearfull dethe. But we are in no lesse peryll atall / whan prosperite to moche laugheth on vs / than whan we be ouer moche feared with trouble and aduersyte: They are an innumerable sorte whiche fall on euery side / some for feare of punysshment do sacrifyce to wicked deuyls / some ouerthrone and astonyed with yuels and vexacions / do blaspheme thy most holy name: & agayne / some drowned with ouermoche worldely welthe / sette at nought and dyspice thy gyftes of grace / and retourne agayne in to their olde and former fylthynesse / as the sonne that the scripture speketh of / whiche after tyme he hadde [f3] spent and reuelled out all his fathers substaunce / by vnthrifty and vngracious rule / was brought to that misery and wretchednesse / that he enuyed the swyne their chaffe. We knowe well good father / that our aduersary hath no power ouer vs at all / but by thy suffraunce: wherfore we be content to be put to what soeuer ieopardy it pleaseth the / so it wyll lyke thy gentylnesse to measure our ennemys assaute and our strength / for so though we be somtyme in the fyrst metyng to weake / yet thy wysedome in the conclusyon wyll tourne it to our welthe. So thy most dere and honorable son / was euer wonte to ouercome the deuyll: thus the flesshe: and thus the worlde: that whan he semed moost to be oppressed / he than moost specially triumphed / and he fought for vs / he ouercame for vs / and triumphed for vs: Let vs also ouercome by his ensample with thy helpe / and by the holy goost / procedyng from bothe for euer. Amen.

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[c3] sed libera nos à malo.

ater omnipotens, tua gratuita benignitas nos semel à peccatis expiatos, ab impurissimo patre diabolo liberauit per Iesum Christum filium tuum, & in honorem nominis ac haereditatis adoptauit: sed ita, ut quandiu uersamur in terris, perpetua lucta sit cum hoste, nihil non moliente, ut nos quibus inuidet tuum beneficium, in suum ius retrahat. Horrescimus animo, quoties recordamur quàm foedum patrem habuerimus, quum essemus mancipia peccati, quàm infelici haereditati fuerimus destinati, quàm immiti seruierimus domino. Nec ignoramus illius obstinatam maliciam, non solum uiribus, sed mille etiam artibus ac dolis instructam in nostram perniciem. Nunquam dormit, numquam cessat, sed semper obambulat, ueluti leo fame rugiens, captans, quaeritans, ac uenans quem deuoret. Nimirum tui pater est dissimillimus. Tu enim natura bonus ac beneficus, ouem erraticum reportas ad ouile, morbidam sanas, extinctam ad uitam reuocas, inimicos etiam tuos blasphemos in sanctum nomen tuum, amore tuo praeuenis, & ad salutem aeternam inuitas. Ille odio insatiabili erga nos, à quibus nunquam laesus est, nihil aliud molitur, quàm ut quàm plurimos secum in exitium pertrahat. Insignis cuiusdam maliciae est, gratis nulloque suo commodo uelle per[c3v]dere, à quo quis non est iniuria lacessitus. At hicsuo etiam malo imminet in malum eorum, quos tu in tutelam tuam seuocasti. Non tu illum talem condideras, sed eò maliciae delapsus est, posteaquàm sibi placens, tuae maiestati subiectus esse noluit. Proinde stimulatus inuidia, primos nostri generis parentes, arte circumuentos pellexit in mortem, inuidens illis paradisi uoluptates, quum ipse sese coeli gaudijs spoliasset. Nunc etiam acrioribus inuidiae stimulis uritur quod paradiso exclusos subuehis in coelum: quod morti destinatos per fiduciam in Iesum filium tuum ad beatam immortalitatem inuitas:

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the seuenth peticion

ed libera nos a malo. O almyghty father / it hath pleased thy mere and liberall goodnesse / ones whan we were rydde from synne / to delyuer vs by thy sonne Iesus Christ / out of the handes of our moost foule and vnclene father the deuyll / & to electe & take vs in to the honour bothe of thy name and thyne inherytaunce: but yet of this condycion that all the while we lyue here in erthe we shulde be in contynuall batell with our enemy / [f3v] whiche leaueth no wayes vnassayed / wherby he might drawe and plucke vs agayne in to his power and authorite / We quake & trymble in herte / as often tymes as we remembre howe shamefull a father we had / whan we were thrall and bonde to synne / and to howe wretched and vnhappy inheritaunce we were apoynted / & howe currysshe and vngentyll a mayster we serued. & we knowe well inoughe / his obstinate and frowarde malice and yuell wyll / whiche alwaye layeth wayte and lyeth redy bent to our distruction / nat onely with violence and stronge hande / but also with traynes & subtell wyles / he neuer slepeth nor resteth / but alway ronneth vp and downe hyther and thyther lyke a rauenous lyon / lyeng in wayte / sekynge and huntyng about / whom he maye deuoure. Verily father he is farre vnlyke the / for thou art naturally good and gentyll / thou caryest home agayne to the flocke / the wandringe and strayeng shepe: thou curest and makest hole the sicke and scabbe shepe / and releuest the deed: ye / and thyne ennemyes also / & blasphemers of thy holy name thou preuentest with thy loue / and callest moost graciously to euerlastyng helthe: But he of an vnreasonable and vnsacyable hatered towarde vs / whiche neuer dyde hym displeasure / laboureth & gothe about nothyng elles / than to bringe with hym as many as he can in to distruction: It is a signe and token of an excedynge malyce / one for nought & without any commodyte of his owne / to endeuer to distroy hym of whom he was neuer wronged / [f4] but this euyn with his owne hurte / wayteth those hurt and domage / whome thou hast taken a syde vnder thy protection: thou madest hym nat suche but he fyll in to this great malyce / after tyme he begun to stande in his owne conceyt / and refused to be subiet and obedyent to thy maiestie: Wherfore he beyng pricked all with enuy / by crafty besegyng / entysed to distruction our firste progenytours / enuyeng them the ioyes of paradyse / for as moche as he had depriued hym selfe of ye gladnesse and myrthe of heuen / but nowe he is of farre greater enuy / bicause thou cariest them out of paradyse in to heuen: and where as they were afore apoynted to dethe and dampnacion / thou by reason of the faythfull trust whiche they haue put in thy sonne Iesus / callest them to euerlastyng blysse: and

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quod ipsius etiam maliciam uertis in cumulum tuae gloriae, nostrae salutis. Proinde quanquam ille multis merito formidabilis est, tamen consolatur nos tua bonitas: quae plus potest ad salutem, quàm uniuersa illius malicia ad perniciem. Agnoscimus nostram imbecillitatem, sed non expauescimus hostis incursum, siue uiuimus, siue morimur, quandiu te merebimur habere protectorem. Non metuimus exitium ab illo malo, quandiu continget adhaerere bono. Haec uota filiorum tuorum pater aeterne si pia sunt, si iuxta formam à filio tuo Iesu praescriptam concepta, certa nos habet fiducia, tuam bonitatem praestaturam quod petimus. DOMINICAE PRAECATIO/ nis finis.

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also / that thou tournest his owne malyce in to thencrease of thy glorie and our helthe: Wherfore thoughe nat without a cause / he is of many to be feared: yet thy goodnesse dothe conforte vs / whiche is able to do more to our helthe and saluacion / than all his malyce to our distruction. We aknowlege our owne imbecilite and feblenesse / but yet we feare nat our ennemyes assaute / whyther we lyue or dye / all the whyle we deserue to haue ye our protectour and defender / We feare no dystruction of that yuell and wicked deuyll / all ye whyle it is our chaunce to stycke to hym that is so good. These desyres and petycions of thy children / O immortall father / if they be good & after ye forme and order apoynted of thy sonne Iesus / than we [f4v] nothing mystrust / but that thou wylte performe that whiche we desyre of the. Amen. Thus endeth thexposicion of the Pater noster. Imprinted at London in Fletestrete / in the house of Thomas Berthelet nere to the Cundite / at the signe of Lucrece. Cum priuilegio a rege indulto.

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Letter of Alice Alington to Margaret Roper Letter of Alice Alington to Margaret Roper

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Letter of Alice Alington to Margaret Roper 1 17 August [1534]

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[1433b] [Rastell’s headnote] In August in the yere of our lord .1534. & in the .xxvi. yere of the raygne of kyng Henrye the eyght, the ladye Alyce Alington, (wyfe to syr Gyles Alington knighte, and daughter to syr Thomas Mores seconde and last wife) wrote a letter to maistres Margaret Roper, the copy whereof here foloweth. SYster Roper with all my heart I recommend me vnto you, thanking you for all kyndnesse. The cause of my wrytynge at thys time is, to shew you that at my coming home, within .ii. howres after, my lord [1433c] chauncellour did come to take a course at a bucke in our parke, the which was to my husband a greate coumfort, that it wold please him so to dooe. Then when he had taken hys pleasure and kilde his dere, he wente to syr Thomas Barmestons to bed: where I was the next day with him at his desyre, the which I could not say naye to, for me 1. This ­old-spelling text is a direct transcription of the online ­black-letter edition of William Rastell, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lord Chancellour of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge (London: J. Cawood, J. Waly, A. R. Tottell, 1557), 1433a–1434a. A facsimile is available at https://thomas morestudies.org/­wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Dialogue_on_Conscience.pdf (accessed May 7, 2022), as well as a study guide at https://essentialmore.org/­wp-content/uploads/­Dialogue-of-Conscience-Study-Guide.pdf ?msclkid=b195dd1cce4f11eca1b35da79af556b3 (accessed May 7, 2022), sponsored by The Center for Thomas More Studies, directed by Professor Gerald Wegemer. Italicized letters or words indicate expanded abbreviations. Sister Anne O’Donnell assisted with proofreading this transcription against several printed copies of Rastell’s English Workes. Rastell’s page numbers and marginal column divisions are included in the text within brackets. Scholars may also wish to consult these other textual sources of this document: British Museum MS. Royal 17 D xiv, fol. 402r; Elizabeth F. Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), 511–13, no. 205.

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thought he dyd byd me heartelye: and most especially, because I would speake to him for my father. And when I sawe my tyme, I did desyre hym as humbly as I coulde, that he would (as I haue heard say that he hath been) be still good lord vnto my [1433d] father. Fyrst he aunswered me, that he woulde be as gladde to dooe for hym as for his father, and that (he sayd) did appeare very well, when the matter of the nonne was layde to hys charge. And as for thys other matter, he meruayled that my father is so obstinate in his owne conceite, in that that euery bodye went furth withall, saue onelye the blynde bysshoppe and he. And in good faythe (sayde my lorde) I am very gladde that I haue no learning, but in a fewe of Isopes fables, of the which I shal tel you one. Ther was a countrey in the which there wer almoste none but fooles, sauing a fewe whiche were wise and they by theyr wisdom knew, that ther shold fall a great rayne, the whiche shoulde make all theym fooles, that shoulde be fowled or wet therewith. They seeyng that, made them caues vnder the ground, [1433f] till all the rayne was paste. Than they came furth, thinking to make the fooles dooe what they lyste, and to rule theym as they woulde. But the fooles woulde none of that, but woulde haue the rule themselues for all theyr craft. And when the wyse men saw that they coulde not obteyn theyr purpose, they wished that they had been in the rayne, and had defoyled theyr clothes with them. When this tale was tolde, my Lord dyd laugh very merely. Than I sayd to him, that for al hys mery fable, I did put no dou[1433g]tes, but that he woulde be good lord vnto my father when he sawe hys tyme. He sayde, I woulde not haue your father so scrupulous of hys conscience. And then he tolde me another fable, of a Lyon, an Asse, and a wolfe, & of theyr confession. Fyrst the Lyon confessed that he had deuowred al the beastes that he could come by. His confessour assoyled hym, because he was a king, and also it was his nature so to dooe. Than came the poore Asse, and sayde that he tooke but one strawe out of hys maisters shoe for [1433h] hunger, by the meanes wherof he thought that his maister did take colde. Hys confessour could not assoile this great trespas, but by and by sent hym to the bysshop. Than came the woolfe and made his confession, and he was straytly commaunded that he shoulde not passe .vi. pence at a meale. But when the sayde woolfe had vsed this dyet a little whyle, he waxed very hungry, in so much that on a day when he saw a cowe with her calfe come by him, he sayd to himselfe, I am very hungry, and fayne would I eate, but that I am bound by my gostly father. Notwithstanding that, my conscience shall iudge me. And than if that be so, than shall my conscience be thus, that the cowe doth seme to me now but woorth a grote. And than if the cowe be but



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[1434a] woorth a grote, than is the calfe but woorth .ii. pence. So did the woolfe eate both the cowe & the calfe. Now my good sister, hath not my lord tolde me .ij. prety fables. In good fayth they pleased me nothing, nor I wist not what to say, for I was abashed of this annswer. And I see no better suite than to almightie god. For he is the comforter of all sorowes, and will not fayle to send his coumfort to his seruauntes when they haue most nede. Thus fare ye well mine own good sister. Written the monday after saint [1434b] Laurence in haste. Your sister Alice Alington.

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Letter of Alice Alington to Margaret Roper

Letter of Margaret Roper to Alice Alington Letter of Margaret Roper to Alice Alington

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Letter of Margaret Roper to Alice Alington1 [August 1534] [Rastell’s headnote] [1434b] When maistres Roper had recciued this letter, she at her next repayre to her father in the tower, shewed him this letter. And what communicacion was therupon betwene her father and her, ye shall perceiue by an aunswer here folowing (as writen to the ladye Alington.) But whether thys aunswer wer writen by syr Thomas More in his daughter Ropers name, or by her selfe, it is not certaynelye knowen. [1434c] WHen I came next vnto my father after, me thoughte it both conuenient and necessary, to shew him your letter. Conuenient, that he might thereby see your louing laboure taken for hym. Necessarye, that sith he might perceiue therby, that if he stande still in this scruple of hys conscience, (as it is at the least 1. This ­old-spelling text is a direct transcription of the online ­black-letter edition of William Rastell, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lord Chancellour of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge (London: J. Cawood, J. Waly, A. R. Tottell, 1557), 1433a–1443a. A facsimile is available at https://thomas morestudies.org/­wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Dialogue_on_Conscience.pdf (accessed May 7, 2022) as well as a study guide at https://essentialmore.org/­wp-content/uploads/­Dialogue-of-Conscience-Study-Guide.pdf ?msclkid=b195dd1cce4f11eca1b35da79af556b3 (accessed May 7, 2022), sponsored by The Center for Thomas More Studies, directed by Professor Gerald Wegemer. No paragraphing exists in the Rastell edition; paragraphing in this text (for ease of reading) follows a standardized spelling version of the “Letter to Alice Alington,” generously shared by Professor Wegemer, that was created for the online concordance project of the Center for Thomas More Studies. Italicized letters or words usually indicate expanded abbreviations. Editorial clarifications are footnoted or bracketed. Sister Anne O’Donnell assisted with proofreading this transcription against several printed copies of Rastell’s English Workes. Rastell’s page numbers and marginal column divisions are included in the text within brackets. Scholars may also wish to consult these other textual sources of this document: Bodleian MS. Ballard 72, fol. 86v; British Museum MS. Royal 17 D xiv, fol. 404r; Elizabeth F. Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 514–32, no. 206.

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wyse called by many that are his frendes and wyse2) al his frendes that seme most able to dooe him good, either shall finally forsake him, or peraduenture not be hable in dede to do [1434d] him anye good at all. And for these causes, at my next being with him after your letter receiued, when I had a while talked with him, fyrst of his diseases bothe in his brest of olde, & his reynes nowe, by reason of grauell and stone, & of the crampe also that dyuers nightes grypeth hym in his legges, and that I found by his woordes that they wer not much encreased, but continued after theyr maner that they did before, sometime very sore & sometime little grief, and that at that time I found him out of payn, and as one in his case mighte, metelye well minded, after oure .vii. Psalmes & the letany said, to sit & talke & be merye, beginning fyrst with other thinges, of the [1434e] good coumfort of my mother, & the good order of my brother & all my sisters, disposing themself euery day more & more to set little by the world, & drawe more & more to God, & that his housholde, hys neighbors, & other good frendes abrode, diligently remembred him in their prayers, I added vnto this: I pray god good father that theyr prayers & ours & your owne therwith, may purchase of god the grace, that you may in this great matter (for which you stand in this trouble, and for your trouble all we also that loue you) take such a waye by time, as standing with the pleasure of god, may content & please the king, whom ye haue al[1434f]waye founden so singularly gracious vnto you, that if ye shoulde stifly refuse to doe the thing that wer his pleasure, which god not displeased you might do (as many great wise & well learned men say that in this thing you may) it wold both be a great blot in your woorship in euery wise mannes opinion, and as my selfe haue heard some say (such as your selfe haue alway taken for well learned and good) a perill vnto your soule also. But as for that point (father) wil I not be bolde to dispute vpon, sith I truste in God and your good mynde that ye will looke surely therto. And your learning [1434g] I know for suche, that I wot well you can. But one thing is ther which I & other your frendes fynd and perceiue abrode, whiche but if it be shewed you, you may peraduenture to your greate perill, mistake, and hope for lesse harm (for as for good I wot wel in this world of this matter ye looke for none) than I sore feare me, shall be likelye to fall to you. For I assure you father, I haue receiued a letter of late from my sister Alington, by whiche I see well that if ye change not your mind, you are likelye [1434h] to lose al those frendes that are hable to do you any good. Or if ye leese not their good wils, you shal at the least wise lese the effect therof, for any good that they shalbe hable to dooe you. 2. Rastell: wyfe

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Letter of Margaret Roper to Alice Alington

With this my father smyled vpon me & saide: what maistres Eue (as I called you when you came first) hath my daughter Alington plaid the serpent with you, & with a letter set you a woorke to come tempt your father again, & for the fauour that you beare him labour to make him sweare against his conscience, & so send him to the deuil? And after that, he loked sadly agayne, & earnestly said vnto me. Daughter Margaret, we two haue talked of this thinge [1435a] ofter than twyse or thrise. And that same tale in effect, that you tell me now therein, & the same feare too, haue you twise told me before, & I haue twice aunswered you too, that in this matter if it were possible for me to dooe the thing that might content the kinges grace, & god therewith not offended, ther hath no man taken this othe already more gladly than I would dooe: as he that reckoneth himselfe more diepelye bounden vnto the kynges hyghnesse, for his most singular bountie, many wayes shewed and declared, than any of them all besyde. But sith standing my conscience [1435b] I can in no wyse dooe it, & that for the instruction of my conscience in the matter, I haue not sleightly looked, but by many yeres studied & aduisedly considred, & neuer could yet see nor heare that thing, nor I thinke I neuer shal, that could enduce mine own mind to think otherwise than I do, I haue no maner remedy, but god hathe geuen me to that streight, that either I must dedly displease him, or abide anye worldly harme that he shal for mine other sinnes, vnder name of this thyng, suffer to fall vpon me. Whereof (as I before thys haue told you to) I haue ere I came here, [1435c] not left vnbethought nor vnconsidered, the very worst & the vttermost that can by possibilitie fall. And albeit that I know mine own frailtie ful well, & the natural faintnes of mine own heart, yet if I had not trusted that god shold geue me strength rather to endure al thinges, than offend him by swearing vngodly against mine own conscience, you may be very sure I woulde not haue come here. And sith I looke in this matter but only vnto god, it maketh me little matter, though men cal it as it please them, & say it is no consience but a foolish scruple. At this word I toke a good occasion, & said vnto him thus: In [1435d] good faith father for my parte, I neither doo, nor it cannot become me, either to mistrust your good minde or your learnyng. But because you speake of that that some calle it but a scruple, I assure you you shall see by my sisters letter, that one of the greateste estates in this realme, & a man learned too, & (as I dare say your self shal thinke when you know him, & as you haue already right effectuallye prooued him) your tender frend and very speciall good lord, accounteth your conscience in this matter, for a right simple scruple. And you may be sure he saith



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it of good mind, and lyeth no little cause. For he saith, that where you say your conscience mooueth you to this, all the nobles of this realme, & almost [1435e] all other men too, go boldly furth with the contrary, & sticke not thereat, saue only your self & one other man: whom though he be right good & very well learned too, yet would I wene few that loue you, geue you the counsayle against al other menne, to leane to his minde alone. And with this word I toke him your letter, that he might see my wordes wer not fayned, but spoken of his mouth, whom he much loueth & estemeth highly. Therupon he read ouer your letter. And when he came to the end, he began it afresh & read it ouer again. And in the reading he made no maner haste, but aduised it laisorly, & pointed euery word. [1435f] And after that he pawsed, & than thus he said. Forsooth daughter Margaret, I find my daughter Alington such as I haue euer found her, & I trust euer shal, as naturally minding me as you that are mine owne. Howbeit, her take I verely for mine own too, sith I haue maried her mother, & brought vp her of a child as I haue brought vp you, in other thinges and in learning both, wherein I thanke God she fyndeth now some fruite, & bringeth her own vp very verteously and well. Wherof god I thanke him hath sent her good store, oure [1435g] lord preserue them & sende her much ioy of them, & my good sonne her gentle husbande too, & haue mercye on the soule of mine other good sonne her first: I am daily bede man (& so write her) for them all. In this matter she hath vsed her self like her self, wisely & like a very daughter toward me & in the ende of her letter, geueth as good counsel as any man that wit hath wold wish, god geue me grace to folowe it, & god reward her for it. Now daughter Margaret as for my lord, I not only thinke, but haue also found it, that he is vndoutedly [1435h] my singuler good lord. And in mine other busines concerning the sely nunne, as my cause was good & clere, so was he my good lord therin, & M. Secretary my good master too. For which I shall neuer cease to be faithful bedeman for them both, & daily doe I by my trouth, praye for them as I pray for my selfe. And whensoeuer it shold happen (which I trust in god shall neuer happen) that I be found other than a true man to my prince, let them neuer fauor me neither of them both, nor of trouth no more it could become them to do. But in this matter Megge to tell the trouth betwene thee & me, my lords Esops fables do not gretly moue me. But as his wisdom for hys pastime told them merely to mine owne daughter, so shal I for my pastime, aunswer them to thee Megge that arte mine other. [1436a] The fyrst fable of the rayne that washte away

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al their wittes that stode abrode when it fell, I haue heard oft ere this: It was a tale so often told among the kinges counsel by my lorde Cardinall when hys grace was chauncellour, that I cannot lightlye forgeatte it. For of trouth in tymes past when variance began to fall betwene the Emperour and the frenche king, in such wise that they were lykely & dyd in dede, fall together at warre, & that ther wer in the counsayle here sometime sundry opinions, in which some were of the mynde that they thoughte it wisedom, that we should sit stil & let them alone: but euer[1436b]more against that way, my lord vsed this fable of those wyse men, that because they would not be washed with the rayn that shold make all the people fooles, went them self in caues, & hid them vnder the ground. But when the rayne had once made all the remenant fooles, and that they came out of theyr caues & wold vtter their wisdome, the fooles agreed together agaynst them, & there all to bet them. And so sayd his grace, that if we woulde be so wyse that we woulde sitte in peace whyle the fooles foughte, they woulde not fayle after, to make peace and agree and fall at length [1436c] all vpon vs. I will not dispute vpon hys graces counsayle, and I truste we neuer made warre but as reason woulde. But yet this fable for hys parte, dydde in hys dayes help the king & the realme to spend manye a fayre penye. But that geare is passed, and hys grace is gone our lorde assoyle his soule. And therefore shall I nowe come to thys Esopes fable, as my Lorde full merelye layde it furth for me. If those wyse menne Megge, when the rayn was gone at theyr coming abrode, where they found all men fooles, wished themselues fooles too, because they could [1436d] not rule them, than semeth it that the foolysh rayne was so sore a showre, that euen thorowe the grounde it sanke into theyr caues, and powred downe vppon theyr heades, and wette theim to the skynne, & made theim more nodies than them that stoode abrode. For if they had had anye witte, they myght well see, that thoughe they had been fooles too, that thing wold not haue suffysed, to make theim the rulers ouer the other fooles, no more than that tother fooles ouer them: and of so manye fooles all myght not be rulers. Now when they longed so sore to bere a rule among fooles, that so they so mighte, they would be gladde to leese their witte and be fooles to, the foolishe rayne hadde wash[1436e]ed them metely well. Howe be it, to saye the trouth, before the rayne came, if they thoughte that all the remenaunte should turne into fooles, and than either were so foolishe that they woulde, or so madde to thinke that they shoulde, so fewe rule so many fooles, and hadde not so much wit, as to consider that there are none so vnruly as they that lacke witte and are



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fooles, than were these wyse menne starke fooles before the rayne came. Howe be it daughter Roper, whome my Lorde here taketh for the wyse menne, and whome he meaneth to be fooles, I cannot verye well geasse, I cannot reade well suche [1436f] ryddles. For as Dauus saythe in Therence: Non sum Oedipus. I may say you wot well: Non sum Oedipus sed Morus, which name of myne what it signi[f] eyeth3 in Greke, I nede not tell you.4 But I truste my lorde reckoneth me amonge the fooles, and so reckon I my self, as my name is in greke. And I finde I thanke God, causes not a fewe, wherfore I so should in very dede. But surelye among those that long to be rewlers, God and myne owne conscience clerely knoweth, that no man may truely noumber and reckon me. And I wene eche other mans conscience can tell himself the same, since it is so welll5 knowen [1436g] that of the kinges great goodnes, I was one of the greattest rewlers in thys noble realme, and that at myne owne great labour by his gret goodnes dyscharged. But whomsoeuer my lord meane for the wyse men, and whomsoeuer his lordeshyp take for the fooles, and whomsoeuer long for the rule, & who so euer long for none, I beseche our lord make vs all so wise as that we may euerye man here so wiselye rule our self, in this tyme of teares, thys vale of miserye, thys symple wretched world (in which as Boece sayth, one man to be prowde that he beareth rule ouer o[1436h]ther men, is much like as one mouce wold be proude to beare a rule ouer other mice in a barne) god I say geue vs the grace so wisely to rule our self here, that when we shall hence in hast to mete that great spouse we be not taken slepers, & for lacke of light in our lampes, shyt6 out of heauen among the .v. foolishe vyrgins. The second fable Marget semeth not to be Esopes. For by that the matter goeth all vpon confession, it semeth to be fained since christendom began. For in Grece before Christes daies they vsed not confession, no more the men than, than the beastes now. And Esope was a Greke, & died long ere Christ was borne. But what? who made it, maketh [1437a] little matter. Nor I enuy not that Esope hath the name. But surely it is somwhat to subtil for me. For whan [whom] his lordship vnderstandeth by the lyon & the woolfe, which both twayn confessed themselfe, of rauin & deuowring of al that came to their handes, & the tone enlarged his conscience at his pleasure in the construccion of his penance, nor whom by the good discrete confessor that enioyned the tone a little penance, & 3. “f” omitted 4. ἡ μωρία/μῶρος, mōria/mōros: “folly” or “fool.” 5. Sic 6. That is, “sh[u]t”

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the tother none at all, and sente the poore Asse to the bysshop, of all these thinges can I nothing tel. But by the foolishe scrupelous Asse, that had so [1437b] sore a conscience, for the taking of a straw for hungar out of hys maisters shoo, my lordes other woordes of my scruple declare, that his lordshyp merely meant that by me: signifying (as it seemeth by that similitude) that of ouersight & folye, my scrupulous conscience taketh for a gret perilous thynge towarde my soule, if I should sweare this othe, which thing as his lordship thinketh, wer in dede but a tryfle. And I suppose well Margaret as you tolde me right now, that so thinke many mo besyde, as well spirituall as temporal, and that euen of those, that for theyr [1437c] learning and their vertue, my self not a little esteme. And yet albeit that I suppose this to be true, yet beleue I not euen very surely, that euerye man so thynketh that so saith. But though they did daughter, that would not make much to me, not though I shoulde see my lorde of Rochester say the same, & sweare the oth himself before me too. For whereas you tolde me right now, that such as loue me, wold not aduyse me, that agaynst all other men, I should leane vnto hys mind alone, verely daughter no more I dooe. For albeit that of very trouthe, I haue hym in that reuerent estimacion, that I reckon in this [1437d] realm no one man, in wisdom, learning, & long approued vertue together, mete to be matched & compared with him, yet that in this matter I was not lead by him, very wel & plain appeareth, both in that I refused the oth before it was offred him & in that also that his lordship was content to haue sworne of that oth (as I perceyued since by you when you moued me to the same) either somewhat more, or in some other maner than euer I mynded to doe. Verely daughter I neuer entend (God being my good lorde) to pynne my soule at another mannes backe, not euen the best man that I know this day liuing; for I knowe not whither he may happe to cary it. Ther is no man liuing, of whom [1437e] whyle he liueth, I maye make my selfe sure. Some may dooe for fauour, & some may doo for feare, & so might they carye my soule a wrong way. And some might hap to frame himselfe a conscience, and thinke that while he did it for feare, god would forgeue it. And some may peraduenture thinke that they will repente & be shriuen therof, & that so shall god remit it them. And some may be peraduenture of that mind, that if they say one thing & thinke the whyle the contrary, god more regardeth their heart than their tonge, & that therfore their oth goeth vpon that they thinke, and not vpon that they say: [1437f] as a woman resoned once. I trow daughter you wer by. But in good fayth Marget, I can vse no such wayes in so great a matter: but lyke as if mine



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owne conscience serued me, I would not let to do it though other men refused, so though other refuse it not, I dare not do it, mine owne conscience standyng agaynst it. If I had (as I tolde you) looked but lightly for the matter, I shold haue cause to feare[.] But now haue I so looked for it & so long, that I purpose at the least wyse to haue no lesse regard vnto my soule, than had once a poore honest man of the country, [1437g] that was called Cumpanye[.] And with this, he told me a tale, I wene I can skant tell it you agayne, because it hangeth vpon some tearmes and ceremonies of the law. But as farre as I can call to mind my fathers tale was this, that ther is a court belongyng of course vnto euerye fayre, to dooe iustice in such thynges as happen within the same. Thys courte hath a prety fond name, but I canot happen on it: but it begynneth with a pye, & the remenant goeth much like the name [1437h] of a knyght that I haue knowen I wis, and I trowe you too, for he hath been at my fathers ofte ere this, at such tyme as you wer there, a metely tall black man, hys name was syr William Pounder. But tut let the name of the court go for thys once, or call it if ye will a courte of pye syr William Pownder.7 But thys was the matter loe, that vpon a tyme, at suche a courte holden at Bartylmewe fayre, there was an eschetour of London that had arested a man that was outelawed, & had seased hys goodes that he hadde brought into the fayre, tollyng hym out of the fayre by a trayne. The man that was arested & hys goodes seased was a northern manne, whiche by his frendes made theschetour8 within the fayre to be arested, vpon an accion, I wot neer what, [1438a] and so was he brought before the iudge of the court of py syr William Pounder. And at the laste the matter came to a certayne ceremonye to be tryed by a quest of .xii. men, a iury as I remember they call it, or elles a periury. Nowe had the clothman by frendshyp of the officers, founden the meanes to haue all the quest almost, made of the northern men, such as had theyr boothes there standing in the fayre. Now was it come to the last daye in the after none, & the .xii. men had herd both the parties & theyr counsel tel their tales at the barre, & were fro the barre had into a place, to talke & common, & a[1438b] gree vpon their sentence. Nay let me speke better in my termes yet, I trow the iudge geueth the sentence & the questes tale is called a verdit. They wer skant come in together, but the northern men were agreed, & in effect all the tother 7. Rastell’s marginal note: “A courte of pypowdres.” For further discussion see, in this volume, Katherine Rodgers, “Dialogic Imagination in ‘The Letter to Alice Alington,’ ” 215; and Stephen Merriam Foley, “Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the ‘Letter to Alington,’ ” 238–39. 8. Elision of “the eschetor.” An escheator was a county official who was responsible to report on property subject to forfeiture. See OED, s.v. “escheator, n.”

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too, to cast our London eschetour. They thoughte ther neded no more to proue that he dyd wrong, than euen the name of hys bare office alone. But than was ther among them as the deuill wold, this honest man of another quarter, that was called Cumpany. And because the felowe semed but a [f]owle,9 & sate still & sayde nothing, they [1438c] made no rekoning of hym, but sayd we be agreed now, come let vs go geue our verdit. Than whan the poore felowe sawe that they made such hast, & his mind nothing gaue him that way that theirs did (if their mindes gaue them that way that they said) he prayde them to tary & talke vpon the matter, and tell him such reason therin, that he might thinke as they did: and when he so shold do, he wold be glad to say with them, or els he sayde they must pardone him. For sith he had a soule of his own to kepe as they had, he must say as he thoughte for hys, as they must for [1438d] theyrs. Whan they herd thys, they wer half angry with him. What good felow (quod one of the northern men) whare wonnes thou? Be not we aleuen here, & thou ne but ene la10 alene, & all we agreed? whereto shouldest thou sticke? what is thy name gude felow? Masters (quod he) my name is called Cumpany. Cumpany quod they, now by thy trouth gude felowe playe than the gude companion, come theron furth with vs, & passe euen for gude company. Wold god good maisters quod the man agayn, that ther lay no more weight theron. But now when we shall hence & come before god, and that he shal send you to heauen for doing according to youre conscience, and me to [1438e] the deuill for dooyng againste myne, in passing at your request here for good company now, by god maister Dykonson [(]that was one of the northern mens names) if I shall than say to all you agayn, maisters, I went once for good company with you, which is the cause that I goe nowe to hell, play you the good felowes nowe agayn with me, as I went than for good companye with you, so some of you goe now for good company with me. Wold ye goe maister Dikonson? nay naye by our lady, nor neuer one of you all. And therfore must ye pardon me from passing as you passe, but if I thought in the matter as you doe, I dare not in such a mat[1438f]ter passe for good company. For the passage of my poore soule passeth al good company. And when my father had told me thys tale, than sayde he ferther thus: I praye thee nowe good Margaret tell me this, wouldest thou wishe thy poore father being at the lestwise somewhat lerned, lesse to regard the peril of his soule than did there that honest vnlearned man? I medle not (you wot wel) with the 9. That is, “fool”; “sowle” (soul) in Rastell. 10. Transposed letters: “al” is intended.



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conscience of any man, that hath sworne: nor I take not vpon me to be theyr iudge. But now if they doe well, & that theyr conscience grudge them not, if I with my conscience to the contrary, shoulde for good compa[1438g]ny passe on with them & sweare as they doe, when all our soules hereafter shall passe out of this world, & stand in iudgement at the barre before the high iudge, if he iudge them to heauen and me to the deuil, because I did as they did, not thinking as they thought, if I shold than say (as the good man Cumpany sayd) Myne olde good lordes & frendes, naming such a lord and such, yea and some bishoppes peraduenture of suche as I loue best, I sware because you sware, & wente that way that you went, doe likewyse for me [1438h] now, let me not go alone, if there be any good felowshippe with you, some of you come with me: by my trouth Marget I may say to the in secret counsayle, here betwene vs twayn (but let it goe no ferther I beseche the heartely)[.] I fynde the frendship of thys wretched worlde so ficle, that for any thing that I could trete or pray, that woulde for good felowshyp goe to the deuill with me, amonge them all I wene should I not fynde one. And than by God Marget if you thinke so too, best it is I suppose, that for any respecte of them, all were they twyse as many moe as they be, I haue my selfe a respecte to myne owne soule. Surely father quod [1439a] I, without any scruple at all, you may be bolde I dare saye for to sweare that. But father, they that thynke you shold not refuse to sweare the thyng, that you see so manye so good menne and so well learned sweare before you, meane not that you shoulde sweare to beare theym felowshyp, nor to passe with theym for good coumpanye: but that the credence that you may with reason geue to theyr persones for theyr aforesayde qualities, shoulde well moue you to thinke the oth such of it selfe, as euery man maye well sweare withoute perill of theyr soule, if [1439b] theyr own priuate conscience to the contrarye be not the lette: and that ye well oughte and haue good cause to chaunge youre own conscience, in confyrmynge your owne conscience to the conscience of so many other, namely being such as you knowe they be. And syth it is also by a lawe made by the parlement commaunded, they thynke that you be vpon the peryll of youre soule, bounden to change and refourme your conscience, and confyrme your owne as I sayd vnto other mennes. Mary Marget (quod my father agayne) for the part that you [1439c] playe, you playe it not muche a mysse. But Margaret fyrst, as for the lawe of the lande, thoughe euerye man beynge borne and inhabityng therein, is bounden to the keepinge in euerye case vpon some temporall payne, and in many cases vppon

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payne of Goddes displeasure too, yet is there no manne bounden to sweare, that euery lawe is well made, nor bounden vpon the payne of Goddes dyspleasure, to perfourme anye suche poynte of the lawe, as were in dede vnlawefull. Of which maner kynd, that there maye suche happe to bee made in anye parte of chrystendome, I suppose [1439d] no manne doubteth, the generall counsayle of the whole bodye of christendom euermore in that poynte excepte: which though it may make some thynges better than other, and some thynges maye growe to that poynte, that by another lawe they maye neede to be refourmed, yet to institute any thing in suche wyse to Goddes dysplesure, as at the making might not lawfully be perfourmed, the spirit of god that gouerneth his church, neuer hath yet suffered, nor neuer hereafter shall, hys whole catholike church lawfullye gathered together in a generall counsayle, as Chryste hathe made playne promises in scripture. Now if it [1439e] so happe, that in anye particuler parte of chrystendome, there be a lawe made, that be suche, as for some parte thereof some menne thinke that the law of god cannot beare it, and some other thinke yes, the thing being in suche maner in question, that thorow diuers quarters of chrystendom, some that are good men and cunning, bothe of our owne dayes and before oure dayes thynke some one way, and some other of lyke learnynge and goodnesse thynke the contrarye, in thys case he that thinketh agaynste the lawe, neither maye sweare that lawe lawefullye was made, standynge hys owne conscience to the contrarye, nor is bounden vpon payne of Goddes displeasure to chaunge hys [1439f] owne conscience therein, for anye particuler lawe made any where, other than by the generall counsayle, or by a general fayth growen by the woorkinge of God vniuersally thorowe all christen nacions: nor other authoritie than one of these twayne (except speciall reuelacion and expresse commaundement of God) sith the contrarye opinions of good menne and well learned, as I putte you the [1439g] case, made the vnderstandynge of the scryptures doubtefull, I can see none that lawefully maye commaunde and compell anye man to chaunge his own opinion, and to translate his own conscience from the tone syde to the tother. For an ensaumple of some such maner thinges, I haue I trow before this time tolde you, that whither our blessed lady wer conceued in originall sinne or not, was somtime in great question among the great learned men of christendom. And whether it be yet decyded & determined by any generall counsayle, I re[1439h]member not. But this I remember well, that notwithstanding that the feaste of her concepcion, was than celebrate in the churche (at the least wyse in dyuers prouinces) yet was holy S. Barnarde, whiche as his manifold bokes made



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in the lawde & prayse of our ladye dooe declare, was of as deuoute affection towarde al thinges sowning11 toward her commendacion, that he thought might well be verifyed or suffered, as any man was liuynge, yet I saye was that holye deuoute manne, agaynste that part of her prayse, as appereth well by a pistle of hys, wherein he ryghte sore and with gret reason argueth theragainst, and approueth not the institucion of [1440a] that feaste neither. Nor he was not of thys mynde alone, but many other wel learned menne with hym, and ryghte holye menne too. Nowe was there on the tother syde, the blessed holye byshop Saynte Anselme, and he not alone neither, but many well learned and verye verteous also with him. And they bee both twayne holye sayntes in heauen, and many moe that wer on eyther side. Nor neither parte was there bounden to chaunge theyr opinion for thother, nor for anye prouinciall counsayle eyther. But lyke as after the determinacion of a well assembled general coun[1440b] sayle, euerye manne had been bounden to geue credence that waye, & confirme theyr owne conscience to the determinacion of the counsayle generalle, and than all they that helde the contrarye before, were for that holdynge oute of blame, so if before suche decision a man had agaynst his own conscience, sworn to mayntayn and defend the other side, he hadde not fayled to offende God very sore. But marye if on the tother side a man wolde in a matter take a way by hymselfe vpon his owne mynde alone, or with some few, or with neuer so ma[1440c]ny, agaynste an euident trouth appearynge by the common fayth of christendome, thys conscience is verye damnable. Yea, or if it be not euen fullye so playn and euident, yet if he see but himselfe with farre the fewer parte, thinke the tone way, agaynste farre the more parte of as well learned and as good, as those are that affyrme the thing that he thinketh, thinking and affyrmynge the contrarye, and that of such folke as he hath no reasonable cause wherefore he shoulde not in that matter suppose, that those which say they think against [1440d] hys mynde, affyrme the thing that they saye, for none other cause but for that they so thynke in dede, thys is of verye trouthe a verye good occasion to moue him, and yet not to compell him, to conforme his mynde and conscience vnto theyrs. But Margaret, for what causes I refuse the othe, that thyng (as I haue often tolde you) I wil neuer shew you, neither you nor no bodye elles, excepte the kinges hyghnes should like to commaund me. Whiche if hys grace did, I haue ere this tolde you therein howe obedientlye I haue sayde. But surelye daughter I haue refused it and doe, for mo causes than one. And for what cau[1440e]ses soeuer I re11. “being sown,” so that it may grow; OED, s.v. sow, v. 1.

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fuse it, thys am I sure, that it is well knowen, that of theym that haue sworne it, some of the best lerned before the othe geuen theym, sayde and playne affyrmed the contrarye, of some suche thinges as they haue nowe sworne in the othe, and that vpon theyr trouthe and theyr learninge than, and that not in haste nor sodaynely, but often and after greate diligence doone to seeke and fynde out the trouthe. That might be father (quod I) and yet since they myghte see more, I will not (quod he) dispute daughter Margaret against that, nor misseiudge any other mannes [1440f] conscience, whiche lyeth in theyr owne hearte farre out of my sighte. But thys will I saye, that I neuer hearde my self the cause of their chaunge, by any new further thinge founden of aucthoritie, than as farre as I perceiue they hadde looked on, and as I suppose, verye well wayed before. Nowe of the selfe same thinges that they saw before, seme some otherwyse vnto theym nowe than they did before, I am for theyr sakes the gladder a greate deale. But anye thing that euer I sawe before, yet at thys days to me they seme but as they did. And therfore, though they maye dooe otherwyse than they mighte, yet doughter I maye [1440g] not. As for suche thynges as some men woulde happely saye, that I myghte with reason the lesse regard their change, for anye saumple of theym to be taken to the change of my conscience, because that the kepyng of the princes pleasure, and the auoyding of hys indignacion, the feare of the losing of theyr worldlye substaunce, with regarde vnto the dyscoumforte of theyr kinredde and theyr frendes, myght happe make some men either swere otherwise than they think, or frame theyr conscience a freshe to thinke otherwyse than they thoughte, [1440h] anye suche opinion as thys is, will I not conceyue of theym, I haue better hope of theyr goodnesse, than to thinke of theym so. For if suche thinges sholde haue tourned theym, the same thynges hadde been likelye to make me dooe the same: for in good faythe I knewe fewe so faynte hearted as my selfe. Therfore will I Margaret by my will, thinke no worse of other folke in the thing that I knowe not, than I find in my self. But as I know well myne onely conscience causeth me to refuse the othe, so will I truste in God, that accordinge to theyr [1441a] conscience they haue receyued it and sworne. But whereas you thynk Marget, that they bee so manye, moo than there are on the tother syde that thynke in this thynge as I thynke, surelye for your owne coumfort that you shall not take thoughte, thynking that your father casteth hym selfe awaye so lyke a foole, that he woulde ieobarde the losse of hys substaunce, and peraduenture his bodye, withoute anye cause why he so shoulde for peryll



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of hys soule, but rather hys soule in peryll thereby too, to thys shall I saye to thee Marget, that in [1441b] some of my causes I nothing doubte at all, but that though not in this realme, yet in Chrystendome aboute, of those well learned menne and vertuous that are yet aliue, they be not the fewer part that are of my mynde. Besydes that, that it were ye wotte well possible, that some menne in thys realme too, thinke not so cleare the contrarye, as by the othe receiued they haue sworne to say. Nowe thus farre foorth I saye for them that are yet alyue. But goe me nowe to theym that are deadde before, and that are I trust in heauen, I am sure that it [1441c] is not the fewer parte of them, that all the tyme whyle they liued, thoughte in some of the thinges, the way that I think now. I am also Margaret of this thing sure ynough, that of those holy doctors and sayntes, whiche to be with God in heauen long a go no good christen man douteth, whose bokes yet at his day remayn here in mens handes, there thought in some suche thynges as I thynke nowe. I say not that they thought al so, but surely such & so manye as will well appeare by their wryting, that I praye god geue me the grace that my soule maye folow theyrs. And yet I shewe you not [1441d] all Marget that I haue for my selfe in the sure discharge of my conscience. But for the conclusion daughter Margaret of all this matter, as I haue often tolde you, I take not vppon me neither to dyffine nor dyspute in these matters, nor I rebuke not nor impugne any other mans dede, nor I neuer wrote, nor so muche as spake in any company, any woorde of reproche in anye thing that the parlement hadde passed, nor I medled not with the conscience of any other man, that either thinketh or saith he thinketh contrarye vnto myne. But as concerning mine owne selfe, for thy coumfort shal I say daughter to thee, that mine own [1441e] conscience in this mater (I damne none other mans) is such, as may well stand with mine owne saluacion, thereof am I Megge as sure, as that is, god is in heauen. And therfore as for al the remenant, goodes, landes, and life both, (if the chance sholde so fortune) sith this conscience is sure for me, I verelye trust in God, he shall rather strengthe me to beare the losse, than agaynste thys conscience to sweare and putte my soule in peril, sith al the causes that I perceue moue other men to the contrary, seme not suche vnto me as in my conscience make anye change. When he saw me sit with this [1441f] very sadde, as I promise you sister my hearte was full heauye for the perill of his persone, for in fayth I feare not his soule, he smiled vpon me & said: how now daughter Marget? what howe mother Eue? where is your mind nowe? sit not musing with some serpent in youre brest,

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vpon some new perswasion, to offer father Adam the apple yet once agayne? In good fayth father quod I, I can no ferther goe, but am (as I trowe Cresede saith in Chaucer) comen to Dulcarnon euen at my wittes ende.12 For sith then[1441g] saumple of so manye wyse men, cannot in this matter moue you, I se not what to say more, but if I should loke to perswade you with the reason that master Harry Patenson made. For he met one day one of our men, & when he had asked where you wer, & heard that you wer in the towre still, he waxed euen angry with you & sayd: Why? what eyleth him that he wil not sweare? wherefore shoulde he sticke to swere? I haue sworn the oth my self. And so I can in good faith go now no ferther neither, after so many wyse men whom ye take for no saumple, but if I should say [1441h] like M. Harry: why shold you refuse to swere father? for I haue sworn my self.13 At this he laughed & sayde, That woord was like Eue too, for she offered Adam no woorse fruit than she had eaten her self. But yet father quod I by my trouth, I fere me very sore, that this matter will brynge you in merueilous heauy tr[ou]ble.14 You know wel that as I shewed you, M. Secretary sent you word as your very frend, to remember, that the parlement lasteth yet. Margaret quod my father, I thanke hym right hertely. But as I shewed you than agayn, I left not this geare vnthought on. And albeit I knowe well that if they would make a lawe to doo me any harme, that lawe coulde neuer be law[1442a]full, but that God shall I trust kepe me in that grace that concernyng my duetie to my prynce, no man shall dooe me hurte but if he doo me wronge (and than as I tolde you, thys is lyke a ryddle, a case in whiche a man may lese his head and haue no harme) and not withstandyng also that I haue good hope, that God shal neuer suffer so good & wyse a prince, in such wyse to requyte the long seruice of his true faythfull ser­ uaunte, yet sith there is nothynge vnpossible to falle, I forgat not in thys matter, the counsell of Chryst in the gospell, that ere I shold begynne to buylde thys castell for the [1442b] sauegarde of myne owne soule, I shold sytte and rekon what the charge would be. I coumpted Marget full surely many a restles night, whyle my wyfe slept, and wente I had slepte too, what peryll were possible for to falle to me, so farre furth that I am sure ther can come none aboue. And in deuisyng daughter thervpon, I had a full heauy heart. But yet I thanke oure Lorde for all 12. See Stephen Merriam Foley, “Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the ‘Letter to Alington,’ ” in this volume, pp. 244–46 for discussion of this passage. 13. Rastell’s marginal note: “She toke the othe with this excepcion as farre as would stande with the law of god.” 14. Rastell edition: “truoble.”



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that, I neuer thought to change, though the very vttermoste shoulde happe me that my feare ranne vpon. No father (quod I) it is not lyke to thinke vpon a thynge that [1442c] may be, and to see a thynge that shalbe, as ye shoulde (our Lorde saue you) if the chaunce shoulde so fortune. And than shoulde you peraduenture thynke, that you thinke not nowe, and yet than peraduenture it woulde be to late. To late daughter (quod my father) Margaret? I beseche our Lord, that if euer I make suche a chaunge, it maye bee to late in dede. For wel I wotte the chaunge can not be good for my soule, that chaunge I saye that shoulde growe but by feare. And therefore I pray God that in thys world I neuer haue good of such change. [1442d] For so muche as I take harme here, I shall haue at the leastwise the lesse therfore when I am hence. And if it so were that I wiste well nowe, that I sholde faynte and falle, and for feare sweare hereafter, yet woulde I wyshe to take harme by the refusyng fyrst: for so shold I haue the better hope for grace to ryse againe. And albeit (Marget) that I wot well my lewdenes hath been suche: that I knowe my selfe well woorthye that god shoulde let me slippe, yet can I not but trust in hys mercifull goodnes, that as his grace hath strengthed me hetherto, and made me contente in my hearte, to leese, good, lande, and lyfe too, rather [1442e] than to sweare agaynst my conscience, and hath also putte in the kyng toward me that good and gracious mynde, that as yet he hath taken fro me nothing but my libertie (wherwith as helpe me god) his grace hath doone me so great good by the spiritual profite that I trust I take thereby, that among all his great benefites heaped vppon me so thycke, I reckon vpon my fayth my prisonment, [(]euen the very chief) I cannot I saye therfore mistruste the grace of God, but that eyther he shall conserue and kepe the king in that gracious mynde still, to doe me none hurt, or els if hys pleasure be, that [1442f] for myne other synnes I shall suffer in suche a cause in sighte as I shall not deserue, his grace shal geue me the strength to take it pacientlye, and peraduenture somewhat gladdely to, wherby his high goodnes shall (by the merites of his bitter passion ioyned thereunto, and farre surmounting in merite for me, all that I can suffer my selfe) make it serue for release of my payne in purgatorye, and ouer that for encrease of some rewarde in heauen. Mystruste him Megge will I not, though I fele me faint. Yea and though I shoulde feele my feare euen at poynt to ouerthrowe me to, yet shall I [1442g] remember howe Saynte Peter with a blaste of a wynde, beganne to synke for his faynt fayth, and shall doe as he did, call vpon Christ and pray him to helpe. And

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than I truste he shall sette his holy hande vnto me, and in the stormy seas, hold me vppe from drowning. Yea and if he suffer me to playe Sayncte Peter ferther, and to fall full to the grounde, and sweare and forsweare too, (whiche oure Lorde for his tender passion kepe me fro, and let me leese if it so fall, and neuer wynne thereby:) yet after shall I trust that his goodnesse will caste vpon [1442h] me his tender pitteous eye, as he dyd vpon Saynt Peter, and make me stande vppe agayne, and confesse the trouth of my conscience a freshe, and abyde the shame and the harme here of myne own faulte. And finally Marget, thys wotte I verye well, that withoute my faulte he will not lette me be loste. I shal therfore with good hope, committe my selfe wholye to him. And if he suffer me for my fautes to perish, yet shal I than serue for a prayse of his iustice. But in good fayth Meg, I trust that his tender pitie shal kepe my pore soule safe & make me commend his mercy. And therfore mine own [1443a] good daughter, neuer trouble thy mind, for anye thyng that euer shall happe me in this worlde. Nothyng can come, but that that God wille. And I make me verye sure, that what soeuer that bee, seme it neuer so badde in sight, it shal in dede be the best. And with thys my good chylde I pray you heartely, be you and all your sisters and my sonnes too, comfortable and seruisable to your good mother my wyfe. And of youre good housbandes mindes I haue no maner dout. Commende me to theym all, and to my good daughter Alington, and to all my [1443b] other frendes, sisters, neces, nephewes, and alies, and vnto all our seruauntes, man, woman, and chylde, & all my good neyghbours and oure acquayntance abrode. And I right heartely, praye both you and them, to serue God, and be mery and reioyce in hym. And if any thing happe me that you would be lothe, pray to god for me, but trouble not your self: as I shall full heartely praye for vs all, that wee maye meete together once in heauen, where we shall make merye for euer, and neuer haue trouble after.



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CRITICISM ∞

“A Young, Virtuous, and Well-learned Gentlewoman” Elizabeth McCutcheon

Six √

“A Young, Virtuous, and ­ Well-Learned Gentlewoman” Margaret More Roper in the Republic of Letters E l i zab eth M cCutch eo n

By 1524 Margaret More Roper had effectively transgressed ­long-established gender norms to take a place in the Republic of Letters, an accomplishment without precedent in early Tudor England.1 But questions remain about her agency and why her translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica was published when it was. In this essay I want to look closely at what has proven to be a very complex and nuanced story by revisiting her interactions with Thomas More, the family tutors, Erasmus, and other humanists before and during the 1520s; her translation of Erasmus’s commentary; and aspects of her life thereafter.2 I am less concerned about allocating agency, as such, however, than about the various ways, 1. See John A. Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica and the Apprenticeship behind Early Tudor Translation,” Review of English Studies 13 (1937): 257–71. 2. I first “visited” her life and writings in the 1980s; see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “The Learned Woman in Tudor England: Margaret More Roper,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449–80; in what follows I have drawn upon material from this essay. In 1995 I gave a paper at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York on “Community and Collaboration in Margaret More’s Writings,” in which I returned to questions I still had about how best to characterize her as a writer and to what extent she was concerned with fashioning her own authority. I am also indebted to the many studies of early modern women writers in general and of Roper in particular that have appeared in increasing numbers since the 1980s.

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personal, social, and public, in which she deployed her education and interacted with those who mentored and sponsored her. When and how early modern women exercised agency has been a major preoccupation in recent criticism and scholarship. But there is a danger of isolating such women from their social, intellectual, and cultural networks, and this is particularly problematic for someone like Margaret More Roper, much of whose extant writing was collaborative. Let me be clear, too, about “interaction”: she was never a passive recipient but an intelligent participant. In “For Women, Parity Is Still a Subtly Steep Climb,” business journalist Phyllis Korkki argues that “social norms” are still “so gendered and so stereotyped” today that they continue to hold women back. Even mentors are not enough; women also need a sponsor at the top to advocate for them. She goes on to draw a distinction between mentors and sponsors: the former “lend friendly advice and allow workers to share their quandaries and challenges,” while “sponsors make a direct bet on the promotion of their protégés.”3 It may seem like a huge leap from this article to an essay on a woman who lived more than five centuries ago in a different culture and environment. But it is surprisingly relevant; social norms were much more gendered then, and women were marginalized, but they still had the equivalent of mentors and sponsors, by way of tutors and ­well-placed members of their families.4 Obviously, Margaret More Roper’s innate abilities and character were essential to her success. We have More’s word for her intelligence, strong will, and independence of spirit from the time she was a child. As he wrote to her in 1523, just before her first child was born, in an important letter to which I shall return, Something I once said to you in joke came back to my mind, and I realized how true it was. It was to the effect that you were to be pitied, because the incredulity of men would rob you of the praise you so richly deserved for your laborious vigils, as they would never believe, when they read what you had written, that you had not often availed yourself of another’s help: whereas of all the writers you least deserve to be thus suspected. Even when a tiny child you could never endure to be decked out in another’s finery.5 3. Phyllis Korkki, “For Women, Parity Is Still a Subtly Steep Climb,” New York Times, October 9, 2011, national edition, business section, p. 9. 4. Several recent studies are concerned with familial connections, including Marion W ­ ynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); chapter one treats the More family in detail. 5. Letter no. 35 in St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961). Hereafter, letters from this edition will be cited as Rogers, SL, followed by the

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But the extraordinary education she received and her father’s and her own connections with other humanists, facilitated by More and Erasmus, were also important. More’s teaching and mentoring of his daughter involved much more than friendly advice, while Erasmus, who was older than More and the foremost humanist in Northern Europe, became her sponsor “at the top,” and actively promoted her internationally, notably by the Latin letter he wrote to her in December 1523, which soon after circulated in print, and by a colloquy alluding to her that was published shortly afterwards. This is the story of a complicated, productive, and reciprocal collaboration, then, in which Margaret More Roper, who was certainly an agent, though not the only one, became the prototype of the learned woman in ­sixteenth-century England. Unfortunately, there is no extant writing by Margaret Roper herself before 1524. But we can read between the lines of letters to and about her, supplemented by other contemporary comments and the report of Thomas Stapleton, a later ­sixteenth-century biographer of Thomas More and the family, who had access to family papers. These materials reveal a great deal about both her nature and her nurture, including her education and the rapid progress she made; More’s role as her first and major mentor; and the crucial relationship, at once personal and epistolary, that evolved between Margaret and Erasmus. They also document, albeit obliquely, Margaret’s own development as a humanist and a writer in her formative years. By late 1523, when she was about eighteen years old, she was no longer an apprentice and was poised to take a place in what ­sixteenth-century humanists thought of as the Republic of Letters. At about the same time, More, Erasmus, Vives, and fellow humanists in Northern Europe were promoting the role of the ­well-educated woman (one literate in Greek and Latin) and were soon to find an outstanding model in Margaret Roper, born Margaret More.6

letter number. See also letter no. 128 in The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947). Hereafter letters from this edition will be cited as Rogers, Correspondence, followed by letter number. This particular letter consists of extracts from two letters, written in different years, that Stapleton combined. For more on the dates, see Rogers, Correspondence, introduction to no. 128. 6. Women writers today are usually referred to by their last name. This is complicated in Margaret More Roper’s case since she shares a surname with her father and her husband, who also figure in this study. Moreover, it sounds odd to refer to a young girl by her married name. In this study, I have varied her name according to the context.



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Margaret More Roper and Thomas More Margaret, the first child and eldest daughter of Thomas More and his first wife, Jane (Joan) Colt More, was born in 1505. She had two younger sisters, Elizabeth (1506) and Cecily (1507), and one younger brother, John (1509). She was clearly the most gifted and precocious of More’s four children; as Stapleton represents her, “More than all the rest of his children, she resembled her father, as well in stature, appearance, and voice, as in mind and in general character.”7 Additionally, the relationship between them was a strong one. John Guy posits that by three she “had already started learning to read,” imagining “her holding up, to her father’s delight, one of the easier English translations of Aesop’s Fables.”8 Part of the story of her subsequent education in what More called his school is a familiar one.9 But it bears a closer look because it is such an essential part of her later achievements, and it was exceptional, even by the standards of other humanists, such as Juan Luis Vives or Richard Hyrde. In a letter to Margaret, then in her twenties, More articulated the goal of the education he designed and oversaw: in brief, to be “well furnished for the whole scope of human life, (which is to have a sound mind in a sound body).” While it included both medical science and sacred literature, it was based upon the “humane letters and ­so-called liberal studies,” which, More argued, form or perfect “a good judgment.”10 More comes closest to spelling out his concept of a complete education in a long letter to Margaret’s tutor, William Gonnell, a schoolteacher living near Cambridge, whom Erasmus had recommended to More.11 He probably wrote this letter in 1518, when Margaret was about thirteen years old. It has been interpreted both affirmatively and negatively, because More explores two sets of values 7. Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, trans. Philip E. Hallett, ed. E. E. Reynolds (London: Burns & Oates Ltd., 1966), 103. 8. John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas & Margaret More (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 24. I am indebted to this double biography for material and information about her life. 9. Representative studies include Guy, A Daughter’s Love; Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More; McCutcheon, “The Learned Woman in Tudor England”; Elizabeth McCutcheon, “The Education of Thomas More’s Daughters,” in East Meets West: Homage to Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., ed. Roger L. Hadlich and J. D. Ellesworth (Honolulu: Department of European Languages and Literature and College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, 1988), 193–207; J. W. Sowards, “On Education: More’s Debt to Erasmus,” in Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, ed. Clare Murphy et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), 103–22. 10. Rogers, SL, no. 31; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 106. 11. E. E. Reynolds, Margaret Roper: Eldest Daughter of St. Thomas More (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 13; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 59–63.

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that may seem almost contradictory—especially to readers today.12 On the one hand, he claims that “renown for learning, if you take away moral probity, brings nothing else but notorious and noteworthy infamy, especially in a woman” (emphasis mine). On the other hand, he emphasizes the importance of education for women as well as men. Acknowledging that “erudition in woman is a new thing and a reproach to the sloth of men,” he calls for “modesty of character” and “eminent virtue of mind.” At the same time, he emphasizes learning, which he sees as bringing wisdom and which “depends on the inner knowledge of what is right, not on the talk of men [i. e., others]” (non ab aliorum sermone).13 For More, then, education is both an intellectual and a moral process, which is why it should not be denied to women. As he explains, exploiting favorite agricultural metaphors: Nor do I think that the harvest is much affected whether it is a man or a woman who does the sowing. They both have the name of human being whose nature reason differentiates from that of beasts; both, I say, are equally suited for the knowledge of learning by which reason is cultivated, and, like plowed land, germinates a crop when the seeds of good precepts have been sown. But if the soil of a woman be naturally bad, and apter to bear fern than grain, by which saying many keep women from study, I think, on the contrary, that a woman’s wit is the more diligently to be cultivated, so that nature’s defect may be redressed by industry.14

Here as elsewhere More insists on the importance of nurture as well as nature—a question treated at great length in the second book of Utopia. He is also acutely aware of the enmity a learned woman may incur, a practical reason for his stress on “modesty.” And he is a man of his times, insofar as he is patriarchal, respectful of hierarchy, and likely to privilege age over youth and male over female—except when it comes to learning. In or about 1521, More ended a letter to Margaret (now married) this way: “I am ever wont to persuade you to yield in 12. For what remains one of the most balanced discussions of More’s attitudes towards women, see Judith P. Jones and Sherianne Sellers Seibel, “Thomas More’s Feminism: To Reform or ­Re-Form,” in Quincentennial Essays on St. Thomas More: Selected Papers from the Thomas More College Conference, ed. Michael J. Moore (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian State University, 1978), 67–77. See also Elaine Beilin, “Learning and Virtue: Margaret More Roper,” in Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Pamela Joseph Benson, “The New Ideal in England: Thomas More, Juan Luis Vives, and Richard Hyrde,” in The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 13. Rogers, SL, no. 20; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 63. 14. Rogers, SL, no. 20; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 63.



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everything to your husband; now, on the contrary, I give you full leave to strive to surpass him in the knowledge of the celestial system.”15 If, ­half-jokingly, he protects his paternal authority, he also acknowledges and encourages her determination and intellectual drive. Furthermore, his concept of “modesty” is not limited to the female sex, nor is it simply a euphemism for chastity or virtue understood as virginity and purity. More wants all his children, whether female or male, to avoid pride, be indifferent to flattery, and possess a good conscience. And he himself clearly feels that the two genders are potentially equal in their rational capacity and their ability to learn and to exercise what he would have thought of as “right reason,” at once an intellectual and ethical exercise of the mind that brings about what More calls “judgment.”16 John Guy rightly points out that More’s letter to Gonnell was prompted, in large part, by the tutor’s description of Margaret’s “lofty and exalted character of mind [which] should not be debased”17—a description that elicited a strong response on More’s part. (I am tempted to say that More protested too much.) For Guy, the issue facing More then and later is whether or not a woman should strive to be a “published author, especially in her own lifetime”; he adds that he “conformed intransigently to the social convention of his time that it was morally disreputable for a woman to seek recognition as a writer.”18 I want to restate the problem as it probably struck More then and later. In 1517/18, Margaret was still very young (about twelve or thirteen years old), and she continued her education in the following years. It seems unlikely that publication by her was an issue in 1518. It seems to me, too, that in this letter More is distinguishing between motives for acquiring and publicizing one’s learning. Learning that is acquired and promoted for the sake of glory or renown, fama, brings “nothing else but 15. Rogers, SL, no. 31; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 106. 16. Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); cf. Erasmus, letter to Guillaume Budé, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8, The Correspondence of Erasmus, trans. R. A. B. Mynors, annotated by Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), no. 1233, 297–98. Subsequent references to Erasmus’s letters in English will be referred to as CWE followed by volume number and letter number, if already published in this edition. Note that vol. 9 (1989) was translated by R. A. B. Mynors and annotated by James M. Estes; vol. 10 (1992) was translated by R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell and annotated by James M. Estes. Since this essay was completed, vol. 16 (2015), containing English translations of the letters that Erasmus and Roper exchanged in 1529, has been printed, translated by Alexander Dalzell and annotated by James M. Estes. For Erasmus’s Latin originals, see Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 11 vols. and index, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58). The original Latin letter to Budé is from vol. 4, no. 1233. Subsequent references to Erasmus’s letters in Latin will be referred to as Allen, Opus epistolarum, followed by volume number and letter number. 17. Rogers, SL, no. 20; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 63; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 64. 18. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 64–65.

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notorious and noteworthy infamy.” And this is true for either sex; as he explains subsequently, “For as it becomes a good man to avoid infamy, so to lay oneself out for renown is the sign of a man who is not only arrogant, but ridiculous and miserable.” Because “erudition in women is a new thing,” it is even more impor­ tant that a woman be a person of moral probity; otherwise, she gives herself and learning a bad name.19 In fact, More will begin to promote her work, albeit discreetly, in a larger arena, despite (and to some extent because of) his awareness of gender stereotypes. I wonder if Gonnell’s insistence on Margaret’s quality of mind led More to ponder a question that he may not fully have considered before 1518: given that she is a prodigy, what should her future include? In early s­ ixteenth-century England there was no institutional or professional secular position available to a woman of her class, however clever and able, outside of the family network. Marriage, which could entail a great deal of responsibility, was the usual pattern: hence, Vives’s organization of his very popular and frequently published conduct book for women, De institutione foeminae Christianae (1524), soon after translated into English by Richard Hyrde, for several years a member of More’s household, by the three stages of virginity, marriage, and widowhood.20 Both More and Erasmus had a more expansive notion of the married woman’s role—to include being a companion for her husband—hence, an important motive and practical reason for her education. But was even this sort of marriage in and of itself enough for a daughter who was so learned and showed so much promise? I think the anxiety that More shows about Margaret’s reputation (fama) and his almost too insistent remarks on modesty and humility belie his own pride in his daughter’s achievements and dialectically generate his reiterated faith in the importance of and commitment to a liberal education for all his children. In what he says and does, moreover, we can see a difference from Juan Luis Vives, for example. In the latter’s conduct book, he maintains that “if she be good, hit were better to be at home within, and unknowen to other folkes. And in compa19. Rogers, SL, no. 20; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 63. 20. Hyrde was the resident physician in the almshouses that More had established for the relief of “the infirm, poor, or old,” and that Margaret Roper was in charge of “in her father’s absence”; see Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 67; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 151–52. See also Diane Valeri Bayne, “The Instruction of a Christian Woman: Richard Hyrde and the Thomas More Circle,” Moreana 12, no. 45 (1975): 5–15; and the introduction to Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde, ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, Margaret Mikesell, et al. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002).



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ny to holde her tonge demurely. And let fewe se her, and none at al here her.”21 By contrast, consider the way that More represents his four children and their lives in a verse epistle that he wrote in 1517 or 1518 and published in his collection of epigrams in 1520, specifically naming them in the title, beginning with the eldest, Margaret—in effect publicizing them in Latin. (Then and later, More and other humanists were sometimes reluctant to name women in vernacular works because of a broader, mixed readership.22) Towards the latter part of this letter, which overflows with his love for them, he writes: “But now my love has grown so much that it seems to me I did not love you at all before. This is because you combine the wise behavior of old age with the years of childhood, because your hearts have been informed with genuine learning, because you have learned to speak with grace and eloquence, weighing each word carefully.”23 What is striking here is both an emotional and an intellectual component in words of praise that are essentially rhetorical, in the best sense of that word. Note, too, that More emphasizes eloquent speech, not silence. In practice, the children’s education reflected More’s humanism and his religious convictions. It was based on a study of Greek and Latin texts, embraced all the liberal and humane arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, poetry, mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy) as well as theology and medicine, and was accompanied by daily worship and other reading in religious and spiritual materials. While More himself oversaw their education, he also employed or supported as tutors a number of young men who subsequently had distinguished careers as university lecturers, physicians, etc.; these included John Clement, Gonnell, a Master Drew, Nicholas Kratzer (later King Henry VIII’s astronomer) and Hyrde.24 We also can identify a few of the many Greek and Latin authors that Margaret and other members of the school read. These would have included a Bible and a book of hours; the writings of the church fathers, including St. Cyprian, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine; Eusebius; Plato, Aristotle, and Galen; Cicero, Sallust, 21. Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 23; Valerie Wayne, “Some Sad Sentence: Vives’ Instructions of a Christian Woman,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985), 15–29. 22. David Weil Baker, Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in S­ ixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), discusses the humanists’ ambivalent attitudes towards publication in the vernacular more generally. 23. Latin poem no. 264 in The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, part 2, Latin Poems, ed. Clarence Miller et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 281 (emphasis mine); the Latin is on 280. 24. Sowards, “On Education: More’s Debt to Erasmus,” identifies the various tutors, 110–12.

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Livy, Seneca, and Quintilian; Boethius; and a variety of her father’s own writings, the works of Erasmus, and other humanist works. The significance and rigor of this list are not ­self-evident. Vives cites similar texts in his conduct book for women. According to him, “what bokes ought to be redde, some every body knoweth: as the gospelles, and the actes, and the epistoles of thapostles, and the olde Testament, saynt Hieronyme, saynt Cyprian, Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Gregory, Plato, Cicero, Senec, and suche other.”25 But his emphasis is much more explicitly Christian, and what he means by reading and writing is limited by comparison with More’s curriculum. As Vives explains, “Whan she shalbe taught to rede, let those bokes be taken in hande, that may teche good maners. And whan she shall lerne to write, let nat her example be voyde verses, nor wanton or tryflyng songes: but some sad sentence, prudent and chaste, taken out of holy scripture, or the sayenges of philosophers: which by often writyng she may fasten better in her memory.”26 For Vives, education tends to mean exposure to suitably moral texts that could be read didactically and memorized, and learning, carefully monitored, a way to keep girls and young women busy and out of harm’s way. And he is wary, explaining that “Hit is better to lacke a good thyng than to use hit yll.”27 So his recommendations (intended for the young) are less liberal than More’s conception of a full and dynamic education that reflects its Latin root: a leading out of the mind and a genuine exercise of intellect and values that allows for discovery, intellectual excitement, pleasure, even fun. One example here must suffice. While reading an edition of St. Cyprian’s letters by Erasmus, first published in 1521, Margaret emended a corrupt passage in a letter thought to be by him, and correctly identified the author as Novatian.28 For Margaret and her siblings, then, how to read critically was as important as what to read, and she rightly earned recognition as a scholar. Reading and writing (that is, composing, not merely copying a text over and over) were also closely interrelated in the program More designed. For example, he encouraged a system of double translation from one language to another and back again, and the children became skilled linguists and translators: one of More’s daughters translated into English the long Latin letter More had written to Oxford University in 1518, defending Greek and liberal learning in general from 25. Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 27. 26. Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 23. 27. Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 27. 28. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 103; Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 141–42 and notes. See, too, the essay on this passage by Eugenio Olivares Merino in the present collection.



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an attack by a “barbarous” preacher, and another turned it back into Latin.29 It is also essential to recognize the spirit of competition that More encouraged, and that training in rhetoric and oratory, including dialectic and disputation, were important aspects of the children’s education.30 Stapleton describes one such disputation, which he characterizes as “eloquent, clever, and perfect in its use of oratorical devices,” in which Margaret wrote “in rivalry, of Quintilian’s speech on the destruction of the poor man’s bees through the poison that had been sprinkled upon the flowers in the rich man’s garden. Quintilian defends the cause of the poor man: Margaret of the rich. The more difficult such a defence is, the greater scope for Margaret’s eloquence and wit,” Stapleton explains.31 Guy identifies this as the speech that Margaret Roper made in 1525 or 1526, when she and her sisters disputed before Henry VIII at court.32 More also believed, as Vives wrote about him, that “the art of writing might be disclosed more openly by contradiction, and, as it were, by conflict.”33 Yet another crucial element in More’s educational system is the exchange of letters in Latin, initially between him and his children, and later between them and other humanists, that he instituted and Margaret adapted. Letter writing “had long been thought the easiest way for young students to learn how to express their own ideas.”34 It became far more important in early ­sixteenth-century culture as a very popular and varied form that proved to be indispensable in the development and promotion of a humanist community.35 It also had more specifically literary implications, as More and the children practiced it. Claudio Guillén has described the Renaissance letter as “writing proclaiming itself as 29. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 92. 30. Unfortunately, it is often assumed that Tudor women were denied rhetorical training; for this view see the introduction to Hannay, Silent but for the Word, 8–9, or Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 60–61, a position belied by Guy’s later discussion of More’s daughters’ disputations at court (155–57). Guy further notes that Vives had seen them practicing at home; see also Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 25–26, on Vives. For a comprehensive discussion of the connections between More, Vives, and Margaret Roper, see Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, “A Month with the Mores: The Meeting of Juan Luis Vives and Margaret More Roper,” English Studies 88, no. 4 (2007): 388–400. 31. Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 107. 32. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 156–57. 33. Quoted in Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 25–26. In this connection see Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), on the habit of arguing in utramque partem (on either side), its relationship to education and drama, and how More, Erasmus, and dramatists embraced this as explorative. 34. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 61–62. 35. On More’s uses of the familiar letter see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “The Humanism of Thomas More: Continuities and Transformations in His Latin Letters,” in Acta Conventus N ­ eo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of N ­ eo-Latin Studies, ed. J. F. Alcina, et al. (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), 25–40.

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writing in the process of correspondence.”36 What he means, in part, is that writing a letter is in some sense a ­self-aware, if not autobiographical, act; rhetorically, the writer is conscious both of himself or herself and the correspondent, situating the self in a particular time and place. More’s early verse letter and the Latin prose letters addressed to his whole school or to Margaret show just how artfully he developed his role as father and mentor and theirs as students, situating himself both as writer and eager recipient (he expected almost daily letters in return), while articulating the writing process. Commenting on the content, language, and style of their letters and encouraging competition between and among them, he spelled out and modeled what amounted to an art of familiar letter writing, which would prove to be especially important for Margaret throughout her life. Although none of Margaret More’s letters to her father from her early years is extant, Stapleton preserved five of More’s to her and three more that refer to her. More is lavish in praise and encouragement; a constant refrain is how pleased he is to have received a letter or letters and how delighted he is to know about their studies. He also offers critical comments; in one letter, he finds their letters “pleasing by their own merits, the charm and pure Latinity of their style,” before singling out John’s letter because of its length and its pleasant combination of wit and due respect. This leads him to a discussion of how best to write a Latin letter—first writing the whole in English, then turning it into Latin, then reviewing it, correcting it, and writing the whole letter out again.37 For More, as for later writing teachers, good writing is rewriting. Furthermore, Margaret and her siblings were writing in and reading both English and Latin. Unlike humanists such as Erasmus, More felt that the vernacular had its own strengths, and he himself wrote extensively in English as well as in Latin, while most of the writing we have by Margaret is in English.38 Two letters in which More broadcasts her talent, describing events when Margaret would have been sixteen or seventeen years old, are especially interesting. While he is not addressing the public at large, he is promoting her talents beyond the family circle. In the first letter, which begins with an extract that Stapleton combined with an extract written when Margaret was pregnant, More 36. Claudio Guillén, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 80. 37. Rogers, SL, no. 32; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 107. 38. Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version,” 268–71, emphasizes the importance of these practices of literary translation and of writing in the vernacular.



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describes an encounter, probably early in 1521, with Reginald Pole, a relative of the king. Pole found one of her letters “nothing short of marvelous” and could hardly believe that she had written it without the help of a teacher.39 In the second letter, written from court, probably in 1522, More writes about an encounter with John Veysey or Voysey, the bishop of Exeter. By accident (he claims) he happened to take out of his pocket a letter he had received from Margaret. When the bishop realized that it was a letter from a woman, he was not just surprised but amazed and read it “more eagerly,” praising it “for its pure Latinity, its correctness, its erudition, and its expressions of tender affection.”40 Like Pole, he could hardly believe that it could have been written by More’s daughter. Whereupon More assured him it had been and produced more of Margaret’s writing, namely, a declamation or speech and her poems. The bishop was overwhelmed by the quality of her writing, so much so that words were wholly inadequate to express his pleasure, and he gave More a gold coin to send to her. The story is even more dramatic and drawn out as More writes it, but tellingly he adds, “Write him your thanks carefully in the nicest letter you can. You will one day be glad to have given pleasure to such a man.”41 Surely More hardly needed to remind his daughter, who already had corresponded with Erasmus, to write and thank the bishop of Exeter, and the bishop’s condescension and patronizing attitude are unsettling for ­twenty-first century readers. But the letter also demonstrates just how unusual, even shocking, Margaret’s learning was for More’s contemporaries. It also explains his concern for her reputation and some part of his stress on “modesty,” which was intended to protect her and which she understood, indeed adopted: modesty, which includes discretion, facilitated her support of her father during and after his imprisonment. The letter as a whole, with its Morean hyperbole, also dramatizes More’s pride in his daughter, the novelty of her achievements, and his ambitions for her (despite his insistence on modesty) as well as some of the many uses to which a letter could be put, including networking and public relations. Thanks to these and other letters from More, and to Stapleton’s biography, we also know something about Margaret’s other early writings. As Stapleton puts it, “She wrote very eloquently prose and verse both in Greek and Latin.” He mentions as least three speeches, including two Latin speeches, “written as an exer39. Rogers, SL, no. 35; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 128. 40. Rogers, SL, no. 33; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 108. 41. Rogers, SL, no. 33; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 108.

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cise, which I have myself seen,” “in style elegant and graceful, while in treatment they hardly yield to her father’s compositions.” A third speech was translated from English by both More and Margaret, independently, “with such great skill that one would not know which to prefer.”42 In addition, around 1522, both father and daughter wrote in English on the “Four Last Things.” More never completed his treatise, but he insisted “that the treatise of his daughter was in no way inferior to his own.”43 Margaret thus occupied an almost anomalous place; it is one thing to compete with other students, including one’s siblings and husband, and quite another to compete with a father like Thomas More, a leading intellectual figure in England. This says more than Stapleton or More’s praise does about Margaret’s ability and accomplishments. It also emphasizes More’s pioneering role in the humanist education of women, which Erasmus stressed in his letter of 1521 to Budé, the famous French humanist, who had educated only his sons and brothers. Erasmus also credited More’s experiment for his own change of opinion about the wisdom of education for women. Insisting that “scarcely any mortal man was not under the conviction that, for the female sex, education had nothing to offer in the way of either virtue or reputation,” he adds “Nor was I myself in the old days completely free of this opinion, but More has quite put it out of my head.”44 As he so often did, Erasmus writes hyperbolically to bring home the point he is making. I want to return to More’s curiously nuanced letter to Margaret Roper, looking now at the second part, written towards the end of 1523, just before her first child was born, in which he congratulated her on her ability as a writer yet observed that she entertained (and was content to entertain) an audience of two: her father and her husband. Although you cannot hope for an adequate reward for your labor, yet nevertheless you continue to unite to your singular love of virtue the pursuit of literature and art. Content with the profit and pleasure of your conscience, in your modesty you do not seek for the praise of the public [a populo fama], nor value it overmuch even if you receive it, but because of the great love you bear us, you regard us—your husband and myself—as a sufficiently large circle of readers for all that you write.45 42. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 103. 43. Ibid. More’s work was first printed in English Workes, edited by William Rastell, in 1557. See The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 1, ed. Anthony S. G. Edwards , K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 44. CWE, vol. 8, no. 1233; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 4, no. 1233. 45. Rogers, SL, no. 35; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 128.



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The thrust of the passage seems consolatory; though only a tiny family circle will know what an accomplished writer she is, she is content with a very select audience. But the translation unintentionally obscures concerns about exposing her to the view of the crowd. More is not thinking here of readers as we understand the term but of an audience listening to someone read and imagines his daughter reading aloud to people in a “theatrum,” a theatre—a shocking image at a time when only male actors appeared on stage. Yet this isn’t the whole story. More’s reference to the “praise of the public,” that is, “fama,” suggests that she has already received some, as in fact she has. Moreover, to have entertained the possibility of a larger, public audience, even if the idea is rejected, suggests that thought must already have been given to it. This question of a larger, public readership, with its attendant publicity, is particularly relevant, since Margaret Roper finished translating Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica before October 1, 1524, and it was published three times during her lifetime, albeit q­ uasi-anonymously.46 Clearly, her appearance in print had been rethought. This publication invites several questions, then. To what extent and in what way or ways was she the agent? Or, more specifically, who was involved in the decision to publish, and when and why was the decision made? John Guy assumes that she and she alone was the agent in discrete opposition to her father.47 Many literary studies have emphasized the personal rather than the public aspects of her writing as a way of establishing her agency, and four particularly interesting studies have focused on how a purportedly personal role became public and/or political. In an explicitly feminist reading, Mary Ellen Lamb, while noting how problematic the concept of agency is for this period, relates Margaret Roper’s writings to a broader humanist political and cultural agenda that was challenging the aristocratic values of court by a formidable publicity campaign. 48 More recently, Jaime Goodrich has also called for a reconsideration of what agency meant for More and his daughter, arguing that Margaret Roper “gained covert political power from her ability to symbolize the private life of her father,” first by her support of More’s friendship and religious affiliations with Erasmus in the 46. See discussion of its complicated publishing history below, p. 143 and notes. 47. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 149–52. See also Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 48. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project, and the Problem of Agency,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies: Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 83–108, reprinted in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, vol. 1, Early Tudor Writers, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 47–72.

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1520s and, later, by her activities on his behalf as he opposed Henry VIII’s political and religious agenda.49 I agree that the private and public were not mutually exclusive; as Barbara Harris has shown, the boundaries between them “were extraordinarily permeable in the early Tudor Period.”50 I also think we must allow for a related kind of writing, one that is social, located somewhere between the personal and the public and shared with a limited group of readers.51 Nor do I think that there was a single motive for Margaret’s appearance in print; it seems, rather, that several different motives coalesced. In any case, given the limits of the evidence we have, we can never know just what precipitated the decision to print Margaret’s translation of the Precatio Dominica, when it was made, or even how many people were involved, although it seems likely that Margaret Roper, Thomas More, and Richard Hyrde, who wrote the preface to her translation, were among them.52 Meanwhile, another humanist was promoting her in the international humanist community, and it is time to consider in more detail the interactions between Margaret and Erasmus that culminated in the 1520s, when, in effect, Erasmus became her sponsor.

49. Jaime Goodrich, “Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: A Case for Rethinking Women’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 4 (2008): 1021, further developed in Jaime Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014), chap. 1, on Margaret Roper and her daughter, Mary Basset. See also Brenda M. Hosington, “Translation in the Service of Politics and Religion: A Family Tradition for Thomas More, Margaret Roper and Mary Clarke Basset,” in Between Scylla and Charybdis: Learned Letter Writers Navigating the Reefs of Religious and Political Controversy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeanine De Landtsheer and Henk Nellen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 93–108. 50. Barbara J. Harris, “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,” The Historical Journal 33, no. 2 (1990): 259–81. 51. Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), identifies what he calls a “social mode,” a middle ground that can partake of the personal and the public but is intended for a small community (3–42). See, too, Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Social Author,” in Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Miner and Ezell are addressing ­seventeenth-century practices, but their comments seem equally applicable to some ­sixteenth-century humanist writings, especially those in Latin, which were initially intended for a select readership with shared social and cultural values rather than for the public at large. Erasmus’s letter to Margaret Roper in 1529, which she was expected to show to others, and which was subsequently included in Epistolae Floridiae (Basel, 1531) is a case in point. Compare the correspondence between More and Margaret while he was in the Tower of London; while written with an awareness of more than one reader and shared in manuscript, it could not have been printed at that time. 52. I doubt that her husband, William Roper, played any role at all. In “A Month with the Mores,” Olivares Merino suggests that Vives may well have personally encouraged her (397).



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Margaret More Roper and Erasmus On September 6, 1529, Erasmus wrote a complimentary letter to Margaret More Roper, acknowledging his delight in Holbein’s now ­well-known sketch of the More family that he had recently received, singling out Margaret herself and commenting on the beautiful spirit that he saw shining in Holbein’s sketch. 53 This prompted Margaret’s gracious t­ hank-you letter of November 4 to him, valuable in some part because it is the only instance of her handwriting that we know about.54 It is full of praise for Erasmus, expressed in the hyperbolic language that was the common currency between humanists, for whom encomium was indispensable. I will return later to the whole of this letter. For now, I want to highlight just that part of the letter in which she refers to him as our teacher or preceptor, “by whose learned labours we have received whatever of good letters we have imbibed, and one who is the old and faithful friend of our father.”55 Interestingly, both Reynolds’s biography of Margaret Roper and Allen’s edition of Erasmus’s letters take issue with the word “praeceptor,” the former pointing out that “she was not, of course, referring to him as a former tutor,” the latter insisting that “this is not to be interpreted literally . . . but as . . . of one who taught through his books.”56 Margaret says as much and more, both by way of metaphoric language—the word “imbibed,” “drunk in,” is particularly telling—and by linking “praeceptor,” a word implying learned authority, with the humanist ideal of good letters and the language of friendship. What she is suggesting, I think, is a long and engaged relationship in which Erasmus was not only a friend but a mentor and a sponsor for her father (consider his letters promoting More and his role in the publication of Utopia) and for her. Erasmus and More first met each other in 1499, rapidly becoming friends and colleagues in what quickly became a circle of English and northern European humanists. By 1505 Erasmus was a guest in More’s house, and the two men were collaborators and friendly competitors as they translated parts of Lucian from Greek to Latin. Erasmus’s stay overlapped with Margaret More’s birth, and it is 53. Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2212. 54. MS Rehdiger 254.129, University Library of Wroclaw (Poland). 55. Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2233. There is an English translation of the whole letter in Rey­ nolds, Margaret Roper, 54–55. In the recently published translation of this letter, in CWE, vol. 16, no. 2233, which became available only after I completed this essay, the word praeceptor is translated as “mentor,” (87); cf. my comment on “mentor,” below. 56. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 55; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2233, note to line 23, and no. 2211, note to line 28.

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possible that he was shown the new baby, although Guy surmises that they did not meet then, since she was staying next door with her wet nurse.57 They definitely met four years later, when Margaret was four, and Erasmus spent much of 1509 in More’s house while writing his Moria, The Praise of Folly (with its famous pun on More’s name). As the oldest of the children and the most precocious, she would have been present in any case (they would have been together during family prayers, for example), and surely More was anxious to show off her accomplishments. There were subsequent chances to meet, too, as Erasmus came and went from the continent to London or Cambridge, but the last time they would have seen each other would have been in 1516, when Margaret was eleven.58 Erasmus sustained his interest in More’s family, however, which he tended to idealize and hold up as a model humanist family. In 1519, when Margaret would have been fourteen, he simply names her as the eldest of More’s three daughters in his elegant letter to a fellow humanist, Ulrich von Hutten, about More.59 But in 1521 he describes Margaret’s and her siblings’ accomplishments in some detail while writing to Budé. Notably, he offers concrete evidence for their education, namely the letters that More had each of his children write to Erasmus sometime the year before. He explains that each one wrote independently and that More did not correct their letters. Instead, he had each one make a neater copy, which he sealed and sent to Erasmus, who found the letters “admirable.” Note, too, the remark on their daily progress, meant to suggest how closely he followed their education, which, as I have argued, truly was exceptional. He mentions other details, too; the three girls are not given to trifles, but “have a Livy in their hands,” and are skillful auditors of the sermons they hear, intelligently and wittily summarizing and critiquing them.60 By 1523 Erasmus no longer thought of Margaret Roper as a student, instead praising her as an exemplary wife, mother, and humanist, whom he encouraged to continue to “sing,” that is, to continue to speak and write as part of a larger circle of ­well-educated and virtuous women and men, who, he hoped, would make up a humanist community. He says all this and more in a brief but extremely elegant letter to her, dated December 25, 1523, that introduced his commentary on two hymns by Prudentius—one for Christmas, the other for Epiphany—that 57. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 30. 58. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 35–36; Germain Marc’hadour, L’Univers de Thomas More: Chronologie critique de More, Erasme, et leur époque (1477–1536) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1963). 59. CWE, vol. 7, no. 999; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 4, no. 999. 60. CWE, vol. 8, no. 1233; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 4, no. 1233.



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he dedicated to her.61 Erasmus much admired the hymns of Prudentius and, as Béné has shown so well, his gift of these commentaries is itself high praise of Margaret’s intellect and talents.62 Erasmus’s first commentary, in particular, is a very dense analysis of the hymn, beginning with its metrics. By February 1524, Froben’s press in Basel had printed the hymns, along with Erasmus’s dedicatory letter; they were preceded in the volume by Erasmus’s commentary on the ­pseudo-Ovidian Nux with a prefatory letter dedicating it to John More.63 In the prefatory letter to her brother, Erasmus already writes enthusiastically about Margaret, her sisters, and Margaret Giggs. Praising their sensible, lucid letters and their pure Latin, he compares the sisters to the three Graces; characterizes them as a spur for John, whom he urges to compete with them; and predicts that they will rival that eminent Roman matron, Cornelia.64 This high praise is only an introduction, so to speak, to his dedicatory letter to Margaret Roper that publicly introduces her to a learned international audience who would eagerly buy and read any work by Erasmus.65 In this way, he encouraged her as a writer and simultaneously promoted a favorite topic: the learned and pious woman who shares her humanist values with her husband and can be a companion as well as a wife and mother. Here, as so often in humanist writings, the personal, social, and public are virtually indistinguishable, and firm boundaries between the domains are almost impossible to establish. Erasmus begins this letter by acknowledging his indebtedness to Margaret and her sisters for their letters, which are “so sensible, ­well-written, modest, forthright, [and] friendly” that even if the headings were cut off he would recognize the authors. But alas, he has failed to answer them, and he describes himself as “buried,” as it were, in his work and in danger of seeming “deaf” to their song. He also foregrounds a major theme, the humanist family, and gracefully compliments Margaret, already known for her mastery of Greek, by alluding to her and her sisters as “γνήσια τέκνα [gnēsia tékna],” “offspring ­true-born” of Thomas More and speaking of her “παιδίον [paidíon],” kissable “little child,” to whom Margaret 61. CWE, vol.10, no. 1404; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 5, no.1404. 62. Charles Béné, “Cadeau d’Érasme à Margaret Roper: Deux hymnes de Prudence,” Miscellanea Moreana/ Moreana 26, no. 100 (1989): 469–80. 63. Note how the original title page highlights the names of the dedicatees: Commentarivs Erasmi Roterodami in Nucem Ouidij, ad Ioanne[m] Morum Thomae Mori filium; Eiusdem commentarivs in duos hymnos Prudentij, ad Margaretam Roperam Thomae Mori filiam. Copy seen at the Folger Library, Washington D.C., in March, 2012. 64. CWE, vol. 10, no. 1402; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 5, no. 1402. 65. See Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 82–86.

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recently gave birth.66 This is high praise, for Erasmus goes on to link the birth of her child with the birth of another child, Jesus, on Christmas day, his date for the letter. This linkage explains the sanctity that permeates the letter: Erasmus is writing on Christmas day, sending his commentary on poems about the birth of Christ on that day (and the epiphany, twelve days later) to a woman, a devout Christian, who has herself just given birth. He also responds feelingly to some of the imagery associated with Christmas: the letter is infused with a sense of light, new birth, and fecundity, manifested in the conceits and metaphors that he employs. Christ is a gift to the world; Margaret’s newborn child is a gift of her husband to her, or rather, of her to her husband, or most truly, of each to the other; while Erasmus’s commentary is also a gift, like Prudentius’s earlier gift of hymns to the Christ child. Erasmus plays upon both the notion of a book as child—a favorite metaphysical conceit—and the conceit of song, which harmonizes the birth of Christ with the hymns of Prudentius, Erasmus’s commentary on them, and Margaret’s writing, characterized several times as “song.” He imagines the happy couple singing hymns praising the Christ child, who will be the true Apollo for their studies. Toward the end of the letter, now more specifically public, he develops this classical conceit, describing the queen of England, Katherine of Aragon, as Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and imagining her as the center of a whole chorus hymning the Christ child—what he calls a saintly choir. He makes a similar point, less lyrically and more literally, at the very end of the letter, where, having predicted that the kind of virtuous and happy marriage between a woman and a man versed in good letters, which he sees in Margaret’s marriage to William Roper, will spread, he writes, “In Germany too there are families of no mean station who practise with success the life of which you have given hitherto such a successful example,” establishing a virtual community.67 Very shortly afterwards a reprise appeared in a different and wittier form in Erasmus’s w ­ ell-known colloquy on “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” first print66. There has long been confusion about the gender of Margaret’s first child. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, does not cite the Greek but points out, correctly, that the passage “does not say whether it was a boy or a girl” (37). Allen, Correspondence, vol. 5, no. 1404, identifies the child as Margaret’s elder son, Thomas; the translation in CWE, vol. 10, no. 1404, reads “baby boy.” But in 2008 in A Daughter’s Love (138–39), Guy identified Margaret’s first child as a girl, Elizabeth. Margaret had five children, in this order: Elizabeth, Mary, Margaret, Thomas, and Anthony (Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 220). 67. CWE, vol. 10, no. 1404; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 5, no. 1404. In effect, Erasmus, anticipating later developments, was imagining a transnational community of early ­sixteenth-century women of letters; see Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed. Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).



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ed in March 1524. Erasmus combines comedy with satire, wit, and philosophy to create a lively dialogue between an abbot, whom he calls “Antronius” (ass), and Magdalia, a young wife and mother who is generally thought to have been “drawn with Margaret Roper . . . in mind.”68 From an early ­sixteenth-century perspective, this colloquy is very provocative: not only is it a sharp attack on clerics, but a young woman is engaging in dialectic with an older man—an abbot, no less—on a serious subject in a debate that takes place in her house, which is filled with books in Greek and Latin, to the abbot’s consternation. Antronius is a particularly reprehensible example of ignorance, laziness, sensuality, corrupt behavior, and pride, while Magdalia is a witty, vivacious, and knowledgeable disputant who bests him in an abbreviated version of a Socratic dialogue on the subject of living well. The abbot is attached to externals, including sleep, dinner parties, drink, games, hunting, horses, money, honors, and, Erasmus insinuates, sex. On the other hand, books are anathema to him, and Antronius is given to ­not-so-clever remarks like, “It’s not feminine to be brainy” and “A wise woman is twice foolish.” By contrast, Magdalia argues for the life of the mind, insists that a wife can hardly manage the household and raise the children without wisdom, and that, far from corrupting a woman, it is by reading, notably, good books (Latin and Greek) that wisdom is acquired. Toward the end of the dialogue, she boldly challenges Antronius’s claim that women these days rarely read the Bible, pointing out that “In Spain and Italy there are not a few women of the highest rank who can rival any man. In England there are the More girls, in Germany the Pirckheimer and Blouer girls.”69 This remark, which echoes the end of Erasmus’s 1523 letter to Margaret Roper, is double edged; it highlights what some women, including More’s daughters, already have accomplished, while putting men to shame.70 68. Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 218. Besides the evidence Thompson cites, see Magdalia’s question to the abbot, “If you had to die tomorrow, would you rather die more foolish or more wise?” (222), which resembles the conversation Erasmus reports between himself and More on whether he would be more grief-stricken if his daughters died educated or uneducated (CWE, vol. 8, no. 1233; Allen, Opus epistolarum, 4, no. 1233). More and Magdalia insist upon the value of the effort involved, which the abbot scorns. 69. Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, 219–23. For the Latin see Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1, part 3, ed. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, and R. Hoven (Amsterdam: N ­ orth-Holland Publishing Company, 1972), 403–8. 70. For more on Erasmus’s ideas about and representations of women, see, e.g., J. K. Sowards, “Erasmus and the Education of Women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982): 77–89; Anne M. O’Donnell, S. N. D., “Contemporary Women in the Letters of Erasmus,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 9 (1989): 34–72; Elizabeth McCutcheon, “’Tongues as Ready as Men’s’: Erasmus’ Representations of Women and Their Discourse,” Erasmus

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Margaret More Roper’s Translation of Erasmus on the Lord’s Prayer Erasmus completed his Precatio Dominica in Septem Portiones Distributa by October 24, 1523. It was printed for the first time that same year and quickly became a very popular work throughout Europe.71 Sometime afterwards Margaret Roper set about translating it into English, and her translation almost certainly was in print before the end of 1524, although this edition is known only by external evidence. On March 12, 1525/6, Thomas Berthelet, the printer, was charged by Richard Foxford, the Vicar General, with failing to submit a copy of Roper’s translation and three other books to Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall for his approval before going to print. This was probably a technical fault, as Reed has shown; the ecclesiastical regulations that Berthelet was charged with violating were designed to prevent the circulation of Lutheran books (considered heretical), and all four of the books Berthelet had printed were clearly ­anti-Lutheran. In fact, the book by Fisher was a sermon he had recently preached against Luther, and neither Roper’s nor the other two texts (both translations of little works by Erasmus) could have been viewed as Lutheran. Roper’s work was soon reprinted, probably later in 1526, with a hastily constructed woodcut of Cardinal Wolsey’s coat of arms on the back of the ­title-page. A subsequent edition followed circa 1531. Two copies of the 1526 edition and one copy of the 1531 are extant.72 There were a number of reasons that Margaret would have been interested in translating the Precatio Dominica. Erasmus was both a friend and a learned authority; she was regularly reading his writings, and he had recently dedicated his commentaries on two of Prudentius’s hymns to her, so her translation could constitute a gift to him, in return for his to her. In addition, her own piety of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 12 (1992): 64- 86; and Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 71. See the introduction to Richard DeMolen’s edition of Margaret Roper’s translation of the Precatio Dominica, in Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Quincentennial Symposium, ed. Richard DeMolen (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), 94–95. 72. I am condensing a much more complicated story. See, in particular, Arthur W. Reed, “The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 15 (1917–1919): 157–84; Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version,” 257–71; E. J. Devereux, “Some Lost English Translations of Erasmus,” The Library, 5th series, vol. 17 (1962): 254–59, and Guy, A Daughter’s Love, especially 149–52, and the bibliographical note on 302. For a different interpretation, see Goodrich, who has argued that Roper’s text was called in because of hostility to some of Erasmus’s opinions (Faithful Translators, 34–42). Opinions as to the number of editions have ranged from two to four. For copies and their locations, see the STC [­Short-Title Catalog], second edition, numbers 10477 and 10477.5.



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would have led her to be particularly attracted to a paraphrase of and meditation upon the Lord’s Prayer, the essential prayer of Christendom. I do not know if she intended, before she began her translation, to have it published, but she would have been encouraged to think about publication by Erasmus’s w ­ ell-publicized introduction of her to the international humanist community early in 1524. Furthermore, her name was also surfacing in the publication of other works concerned with the education of women, in particular, in Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione foeminae Christianae (1524), which was dedicated to Queen Katherine and which Hyrde was to translate into English a few years later. In the English version the identity of Margaret, her sisters, and Margaret Giggs is shielded: only their initials are given. But Vives gives their full names in his Latin text, further evidence of a concerted effort on the part of these and other humanists to promote the cause of a full humanist education for women in and around 1524, while ­half-concealing their identity in the vernacular.73 From this point of view, the publication of Margaret Roper’s translation became concrete proof of the learned woman’s achievements. In this and other respects, the choice of text was a brilliant one. It confirms the linkage that More, Erasmus, Vives, Hyrde, and other humanists insisted upon between learning, virtue, and piety in women in a most powerful and attractive way, presenting the work of a “yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of .xix. yere of age,” as the translator is described on the ­title-page.74 At the same time, it disseminated an awareness of Erasmian piety in England; it is the first work of his to be published in English at a time when More himself was interested in promoting Erasmus’s ideas and values.75 In short, its appearance in print was personal, social, and public and could not have been more timely. This makes it extremely difficult to allocate agency. More was adept at working behind the scenes and had political and religious reasons for wanting to see this work by Erasmus in print; Hyrde, like More, Erasmus, and Vives, was actively involved in promoting the idea of the w ­ ell-educated woman; Erasmus was on record as urging Margaret to continue to write; and Margaret herself was ready to appear in public, albeit modestly. 73. Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, xxx, note 75; 22. 74. For the title page, see DeMolen, ed., Precatio Dominica, in Erasmus of Rotterdam, 96, and Moreana 3, no. 9 (1966): 65. 75. James Kelsey McConica, “Patterns of Patronage,” in English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); and Goodrich, “Thomas More and Margaret More Roper.” See also Hosington, “Translation in the Service of Politics and Religion,” 93–108.

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For all its apparent modesty, however, her translation is almost unprecedented as a work written and published by a woman in early ­sixteenth-century England. A very few works by women had appeared in print before 1524, and these were either published posthumously or were associated with royalty: Margaret Beaufort (mother to Henry VII) is a case in point.76 By contrast, Margaret Roper was still a very young woman; while a gentlewoman, she was not royal; she was unknown to the world at large; and her connections were neither with the court nor the church but with the new humanist movement. So her “devout treatise” ultimately makes a large claim for the fruit of the new learning for women, a claim visualized for its readers in the woodcut from the first extant edition, which shows a young woman at a desk turning the pages of a folio, a large sized book, which implies a learned book, rather than a small book of hours, in a ­book-lined room.77 Hyrde’s preface to her translation is invaluable, although he is silent about questions we would like to know more about, namely when Margaret Roper started her translation, when the decision to go to print was made, and why and by whom. He does mention the “laboure that I haue had with it about the printing.”78 This could be just another way to shift attention from Margaret Roper, but he probably was involved in the printing; he dedicates his labor to young Frances Staverton, More’s niece and Margaret’s first cousin, and he had a close relationship with the More household, which he describes here and in the preface to his subsequent translation of Vives’s Instruction.79 As in his later preface, he emphasizes the humanist agenda for women’s education and its benefits, while, more 76. See Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Margaret More Roper: Similarities and Differences,” in “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”: Homenagem a Maria Helena de Paiva Correia, ed. A Pinheiro de Sousa et al. (Lisbon: Departamento de Estudos Anglisticos da Universidade de Lisboa, 2009), 227–45. 77. See Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts: 1480–1535 (1935; repr. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1973), 397; and Moreana 3, no. 9 (1966): 65; and two recent articles: Patricia Brace, “Speaking Pictures: Margaret Roper and the Representation of Lady Rhetoric,” Moreana 50, 193–94 (2013): 93–130, and Anne E. B. Coldiron, “The Translator’s Visibility in Early Printed ­Portrait-Images and the Ambiguous Example of Margaret More Roper,” in Thresholds of Translation: Paratexts, Print, and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Britain, ed. ­Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 51–74. 78. The text of Hyrde’s preface used here originally appeared in “Défense et illustration des humanités féminines, by Richard Hyrde,” Moreana 4, no. 13 (1967): 6–24, edited by Germain Marc’hadour; Hyrde’s English is on the l­eft-hand side of each page, accompanied by a French translation by M ­ arie-Claire Robineau, OP, on the facing page. Subsequent citations from Hyrde’s preface will be to the Marc’hadour edition as well as to the text in this volume, here 58/34. 79. Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 5–7. Note that he records a conversation with More about his translation and explains that he asked More, who, he said, had hoped to translate it himself, “to take the labour to rede hit over, and correcte hit. Whiche he ryght gladlye dyd” (6).



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particularly, he calls attention to the talents of the young and very learned and pious translator, whose example should be imitated. In typical humanist fashion, then, he mingles the personal with the social and the public, shaping his preface, which is polemical, hortatory, and encomiastic, for the several audiences he is addressing. One such audience is the “moost studyous and vertuous yonge mayde, Fraunces S.,” his dedicatee, whom he praises at length.80 Another would have been the extended household, including Frances Staverton’s mother and other potential English readers of an Erasmian work hitherto available only in Latin. More specifically, he is addressing girls and women who, he hoped, would be moved to follow Margaret’s stellar example. And there is one more group, which he actually addresses first: those men who were suspicious of or opposed to the very idea of an education for women and had a misogynous and dismissive view of half of humankind. So he begins his dedicatory letter by defending women from the erroneous opinions of men. He insists that, far from corrupting women, the reading of Latin and Greek books will make them wise and good wives and mothers, in effect appealing to the ­self-interest of his male readers. Many of Hyrde’s arguments resemble More’s, Vives’s, and Erasmus’s views on women’s education. He even echoes part of Erasmus’s colloquy on the learned woman, where the abbot fatuously claims that women would be “safer from priests if they don’t know Latin,” an absurd claim in view of Erasmus’s satiric characterization of them.81 An early t­ wentieth-century scholar, Foster Watson, has termed this treatise “the first Renascence document in English on the education of women.”82 Hyrde’s notion of “virtue,” however, is less profound than More’s—as More articulated it in his letter to Gonnell—less philosophical, less interested in intellectual ability and good judgment as such, and more pragmatic. Hyrde has a more domesticated view of women’s role; like Vives, in particular, he is explicit that “women abyde moost at home / occupied euer with some good or necessary busynesse,”83 and he dwells upon their virtue. At the same time, he writes persuasively and, again like Vives, idealizes the educated woman’s virtue, declaring, for example, that, “I neuer herde tell / nor reed of any woman well lerned / that euer was (as plentuous as yuell tonges be) spotted or infamed as 80. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise 53/1–2; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 6, 18. 81. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise 55/29–56/2; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 10, 12; Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, 221. 82. Foster Watson, ed., Vives and the Renascence Education of Women (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), 159. 83. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 55/17–18; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 10.

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vicious. But on the other side / many by their lernyng taken suche encreace of goodnesse / yt many may beare them wytnesse of their vertue.”84 Hyrde also faced a dilemma in writing this preface. On the one hand, the translation and its translator confirmed his insistent claims for the value of a humanist education for women. On the other hand, there was the troubling question of what, for simplicity’s sake, I will call “modesty.”85 Probably neither Margaret More Roper nor her father wanted her name broadcast too widely, at least in English. There would have been a general worry about opprobrium, a reasonable concern given the attitudes towards women generally and learned women in particular that More, Erasmus, Vives, and Hyrde were refuting. Then, too, Margaret represents herself modestly in her letters to her father and Erasmus; indeed, More once wittily reproached his daughter for being too modest, beginning a letter to her by saying, “You are too bashful and timid in your request for money, from a father who wants to give it.”86 She was also socially astute, so much so that once, when she noticed her ­sister-in-law, Anne Cresacre, laughing at the hair shirt that More wore under his doublet, she “privily told him of it. And he, being sorry that she saw it, presently amended it.”87 It could not have escaped her notice that a rhetoric of modesty was disarming and protective, allowing her (ironically) more freedom than if she challenged received opinions directly, like the witty and subversive Magdalia in Erasmus’s colloquy. Indeed, this same “modesty” enabled her to be her father’s confidante and main support and representative while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534 and 1535. The expedients that later women writers adopted, publishing anonymously or under another name, would not do here, because her character and her work were the best evidence for the claims that the humanists were making. Under the circumstances, a compromise was worked out. Her name was not bandied about; in fact, it was omitted from the title page. Instead Hyrde played up the rhetoric of modesty, explaining that he was unwilling to flatter someone who “is as lothe to haue prayse gyuyn her / as she is worthy to haue it / and had leauer her prayse to reste in mennes hertes / than in their tonges / or rather in goddes estimacion 84. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 56/18–22; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 14. 85. See Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) for a study of modesty tropes and rhetoric generally in women’s lives and writing from the 1540s to the middle of the seventeenth century. 86. Rogers, SL, no. 23; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 70. 87. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and David Harding (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), 224.



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and pleasure / than any mannes wordes or thought.”88 As proof of her virtue, in short, she is not seeking fame. At the same time, he writes from Chelsea, the More home, and speaks so eloquently about young Frances, her mother, and the translator, Margaret, that those “in the know” would have recognized the identity of the n­ ineteen-year-old anonymous person described on the title page. He urges Frances to embrace good learning and to follow her mother’s example, who is “busye” to learn and has benefitted from her study of Latin, despite her “almost contynuall disease and syckenesse.”89 Margaret Roper brought her familiarity with the Scriptures, her knowledge of the teachings of the church, her interest in sacred literature, and her own practice of daily prayer, as well as her familiarity with Erasmus’s ideas, her acute intellect, her mastery of Latin and English, and a distinctive voice, to her translation of the Precatio Dominica. In his letter of December 25, 1523, Erasmus had already noted how he could recognize her from her prose. And Hyrde’s claims about her translation are well taken: he insists that “who so lyst and well can conferre and examyne the translacyon with the originall / he shall nat fayle to fynde that she hath shewed herselfe / nat onely erudite and elegant in eyther tong / But hath also vsed suche wysedom / suche dyscrete and substancyall iudgement in expressyinge lyuely the latyn. . . .”90 Margaret Roper did not specifically tailor her translation for female readers. But she does domesticate Erasmus’s Latin for an ­English-speaking and -reading public—even the change in reference from the Precatio Dominica, the Lord’s Prayer, to Pater Noster, “Our Father,” is telling: it highlights Margaret’s focus, and it brings the Lord into a close family circle. Erasmus’s text has a slightly more formal structure, to begin with, since he organized 88. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 58/21–23; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 20. 89. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 59/12; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 20, 22. In very similar language he praises Margaret, “whose vertuous conuersacion / lyuyng / and sadde demeanoure / maye be profe euydente ynough / what good lernynge dothe / where it is surely roted” (Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 56/24–26; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 14). 90. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, 58/28–32; Marc’hadour, ed., “Défense et illustration,” 20. Several studies of her translation have been conveniently reprinted in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700: Vol. I: Early Tudor Women Writers, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). Besides the essays by Gee and Lamb, already cited, these include Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper’s Translation of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica” in Acta Conventus N ­ eo-Latini Guelpherbytani, ed. Stella Revard, et al. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988), 659–66. See also Rita Verbrugge, “Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster,” in Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word, 30–42, 260–64; Patricia Demers, “Margaret Roper & Erasmus: The Relationship of Translator and Source,” Women Writing and Reading 1 (2005), 1–7, reprinted in the present collection, pp. 158–71; and Anne M. O’Donnell, S. N. D., “Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster: Patristic and Linguistic Sources,” in the present collection, pp. 172–204.

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the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer around the seven days of the week, a popular prayer structure, but one that Margaret drops, relying, instead, on the seven petitions, cited in Latin, to mark the seven divisions of the text.91 She has an excellent ear and writes for the ear as well as the eye, and her English, written for English readers, is more intimate, colloquial, and conversational, where Erasmus’s Latin, directed at fellow readers of Latin, is more strictly ordered and concise. Like Erasmus, who thought of his paraphrase as prayer, she speaks from a position of prayer, but she is more humble and more affectionate, characteristics of almost all her extant writing. Her language, naturally, is less recondite, and she cannot depend on the power Erasmus generates through tightly controlled syntax and the verbal echoes of the Latin endings. Nevertheless, she can build rhythmically. This is Erasmus: “cuius potentia conditi sumus, quum nihil essemus: cuius bonitate restituti sumus, quum perissemus: cuius sapientia gubernamur et conseruamur, ne reuoluamur in exitium.”92 And this is Roper: “By whose marueylous power we were made somwhat of ryght nought: by whose goodnesse we were restored / whan we were loste: by whose wysedome incomparable / euermore we are gouerned & kepte / that we fall nat agayne in to distruction.”93 Inevitably, her translation is longer than the Latin, her phrases less concise, her syntax natural and cumulative. In the passage just quoted she has added three adjectives, a noun, and an adverb for the emphasis that Erasmus generated by his choice of verbs, and she has not tried to preserve all of Erasmus’s tight parallel phrases. She likes doublets, both for emphasis and because of her sensitivity to the shades of meaning in a particular Latin word. So each pair, “ser­ 91. Erasmus’s Precatio dominica and Roper’s Devout Treatise are printed side by side in this volume, facilitating their comparison. Page and line numbers are cited. These texts have been transcribed from “Erasmvs’ Paraphrase of the Pater Noster (1523) with its English Translation by Margaret Roper (1524),” ed. Germain Marc’hadour, in Moreana 2, no. 7 (1965): 9–64, hereafter “Marc’hadour, ed.,” followed by page number. See also Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, ed. Jean LeClerc, 11 vols. in 10 (1703–4; facsimile repr. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962), vol. 5, columns 1217–1228. For a modern English translation, see “The Lord’s Prayer / Precatio dominica,” trans. and annot. John N. Grant, in CWE, vol. 69, Spiritualia and Pastoralia, ed. John W. O’Malley and Louis A. Perraud (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 55–77. Hilmar M. Pabel, Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus’ Pastoral Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), includes an excellent discussion of this work (109–54). There are several other editions of Roper’s translation, including Richard DeMolen’s, in DeMolen, ed., Erasmus of Rotterdam, 93–124, and notes; a facsimile in Lee Cullen Khanna, ed., Early Tudor Translators: Margaret Beaufort, Margaret More Roper and Mary Basset, Early Modern Englishwomen: Facsimile Library of Essential Works, 1st series, vol. 4, part 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and online texts in the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University, Early English Books Online (EEBO). 92. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 62/15–18; Marc’hadour, ed., 12. 93. Roper, Devout Treatise, 63/19–22; Marc’hadour, ed., 13.



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uauntes and bondemen,” “veryte and trouthe,” and “vnyte and concorde,” replaces a single noun. Similarly, she renders Omnes eadem petimus as “we all one thyng praye for and desyre.”94 She turns to amplification or synonyms for emphasis and dramatic effect. Erasmus’s ambitione becomes “ambicious desyre of worldely promocion,”95 and she replaces Erasmus’s valeat, “away with,” implying a scornful dismissal, with four different, increasingly strong words for dramatic effect: “What a god is he / that hath suche maner of worshippers: Fye on suche a mayster that hath so vnrewly seruauntes: Out vpon suche a father / whose children be so leude: Banisshed be suche a kyng / yt hath suche maner of people and subiectes.”96 The Lord’s Prayer is centered upon the relationship between God as father and his children, a relationship that both Erasmus and Margaret Roper meditate upon and to which she is especially sensitive. Again and again she emphasizes how God, a loving father, saves and protects his children from the wiles of the devil, a tyrant who, like a “rauenous lyon / [is] lyeng in wayte / sekynge and huntyng about / whom he maye deuoure.”97 She increases the number of “fathers” or “good fathers,” where Erasmus has nothing or only pater; she also renders salvation even more personal, so that his denique & uitam conferet aeternam becomes “and finally brynge vs to euerlasting lyfe.”98 She is especially moved by the fourth petition, with its meditation upon the different ways that a heavenly father gives his children their daily bread: the host, which embodies God’s sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ; the word of God; and the nourishment and support that God lovingly gives his children while they are here on earth.99 Here, then, is Margaret Roper’s Englishing of an already passionate Erasmian exclamation: “For who[,] father[,] might abyde to be had in derision of the worlde / to be outlawed and banisshed / to be putte in prison: to be fettred and manacled: to be spoyled of all his goodes / and by stronge hande / be depriued of the company of his moost dere wyfe and welbeloued children / but if nowe and than / he were 94. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, seruis (62/27), veritatem (64/1), concordiae (64/1–2), omnes eadem petimus (64/4–5); Roper, Devout Treatise, 63/32–33, 65/1, 65/2, 65/5. 95. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 68/23–26; Roper, Devout Treatise, 69/26–29; Marc’hadour, ed., 14, 15. 96. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 68/23–26; Roper, Devout Treatise, 69/26–29; Marc’hadour, ed., 22, 23; emphasis mine. 97. Roper, Devout Treatise, 97/15–16; Marc’hadour, ed., 61. 98. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 98/18, Roper, Devout Treatise, 87/21; Marc’hadour, ed., 46, 47; emphasis mine. 99. Pabel, Conversing with God, includes a metalcut from the first edition of Erasmus (1523) for “Fiat uoluntas tua” and another for “Panem nostrum” (114, 141). The metalcut for “our bread” shows all three interpretations of “Panem nostrum,” while foregrounding a group of people gathered by a pulpit. Erasmus’s first edition paired each petition with a corresponding metalcut that further emphasized his structure by the days of the week.

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hertened with thy heuenly and gostly breed.”100 If one reads with More’s imprisonment and execution in mind, this is especially moving, although she could not have anticipated such things happening to her own father. Note the many ways her translation intensifies the palpable grief and pain she later must have felt. She adds “father” at the beginning, heightening the relationship between God and herself; she expands each of Erasmus’s verbs; and she renders coelesti pane as “heuenly and gostly breed.” Even more striking is her one omission from Erasmus’s list—whether by accident or, as I think, because she found it too painful to contemplate such suffering for one she loved. She omits Erasmus’s terrifying conclusion, denique crudeli morte perimi (and finally to be destroyed by a cruel death), instead ending the list of torments with the separation of a husband from his wife and children.101 Finally, notice how she has translated confirmatus (strengthened) as “hertened,” a stronger, more affectionate, and more intimate word that further speaks to her feelings.

After the Publication of the Devout Treatise On September 5, 1529, Erasmus wrote a long letter to More, full of news about current political and religious events, but ending with a wish that he could see More and his family once more, whose picture he had recently seen.102 One day later, he wrote to Margaret Roper, expressing his delight in that same picture and praising it again for its likeness to the More family. His letter is full of gallant touches; Erasmus begins by praising her as the “glory of your beloved Britain” and insists that her likeness is the most recognizable of all. Particularly telling is his subsequent comment: “I imagined I was looking beyond the lovely exterior [of the picture] into the brilliant and even lovelier mind within.”103 This is high praise indeed and speaks to the empathy between them. In his interesting discussion of this letter, Aloïs Gerlo does not exaggerate when he speaks of its fervent and warm tone, so rare in Erasmus, proof of his deep affection for 100. Roper, Devout Treatise, 87/27–31; Marc’hadour, ed., 49. Erasmus’s Latin reads: “Quis enim ferat esse mundi ludibrium, relegari, protrudi in carcerem, uinciri, damnari, torqueri, exui facultatibus spoliari uxore charissima ac dulcissimis liberis: denique crudeli morte perimi, nisi fuerit tuo coelesti pane subinde confirmatus?” Erasmus, Precatio dominica 86/22–26; Marc’hadour, ed., 48. 101. In Petitions Two and Six, however, she does include the long phrases about death. 102. CWE 16, no. 2211; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2211. This is the famous sketch of the family by Holbein, frequently reproduced; see, e. g., the plate following p. 108 in Guy, A Daughter’s Love. 103. CWE 16, no. 2212; Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8. no. 2212.



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her.104 In the middle of the letter, in a passage that is rarely cited but deserves mention, Erasmus explains that he is sending the family a copy of a letter that a chaplain wrote to Maria (Mary), the former queen of Hungary, for whom Erasmus had written the Christian Widow, which, he supposes, Margaret has read. As in his letter of 1523, he promotes a connection between women, praising this queen as someone who has given herself to the liberal arts and finds comfort in them in her present situation. This leads him to further discussion about the power of philosophy to sustain the soul in the rise and fall of human affairs. Note, too, how, almost incidentally, he documents Margaret’s familiarity with his writings.105 Margaret Roper answered Erasmus on November 4 with a t­ hree-page letter that is elegantly written in her own italic hand. Its evenly and widely spaced lines show the care she exercised in writing it, although it includes a few corrections.106 She could not have written from a more s­ elf-effacing position than the one she adopts in a letter that bristles with superlatives: Erasmus is most erudite, most distinguished, and most learned. She acknowledges the great honor that she is unworthy to have received, and she is “quite incapable,” she claims, to thank him for “such a splendid tribute.” In fact, she does exceedingly well as she hyperbolically exploits modesty topoi. Alluding to her surprise in receiving his letter, both “elegant” and “affectionate,” she recognizes a favorite posture of Erasmus as she goes on to explain: “I could not have hoped or anticipated that someone as busy as you are with so many important literary projects, constantly shaken by painful maladies, and worn down by the discomforts of old age, would ever have written to me. I shall never deserve the honour to which you have thought fit to raise me by the favour of a letter from your hand.” At the same time, she is fully conscious of the value of the letter, understood as a treasured gift bestowed upon her that will promote her reputation, that is, her fame: “I am sure that whenever I show it to someone else, it will give a considerable boost to my reputation [non mediocrem inde famae meae laudem accessuram intelligo]. No 104. Aloïs Gerlo, Erasme et ses portraitistes: Metsijs, Dürer, Holbein, 2nd ed. (Nieukoop: De Graaf, 1969), 55. 105. Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2212; CWE 16, no. 2212. See also an earlier translation by Sister ­Gertrude-Joseph Donnelly (37–39) in a collection called “Correspondance entre Erasme et Margaret Roper,” in Moreana 3, no. 12 (1966): 29–46. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, includes a translation of part of the letter, 53–54. Cf. Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2233. 106. A ­good-sized reproduction of the first sheet of this letter is included in Reynolds, Margaret Roper, between pages 54 and 55. A similar reproduction of the third sheet is included in Moreana 3, no. 12 (1966): 41; see also Germain Marc’hadour’s comments on the original Latin (44) in this issue. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, includes smaller reproductions of the first and last page of the letter between pages 252 and 253.

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other kind of acclaim could have had such an effect as your letter, for what could compare with the honour that was done me when one who is the glory of the whole world judged me deserving of a personal letter?”107 S­ elf-effacing, perhaps, but at the same time well aware of the value of Erasmus’s praise, what we would now call social capital. This letter may seem too rhetorical, but it is a sign of her mastery of humanist rhetoric and a compliment to her mentor. She is not exaggerating about how unusual this letter from Erasmus was. As Anne O’Donnell has noted about his correspondence, “Of some 3,140 extant letters, only three are from women and fourteen are to women”—including three queens, one other noblewoman, several nuns, and one learned woman: Margaret Roper.108 When she wrote to Erasmus in 1529, her father was newly appointed Lord Chancellor. More had no illusions about Henry VIII; in an earlier conversation with Margaret’s husband, he remarked that “if my head could win him [the king] a castle in France (for then was there war between us) it should not fail to go.”109 But neither of them could have anticipated how much their world would change by 1532, when he resigned the chancellorship, nor could they have foreseen all the dangers that he and the family would face thereafter. After More was imprisoned in the Tower of London, Margaret Roper became her father’s chief support. She has long been celebrated for all that she did to help him, and no one who has read William Roper’s biography of More can forget the scene near Tower wharf when she broke through the guard surrounding her father on his way to his execution to embrace him, not once but twice.110 In his last letter to her, More himself acknowledges her defiance of what he calls “worldly courtesy,” that is, modesty and decorum, to show her love for him, which he calls “daughterly love and dear charity.”111 Unspoken are the political implications of this scene, which dramatizes More’s defiance of the King, and any account of it could not have been circulated in England until after Mary Tudor, a Catholic, ascended the throne in 1553. However, it was soon included in what is commonly referred to as The Paris Newsletter, which circulated in France before the end of July 1535 and promoted More and the Catholic cause on the continent.112 107. Allen, Opus epistolarum, vol. 8, no. 2233; CWE, 16, 2233, p. 87. 108. O’Donnell, “Contemporary Women in the Letters of Erasmus,” 72. 109. Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 208. 110. Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 251–52. 111. Rogers, SL, no. 66; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 218. 112. See Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 105; a French manuscript included in Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, with appendices (London: Early English Text Society, 1932), 265; and for a version in Latin, translated into English, Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal



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Normally, Margaret Roper was more circumspect. She was also uniquely situated to help her father; as the person who best understood him and as an acknowledged woman of letters, she could move between the personal and the public, promoting her father’s agenda, which was both religious and political, while remaining protected by both her gender and her reputation. More obliquely says as much when he names her as his personal representative in 1534, writing that anything she asked of his “Loving Friends” on his behalf should be regarded as if “I moved it unto you and required it of you personally present myself.”113 He stresses the personal, with reference to himself and to his daughter, yet “friends” is a flexible word in the Renaissance that implies a relationship that can be more than personal: friends could be one’s supporters and protectors as well as close personal acquaintances. In this respect, More’s good friend, Antonio Bonvisi, a very wealthy Italian merchant and financier to whom the king was indebted, was especially willing and able to help More and sent weekly gifts of food and drink to him in the Tower.114 In effect, Margaret Roper became the center and coordinator of actions undertaken on behalf of her father and others in jeopardy, including Bishop John Fisher. But any record of such actions is inevitably going to be incomplete. We have only some of her correspondence and that of her father; in some cases, it was destroyed, in other cases lost. In addition, much was done secretly or under cover.115 Early on she succeeded in getting access to More in the Tower, perhaps by a ruse; at least More answers a “lamentable letter,” not extant, in which she urged her father to swear to the oath promising obedience to the Act of Succession and other acts of Parliament. Access included both visits to her father and the correspondence between them. This correspondence was crucial. From one point of view, it was personal; Margaret Roper’s letters overflow with her affection and concern, and on the basis of them we would never guess that More and Margaret talked about Anne Boleyn and the latest bills before Parliament when they met, for example.116 But we are not meant to. Their language was coded, Review with a Collection of Documents, ed. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Louis W. Karlin, and Gerard B. Wegemer (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2011), Document 17, Guildhall Report, Section 14, “More’s Encounter with Margaret,” 193–94. 113. Rogers, SL, no. 57; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 204. 114. See More’s affectionate t­ hank-you letter to Bonvisi, written very shortly before his execution (SL, no. 65; Correspondence, no. 217). Also see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “ ‘The Apple of My Eye’: Thomas More to Antonio Bonvisi; A Reading and a Translation,” Moreana 18, no. 71–72 (1981): 37–56, and Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 236, 255. 115. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, discusses some of these matters in part 5, “Two Against a Tyrant.” 116. See Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 240–41.

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and they wrote with a full consciousness of the different sorts of readers who might intercept these letters or with whom she might share them, then and later. These letters enabled More to report events, conversations, interrogations, and attempts at intimidation that sound very much like attempts at brainwashing. Three long letters to Margaret Roper, which she preserved, are especially impor­ tant, enabling More to record an early interrogation at Lambeth and two interrogations in the spring of 1535 shortly after they occurred.117 When members of the council questioned More, on June 14, 1535, about the letters he had written, he explained that he had written to his daughter out of worry that she, “being (as he thought) with child, should take some harm” when she heard that the council had interrogated him. Stressing his obedience, he added that she “had written to him before divers letters, to exhort him and advertise him to accommodate himself to the king’s pleasure.”118 What he knew, but did not say, is that the letters he wrote let him record his version of the government’s dealings with him at a highly charged time. What More called “daughterly dealings” obviously had political and religious implications, then, during his Tower years and afterwards. Margaret Roper needed to keep all her wits about her in such potentially dangerous circumstances if she was to protect him, the family, their friends, and herself. In fact, following More’s execution, she “was brought before the King’s Council, and charged with keeping her father’s head as a sacred relic, and retaining possession of his books and his writings. She answered that she had saved her father’s head from being devoured by the fishes with the intention of burying it; that she had hardly any books and papers but what had been already published, except a very few personal letters, which she humbly begged to be allowed to keep for her own consolation.”119 In 1537, a family friend, Sir Geoffrey Pole, the younger brother of Reginald (Cardinal) Pole, was imprisoned and interrogated about his meetings with Margaret Roper and Margaret Giggs Clement. “What communication have you had with either of them touching the death of Sir Thomas More and others, and causes of the same?” he was asked. As Guy has shown, Margaret not only saved some of More’s writings, but commissioned John Harris, his former secretary, to copy and find others, intending “to set them into print.”120 We also have the 117. McCutcheon, “Thomas More’s Three Prison Letters,” in Kelly et al., Thomas More’s Trial by Jury, 94–110. 118. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 8, ed. James Gairdner (1885, emended repr. Vaduz: Kraus, 1965), no. 867, iii–iv; cf. J. B. Trapp and Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen, eds., “The King’s Good Servant”: Sir Thomas More: 1477/8–1535 (London: The National Portrait Gallery, 1978), 126, item 244. 119. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 267. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 115, dates the interrogation a year later. 120. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 266–68.



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very important exchange of letters between Margaret Roper’s s­ tep-sister, Alice Alington, and herself, which circulated in manuscript.121 Embedded in the lengthy second letter is a Socratic dialogue between father and daughter in which she plays the devil’s advocate, allowing him to defend his decisions without betraying his reasons for opposing the king or implicating his daughter, who has taken the oath he rejects. The author or authors of this ­dialogue-letter have been long debated; the first editor of More’s works, William Rastell, wrote: “But whether this answere were written by Sir Thomas More in his doughter Ropers name, or by hym self it is not certainely knowen.”122 Certainly Margaret Roper had to have some part in it, so that in this sense the letter, like so much else in which she was involved, is reciprocal and collaborative. It is also a telling instance of how both father and daughter understood the value of arguing in utramque parte (on either side).123 During the last years of her father’s life and thereafter, Margaret More Roper continued to fulfill her domestic responsibilities as a wife, mother, and part of a large extended family, and maintained her commitment to scholarship and writing. She oversaw the education of her children and saw to it that they, like her, knew Greek as well as Latin. Harpsfield, an early biographer, reports that officers of the king, sent suddenly to search her house when her husband was imprisoned in the Tower, were astonished to find her, “not puling and lamenting, but full busily teaching her children.”124 Subsequently, her daughter, Mary Roper Basset (or Bassett), not only translated Eusebius into Latin, but translated her grandfather’s work, the De Tristitia, into English, which was published in 1557, along with More’s other writings, in the collected English works.125 The pedagogical model represented by Margaret Roper, her siblings, other members of the More household, and her daughters was followed by a later generation of humanist families, including the earl of Arundel’s and the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke.126 Margaret Roper’s writings have also been singled out as a remarkable 121. Rogers, Correspondence, nos. 205, 206. In this connection, see the texts and discussions of the letter to Alice Alington in this volume: Katherine Rodgers, “Dialogic Imagination in ‘The Letter to Alice Alington,’ ” 205–21; and Stephen Merriam Foley, “Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the ‘Letter to Alington,’ ” 222–52. 122. Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206. In The Workes of Sir Thomas More (1557), however, Rastell wrote “or by her self,” following “Ropers name,” which makes more sense; see Correspondence, no. 206, bottom of 514. 123. For a provocative reading of this letter, see Peter Iver Kaufman, “Absolute Margaret: Margaret Roper and ‘Well Learned’ Men,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 3 (1989): 443–56. 124. Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sr. Thomas Moore, 79. 125. See Hosington, “Translation in the Service of Politics and Religion,” for a major study of the father’s, daughter’s, and granddaughter’s translations and other writings; see also W ­ ynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse; and Goodrich, Faithful Translators, 29–66. 126. Jane, Lady Lumley, the older daughter of the earl of Arundel, is best known for her translations of

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instance of an interim stage in the development of modern English and as evidence of the importance of translation then and thereafter—a point of particular significance, since translation became a major cultural vehicle in ­sixteenth-century England, and many more women published their translations.127 But I want to turn back to Margaret More Roper. She was not outspoken or self-promoting, nor was she the sentimental figure beloved by the Victorians. She was modest at a time when modesty was a code word for the good manners and behavior expected of both the gentlewoman and the gentleman.128 She was also resolute and a master of rhetoric, and we cannot take her ­self-effacement at face value. Gifted with her innate talents, nurtured by her extraordinary education, and empowered by her father, Erasmus, Vives, and other humanists, she successfully shaped her personal, social, and public roles, effectively refuting the gender stereotypes held by so many of her contemporaries. Her modesty, real and assumed, proved to be invaluable as she came to represent the humanist ideal of the learned woman and later reshaped her role as the “personal” representative of her father, a political prisoner in the Tower of London. As a scholar, a writer, a wife, a mother, and a daughter whose assistance to her father and the religious and political causes he represented was incalculable, Margaret More Roper more than earned her place in the Republic of Letters and in the history of the sixteenth century in England. Iphigenia, based on Erasmus’s ­Greek-Latin text, and some of the orations of Isocrates; her younger sister died young but gave four manuscripts that she wrote in Latin to her father as New Year’s gifts. For the voluminous writings of one of Cooke’s daughters, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, see The Writings of an English Sappho, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 14, ed. Patricia Phillippy, with translations by Jaime Goodrich (Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Renaissance Studies, 2011). For a comprehensive study of household academies in early modern Italy and England, see Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 127. See Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version,” 264–71. For the importance of translation, see M. C. Bradbrook, review of The Paradise of Women, ed. Betty Travitsky, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1 (1982): 89–93, and Suzanne Trill, “­Sixteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Mary Sidney’s Psalmes and the ‘Femininity’ of Translation,” in Writing and the English Renaissance, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996), 140–58. Religious works were another common interest; examples later in the century are listed in Demers, “Margaret Roper & Erasmus,” 5, in the present volume, 170–71. 128. Erasmus, who never met Margaret’s husband, William Roper, also refers to him as “modest,” although Roper was actually both h­ ot-headed and litigious, despite the humble pose he assumes in his biography of his ­father-in-law.



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S ev e n √

Margaret Roper and Erasmus The Relationship of Translator and Source Patri ci a D e me rs

As biographers, dramatists, historians, painters, and philosophers present her, Margaret Roper is preeminently her father’s creature. Educated in the More household, this erudite woman is assumed to be a paragon of filial virtue, a characterization that has the potential to muffle individuality. Only a portion of her writing has survived. Lost are her Latin and Greek verses, her Latin speeches, her imitation of Quintilian, and her treatise The Four Laste Thynges, which More considered equal to his own. What remain are a scattering of letters and the primary text associated with her name, the translation of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica (1523) as A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster (1524), whose subject and mode appear to confirm the derivative nature of this daughter’s accomplishment.1 With its hallmark doubling of meanings for adjectives, nouns, and verbs, This essay is reprinted by permission of the author from Women Writing and Reading 1, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 3–8, with a few modifications. Quotations of Margaret Roper’s A deuout treatise upon the Pater noster have been changed from the text printed in Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Quincentennial Symposium, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Twayne, 1971), used in the original publication of this essay, to the edition of the text included in this volume. 1. Among the remnants are one letter to Erasmus, two to her father in the Tower, and one letter of disputed authorship, the Alington letter, an account of a conversation with her imprisoned father written to her stepsister, Alice Alington. On the matter of Margaret’s writing the Alington letter, Walter M. Gordon favors neither side over the other, pointing to the facts that “there is no winning argument in this dialogue” and that “the two people are left divided, if not in common sympathy, at least in desire and understanding”; see “Tragic Perspectives in Thomas More’s Dialogue with Margaret in the Tower,” Cithara 17 (1978): 4. Elaine Beilin

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the treatise’s claim that “he is nat a naturall and proper chylde / whosoeuer do nat labour all that he can to folowe and be like his father in wytte & condicions,”2 a creative expansion of “non est autem germanus filius, qui pro sua uirili non imitatur ingenium ac mores patris sui,”3 encapsulates the prevailing view of this ­nineteen-year-old wife and mother, “the star product of More’s domestic school.”4 When writing to the eldest, b­ est-known and, presumably, most gifted of his children, Thomas More regularly used superlatives to address puella[e] iucundissima[e], Margareta charissima, dulcissima filia and dulcissima nata.5 Eating a meal was “not so sweet” to More as talking to his “dearest child,” 6 to whom he wrote from the Tower as “myne owne good doughter” and for whom he remained “your tender louynge father.”7 In Erasmus’s correspondence with Roper, whom he greeted as “optima Margareta,” the humanist praised the letters of all the More sisters as “sensible, w ­ ell-written, modest, forthright and friendly.”8 His Christmas gift to her in the year of the publication of Precatio Dominica was his commentary on Prudentius’s hymns for Christmas and the Epiphany; the gift not only verifies his confidence in Margaret’s Latin but also reveals Erasmus’s “attitude presque paternelle” since he casts himself as “le pédagogue attentioné, soucieux de former une élève de choix.”9 The following year Erasmus used Maropts for Roper’s authorship as “more than likely”; see Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 25. Nancy E. Wright uses Foucauldian theory to illustrate how “Margaret’s words function as a homosocial bond between Thomas More and Henry VIII”; see “The Name and the Signature of the Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” in Creative Imagination; New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, et al. (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 257. 2. Margaret Roper, Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, in the present volume, 69/3–5; Germain Marc’hadour, ed., “Erasmus’ Paraphrase of the Pater Noster (1523) and Its English Translation by Margaret Roper (1524),” Moreana 2, no. 7 (1965): 9–64; here 21, lines 8–10. 3. Erasmus, Precatio Dominica Digesta in Septem Partes, in the present volume 68/4–6. Originally quoted from Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami opera omnia, vol. 5 (Holl. & West Frisiae: impensis Petri Vander Aa, 1704), 1221 B. 4. Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 207. 5. “most agreeable girl,” “dearest Margaret,” “sweetest daughter,” and “sweetest born.” See Elizabeth Frances Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), 97, 134, 154. 6. Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. E. Reynolds, trans. Philip E. Hallett (New York: Fordham University Press, 1928), 109. 7. Rogers, Correspondence, 509. 8. Letter written from Basel, December 25, 1523: Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell, annot. James Estes, vol. 10 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), letter 1401. 9. Charles Béné, “Cadeau d’Erasme à Margaret Roper: Deux hymnes de Prudence,” Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, ed. C. Murphy et al. (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), 473.



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garet as “the probable model”10 for Magdalia in the colloquy “The Abbot and the Learned Lady”; this interlocutor wastes no time chastising the Abbot’s fear of women’s learning, deftly wielding a ­double-edged sword to reply to the claim that “a wise woman is twice foolish”: That’s commonly said, yes, but by fools. A woman truly wise is not wise in her own conceit. On the other hand, one who thinks herself wise when she knows nothing is indeed twice foolish.11

Magdalia cannily engages her companion in the topic of clerical ignorance, part of her “veiled critique of the intellectual sloth afflicting men:”12 “if you’re not careful,” she taunts, “the net result will be that we’ll preside in the theological schools, preach in the churches, and wear your miters.”13 When, in September 1529, Holbein unveiled for Erasmus his portrait of the More family, this scholarly friend wrote immediately to Margaret, “the glory of [her] British land” (Britanniae tuae decus), assuring her that he recognized everyone, but no one more than her (omnes agnoui, sed neminem magis quam te), whose lovelier spirit within shines through the exterior (per pulcherrimum domicilium relucentem animum multo pulchriorem) (Freiburg, September 6, 1529).14 Thomas Stapleton, More’s early biographer, devoted a whole chapter of Tres Thomae to More’s eldest daughter, continuing the two strands of Margaret’s reputation: her exceptionality (“she attained a degree of excellence that would scarcely be believed in a woman”) and family likeness (“she resembled her father, as well in stature, appearance, and voice, as in mind and in general character”).15 Visual and figurative images of Margaret Roper associate her with learning. The woodcut prefacing the earliest surviving edition, in 1525, a multipurpose printer’s block, does not purport to represent Margaret Roper, yet the ways it attempts to define and encase the female subject are worth noting. Within the interlocking, infoliated tracery of the border, suggestive of a cloister, this veiled woman, shrouded in meters of cloth and almost surrounded by volumes, looks away from the open folio. This crude woodblock might prompt today’s reader to reflect on the perspectival shifts and linguistic freedom with which Roper col10. King, Women of the Renaissance, 181. 11. The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 222. 12. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism; Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 60. 13. Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. Thompson, 223. 14. Erasmus, Correspondence, letter 2212. 15. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 103.

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ored her vernacular rendering of Latin. Holbein’s finely detailed sketch of Margaret Roper, part of the commissioned family portrait at More’s home at Chelsea, stresses the resemblance to her father and also—as much to capture the full though sideward glance as anything else—represents the subject looking away or up from the book in her hand. Books are a signature emblem for Roper. For a ­seventeenth-century Jesuit eulogist, Pierre Le Moyne, she was an exemplary woman of strength, a modern Maccabee (cf. 2 Maccabees 7). With her knowledge of Greek and Latin, prose and verse, philosophy and history, Le Moyne observes, Margaret was More’s best work, his finest book: “cette Fille a esté le plus docte Livre & le plus poly, qui soit sorty de l’Esprit de Morus.”16 In their speculations about Morean family dynamics, contemporary playwrights have imagined vastly different Margarets: an individual who is filial (for Robert Bolt) and disenchanted (for Paula Vogel). Although in his 1960 play, A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt takes many liberties in introducing Meg as an unmarried woman in her m ­ id-twenties, “a beautiful girl of ardent moral fineness . . . [who] both suffers and shelters behind a reserved stillness,”17 Bolt’s Meg is brilliant and strong. By contrast, Paula Vogel’s 1977 play, Meg, tries so hard to demythologize its central character that it trivializes her. Vogel’s Meg is a cynic, describing herself as “Margaret the Masochist”;18 surprisingly vapid and vain, she answers her own query about why her father decided to teach her Latin and Greek by explaining that “I am very likely the only woman in the world right now pouring [sic] over these words—there is no other woman. I am unique.”19 This Meg is also detached, refusing to wait for her father on his journey from Westminster to the Tower and leaving her husband to fabricate the story of her public embrace of her father, “an action so stunning that it was immediately recorded in at least three anonymous accounts of More’s last days.”20 Reviewing her life, Vogel’s Meg assesses her daughters as giggly gossips; when in fact, Mary Roper Basset, the only woman whose work appeared in print during the reign of Mary Tudor, was an accomplished scholar, translating her grandfather’s Treatise on the Passion from Latin to English, the first book of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History 16. Richard Maber, “Une Machabée Moderne: Magaret Roper vue par le Père Pierre Le Moyne (1647),” Moreana 21, no. 82 (1984): 30–35, at 37. 17. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play of Sir Thomas More (Scarborough, Ont.: Bellhaven, 1963), xx. 18. Paula A. Vogel, Meg: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1977), 6. 19. Vogel, Meg, 25. 20. Clare M. Murphy, “Review of Paula A. Vogel, Meg: A Play in Three Acts,” Moreana 21, no. 82 (1984): 114–16, here 115.



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from Greek to Latin, and the first five books of Eusebius into English.21 Margaret Roper was a creative translator schooled in travelling back and forth between Latin and English. The practice of double translation, from English to Latin and then from Latin back to English, encouraged in More’s ­home-based school, supplied the “early apprenticeship”22 Margaret drew on most effectively in A deuout treatise. Her father’s ardent belief in the need to educate girls and boys as, in the phrasing of his letter to the tutor William Gonell, “equally suited for the knowledge of learning by which reason is cultivated,” not only established “More’s leadership, in both practice and theory about the liberal training of women,”23 but also must have heartened and inspired Margaret when Erasmus’s commentary came into her hands. She knew from experience that “the study of Latin was, to some extent, a Renaissance puberty rite—but only for boys and young men—”24 and that her rare privilege also conferred a responsibility to share and disseminate this catechetical teaching. Margaret’s practice in interlingual translation no doubt familiarized her with the classical touchstones about the advice, in Horace’s Ars poetica, against ­word-for-word slavish translation (nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus interpres).25 A similar directive from Cicero’s De optimo genere oratorum, to convert not as a translator but as an orator (nec converti ut interpres, sed ut orator) by relying on the diction used by one’s readers (verbis ad nostram consuetudinem aptis),26 had also likely been part of Margaret’s formation. Such guidance would soon form the basis of Renaissance translation theory, as begun by Etienne Dolet in 1540 with La Maniere de Biene Tradvire D’Vne Langue en aultre. Yet in this early stage of translating into English, Margaret Roper was a novelty: the first n­ on-royal woman translator to make her mark. Her Treatise joined her father’s 1505 translation of some of Mirandola’s minor works and his biography, the 1504 translation by the Lady Margaret (Beaufort) Tudor, mother of Henry VII, of the fourth book of De Imitatione Christi and her posthumously published translation of the Carthusian text Speculum aureum animae peccatricis as The myrroure of Golde for the Syn21. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 127. 22. Carole Weinberg, “Thomas More and the Use of English in Early Tudor Education,” Moreana 15, no. 59 (1978): 20–30, here 26. 23. Rogers, Correspondence, 120–23. 24. Elizabeth McCutcheon, “The Education of Thomas More’s Daughters: Concepts and Praxis,” in East Meet West: Homage to Edgar Knowlton, ed. R. Hadlich and J. Ellsworth (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1988), 201. 25. Quintus Flaccus Horatius, The Art of Poetry (London: W. Heinemann Ltd., 1932), lines 133–34. 26. M. Tulli Ciceronis De Optimo Genere Oratorum, ed. S. Wilkins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903), chap. 5, sec. 14.

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full soule in 1522, and Tyndale’s 1523 translation of Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani. The preface Richard Hyrde wrote for Margaret’s translation obliquely identified the “gentylwoman / whiche translated this lytell boke” by her “vertuous conuersacion / lyuyng / and sadde demeanoure” and by her culturally approved diffidence, being “as lothe to haue prayse gyuyn her / as she is worthy to haue it / and had leauer her prayse to reste in mennes hertes / than in their tonges / or rather in goddes estimacion and pleasure / than any mannes wordes or thought.”27 There is no way of knowing whether Hyrde’s depiction of Margaret, which accords so neatly with the patriarchal discursive order, tallies with her actual personality, nor of verifying if, perhaps, his “special accommodations for her gender” might constitute a deliberate verbal maneuver: “enabling women to be presented . . . as writers within a culture hostile to women’s speech.”28 The imaginative detail and care Roper lavished on this production, its expressive idiomatic range, and independent control of syntax indicate that this young artist was as fully aware as Hyrde of the extraordinariness of her accomplishment. Roper adjusted, juxtaposed, and ­re-aligned syntactic and morphological categories. In its “ability to manipulate and mold the receiving rather than the lending tongue,”29 her work shows how “translation absorbed, shaped, oriented the necessary raw material.”30 Two close readings of Roper’s translation, one by John Archer Gee in 1937 and the other by Rita Verbrugge in 1985, emphasize the natural rhythms and maturity of her achievement. Although he cites few examples, Gee argues for the “scholarship and art” of this “relatively unknown girl” by indicating how her translation “rarely follows the Latin ordering and structure” and how in the “felicitous freedom” of her diction “a Latin word [is] seldom expressed by its English derivative.”31 Claiming that “the translation is as much Margaret’s work as Precatio Dominica is Erasmus’s,” Verbrugge conducts a more detailed and substantiated examination of Roper’s “simple, straightforward, and unpretentious” vocabulary, 27. Hyrde’s Preface to the Devout Treatise, chap. 2 in this volume, 56/24–25 and 58/21–23. 28. Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 10–11. 29. Burton Raffel, “How to Read a Translation,” The Forked Tongue: A Study of the Translation Process (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 105. 30. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 247. 31. John Archer Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica and the Apprenticeship behind Early Tudor Translation,” Review of English Studies 13 (1937): 257–71, here 261 and 265.



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her “tendency to double or couple the adjectives or verbs,” and her building of “parallel structures of her own.”32 This essay undertakes a broader consideration of the ways Roper’s translation achieves distinctiveness and independence. In a discourse acknowledging that “he assigned vs also away of prayeng” (precandi formulam),33 it makes sense that the translator strives to clarify and crystallize the catechetical intent. Accordingly, Roper enumerates the seven parts and titles them “peticions.” She also adjusts sentence structure to underline didactic points. In the first petition, about the hallowing of the divine name, she expands and ­re-orders the source text to emphasize human duty in the face of divine magnitude. for thy glorie as it is great/ so neyther hauyng begynnyng nor endyng / but euer in it selfe florisshynge / can neyther encreace nor decreace / but it skylleth yet mankynde nat a lytell / yt euery man it knowe and magnifye / for to knowe and confesse the onely very god. Tua quidem gloria ut immensa, ita nec initium habens, nec finem habitura, semper florens in sese: neque crescere potest, neque decrescere: sed humani generis refert, ut illa cunctis innotescat.34

The clearly paralleled participles and verbs affirm divine glory and prompt a human response, a response that does more than concern (refert) humankind (“it skylleth yet mankynde nat a lytell”), involves more than knowing (innotescat) this glory (“knowe and magnifye”) and, by incorporating part of the next sentence, also entails knowledge and creed (“to knowe and confesse the onely very god”). To maintain parallelism and focus attention Roper often simplifies. She reduces the description of the Holy Spirit which began, carried on, and perfected human health (ad humani generis salutem haec omnia coepit, prouexit, ac perfecit) to “that was bothe the begynner and ender of all this in them.”35 She retains the force of a string of verbs, reducing fastened on the cross (suffigimur in crucem) to “crucified” and being submerged in the sea (demergimur in mare) to “drowned,” to stress the mysterious and n­ ot-always-martyrous emergence of spiritual strength:

32. Rita Verbrugge, “Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. M. P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985), 40. 33. Roper, Devout Treatise, 63/23; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 62/19; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1219 C. 34. Roper, Devout Treatise, 65/18–22; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 64/18–21; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1220 B. 35. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 74/19–20; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1222 F; Roper, Devout Treatise, 75/22–23.

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si non includimur, excruciamur, secamur, urimur, suffigimur in crucem, demergimur in mare, aut decollamur: tamen illustrabitur et in nobis uis ac splendor tui regni albeit we be nat imprysoned nor turmented: though we be nat wounded nor brent / althogh we be nat crucified nor drowned: thoughe we be nat beheeded: yet natwithstandyng / the strength and clerenesse of thy realme: may shine and be noble in vs.36

On the whole Roper’s expansions are apt and effective. The rendering of ut hac graui perpetuaque colluctatione uirtutem tuorum & exerceres & confirmares as “by continuall and greuous batayle / to exercise / confyrme / and make stedfaste the vertue and strengthe of thy people”37 underscores the results of perpetual wrestling in the additional reference to steadfastness. On rare occasions her string of verbs does not capture the boldness of the original. The Erasmian warning against subverters within the church (intra ecclesiae tuae moenia) whose aim is to dishonor and impair strength (dedecorant, ac robur labefactant) does not emerge as bluntly in Roper’s treatment of adversaries who “abate / shame / & dishonest the glory of thy realme.”38 Among Roper’s most successful expansions are those that reinforce the scriptural foundations of Erasmus’s commentary. In discussing the obedient children who attempt to fulfil the divine will (quae tua dictat uoluntas), Roper enlarges the sense of “those thynges / whiche they knowe shall content thy mynde & pleasure”39 to accent not just the dictate of the divine will but the informed consent of the dutiful creature. Erasmus’s illustration of such obedience is the Gethsemane scene and Jesus’s prayer that not his will but his Father’s be done. Roper expands the lesson, ut iam pudeat quemuis hominem suam uoluntatem praeferre tuae, with an additional subordinate clause that emphasizes the biblical example: “So that than nedes must man be a shamed / to preferre & set forth his owne wyll / if Christ our maister was content to cast his owne wyll awaye / and subdue it to thyne.”40 When, in explaining the petition about daily bread, Erasmus alludes to the Johannine pericope (Jn 6:35–58) of bread from heaven (sed filij spirituales à patre spirituum spiritualem illum ac coelestem panem flagitamus), Roper makes it clear that the reference involves mental and physical sustenance, as 36. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 74/22–25; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1222 F; Roper, Devout Treatise, 75/25–28. 37. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 76/8–10; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1223 A; Roper, Devout Treatise, 77/11–12. 38. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 76/22–23; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1223 B; Roper, Devout Treatise, 77/26. 39. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 80/14, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1224 A; Roper, Devout Treatise, 81/15–16. 40. Roper, Devout Treatise, 80/21–22; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 81/23–25; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1224 B.



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she translates the next use of panem to contrast the inadequate provisions of the philosophers and Pharisees, “For verily / the breed and teachynge of the proude philosophers and pharises / coude nat suffice and content our mynde.” 41 The directive to reconcile with one’s brother before making an offering at the altar warrants some colorful expansion in Roper’s translation; not only is the verb to hasten (propero) vivified as “hye us a pace to,” but a concluding section is added to complete the sequence. Ita nos docuit filius tuus, etiam ad altare relicto munere, properandum ad fraternae pacis reconciliationem becomes “Therfore thy sonne gaue vs this in commaundement / that we whulde42 leaue our offring euyn at ye auter / & hye vs a pace to our brother / and labour to be in peace with hym / and than returne agayne & offre vp our rewarde.”43 Roper’s English achieves its directness and immediacy through many—often surprising—experiments. She shows a real ability to dramatize fairly static utterances. Although in his On Copia of Words and Ideas, a work designed to assist translators “in interpreting authors” and a work which Roper no doubt knew, Erasmus had warned against tautology as “repetition of the same word or expression,”44 he had resorted to this technique, along with effective parallelism, to exhibit the vehement response of those who judged God through his followers and thereby dismissed him repeatedly: Valeat ille deus, qui tales habet cultores: ualeat ille dominus, qui tales habet seruos: ualeat ille pater, qui tales habet filios: ualeat ille rex, qui talem habet populum. Roper’s translation uses no repetition, but catches the parallelism of mounting tension and frustration, the prophetic sense of misrule and disjointedness. “What a god is he / that hath suche maner of worshippers: Fye on suche a mayster that hath so vnrewly seruauntes: Out vpon suche a father / whose children be so leude: Banisshed be suche a kyng / yt hath suche maner of people and subiectes.”45 She is as capable of shrinking as expanding the source. In contrast to Erasmus’s catalogue of beasts and food to whom unbelievers offer worship, boues, arietes, simias, porrum, cepe (bullocks, rams, monkeys, leek, onion), Roper listens more to the De Copia advice about metonymy (in chapter 22) to make the ­best-known sacrifices stand in for all the rest; she reduces the list to “some also 41. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 84/22–23; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1225 B; Roper, Devout Treatise, 85/33, 87/1–2. 42. Beinecke: shulde. 43. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 90/11–12; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1226 B; Roper, Devout Treatise, 91/13–16. 44. Desiderius Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. D. B. King and H. B. Rix (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 1963), 17. 45. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 68/23–26; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1221D; Roper, Devout Treatise, 69/26–29.

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to oxen some to bulles /and such other lyke.”46 Colour is a hallmark of her style; it resides in onomatopoeic coinages such as “ye bublisshyng of ryuers” for fontium scatebrae,47 illustrative, though now archaic, words such as “ouerhippe” for praetergrediamur (go beyond) in her version of ne qua in re diuinae uoluntatis tuae praescriptum praetergrediamur as “that in nothyng we ouerhippe or be agaynst that / whiche thy godly and diuine wyll hath apoynted vs,”48 and precise elongations of sensory and emotional details as in enlarging neque . . . placet to “thou vtterly dispysest,”49 quae carnalis est to “that sauereth all carnally,”50 and es fame pereuntibus to “what tyme we were lyke to haue perisshed for hungre.” 51 The advice in the De Copia about observing “how a particular age has achieved variety in the use of words” as opposed to wasting “time with synonyms” which are “not far from babbling”52 must have had a special place in Roper’s thoughts as she embellished certain phrases to reflect Reformation realities. It is very possible that the texts, ­book-burnings, and ecclesiastical inspections of the campaign “to stem the steady stream of Lutheran literature”53 in the early 1520s were flashing through her mind when she expanded Audi uota concordiae. Non enim conuenit, ut inter fratres, quos tua bonitas aequauit in honore gratuito, ambitione, contentione, odio, liuore inter sese dissideant to Here nowe the desyres of vnyte and concorde / for it is nat fytting ne agreeable / that bretherne whom thy goodnesse hath put in equall honoure / shulde disagre or varry among themselfe / by ambicious desyre of worldely promocion / by contencious debate / hatered or enuy.54

Although her emphatic abhorrence of violence conveys a standard de contemptu mundi position, especially evident in the contrast of “the realme of this worlde / . . . holde vp by garrisons of men / by hostes and armour / . . . & defended by fierse cruelnesse” with the victory of Jesus which “by mekenesse venquesshed cruelnesse,”55 Roper not only fulfils but overgoes the letter of the source text’s vehemence about the Jews. Her father’s increasingly vocal role as “a staunch per46. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 66/8–9; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1220 D; Roper, Devout Treatise, 67/9–10. 47. Roper, Devout Treatise, 71/8; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 70/8–9; Marc’hadour, ed., 1221 E. 48. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 82/29–30, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1224 E; Roper, Devout Treatise, 83/32–33. 49. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 84/17, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1225 A; Roper, Devout Treatise, 85/24. 50. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 84/18, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1225 A; Roper, Devout Treatise, 85/23–24. 51. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 84/25, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1225 B; Roper, Devout Treatise, 85/33. 52. Erasmus, On Copia, 24–25. 53. Verbrugge, “Roper’s Personal Expression,” 36–37. 54. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 64/1–4, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1219 D; Roper, Devout Treatise, 65/1–5. 55. Roper, Devout Treatise, 75/6–9.



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secutor of heresy and an undeviating apologist for Catholic orthodoxy”56 may have affected her coloring of the original; Erasmus’s words themselves reveal “a form of religious a­ nti-Semitism, rather than racial, . . . shared by many contemporary humanists.”57 Roper characterizes Jewish practice “in their sinagoges and resorte of people” (in synagogis) as incessant “dispitefull and abominable bacbytinge” (abominandis probris).58 She heightens the meaning of “dash against” in impingunt to “They cast eke in our tethe / as a thyng of great dishonestie / ye most glorious name of thy chyldren” (Nobis probri loco impingunt gloriosum cognomen filij tui).59 The h­ oped-for conversion of the Jews means a completely unproblematized resignation, “whan the iewes also shall bryng and submyt them selfe to the spirituall and gostely lernyng of ye gospell” (Iudaeis etiam in regnum Euangelicum sese aggregantibus).60 Familiar as she evidently is with the whole array of Erasmian suggestions for embellishing, amplifying, and enumerating detail, the advice Roper follows the most concerns the method of amplification by which “we do not state a thing simply, but set it forth to be viewed as though portrayed in color on a tablet, so that it may seem that we have painted, not narrated, and that the reader has seen, not read.”61 Her extensions and adjustments of the Latin show a constant striving to be clear and graphic. To emphasize the a­ lmost-angelic radiance of believers, she adjusts the meaning of reluceat (shine back) to create a compelling picture of divine glory reflected equally at human and angelic levels. Reluceat & in moribus nostris, non minus quàm in angelis caeterisque rebus abs te conditis, tui nominis gloria becomes “that the light and glory of thy name / maye no lesse appere and shyne in our maners and lyuenge / than it shyneth in thy Angels / and in all thynge that thou hast created and made.”62 The elongations always reveal how quickly Roper’s moral intelligence tracks the consequences of wayward attitudes; rerum fluxarum appears as “frayle and vanysshyng thynges,”63 and mancipia peccati as “thrall and bonde to synne.”64 She does not shy away from stern indict­56. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance ­Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 53. 57. DeMolen, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 94. 58. Roper, Devout Treatise, 67/15–16; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 66/13–14, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1220 D. 59. Roper, Devout Treatise, 68/18–19; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 66/16–17, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1220 D. 60. Roper, Devout Treatise, 77/18–20; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 76/14–15, Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1223 B. 61. Erasmus, On Copia, 47. 62. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 70/20–22; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1221 F; Roper, Devout Treatise, 71/19–21. 63. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 80/26; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1224 B; Roper, Devout Treatise, 81/29. 64. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 96/8; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1227 C; Roper, Devout Treatise, 97/9.

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ments or grisly details to make the contrast between Christ and Satan as visual and immediate as possible. Unlike the “naturally good and gentyll” (natura bonus ac beneficus) Lord, the devil is a “currysshe and vngentyll . . . mayster” (immiti . . . domino);65 Jesus’ pastoral intervention, “thou curest and makest hole the sicke and scabbe shepe,” an arresting but not “repulsive”66 translation of morbidam sanas,67 is an entirely justified reclamation of possible casualties through the wounds inflicted by the devil, who was compared to “a rauenous lyon / lyeng in wayte / sekynge and huntyng about / whom he maye deuoure.” 68 However, as well as hitting home the grimness, Roper deliberately softens many of the negative constructions in Erasmus’s Latin. She sidesteps the straightforward declaration that unless the Father gives the bread it will not be salutary, conveyed directly through the negatives of nec salutaris est, nisi tu pater quotidie dederis, by obscuring the negative implications in the somewhat cumbersome “yet but if thou father doest gyue it / it is nat holesome nor any thyng auayleth.”69 She silences a whole clause dealing with mortal offences to lay greater stress on the amendment of fatherly correction; “if in any thyng we offende the” mitigates the human propensity toward sin shown in Erasmus’s supposition si quid offendimus, sicut offendimus frequenter in multis.70 As if to emphasize human compliance with divine “gentylnesse” and “wysedome,” Roper alters the literal meaning of “we do not protest against” for non recusamus to “wherfore we be content to be put to what soeuer ieopardy it pleaseth the.”71 The work of this unknown girl, who was also a remarkably shrewd, s­ elfpossessed scholar, is poised on the brink of individual creative expression. Although in the s­ ixteenth-century, f­ emale-gendered activity of translating, a woman translator was “less vulnerable to the accusation of circulating her words inappropriately” because “they were not, strictly speaking, her words at all,”72 Roper’s translation is not enslaved to the source language, nor does it caper irresponsibly in the target language. The respect accorded the source seems due as much to its subject and intent as to its authorship. Her text, a commentary on what is likely the most famous prayer, is itself a meditation. 65. Roper, Devout Treatise, 97/17, 10–11; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 96/14, 9; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1228 A. 66. Verbrugge, “Roper’s Personal Expression,” 42. 67. Roper, Devout Treatise, 97/18–19; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 96/15; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1228 A. 68. Roper, Devout Treatise, 97/15–16. 69. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 86/5–6; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1225 C; Roper, Devout Treatise, 87/6–7. 70. Roper, Devout Treatise, 91/30; Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 90/25–26; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1226 C. 71. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 94/16; Opera omnia, vol. 5, 1227 B; Roper, Devout Treatise, 95/18–19. 72. Lamb, Gender and Authorship, 12.



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The extensions and adaptations of Roper’s version identify her as a forerunner of the whole contingent of s­ ixteenth-century pious women who dedicated themselves to “taking care of souls.”73 Although she voices a ­pre-Reformation doctrine, her scripturalism is every bit as precise and her enthusiasm for preaching and teaching as refined and developed as in the later English collections of prayers that “were important steps in the establishment of a feminine literary presence.”74 Despite changes in allegiance and creedal formulation, Roper’s sentiments prepare the way for subsequent generations of women. The rich assortment of writing by women compiled by Thomas Bentley in the Second Lampe of Virginitie of his Monument of Matrones (1582) corroborates the perseverance of Roper’s work. Had she read it, she would have echoed wholeheartedly the “exhortation” of Lady Jane Dudley “the night before she suffered,” a prayer which the imprisoned and condemned Lady Jane wrote at the end of her Greek New Testament and sent to her sister: “It will teach you to live and learne you to die. It shall win you more than you should have gained by the possessions of your wofull fathers land.”75 Roper would also have endorsed the logic of the creaturely petition in Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s prayer about “our frailtie and miserie”; its contrastive picture of human weakness would have been very well known to Roper: What shall I saie to God? Thou art most good, and I euill; thou holie, and I miserable; thou art light, and I am blind; thou art the blessed one, and I am carefull and full of sorowe. My Lord, thou art the Physician, and I am the miserable patient; I am nothing but uanitie and corrupt, as euery liuing man is. What shall I say O Creator but this, that I am thy creature, and shall I perish?76

Another collection with which Roper would agree, The Praiers made by the right Honourable Ladie Frances Aburgauennie, and committed at the houre of hir death, to the right Worshipfull Ladie Marie Fane (hir onlie daughter) as a Iewell of health for the soule, and a perfect path to Paradise, contains many literary forms Roper did not attempt, such as “a Praier deciphering in Alphabet forme” the name of Lady Abergavenny’s daughter and a closing acrostic. Yet Abergavenny’s recorded prayer against “euill imaginations,” requesting “a cleere conscience, shamefast eies, innocent hands, and a tongue to tell the truth,”77 transmits the same pristine re73. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 81. 74. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 75. 75. Thomas Bentley, The Monument of Matrones; conteining seuen seuerall Lampes of Virginitie (London: H. Denham, 1582), 101. 76. Bentley, Monument of Matrones, 113. 77. Bentley, Monument of Matrones, 173.

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solve seen throughout Roper’s translation. The fervor of the catechism showing “the maner how to examine . . . young persons,” in Dorcas Martin’s translation from the French of An instruction for Christians, conteining a fruitfull and godlie exercise, as well in wholsome and fruitfull praiers, pinpoints the issue at the heart of Roper’s earlier undertaking. When the Mother asks the Child to “rehearse . . . in the common language . . . the forme that he hath given us,” the Child not only recites the Our Father but explains its name: “To declare the love that he beareth towards us in Jesus Christ, to the end that in full assurance and boldnesse we may come to him onlie, and not to be afraid of him, no more than a child is of his father.”78 The intense filial bond between Margaret More Roper and her father accounts for her scholarship, her friendship with Erasmus, and, in a practical way, our recognition of her as a translator. But this daughter for all seasons is not simply a conveyor (translatus meaning “carried across”) from Latin to English. In its elements of s­ elf-conscious discourse, her authorial voice does not shy away from teaching, from commentary on its own functioning and primary message. Her additions and embellishments, along with decisions to elide and collapse phrases, show how warmly she responded to the rhetorical exercise of preaching. Expounding on, coloring and extending the Erasmian source, her translation supplies a truly polyphonic response. 78. Bentley, Monument of Matrones, 236.



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Anne M. O’Donnell, SND Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster

Eight √

Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster Patristic and Linguistic Sources A nne M . O ’ D on nel l, SN D

In 1523 Erasmus published Precatio Dominica, his elegant paraphrase of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, the foundational prayer composed by Jesus (Mt 6:9–13). The next year Margaret Roper published A Devout Treatise vpon the Pater Noster, her lively English translation of Erasmus’s brief commentary. Erasmus, the most renowned humanist in Northern Europe, had already authored many books and edited and translated many others, including a new translation of the New Testament. Margaret was a young scholar, only nineteen years old and largely unknown outside a small circle of the More family, their friends, and other humanists. They shared a common purpose: to help others know and love this prayer of prayers. But they were writing for different audiences in different languages: one a fairly learned readership, mostly male, in Latin, the other a mixed readership, both male and female, in the vernacular. For both writers, moreover, the content was not only scriptural but reflected a long tradition of patristic commentary on the Lord’s Prayer. Erasmus’s genius lay, in part, in his ability to weave this material into an eloquent whole; Margaret’s challenge was to convey this dense material, some of which she had been studying under the guidance of Thomas More and her tutors,1 in words that would bring the prayer 1. See the essay by Elizabeth McCutcheon in this collection for more details on Roper’s rigorous education, which included a mastery of Greek and Latin and extensive training in translation.

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home to the hearts and minds of English readers. In the first part of this essay I explore the ad fontes contexts of the Precatio, considering Erasmus’s use of scripture and religious commentaries and identifying in each petition the key words that he used and Margaret translated.2 In the second part I focus more specifically on her language, especially its derivations in Old English, ­Anglo-Norman, Greek, and Latin.3 Finally, I discuss Margaret’s use of doublets, or a pair of synonyms, which she applies in a variety of telling ways, in a Postscript.

I In the words of Germain Marc’hadour, Erasmus’s Precatio is “a mosaic of Gospel phrases disposed in a beautiful pattern by a skillful artist who . . . had inhabited . . . the New Testament, had edited it, translated it, paraphrased much of it.”4 Erasmus uses scripture to interpret scripture. Following the precept of Augustine from De doctrina christiana, he alludes to Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, instead of Luke’s, ­twenty-one times.5 Erasmus also had extensive knowledge of commentaries on the Pater Noster, and incorporated this rich tradition of biblical commentary in his Precatio, often drawing upon those by authors whose works he had edited: Jerome (1516), Cyprian (1520), Augustine of Hippo with the collaboration of Juan Luis Vives (1522–1529), John Chrysostom (1525–1530), and Ambrose (1527). He did not edit the Bulgarian bishop Theo­ phylactus (d. after 1107), but he cites him on the Pater Noster in his Annotations on the New Testament.6 Cyprian (ca. 200–258) wrote a commentary specifically on 2. For an important study of the relationship between Erasmus and Margaret Roper, focused on the political and religious situation in the early 1520s, see Jaime Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014), especially chapter 1. 3. Two good general studies of the Lord’s Prayer are Jaroslav Pelikan, Divine Rhetoric: The Sermon on the Mount as Message and as Model in Augustine, Chrysostom, and Luther (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 2001), and Kenneth W. Stevenson, The Lord’s Prayer: A Text in Tradition (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2004). 4. Germain Marc’hadour, “Erasmus Englished by Margaret More,” Clergy Review 43, no. 2 (February 1958): 78–91; esp. 81. 5. Altogether, there are about 110 biblical allusions in the Precatio. The editor John N. Grant annotates these references, and I have added a few more. In this essay, I have checked every quotation from Erasmus against Grant, but I record only the notable instances in which Margaret does not translate Erasmus or translates him freely. See “The Lord’s Prayer,” trans. and annot. John N. Grant, in Spiritualia and Pastoralia, ed. John W. O’Malley, SJ, and Louis A. Perraud, vol. 69 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 59–77; hereafter abbreviated Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer.” The Collected Works of Erasmus, 89 vols. projected (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–) are hereafter abbreviated CWE. 6. John C. Olin, “Erasmus and the Church Fathers,” in Six Essays on Erasmus (New York: Fordham University



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the Lord’s Prayer. Chrysostom (ca. 349–407) and Jerome (ca. 340/7–420) commented on it as a significant part of a larger work. According to Roy Hammerling, Augustine (354–430) refers to the Lord’s Prayer in sixteen works.7 Augustine’s most pertinent commentary, which is also his first major work on the Pater Noster, De sermone Domini in monte,8 is very helpful in explicating Erasmus’s Precatio. A tour de force, it ends with a series of analogues between the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven Beatitudes, and the Seven Petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.9 Besides the Precatio Erasmus devoted a total of some nine pages to the Pater Noster in four other works, evidence of his interest in it. The earliest of these, the ­anti-war tract, Querela pacis in 1517 (A Complaint of Peace), refers to public policy. Works written later on the Pater Noster are devotional or catechetical: Modus orandi Deum in 1524 (On Praying to God); Explanatio symboli apostolorum in 1533 (An Explanation of the Apostles’ Creed); and “Precatio ad Patrem” in 1535 (“Prayer to the Father”).10 Precatio dominica is one prayer in seven parts, addressed devotionally to the Press, 1979), 33–47. Earlier in his life, Erasmus made use of the editio princeps of Origen’s biblical commentaries published by Jodocus Badius [Josse Bade] in 1512 (Olin, “Erasmus and the Church Fathers,” 43). His own edition of Origen was published posthumously by Hieronymus Froben in 1536 (Olin, “Erasmus and the Church Fathers,” 44). The second (Latin only) edition does not contain Origen’s On Prayer, with its section on the Pater Noster, so the first edition in Greek may also lack this treatise. For the second edition, see Origenis . . . Opera quae quidem extant omnia, 2 vols. (Basel: Froben, 1557); a copy of this rare book is in the Catholic University of America, Mullen Library, Special Collections. In the sixteenth century, the only surviving manuscript of Origen’s treatise On Prayer was kept in Worms, a city that Erasmus never visited. See the introduction to Origen, On Prayer, in Alexandrian Christianity, trans. J. E. L. Oulton, ed. Henry Chadwick, Library of Christian Classics 2, Ichthus Edition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954), 233–35. 7. Roy Hammerling, “Conclusion,” The Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church: The Pearl of Great Price (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 126–27; chap. 3, 146n3. See also James W. Wiles, A Scripture Index to the Works of St. Augustine in English Translation (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Inc., 1995). 8. Book 2, chap. 4, par. 15, through chap. 11, par. 38, De sermone Domini in monte in Aureleii Augustini opera, ed. Almut Mutzenbecher, in Corpus Christiana, Series Latina 35 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1967), 104–30; this series is hereafter abbreviated CCSL. Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, trans. William Findlay, ed. D. S. Schaff, in A Select Library of the Nicene and ­Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series, 14 vols., ed. Philip Schaff (1886–1890; repr. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1994), vol. 6, 1–63; this series is hereafter abbreviated 1NPNF. 9. Book 2, chap. 11, par. 38, 1NPNF 6:46; CCSL 35:128–30. 10. Querela, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 4, part 2, ed. C. Reedijk et al. (Amsterdam: ­North-Holland, 1969–), 62–100 (hereafter ASD for the Amsterdam edition); Complaint: CWE 27:293–322; Modus: ASD 5.1:121–75; Praying: CWE 70:147–230; Explanatio: ASD 5.1:206–319; Explanation: CWE 70:237–387; Precatio dominica, in Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, ed. Jean Le Clerc, 10 vols. (Leiden, 1703–1706; repr. Hildesheim: Olm, 1961–1962), 5:1197–98; “Prayer”: CWE 69:121–23. See Hilmar M. Pabel, chap. 3, “Interpreting the Lord’s Prayer,” in Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus’ Pastoral Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 109–54.

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Father in the vocative case. Erasmus’s prefatory letter to the work and its subtitle, “in septem portiones distributa,” link the seven petitions to the seven days of the week.11 Following Erasmus, who names the seven days, one petition might be read each day: “septem diebus totam absoluere.”12 Margaret Roper omits the days of the week but identifies each of the petitions, so one could follow an alternative schedule, reading them at seven intervals throughout the day: “singulos dies in septem precandi tempora partiri.”13 Erasmus does not distribute his commentary evenly—the first two sections are much longer than the following five—and he frequently treats the same topic in several sections. He discusses the “temptation to apostasy” in several places, for example, although logically it belongs to Petition Six, and he discusses the “devil as father” in Petitions One and Seven. In Cicero’s terms from the De Inventione (book 1, chap. 7, par. 9), Erasmus’s Precatio could be criticized for its distributio or “organization,” but praised for its inventio or “content” and elocutio or “style.”14 Margaret Roper proved to be both accurate and sensitive in the course of turning Erasmus’s Precatio into early modern English. My c­ lause-by-clause comparison shows that she made only two theological errors, both of which occur in Petition One. The more significant of these occurs in the concluding doxology. She fails to make the fundamental theological distinction between terms for the Trinity when she translates Erasmus’s essentia and persona both as “person.” in simplici essentia agnoscant triplicem personarum proprietatem Let them . . . aknowledge thre persons as one proper persone.15

Margaret would have heard the Nicene Creed (ad 325) at every Sunday Mass. Although it does not contain the words “person” and “essence,” it does name the persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It also asserts that the Son is “consubstantial” or “one in being [essence]” with the Father.16 Germain Marc’hadour, 11. P. S. and H. M. Allen and H. W. Garrod, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 12 vols. including index (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–1958), vol. 5, 344–45, epis. 1393, To Justus Ludovicus Decius, Basel, 24 October 1523; edition hereafter abbreviated Allen, Opus epistolarum, followed by volume and page number. Decius was secretary to the king of Poland and the dedicatee of the work (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” CWE, 69:57–58). 12. Allen, Opus epistolarum, 5:345/40–41; “seven days to go through the whole work” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 58). 13. Allen, Opus epistolarum, 5:345/42; “divide each day into seven times for prayer” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 58). 14. Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubble (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1–345. 15. Erasmus, Precatio Dominica, in this volume, 66/26–27; Roper, Devout Treatise, 67/31–33. 16. See http://www.­preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Symbola/Nicaenum.html; accessed May 25, 2020. “Substance” and “essence” are synonyms. The word “essence,” derived from Latin through French, was seldom used



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who first discovered this error, has observed that “Erasmus, who was a Doctor of Divinity, would not slip on such basic theological terminology.”17 Because More would have corrected this error, it is possible that Margaret did not show her translation to her father. In the second case, where Erasmus refers to the good angels, the seraphim of Chrysostom, Margaret translates “aetherei” as “earthly”18: Aetherei spiritus . . . regem suum laudibus celebrant the erthely spirites . . . neuer lynne [cease]19 pray[s]eng their lorde and kyng20

Could Margaret have heard the teaching of St. John of Damascus (ca. 675–749) in a sermon? “[A]n angel is said to be incorporeal and immaterial as regards us; but compared to God it is corporeal and material. Therefore, he is not simply incorporeal.”21 So, Margaret may be justified in calling the angels “earthly spirits” when compared to the absolute spirit of the Godhead. With the correction of each problem in a footnote, Margaret’s translation is a devotional and literary gift to readers, past and present, who do not know Latin.22

before the sixteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives only three instances before Margaret’s Devout Treatise with the meanings “constitutive substance” (OED, 2.c., first use, ante 1398) and “substance . . . in respect of which the three persons of the Trinity are one” (OED, 4. b. Theol., first two uses, 1481, 1495). The word “person” comes from Latin, meaning “a mask” (OED, Etymology). It was first applied to “a role in real life or in a play” (OED, I.1.) then to “an individual human being” (OED, II.2.a.), and finally to “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (OED, III.6.a.). 17. Germain Marc’hadour, “Pater Noster,” Moreana 3, no. 9 (February 1966): 80n1. 18. OED, “earthly,” A. adj. 1.a.; “OE” (a1150), Blickling Homilies. Grant translates “aetherei” as “the heavenly spirits honour their king with praise” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 64/4–5). 19. This quotation from Treatise contains one word from Old English: “lynne” for “cease.” OED, “lin,” v. Obs. in use, c1000–1725; 1.a. intr.; “OE” (c1000), Beowulf, line 1478. 20. Erasmus, Precatio Dominica, in this volume, 70/6; Roper, Devout Treatise, 71/5–6. Marc’hadour, “Pater Noster,” Moreana 3, no. 9 (February 1966): 78, 80n2, corrects “prayeng” to “pray[s]eng.” 21. John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, book 2, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, part I, question 50, article 1, objection 1. See http://www.­sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/; accessed May 25, 2020. 22. She also makes one minor error, when she relates the prepositional phrase “on the crosse” to the two thieves rather than to Jesus in Petition Five (Roper, Devout Treatise, 91/8).

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petition one (a) Pater noster; “Ovr Father” (Mt 6:9)23 At numerous times in his public life, Jesus addressed God as “Father,” but during the Agony in the Garden, he cried “Abba, Father” (Mk 14:36). “Abba,” the Aramaic word for “Father,” preserves the original language of Jesus. Paul asserts that Christians may also use this familial phrase: “You haue receiued the spirit of adoption of sonnes, wherein we crie: Abba, (Father)” (Rom 8:15), and “And because you are sonnes, God hath sent the Spirit of his sonne into your hartes, crying: Abba, Father” (Gal 4:6).24 Augustine is the first commentator I found to quote “abba pater” as part of the exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer; see his De Sermone Domini in Monte,25 written in 394 while he was still a priest. Erasmus enhances his commentary on the first petition with “Abba pater”, and names God as “father” almost fifty times.26 Margaret further emphasizes “Abba pater / whiche in Englysshe is as moche to saye / as O father father,”27 repeatedly translating it and doubling the word. Perhaps due to the loving relationship she and her siblings had with their father, Margaret adds “good” eight times to her translation of “father,” though it is not in the original Latin.28 By doing 23. The Latin quotations in the Petition headings are taken from Erasmus’s Precatio dominica. Because Margaret Roper did not usually translate the literal scriptural quotations, I have chosen to use the English from the Rheims New Testament (1582): The New Testament of Iesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin, according to the best corrected copies of the same, diligently conferred with the Greeke and other editions in diuers languages (Rheims: John Fogny, 1582) (Folger, STC 2884). For comparison, I use the Rheims for New Testament quotations and the Douai for Old Testament (1609–1610): The Holie Bible faithfully translated into English, out of the authentical Latin: diligently conferred with the Hebrew, Greeke, and other editions in diuers languages, 2 vols. (Douai: Laurence Kellam), vol. 1, Genesis to Job (1609); vol. 2, Psalms to 4 Esdras (1610). The Rheims and Douai versions comprise the early modern English translations of the Vulgate: Biblia Latina cum Glossa Ordinaria, Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps (Adolph Rusch of Strassburg, 1480/81), 4 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), vol. 1, Genesis to Ruth; vol. 2, 1–2 Samuel to Ecclesiasticus; vol. 3, Isaias to 1–2 Macc.; vol. 4, New Testament. 24. Mark and Paul translate Aramaic “Abba” with Greek “Patēr.” They do not use the Greek familiar word“pap[p]as.” See James Barr, “ ‘Abba’ Isn’t ‘Daddy,’ ” Journal of Theological Studies, 39, no. 1 (1988): 28–47, esp. 38. 25. Book 2, chap. 4, par. 15; CCSL 35, 106/2; 1NPNF 6, 38. 26. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 62/12. The texts of Erasmus’s Precatio dominica and Margaret Roper’s Devout Treatise cited in this essay are based on the transcription first published in Moreana 2, no. 7 (August 1965): 9–63, edited by Germain Marc’hadour. He transcribed Precatio dominica (Basel: Froben, 1523?) from British Library, 700.b.37, and Devout Treatise (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1526?) from Beinecke Library, Yale University, If M81 Z526. Internal references are to the page and line numbers of these texts in this volume. 27. Roper, Devout Treatise, 63/14–15. 28. Petition One: “pater coelistis” (Precatio, 66/22), “good father in heuen” (Devout Treatise, 67/25); “ò pater coelestis” (Precatio, 68/31), “O good father” (Devout Treatise, 69/34). Petition Two: “pater in coelis habitans ac regnans” (Precatio, 78/12); “good father” (Devout Treatise, 79/14). Petition Three: “Da” (Precatio, 82/3); “but graunt good father” (Devout Treatise, 83/4). Petition Four: “tu pater” (Precatio, 86/16); “good father” (Devout Treatise, 87/18); “tu pater” (Precatio, 86/30), “thou good father” (Devout Treatise, 87/36). Petition Six: “Pater



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so, she also emphasizes the fundamental contrast between God, the good father, and Satan, whom Erasmus repeatedly characterizes as the father of all that is evil. The Pater Noster and Baptism Jesus is the “only begotten Son” of God (1 Jn 4:9) by nature, but Christians are children of God by adoption: “God sent his sonne . . . that we might receiue the adoption of sonnes” (Gal 4:4–5, Rheims); “[The Father] hath predestinated vs vnto the adoption of sonnes, by IESUS Christ” (Eph 1:5, Rheims). Alluding to these verses, Erasmus refers to divine adoption three times in Petition One, linking it with baptism, the sacrament by which one traditionally becomes a Christian. See too the Gospel according to Mark, which opens with the scene of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, which also links baptism with adoption by God (Mk 1:9–11). nos in huius nominis honorem adoptasset by adoptyon receyued vs in to the great honour of this name29 per fidem & baptismum . . . adoptare to adopt vs by faythe and baptyme30 adoptione, non natura filij sumus thy children by adopcion and nat by nature31

In the patristic era, more specifically, the Lord’s Prayer was linked to baptism, which explains the emphasis that Erasmus puts upon it here. Cyprian did not teach it to prospective Christians until after they were baptized, because only then was God truly their Father. Cyprian alludes to the Pater Noster in regard to the baptisms that had taken place during the Easter Vigil: Homo nouus, renatus et Deo suo per eius gratiam restitutus pater primo in loco dicit, quia filius esse iam coepit. A new man, reborn and restored to his God by his grace says in the first place, “Father,” because he has now begun to be a son.32 noster coelos inhabitans” (Precatio, 92/5), “O good father in heuen” (Devout Treatise, 93/5); “Scimus” (Precatio, 94/14–15), “We knowe well good father” (Devout Treatise, 95/17). 29. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 62/1–2; Roper, Devout Treatise, 63/1–2. 30. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 62/6–7; Roper, Devout Treatise, 63/9. 31. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 68/7; Roper, Devout Treatise, 69/7. 32. Chap. 9, “De Dominica Oratione,” in Sancti Cypriani Episcopi Opera, ed. C. Moreschini, CCSL 3A (Turnholt: Brepols, 1976), 87–113, esp. 94/133–35. Saint Cyprian “The Lord’s Prayer,” in Treatises, trans. Roy J. Deferrari

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The new Christians recited the Pater Noster on emerging from the baptismal font: “primo in loco” or “in the first place.” Similarly, Ambrose (ca. 340–397) gave a set of sermons after Easter to the newly baptized. On Easter Tuesday he records the formula for renouncing the devil and the world, and on Easter Wednesday the formula for professing faith in the Trinity. On Easter Saturday he briefly explains the Pater Noster.33 Augustine, however, taught the Pater Noster to the catechumens before baptism so they could say it correctly as soon as they emerged from the baptismal font: ubi uos . . . Deum Patrem habere coepistis, sed habebitis, cum nati fueritis . . . in fonte. . . . you . . . have begun to have God for your Father. You certainly will have him as such, when you have been born . . . in the [baptismal] font.34

In his six references to the baptismal setting of the Lord’s Prayer, Erasmus names many features of the rite of baptism. (1) The adult catechumens are incorporated into Christ “per fidem & baptismum”; “by faythe and baptyme.”35 (2) They renounce Satan and all his works: “in baptismo renunciauimus patri diabolo”; “at the ­font-stone in baptyme [we have] / renounced and forsaken our father ye deuyll.”36 This rejection of Satan in the baptismal rite is one reason that there are so many references to the devil in the Precatio. (3) After the candidates profess their faith in the Father, they are immersed in water or water is poured over their heads. They follow the same process for the Son and the Holy Spirit. Though in this context Erasmus specifically mentions only the Son—“nomen ipsius in baptismo professi sunt”; “professeth his [Christ’s] name in baptysme”37—the numerous doxologies in the Precatio show that he recognizes the Trinity. He refers indirectly to the baptismal water: “eodem baptismo purgas”; “with one baptysme [thou] purgest.”38 Margaret more clearly refers to water by adding a doublet “and maket al., The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Patristic Series) 36 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 127–65, esp. 133. The Fathers of the Church series is hereafter abbreviated FOTC. 33. Sermon 5, chap. 4, “De Sacramentis libri sex,” Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Opera Omnia, PL 16:450– 54. Saint Ambrose, “The Sacraments” in Theological and Dogmatic Works, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, FOTC 44 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 314–18. 34. Sermon 56, par. 5, CCSL 41Aa, 156/83–86; see also The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Augustinian Heritage Institute, Part 3: Sermons, vol. 3, Sermons 51–94, Primarily on the Gospel of Matthew, trans. and notes Edmund Hill; ed. John E. Rotelle (Brooklyn, NY: New City, 1991), 3/3, 97; hereafter abbreviated WSA. 35. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 62/6–7; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 63/9. 36. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 62/13–14; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 63/17–18. 37. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 78/25–26; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 79/29–30. 38. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 5, 88/10–11; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 5, 89/14.



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est clene” and by an earlier reference to the baptismal font, “at the f­ ont-stone,” which is not in the Latin.39 (4) Baptism forgives the sin inherited from Adam and Eve and the personal sins of the adult candidates: “in baptismo condonasti peccata omnia”; “in baptyme thou hast remytted vs all our synnes.”40 (5) Finally, the candidates make a ­life-long commitment to practice their faith: “Non satis est in baptismo nos esse professos fore dicto audientes tuis iussis, . . . nisi per omnem uitam constanter id praestemus, quod sumus professi; “Nor it is nat inough / yt in baptyme we haue professed / yt we wyll be obedient to thy preceptes / . . . excepte we labour all our lyfe / to perfourme stedfastly that / whiche we haue professed.”41

petition one (b) Qui es in celis; “which art in heauen” (Mt 6:9) There are three doctrinal principles about heaven that are traditionally important: first, the beatific vision by which the angels and saints see God “aperta . . . facie,” “face to face”;42 second, the union of Christians with Christ, the Mystical Body and its Head, “totum corpus unigeniti tui simul agglomeratum capiti suo,” “all the body of thy dere sonne heaped togyder in theyr heed”;43 third, the eventual reunion of each human soul with its resurrected body: “nec animae piorum desiderent sua corpora,” “nor good mennes soules [shall lacke] theyr bodyes.”44 The last book of The City of God enunciates these themes. Augustine explores how the saints will see God face to face. He affirms that the Mystical Body of Christ will be complete only in heaven. He packs complex ideas into few words to describe the glorified body: “Erit ergo spiritui subdita caro spiritualis, sed tamen caro, non spiritus”; “The risen body will be flesh and not spirit, yet it will be a flesh so responsive to the spirit [spiritui subdita caro] that it will be a spiritual body [caro spiritualis].” Augustine also believes that the saints will have beautiful bodies, “non . . . macris pinguibusque”; not “too thin or too fat.”45 39. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 5, 89/14; Petition 1, 63/17. Like Margaret, Grant makes it clear that Erasmus refers to baptismal water, “cleanse them with the same rite of baptism” (CWE 69:72/33–34), but he does not add an earlier reference to the baptismal font (CWE 69:59/16). 40. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 5, 90/28; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 5, 91/32. 41. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 3, 80/28–30; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 81/30–33. 42. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 78/16; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 79/17–18. 43. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 76/29, 78/1; Roper Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 77/33, 79/1. 44. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 3, 80/9–10; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 81/9–10. For “face to face,” cf. 1 Cor 13:12. For the Mystical Body of Christ, cf. Eph 1:22. For the resurrection of the body, cf. 1 Cor 15:12–57. 45. Sancti Aurelii Augustini Episcopi De Civitate Dei Libri XXII, vol. 2, Libri. XIV–XXII, 5th ed., ed. Bernardus

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Drawing upon these same principles, Erasmus makes heaven attractive to the reader of the Precatio by appealing to the mind, the imagination, and the heart. Particularly striking, however, are the many analogies that he uses for the abode of God: fatherland, “ad coelestem patriam,” “to ye countre celestiall”;46 kingdom;47 city, “è ciuitate tua coelesti,” “out of the heuenly cite”;48 and household, “in coelestem familiam,” “in thy celestiall and heuenly house.”49 Note as well how he appeals to the emotions by describing the happiness of heaven: “thesaurum aeternae felicitatis” and “coeli gaudijs.”50 Echoing her father’s happy disposition, and true to her own empathic nature, Margaret also concentrates on the joys of heaven, writing of “the treasure of euerlastyng welthe [spiritual ­well-being] and felycite” and “ye gladnesse and myrthe of heuen.”51

petition one (c) Sanctificetur nomen tuum; “sanctified be thy name” (Mt 6:9) The subjunctive mood of this phrase of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer suggests a theological problem: “May your name be sanctified.” Humans cannot literally pray that God’s name be made holy, because his name is already holy, and it is God who makes others holy. At the same time, praise is a natural response for God’s great gift of adoption. Erasmus explains this part of Petition One by alluding to another precept from the Sermon on the Mount: “So let your light shine before men: that they may see your good workes, and glorifie your father which is in heauen” (Mt 5:16, Rheims). More than any other theologian, John Chrysostom influenced Erasmus’s Dombart and Alfonsus Kalb (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981). (This edition by Dombart and Kalb is later than the one printed in CCSL 48, 1955.) Saint Augustine, The City of God, Books XVII–XXII, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., and Daniel J. Honan, FOTC 24 (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954). For seeing God face to face, see chap. 29, Latin, 623–30; English, 496–505. For the Mystical Body of Christ, see chap. 18, Latin, 595–97; English, 466–67. For resurrected bodies in general, see chap. 21, Latin, 602/20–21; English, 473. For resurrected bodies as beautiful, see chap. 19, Latin, 589/22–23; English, 469. 46. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 60/3; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 61/3–4. 47. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, passim. 48. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 72/27; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 73/31. 49. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 4, 84/3; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 4, 85/8. On “patria” see also the last line of “Verbum supernum,” a Corpus Christi hymn by Thomas Aquinas: “Qui vitam sine termino / Nobis donet in patria”; “O grant us life that shall not end, / In our true native land with Thee.” http://www .­preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Hymni/VerbumSup.html; accessed May 27, 2020. For “city,” biblically understood as the New Jerusalem, cf. Rev 3:12 and 21:2. For “household,” cf. “ad domesticos fidei” (Gal 6:10, Vulgate). 50. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 60/4, and Petitio 7, 96/26–27. 51. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 61/4–5, and Petition 7, 97/32.



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commentary on “sanctificetur.” Chrysostom quotes the same verse in Homily 19 on Matthew 6:1–14 (ca. 390). He explains, “To gar, Hagiasthētōi, touto esti, Doxasthētō” / “Illud enim, Sanctificetur, hoc sibi vult, glorificetur” / “For ‘hallowed’ is glorified.” He urges us to imitate the “Hagios, hagios, hagios” of the Seraphim (Is 6:3); “Sanctos, sanctos, sanctos”; “Holy, holy, holy,” in a way appropriate to humans: houtōs hēmas bioun katharōs, hōs di’ hēmōn apantas se doxazein ut ita pure vivamus, ut per nos te omnes glorificent52 that we may live so purely, that through us all may glorify Thee.53

Instead of “sanctify,” however, Erasmus, like Chrysostom, prefers the term “glorify.” He uses the key noun “gloria” a total of ­twenty-one times in Petition One under several headings: first, in reference to God’s glory (fifteen times). In four of these cases, Margaret’s translation amplifies and varies “gloria” from one to two nouns, making a doublet: gloriam; “glory and honour”54 gloria; “glorie and honour”55 gloria; “honour and glorie”56 gloria; “glorie and renoume”57 gloria; “light and glory”58

She redoubles the meaning of the first and last words of Erasmus’s sentence: “Reluceat . . . gloria” so that the last example is translated the “light and glory . . . appere and shyne.”59 Also, in Petition One, Erasmus rebukes Christians who fail to “glorify” God because they live “viciouslye.” With a rhetorical flourish, he imagines a scenario 52. John Chrysostom, Homily 19, [H]ypomnēma eis ton [h]agion Matthaion ton euangelistēn; Commentarius in Sanctum Mattaeum Evangelistam, ed. Bernardus de Montfaucon, OSB, in Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Graecae, 161 in 166 vols., ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1857–1887), vol. 57, column 279, point 9 ; series hereafter abbreviated PG. 53. John Chrysostom, Homily 19, Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, trans. Sir George Prevost; ed. M. B. Riddle, 1NPNF 10, par. 7 [sic], 134; available online at http://www.voskrese.info/spl/matthom19.html, accessed May 27, 2020. 54. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 66/2; Roper, Devout Treatise, 67/3. 55. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 68/2; Roper, Devout Treatise, 69/2. 56. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 70/36; Roper, Devout Treatise, 71/27. 57. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 66/19; Roper, Devout Treatise, 67/22. 58. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 70/22; Roper, Devout Treatise, 71/19. 59. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 70/21–22; Roper, Devout Treatise, 71/19–20.

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wherein the “uulgus” (the “common people”), who judge God by his followers, are scandalized. Their negative reaction is neatly expressed in the following parallel clauses, with the repetition of “valeat” at the beginning of each sentence: Valeat ille deus . . . ualeat ille dominus . . . ualeat ille pater . . . ualeat ille rex What a god is he . . . Fye on suche a mayster . . . Out vpon suche a father . . . Banisshed be suche a kyng.60

In place of the same word or phrase, Margaret chooses four different translations, as she intensifies their reaction to Christians who fail to follow Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Erasmus focuses on God’s glory, but he also provides six examples of human glory. However, Margaret omits the following example from Petition One, “Parentis enim gloriam pro sua ducunt.”61 Perhaps filial piety did not allow her to claim her father’s honors for herself.

petition two Adueniat regnum tuum; “Let thy Kingdom come” (Mt 6:10a) The phrase “kingdom of God” occurs only once in the Bible outside the New Testament, in the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom:62 “And the just, fleing his brothers wrath, she conducted by the right wayes, and shewed him the kingdom of God” (Wis 10:10, Douai). The phrase “kingdom of God” occurs s­ ixty-nine times in the Greek New Testament and is linked primarily to the mission of Jesus. Out of respect for the name of God, Matthew uses “the kingdom of heaven,” sometimes merely “the kingdom.” Mark, Luke, and Paul feel free to use “the kingdom of God.”63 The most profound scriptural allusion that Erasmus makes to “kingdom” is an eschatological one: “Then the ende, when he [Christ] shal haue deliuered the kingdom to God and the Father” (1 Cor 15:24, Rheims). In Petition Two he para60. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 68/23–25; Roper, Devout Treatise, 69/26–29. Grant preserves Erasmus’s anaphora: “Away with that God . . . away with that Lord . . . away with that Father . . . away with that king” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 63/20–22). 61. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 64/30–31. “For children regard a parent’s glory as their own” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 61/24–25). 62. New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Roland E. Murphy (Engle­ wood Cliffs, N.J.: ­Prentice-Hall, 1990), p. 517, section 30, no. 1, on Wis 10:10. 63. See OED, s.v. “kingdom,” 4. a.



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phrases this verse.64 The span of this verse extends from the public life of Jesus until the Second Coming. In commenting on Petition Two, Erasmus echoes Augustine. The Father’s kingdom is eternal: Habet quidem regnum Deus sempiternum. Quando enim non regnauit, quando regnare coepit, quando regnum eius initium non habet nec finem habebit?65 God, of course, has an everlasting kingdom. When did he ever not reign? When did he ever begin to reign, seeing that his reign or kingdom has no beginning and will have no end?66

Erasmus uses the key noun “regnum” ­thirty-three times in several contexts: God’s and the Gospel’s kingdom, the heavenly and the spiritual kingdom, Israel as a political kingdom, and the world’s and the devil’s kingdom. When translating “regnum,” Margaret alternates among three different English words: “realm” (eighteen times), “kingdom” (five), and “royalme” (four), a triplet. Perhaps she prefers “realm” because it is not an obviously gendered word.

petition three Fiat voluntas tua sicut in celo et in terra; “Thy wil be done, as in heauen, in earth also” (Mt 6:10b) Two notable scriptural passages show Jesus as the model of obedience to God’s will, the subject of the Third Petition. At the beginning of his ministry in Judea, Jesus declares, “I descended from heauen, not to doe mine owne wil, but the wil of him that sent me” (Jn 6:38, Rheims). At the beginning of his Passion, Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemani, “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice passe from me. [N]euerthelesse not as I wil, but as thou [wilt]” (Mt 26:39, Rheims; cf. Mk 14:36, Lk 22:42). God’s will is the standard of virtue and is cited most frequently in Petition Three. Both passages are cited in early commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer. Tertullian of Carthage (ca. 160–ca. 225), the first theologian to write in Latin, composed a 64. Here is a paraphrase of the conclusion of this long verse: “donec illud tibi plenum & integrum tradat idem [hoc regnum (72/16)] filius tuus” (Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 72/18–19); “vntyll that tyme come / in whiche . . . thy sonne shall restore and rendre it [this realme (73/19)] vp to the[e] full and hole. . .” (Roper, Devout Treatise, 73/20–21). 65. Sermon 57, par. 5, CSSL, 41Aa:180/61–63. 66. Sermon 57, par. 5, WSA, 3/3:110.

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general treatise On Prayer (ca. 200). Out of its ­twenty-nine chapters, ten are on the Pater Noster, “the first full commentary on the L[ord’s] P[rayer].”67 Tertullian assures us that it is good for us to say the third petition: uel eo nobis bene optamus, quod nihil mali sit in Dei uoluntate we thereby wish well to ourselves because there is no evil in God’s will68

Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, read Tertullian carefully and devoted his own treatise of ­thirty-six chapters solely to the Lord’s Prayer.69 Erasmus himself did not edit the works of Tertullian, but he recommended the task to his friend Beatus Rhenanus and to his own publisher Johann Froben (Basel, 1521).70 In his Precatio he refers to the key noun “uoluntas” ­twenty-two times. He divides the topic into the will of God; the will of the world, the flesh and the devil; and the human will, good or evil. Margaret, aware of the word’s range of meanings, uses four different English words as doublets for “voluntas.” uoluntatem suam; his propre wyll and delyte71 tua . . . uoluntas; thy mynde & pleasure72 tuae . . . uoluntati; thy wyll and pleasure73 tuisque diuinis legibus uolentes; thy wyll and godly preceptes.74

67. Hammerling, Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church, 25 68. Chap. 4, par. 4, “De Oratione,” ed. G. F. Diercks, Tertvlliani Opera, part 1, CCSL 1 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1954), 260/20–21; “Prayer,” Disciplinary, Moral, and Ascetical Works, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, O.S.A., et al., FOTC 40 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), 162. 69. CCSL 3A, chap. 17, 101/321–22; FOTC 36, chap. 17, 142. Cyprian wrote this commentary between the persecution of Decius (250–51) and that of Valerian (257–260), in which he himself was martyred (258). He asked his flock to pray with him for the conversion of their persecutors, that: “in illis [non] credentibus fiat uoluntas Dei” (among those unwilling to believe, the will of God may be done). 70. Beat von Scarpatetti, “Beatus Rhenanus,” Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol. 1, ­A-E, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 104–9, esp. 106. 71. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 80/23; Roper, Devout Treatise, 81/25–26. 72. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 80/14; Roper, Devout Treatise, 81/15–16. 73. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 82/25–26; Roper, Devout Treatise, 83/28. 74. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 4, 82/22; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 4, 83/26.



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petition four Panem nostrum; “Give vs to day our supersubstantial bread” (Mt 6:11) In his treatise De dominica oratione, Cyprian referred to “panem nostrum cotidianum,” our daily bread.75 But in his revision of the Gospels, Jerome translates the same Greek word, “epiousion,” in two ways: as “supersubstantialem” in Matthew (6:11), and as “quotidianum” in Luke (11:3). In his Commentary on Matthew, Jerome discusses several meanings of “bread,” defining “supersubstantialem panem” as “qui super omnes substantias sit et uniuersas superet creaturas” or “That which is over (super) all substances also surpasses all creatures.”76 This is Christ, “Ego sum panis qui de caelo descendi” or “I am the bread that has come down from heaven” (Jn 6:51).77 In De sermone domini in monte, Augustine explains a threefold meaning of “bread” (book 2, chap. 7) as quae huic uitae sunt necessaria the things which are necessary for this life De sacramento autem corporis domini the sacrament of the Lord’s body praecepta scilicet diuina, quae cotidie oportet meditari et operari divine precepts, which we ought daily to meditate and labour after78

Augustine preached four sermons on the Pater Noster to catechumens.79 In them he repeats this triad: material needs, the Eucharist, and scripture. Erasmus was familiar with Jerome’s commentary on Matthew.80 In Petition 75. Chap. 18, CCSL 3A:101/324–25; FOTC 36:142. 76. S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Commentariorum in Matheum, Opera Exegetica, CCSL 77, pt. 1/7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969): for epiousion, see 37/771; for “supersubstantialem panem,” see 37/782–83. St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, FOTC 117 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 89. 77. CCSL 77:37/777–78; FOTC 117:88. 78. Latin quotations, in order: par. 25, CCSL 35:114/525; par. 26, CCSL 35:114/537; par. 27, CCSL 35:115/558–59. English translations, in order: par. 25, 1NPNF 6:41; par. 26, 1NPNF 6:42; par. 27, 1NPNF 6:42. 79. Sermon 56: par. 10, CCSL 41 Aa:161; WSA 3/3:100; Sermon 57: par. 7, CCSL 41 Aa:183–84; WSA 3/3:112; Sermon 58: par. 5; CCSL 41 Aa:202–3; WSA 3/3:120; and Sermon 59: par. 6, CCSL 41 Aa:223–24; WSA 3/3:128. 80. Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: The Gospels, ed. Anne Reeve (London: Duckworth, 1986), 34–36: note his comment on Mt 6:11.

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Four, however, he follows Augustine in his multiple meanings of “panis,” repeating the word about eighteen times as physical food, the Eucharist, and teaching, bad and good, especially the scriptures.81 corpusculum hoc pane frumenticio pascere to fede with breed made of corne [grain] the body82

He refers to the bread of the Eucharist twice: Corpus unigeniti tui panis est The blessed body of thy dere sonne is the breed83 Vnus panis est, omnium communis It is one breed that indifferently [equally] belongeth to vs all84

What is remarkable, though, is how many times (fourteen) he refers to bread as the word of God, preached or written. For example: ueritas Euangelica panis est trouth also is the breed and teachyng of the gospell85

Making an original contribution to the exegetical tradition, Erasmus contrasts the teachings of Jesus with those of the Greeks (or scholastics86) and the Hebrews (or legalists). He refers to their unwholesome bread once: panis philosophorum aut pharisaeorum the breed and teachynge of the proude philosophers and pharises87

Tellingly, Margaret uses a doublet to show that “bread” is a metaphor for “teaching” in the last two quotations above. As Christian humanists, both writers were devoted to education, indirectly through educational treatises or directly in the family. For them, learning was a dynamic process that would continue 81. He does not refer to “panis” in any other petition. 82. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 84/20; Roper, Devout Treatise, 85/26. 83. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 86/6; Roper, Devout Treatise, 87/7–8. 84. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 86/8; Roper, Devout Treatise, 87/9. 85. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 86/13–14; Roper, Devout Treatise, 87/14–15. 86. Compare “clamosissimos Scotistas et pertinacissimos Occanistas et inuictos Albertistas” (Encomium Moriae, ASD 5­ -3:154/472–73); “these argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and undefeated Albertists” (Praise of Folly, CWE 27:129/11–12). For more on Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Albert the Great, see ASD ­4-3:150n419. 87. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 84/26, 86/1; Roper, Devout Treatise, 85/33, 87/1.



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in heaven. In a characteristic emphasis on good teaching, Erasmus asserts that “in mensa tua coelesti,” “at thy heuenly and celestiall table” we will be filled “perenni copia ueritatis aeternae,” “with ye plentuous abundancye of euerlastynge trouthe.”88

petition five Et remitte nobis; “And forgiue us our dettes, as we also forgiue our deters” (Mt 6:12) In his scholarly version of the New Testament, Erasmus emended the Vulgate’s “dimitte” to “remitte.”89 In making this change, which was controversial in his own time, Erasmus follows Cyprian, one of the best commentators on the Lord’s Prayer—“Et remitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos remittimus debitoribus nostris”—rather than the Vulgate.90 Christian writers through the fifth century believed that the fifth petition was the most important because it is the only one with a conditional clause.91 We ask God to forgive us only if we forgive others. The scriptural passage that best exemplifies the act of forgiveness is the prayer of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgiue them, for they know not what they doe” (Lk 23:34, Rheims). In Sermon 56 to catechumens, Augustine also quotes this verse: “Pater, ignosce illis, quia nesciunt quid faciunt.”92 In Petition Five Erasmus uses the key verb remittere (to forgive an offense) in the heading once and in the body of the text twice. He completely avoids using dīmittere (to forgive a debt) but uses the verb synonyms condōnāre (to pardon, refrain from punishing) and ignoscere (to pardon, overlook) and the noun syn-

88. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 88/2–3; Roper, Devout Treatise, 89/ 2–4. 89. This alteration of one syllable outraged conservative Catholic theologians, such as the Carmelite Nicolaas Baechem (d. 1526) and the Carthusian John Batmanson (d. 1531). The writings of Baechem and Batmanson against Erasmus have not survived. Bietenholz and Deutscher, eds., Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol. 1, ­A-E: Baechem, 81–83; Batmanson, 9­ 9-100. Erika Rummel gives a reason for the antagonism of conservative Catholic theologians: “In their eyes the Vulgate was an inspired text; to criticize it was tantamount to criticizing the Holy Spirit who had been at the translator’s side.” Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, vol. 1, 1515–1522 (Nieuw: De Graff Publishers, 1989), xi. 90. Cyprian, chap. 22, CCSL 3A:103/403–5; FOTC 36:146. See Hilmar M. Pabel, “Erasmus’ Esteem for Cyprian: Parallels in Their Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer,” Erasmus Yearbook 17 (1997): 55–69. 91. Hammerling, Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church, 126–27. 92. Augustine, CCSL, 41Aa, par. 3, 155/61–62; par. 16, 168/369–70; WSA, par. 3, 3/3, 96; WSA, par. 16, 3/3, 104.

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onyms ignoscentia (rare: pardon, forgiveness) and uenia (forgiveness, pardon).93 By doing so Erasmus softens his use of the controversial term remitte. He does not refer to Latin verbs meaning “forgive” in any other petition. Margaret uses only one doublet for the verb “forgive”: “remittat nobis peccata nostra”; “remytte and forgyue vs all our offences.”94 In doing so she may well be aware of the controversy over Erasmus’s use of remitte in his translation of the New Testament, a translation her father had defended in his “Letter to a Monk” (1519).95 Margaret also uses a doublet for the noun “forgiveness”: “impetrandae ueniae conditio”; “waye to optayne pardon and forgyuenesse.”96

petition six Et ne nos in ducas in tentationem; “And leade vs not into tentation” (Mt 6:13a) In Petition Six, Erasmus alludes to the best model of resistance to temptation.97 “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Mt 4:1–10, Mk 1:12–13, Lk 4:1–13). Augustine, in Homily 2, chap. 14, of his Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, links the three temptations of Christ in Matthew’s Gospel with the three sources of sin in 1 John 2:16: nihil invenis unde tentetur cupiditas humana, nisi aut desiderio carnis, aut desiderio oculorum, aut ambitione saeculi. thou canst find nothing whereby human cupidity can be tempted, but either by the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life.98 93. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), svv. remittere, dīmittere, condōnāre, ignoscere, ignoscentia, uenia. 94. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 88/24; Roper, Devout Treatise, 89/30. 95. Thomas More, “Letter to a Monk,” in vol. 15 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Daniel Kinney (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 248/­6-8 (Latin text) and 249/­5-8 (English translation). Hereafter, the Yale edition of More’s Complete Works will be abbreviated as CW. It seems very likely that Margaret herself had read Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament by 1523, if not earlier. 96. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 90/1; Roper, Devout Treatise, 91/1–2. 97. Erasmus uses variations of the key root “tent-” only in Petition Six: “tentatio” (four times), “tentator” (twice), and “tentor” (once), a total of seven times. Margaret uses variations of “temptation” seven times: “temptation” (five times) and “tempt” (twice). 98. Augustine, In Epistolam Joannis ad Parthos Tractatus Decem, PL 35:1977–2062, at 1996; Augustine, CCSL 37, not yet published; Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 1NPNF 7:474, trans. H. Browne and ed. Joseph H. Myers (1888, repr. 1994), 406/7. The n­ ineteenth-century translator echoes 1 John 2:16 in The Bible, Authorized King James Version, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).



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Jesus was tempted by “the lust of the flesh” to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger, by “the lust of the eyes” to cast himself from the Temple and be saved by a miracle, and by “the pride of life” to gain all the kingdoms of the earth by worshipping Satan. In the Precatio Erasmus refers to the flesh, the world, and the devil in Petition Two once, in Three twice, and in Six once, for a total of four times. The familiar phrase, “the flesh, the world, and the devil,” does not occur in the scriptures, although some scholars find its source in the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3), the three temptations of Christ (Mt 4:1–11, Lk 4:1–13), or “the concupiscence of the flesh, & the concupiscence of the eies, and the pride of life” (1 Jn 2:16, Rheims).99 An early reference to the infernal triad linked to specific temptations occurs in the Expositio orationis Dominicae by Abelard (1079–1142):100 Tria autem sunt quae nos tentant, caro, mundus, diabolus. Caro nos tentat per gulam et luxuriam, mundus per prospera et adversa: per prospera ut decipiat, per adversa ut frangat. Diabolus omnibus modis nos aggreditur, et ad omnem nequitiam nos perducere conatur.101 There are three things that tempt us: the flesh, the world, the devil. The flesh tempts us through gluttony and lust. The world through prosperity and adversity: through prosperity that it may deceive us; through adversity that it may break us. The devil attacks us by all methods, and tries to induce us to all wickedness. (my translation)

Besides Abelard, see Aquinas (1225–1274), “Triplex est tentatio, scilicet ‘a carne, a mundo, et a diabolo’ ” or “Temptation is threefold, namely ‘from the flesh, the world, and the devil.’ ”102 In Petitions Two, Four, and Six, Erasmus is particularly interested in the temptation of apostasy, denying one’s faith. He describes Leonides of Alexandria, husband and father of seven sons of whom the oldest was Origen. According to Eusebius, during the persecution of Septimus Severus, Leonides was 99. See Donald R. Howard, The Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 44–56; also Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad: The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), xxv–xxxvi. 100. PL 178:611–18. 101. PL 178:­617A-B. 102. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III. q. 41, a. 1, obj. 3. Aquinas explains the Pater Noster in several works, succinctly in the Summa (­II-II, q. 83, a. 9). S. Thomas De Aquino, Svmma theologiae, 5 vols. (Ottawa: impensis Studii generalis O. P., 1941–1945). St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947–48). Paul Murray, OP, in Praying with Confidence: Aquinas on the Lord’s Prayer (New York: Continuum, 2010), knits together references to the Pater Noster from all the writings of Aquinas.

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beheaded and his property confiscated.103 André Godin believes that Erasmus identified with Origen. Not only did they both become great scripture scholars, but they were both left in poverty by the early death of their fathers.104 Jerome likewise emphasizes the poverty of the surviving family rather than the physical cause of Leonides’s death.105 Although in 1523 Erasmus could not predict More’s fall from royal favor— and neither could Margaret, writing one year later—Leonides’s history foreshadows More’s final year and a half. Like Leonides, he was spoliari uxore charissima ac dulcissimis liberis; depriued of the company of his moost dere wyfe and welbeloued children.106

His property was confiscated, except for the house, barn, and garden given outright to Margaret and her husband:107 bonorum direptio, . . . probra, carcer; losse of our goodes . . . rebukes / imprisonment.108

Though not hanged, disemboweled, and quartered—a traitor’s death—More was “decollatus” (decollamur), “beheeded,” a noble’s death, violent but quick.109

Petition Seven Sed libera nos a malo; “But deliuer us from euil. Amen.” (Mt 6:13b) In his prefatory letter to the Precatio, Erasmus states that he does not want the last two clauses of the Pater Noster separated, “duae postremae . . . distractae.”110 In Petition Six he focuses on the kinds of temptation that the Christian 103. Book 6, chap. 1–2, Eusebius, Church History, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, vol. 1 of A Select Library of the Nicene and P­ ost-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (1890; repr. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 81–387. Also in PG 20:521–22B, 525–26B. 104. André Godin, Érasme lecteur d’Origène, Trauvaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance no. 190 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1982), 636. 105. Chap. 54, par. 1, Jerome, De viris illustribus, Library of Latin Texts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); On Illustrious Men, trans. Thomas P. Halton, FOTC 100:77. 106. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 4, 86/24–25; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 4, 87/29–30. 107. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 227. 108. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 6, 94/5–6; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 6, 95/5–6. 109. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 74/24; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 75/27. To my knowledge I am the first to make this comparison between More and Leonides. 110. Allen, Opus epistolarum, 5: epis. 1393, 345/36, 38; cf. “wrong to separate the last two clauses” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 58/11).



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must resist. Now he focuses on the tempter—who is personified as the devil, the embodiment of evil—and on everyday struggles, preparing readers, who are soon going to put down the treatise and leave their contemplative service of God, to return to the active service of neighbors in public and private life. While the New Testament Greek phrase “apo tou ponērou” and the Latin “a malo” may be translated either as the neuter “from evil” or the masculine “from the evil one,” Erasmus follows Chrysostom and Theophylactus, who discuss not evil in general but the devil as the personification of evil. In Homily 19, Chrysostom asserts that Satan is the evil one: Kat’ exochēn . . . dia tēn huperbolēn tēs kakias, kai epeidē mēden par’ hēmōn adikētheis aspondon pros hēmas echei ton polemon praecipue . . . ob ingentum malitiae magnitudinem: et quia nihil laesus a nobis inexpiabile contra nos bellum gerit p­ re-eminently, by reason of the excess of his wickedness, and because he, in no respect injured by us, wages against us implacable war.111

Theophylactus explains the verse in one compound sentence. Ouk eipen, apo tōn ponērōn anthrōpōn[,] ou gar ekeinoi adikousin hēmas, all’ ho ponēros Non dixit, a malis hominibus: non enim illi nos iniuria afficiunt, sed malignus He did not say, “from evil humans”: for they did not wrong us unjustly, but “the evil one.”112

Erasmus, who had already represented the devil as a father in Petition One, in contrast to God as Father, amplifies this in Petition Seven.113 Here he alludes to Jesus’ harsh words to his adversaries: “You are of your father the Diuel, and the desires of your father you wil doe” (Jn 8:44, Rheims). Jesus also calls the devil “the prince of this world” (Jn 12:31, 14:30, 16:11). From this title Erasmus developed the trope of the devil as tyrant in Petition Two. 111. Chrysostom, Greek and Latin: PG 57, par. 13 [sic], 282; English: 1NPNF 10, par. 10 [sic], 136. 112. Greek and Latin: PG 123:205B; Latin: PG 123:20[6]B; English is my translation. A ­seventeenth-century, bilingual edition of Theophylactus added to “sed malignus” the gloss “daemon scilicet” or “namely the devil” (my translation): Theophylaktou Archiepiskopou Boulgarias Ermēneia eis ta tessara euangelia: Theophylacti Archiepiscopi Bulgariae Commentarij in quatuor; trans. Joannes Oecolampadius; ed. Philippus Montanus (Paris: apud Carollum Morellum, 1635), 36. A copy may be found in the Catholic University of America, Mullen Library, Special Collections. 113. Petition One: à patre diabolo (Precatio, 62/6), “from the deuyll our father” (Devout Treatise, 63/7); patri diabolo (Precatio, 62/14), “our father ye deuyll” (Devout Treatise, 63/17–18). Petition Seven: ab impurissimo patre diabolo (Precatio, 96/2), “of our moost foule and vnclene father the deuyll” (Devout Treatise, 97/3–4); quàm foedum patrem (Precatio, 96/7), “howe shamefull a father” (Devout Treatise, 97/8–9).

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in diaboli tyrannidem in the tyrannous seruice of the deuyll114 tyrannus ille satanas that tyrannous fende115

Erasmus frequently calls the leader of the rebel angels “diaboli” (gen. devil) or “satanas” (Satan), whereas Margaret calls him “deuyll” or “fende.” He twice calls the other fallen angels “daemones,” which she translates simply as “devils.”116 Surprisingly, Margaret uses neither “Satan” (from Hebrew) nor “demon” (from Greek), although both words first appeared in Old English.117 However, when Erasmus refers once to “Lucifer,” she follows him.118 In a case where the Latin may refer to the Evil One or to evil in general, Margaret opts for personification, translating “malo” as the “devil” as in “ab illo malo”; “of that yuell and wicked deuyll.”119 And she likewise feels free to change the part of speech in translating from the source language to the target language. Here she translates one adverb with a doublet of nouns: “qui nobis uolunt male”; “to our ennemy and aduersary.”120 Margaret’s translations are not simply literal, then, but show her sensitivity to context and the significance of each word. In particular, she heightens one’s dependence upon God to reject the power of evil or the evil one.

final prayer Although he ends Petitions One through Six with a prayer of praise to the Trinity, Petition Seven lacks its own doxology. In the last sentence of the entire treatise Erasmus commends all seven petitions to the Father in the formulations of the Son:

114. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 74/2–3; Roper, Devout Treatise, 75/3. 115. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 76/14; Roper, Devout Treatise, 77/17. 116. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 66/9; Petitio 6, 94/9. 117. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 67/11; Petition 6, 95/10. 118. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 78/7; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 79/7. 119. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 3, 98/7; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 99/7. 120. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 68/14; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 69/14–15. Precatio Dominica (Basle: Joan[nes]. Frob[enius], 1523?), British Library, 700.b.37, c3v; Deuout Treatise (London: Thomas Bertelet, 1526?), Beinecke Library, Yale University; ” “of those who wish us evil” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 63/9–10).



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Haec uota filiorum tuorum pater aeterne si pia sunt, si iuxta formam à filio tuo Iesu praescriptam concepta, certa nos habet fiducia, tuam bonitatem praestaturam quod petimus.121

In the first edition of Erasmus’s commentary, the s­ ide-note “Amen” was added near the bottom of the last page, probably by the publisher. In the first surviving edition of Margaret’s translation, the word “Amen” was moved to its normal place at the end of a prayer, probably by Margaret herself.122 In Margaret’s final sentence These desyres and petycions of thy children / O immortall father / if they be good & after ye forme and order apoynted of thy sonne Iesus / than we nothing mystrust / but that thou wylte performe that whiche we desyre of the[e]. Amen.123

she translates “uota” with a doublet: “desyres” that devout readers passively feel and “petycions” that they actively make. She translates “formam” with another doublet: “forme” for the words of Jesus and “order” for the direction of the first three petitions to the glory of the Father and the next four to our human needs. In the main clause, Margaret translates “certa . . . fiducia” as “nothing mystrust.” Here Margaret uses litotes, two negatives to render one affirmative. More uses the same figure of speech to criticize Western Christendom by praising Utopia.124 With radical changes in church and state underway on the Continent and forthcoming in England, Margaret challenges the reader to reject mistrust and seek all from the goodness (“bonitatem”) of God. Margaret makes a greater effort than does Erasmus to bring the Devout Treatise, composed as a direct address to the Father, to an ardent resolution.

121. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, 98/8–10. 122. In CWE 69, to add a sense of termination, Grant or the publisher gives the last sentence its own paragraph: “Eternal Father, if these petitions are proper ones, and expressed according to the form prescribed by your Son Jesus Christ, we have certain faith that in your goodness you will grant what we ask for” (Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 77/22–24). Grant omits, after “petitions,” the modifier “of your children,” a phrase most fitting for the conclusion of a commentary on the Our Father. Neither the Leiden edition (Opera omnia, ed. Le Clerq, vol. 5, 1228) nor Grant includes “Amen” in the final prayer. 123. Roper, Devout Treatise, 99/8–11. 124. See Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Denying the Contrary: More’s Use of Litotes in the Utopia,” Moreana 8, no. 31–32 (1971): 107–21; reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Germain Marc’hadour (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), 263–74.

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II In Devout Treatise the verses of the Pater Noster are printed in Latin at the head of each section; Margaret does not translate them into English, following a ­long-established ecclesiastical decree that remained in effect until the Great Bible was published with royal authorization in 1539.125 In 1409 the archbishop of Canterbury published a decree, directed against Lollards, forbidding the unauthorized translation of the Bible into English. Vernacular translations of the Bible were associated with heresy, and in 1519 seven Lollards, one woman and six men, were burnt at Coventry “for teaching their children and family the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in English.”126 Yet the first edition of her work seemingly ran afoul of the authorities because Thomas Berthelet, its publisher, did not acquire prior ecclesiastical consent. Richard Hyrde, who wrote a prefatory letter for Margaret’s translation, successfully appealed through Bishop Stephen Gardiner to Cardinal Wolsey for authorization of the second edition.127 Margaret must have had the support of her father and her husband while writing her translation, and the support of Hyrde, a humanist and tutor in More’s household, to publish, though some of the evidence for such support must be inferred. In a letter to her written a year before the Treatise was published, More allows for the possibility that she might find a public readership: . . . a populo famam pro tua modestia nec aucuperis nec oblatam libenter velis amplecti . . . in your modesty you do not seek for the praise of the public, nor value it overmuch even if you receive it.128

Yet because of notoriety unfairly associated with female authors, he would prefer that Margaret limit her audience to the family circle: 125. For the Great Bible (Paris and London, 1539), see the website of St. John’s College Library, Cambridge, https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/early_books/gbible.htm ; accessed April 14, 2022. 126. The first edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs claims that teaching their children the “Our Father” in English was the “only cause” of the arrest of these Lollards (1563, book 3, p. 472). Three later editions claim that it was the “principal cause” of their arrest (1570, book 8, p. 1146; 1576, book 8, p. 970; 1583, book 8, p. 997). See John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), https://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe; accessed June 2, 2020; search for “Couentry.” This website contains all four editions (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). 127. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 157–58. 128. Latin: epistle 128, Autumn 1523, in The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (1947; repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970), 302/26–27; English translation: St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, trans. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 155.



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sed pro eximia pietate qua nos prosequeris satis amplum frequensque legenti tibi theatrum simus, maritus tuus et ego; because of the great love you bear us, you regard us—your husband and myself—as a sufficiently large circle of readers for all that you write.129

Before the end of 1524, however, plans were being made for publication. Although there are no extant copies of the first edition, a second followed, ca. 1526, and a third ca. 1531, clear indication of interest in her work. Margaret Roper’s work is historically groundbreaking, the first translation from Latin published by a woman in Tudor England.130 For a long time afterwards, however, it was forgotten. In the last eighty years or so her translation has been rediscovered, thanks in part to the interest in women’s writing in early modern Europe. Invariably, critics have been struck by her language. John Archer Gee favorably compared Margaret’s work with that of fifteenthand s­ ixteenth-century translators from Latin to English and praised her diction in which “a Latin word [is] seldom translated by its English derivative.”131 Subsequently Rita M. Verbrugge described Margaret’s vocabulary as “simple, straightforward, and unpretentious.”132 Elizabeth McCutcheon judged Margaret’s vocabulary “­well-bred, but colloquial, idiomatic, and obviously chosen with an eye to context.”133 Two studies in this collection are also struck by the words she chooses. Patricia Demers notes a number of places where Margaret departs from the original Latin. Frequently, Margaret’s changes show her s­ elf-effacement as More’s daughter and her desire to communicate better to her readers.134 And 129. Latin: Rogers, Correspondence, 302/28–29; English translation: Rogers, Selected Letters, 155. Emphasis added to Latin and English words. Rogers translates pietate as “love,” suggesting ardor instead of devotion. 130. Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), mother of Henry VII, was the first woman in Tudor England to publish translations from French: The Forthe boke of the folowynge of Jesu cryst, 1504; The mirrore of golde, 1506. See Brenda M. Hosington, “Women Translators and the Early Printed Book,” in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), ch. 13, 246–71. For Margaret Beaufort, see 249–52. For Margaret Roper, see 252–56. 131. John Archer Gee, “Margaret Roper’s English Version of Erasmus’ Precatio dominica and the Apprenticeship behind Early Tudor Translation,” Review of English Studies, 13 (1937) 257–71, esp. 265; repr. Elaine V. Beilin, ed., Early Tudor Women Writers (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 1:3–17. 132. Rita M. Verbrugge, “Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985) 30–42, 260–64; esp. 40. 133. Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper’s Translation of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica,” in Acta Conventus ­Neo-Latini Guelpherbytani, ed. Stella P. Revard et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988), 659–66, esp. 663. 134. Patricia Demers, “Margaret Roper and Erasmus: The Relationship of Translator and Source,” Women Writing and Reading 1 (2005), 4–10. This essay is reprinted in this volume.

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McCutcheon gives a cogent reason for Margaret’s use of doublets: “because of her sensitivity to the shades of meaning in a particular Latin word.”135 This essay has already noted Margaret’s translation of key words from Erasmus’s Precatio. It is also illuminating to examine the sources of her vocabulary. Although Margaret was well schooled in Latin and Greek, my assumption that she would use many English words derived from classical and patristic texts was mistaken. Drawing upon the numerous phrases quoted from Margaret in this essay, I have checked the origin and evolution of ­forty-one of her words from Devout Treatise against the Oxford English Dictionary Online. Her English words are derived mainly from Old English, N ­ orman-French, and some biblical Greek and Latin.136 The following discussion offers a historical analysis of Margaret’s language. Twelve words come from Old English: earthly, evil (adj.), father, fiend, forgive, forgiveness, gladness, good, light, lin (cease), mirth, and will. Nine more words or phrases come from Old English with meanings or forms that developed in Middle English: bread, evil (n.), kingdom, mind, out upon!, teaching, what a!, wealth, and wicked. One word from Old English was developed into a phrase in Early Modern English, “away with!” The same phrase is used by William Tyndale in his 1526 New Testament (Mt 19:14): “Awaye with him, awaye with him, crucify him.”137 Twelve words were adopted in Middle English from Latin through French: adversary, banish, enemy, felicity, fie on!, glory, honor, pardon, person, precept, remit, and temptation. Five words were adopted in Middle English directly from French: delight, pleasure, realm, renoume (i.e., renown), royalme (kingdom). One word was adopted into Old English from biblical Greek and Latin, “devil,” and another from biblical Latin, “Lucifer.” Out of the sample chosen, Margaret uses t­wenty-two words, or fi ­ fty-four percent, from a Germanic source; seventeen words, or f­ orty-one percent, from a Romance source; and two words, or five percent, from biblical Greek and Latin. 135. Elizabeth McCutcheon, “ ‘A Young, Virtuous, and W ­ ell-Learned Gentlewoman’: Margaret More Roper in the Republic of Letters,” in the present volume, pp. 149–50. See also the last section of this paper, “Postscript: Further Thoughts on Doublets.” 136. The third edition of the OED divides the periods of English relevant to this study into Old English (ca. 700–ca.1150), Middle English (ca. 1150–1500) [i.e., ­post-Norman Conquest], and early modern English (1500–1700), More words were introduced into English from Latin and Greek after the development of the natural sciences in the seventeenth century. See especially “Early modern English—an overview?”; Section 8, “Fresh perspectives: Old English and new science”: https://www.oed.com/public/englishintime/loginpage; accessed April 22, 2022. 137. OED, “away,” adv. IV. Elliptical uses. 15. “away with!”



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After this intensive linguistic study, it is appropriate to ask why Margaret decided to translate Erasmus’s Precatio dominica and why she chose the English words she did. Surely, a leading motive was to share the richness of the Latin commentary on the Pater Noster with those who could read only English and with those who could only listen. According to Thomas More, some forty percent of the English people were unlettered, “of which people farre more then four partes of all the whole dyuyded into tenne, could neuer rede englyshe yet.”138 Prudently, Margaret chose vocabulary that her audience could understand. Her diction is familiar (father, good, light); affective (delight, gladness, pleasure); and vivid (away with!, fie on!, out upon!). Thus, she calls her readers and listeners to a life of true devotion. In addition to the t­ wenty-two words with a Germanic root mentioned above, Margaret invented another one, “bubblishing,” which is not yet listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).139 At the time of publication, “M. Roper” is cited nine times by the OED Online for the first use of the noun “abundancye,”140 and adjective “disagreyng”;141 the first use of two different senses of “aknowledge” as a transitive verb;142 the first use of the verb phrase “reuelled out”;143 the first use of a sense for “reuenge” as a verb;144 the first use of a sense for “rydde”;145 and representative uses in her period of “company”146 and “dulcarnon.”147 The OED assigned the first use of two phrases to Margaret, but they occur in the preface to Devout Treatise written by Richard Hyrde: “as I reken” and “out of question.” The OED correctly attributes to Hyrde another phrase from the preface, “to take in (good) worth.”148 138. Thomas More, The Apology, CW 9, ed. J. B. Trapp (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 13/23–24. 139. See “bublisshyng,” 71/8. The first use of “bubbling” for the sound of running water occurs in 1598 (OED, 2.b.). Margaret’s “bublisshyng” appears about three hundred years earlier than “bubblish” (OED, adj. insubstantial; 1830, 1846, 2005). These three variations of “bubble” are derived from the same Germanic source. 140. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 4, 89/3. 141. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 71/7. 142. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 61/8, 63/18. 143. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 6, 95/15. 144. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 83/15. 145. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 79/7. 146. Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 79/7. 147. “Dulcarnon” appears in the ­dialogue-letter “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” in this volume, 117/3 and n12. “Dulcarnon” comes from Arabic for “­two-horned” into ­post-classical Latin and means “dilemma.” For further discussion see, in this volume, Stephen Merriam Foley’s essay, “Virtual and Absolute: The Voices of the “Letter to Alington,” 245 and n62; 246 and n64. See also Rogers, Correspondence, epis. 206, 529/564 and note. See also the first English use of the word in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, book 3, line 931 (ca. 1385), and the second use of the word in M. Roper, “Letter to Alice Alington,” 1534. 148. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, (b1), (b2v), and (a3), respectively; in this volume, 57/7, 58/26, and 55/9–10.

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In his preface to Margaret’s Devout Treatise on the Pater Noster (?1526), Hyrde praises her virtue and learning.149 He again acknowledges her learning in his translation of Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione foeminae Christianae (1524) as Instruction of a Christen Woman (?1529), a book championing women’s education. But Hyrde alludes to More, his three daughters, and his foster daughter by their initials only: “Nowe if a man may be suffered amonge quenes to speke of more meane folkes, I wolde reken amonge this sorte the daughters of S. T. M. Kn. M[argaret]. E[lizabeth]. and C[ecily]. and with them theyr kyns woman M[argaret]. G[iggs].”150 Vives (1524), however, gave their names in full, “Tum [adderem] Thomae Mori filias: Margaritam, Elizabetham, Caeciliam atque earum consanguinam Margaritam Gigiam [Giggs].”151 Vives and Hyrde furthered the international reputation of Margaret Roper as well as her sisters. This essay has had two goals: to explore the sources of Erasmus’s Precatio dominica and to analyze Margaret Roper’s English vocabulary in A Devout Treatise. In the sacred scriptures there is always a verse or two that epitomizes the theme of each petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Together, these quotations produce a miniature life of Christ in his ministry and death with a view toward eternity. Erasmus had edited Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, John Chrysostom, and Augustine, theologians of the third to fifth centuries. In composing his own commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, he transmits their deep insights to his readers. In each petition, moreover, Erasmus examines key words: gloria (One), regnum (Two), voluntas (Three), panis (Four), synonyms for remittere (Five), tentatio (Six), and common and proper nouns for diabolus (Seven). He presents copious subject matter in an elegant style,152 but few of us have the proficient Latin needed to read him easily. Writing in the vernacular, Margaret Roper keeps the abundant subject matter but presents it in a flexible, sympathetic, and reliable translation and a lively style.153 To translate one Latin word, she frequently chooses two synonyms or near syn149. Hyrde, Preface to Devout Treatise, a4v, b2v; in this volume, 56/24–28, 58/28–32. 150. See the critical edition of Instruction of a Christen Woman, ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, Margaret Mikesell, et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 22 [E1r]. Vives and Hyrde refer to Isabella of Castile (206) and her daughters Isabella of Portugal (206), Joanna, mother of Charles V (207), Maria of Portugal (206), and Catherine of Aragon (195). 151. Juan Luis Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, tr. and ed. Charles Fantazzi and Constant Matheeussen, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1996–98), bk. 1, ch. 4, par. 26, 38/5–6; the verb “adderem” is taken from 38/3. 152. De Copia, in Literary and Educational Writings of Erasmus, vol. 2, CWE 24, trans. Craig R. Thompson (1978). One could say that Erasmus demonstrates “Abundance of Subject Matter” (book 2, pp. 572–659) and Margaret, “Abundance of Expression” (book 1, pp. 295–571). I believe, however, that Margaret uses doublets, not to give variety to her style, but to communicate better with her readers. 153. For problematic translations of “essentia” and “aetherei,” see 66/27 and 70/6, respectively.



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onyms, that is, doublets. For these she draws on the variety of traditions in her native language: Old English, ­Norman-French, and biblical Greek and Latin. To the goals stated above, I want to add one more: to praise Margaret for increasing her readers’ familiarity with the scriptures, their knowledge of the church fathers, and their gratitude to the humanists in the ­sixteenth-century Republic of Letters.

Postscript: Further Thoughts on Doublets Erasmus uses doublets, a pair of synonyms, about 40 times in Precatio dominica, but Margaret uses them about 320 times in A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster.154 Such a major feature of Margaret’s prose style deserves further attention. Janel M. Mueller never mentions Margaret More Roper in her study of late medieval and early modern English prose, but she provides two categories for analyzing Margaret’s use of doublets. First, Mueller finds an illuminating definition in Latin rhetorical treatises: “synonymia, the usual term for word pairs.” Notable examples of doublets can be found in Augustine, the Old English translations of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and Chaucer. Mueller devotes a whole section of her book to “More versus Tyndale,” in which she regrets the “tautological doubling” found in More’s religious polemic.155 Margaret, however, translates Erasmus’s devotional treatise, and her doublets are rarely tautological. By them, she expands 154. A minority of the Treatise doublets include at least one word ultimately derived from Latin. List of doublets in Precatio dominica and Devout Treatise: Precatio 1, ten doublets; Treatise 1, ­ninety-nine doublets, including sixteen from Latin Precatio 2, eleven doublets; Treatise 2, s­ ixty-five doublets, including eight from Latin Precatio 3, seven doublets; Treatise 3, ­forty-three doublets, including fourteen from Latin Precatio 4, five doublets; Treatise 4, forty doublets, including ten from Latin Precatio 5, two doublets; Treatise 5, twenty doublets, including nine from Latin Precatio, 6, two doublets; Treatise 6, ­twenty-four doublets, including nine from Latin Precatio 7, two doublets; Treatise 7, ­twenty-seven doublets, including seven from Latin This list is based on my interlinear typescript version of “Erasmus’ Paraphrase of the Pater Noster (1523) with its English Translation by Margaret Roper (1524),” ed. Germain Marc’hadour, Moreana 2, no. 7 (August 1965): 9–63. 155. Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380–1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984): see references to Augustine (p. 151), the Old English translations of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (p. 150), and Chaucer (pp. 153, 155). Mueller writes of Erasmus’s “pleonastic doublings and periphrastic constructions” in an English translation (1548) of his “Paraphrase on Matthew 6.32–33,” but she does not analyze the original Latin; see pp. 180–84, especially p. 183. For doublets in the religious polemic of Thomas More, see pp. 201–25, especially p. 219.

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Erasmus’s thought on theological issues of the Early Reformation; she uses alternate synonyms for significant words; she reveals her character as a modest young woman; she highlights meaning by use of alliteration; and, in general, she uses repetition to emphasize key themes. As the daughter of Thomas More, Margaret certainly knew of the successive polemical exchanges between her father and Luther, between his friend Erasmus and Luther, then between her father and the English Reformer, William Tyndale.156 The Reformation watchword of “sola fide, sola gratia, and sola scriptura,” however, is not to be found in Precatio. In fact, Erasmus and Margaret make only three references to “faith” and one to “grace.” Margaret makes only one explicit reference to “scripture,” but all of Precatio is based on scripture.157 Thus, Erasmus and Margaret avoid controversial topics to show how much Catholics and Lutherans share in the Lord’s Prayer. Rather than discuss “fides” and “gratia,” Erasmus and Margaret focus on “charitas,” “amor,” “pietas,” “concordia,” and “benignitas.” Erasmus, of course, uses “charitas” for love of God and neighbor. Most of his examples of “amor” refer to God the Father, so there is no question of illicit love.158 Margaret translates “mutua charitas” with a doublet, “mutuall loue and charyte eche with other”159 to assert that charity must be engaged and never routine. Erasmus himself creates a doublet in “charitatis et pietatis,” which Margaret translates as “louyng and char156. More’s polemical Responsio ad Lutherum was published in a first and revised edition (both 1523); in CW 5, parts 1 and 2, ed. John M. Headley, trans. Sr. Scholastica Mandeville (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969). Erasmus published Inquisitio de fide, an eirenic colloquy between a Catholic and a Lutheran, and a moderate treatise against Luther, De Libero arbitrio (both in 1524). The exchange grew more and more heated with Luther’s De Servo arbitrio (1525) and Erasmus’s Hyperaspistes (1526–1527). See note 164 for the ­More-Tyndale controversy. 157. The three references to “faith” are “syncera fide” (Petitio 3, 78/25; Petitio 4, 84/18–19) or “pure faythe” (Petition 3, 79/29; Petition 4, 85/25) from 1 Tim 1:5; also “fidem & baptismum” (Petitio 1, 62/7), “faythe and baptyme” (Petition 1, 63/9). Personal faith moves an adult to request baptism. The faith of the family brings an infant to baptism. Although “faith and “baptism” are related, they are not a doublet, because they are not synonyms. In Erasmus the one reference to “gratia” is “tuae gratiae coelestis” (Petitio 4, 86/12) or “thy heuenly grace” (Petition 4, 87/13). Margaret translates “dotibus” (Petitio 6, 94/11–12) as “gyftes of grace” (Petition 6, 95/12), a quasi-doublet. The word “scriptura” is not found in Precatio, but Margaret translates “Euangelicus” (Petitio 6, 94/13) as “the scripture” (Petition 6, 95/14) when referring to the parable of the Prodigal Son. 158. “In the Vulgate amo and amor are comparatively little used, probably from their bad associations, amo being used 51 times and amor 20. Instead of these words, diligo, dilectio and caritas were used. Diligo (including ‘dilectus’) occurs 422 times in all; dilectio 43 and caritas 101 times”: see H[enry] E[yster] Jacobs, review of Harper’s Latin Dictionary: A New Dictionary Founded on the Translation of Freund’s L­ atin-German Lexicon, ed. E. A. Andrews, rev. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (New York: Harper & Bros., 1879), in Lutheran Quarterly, 10 (January 1880): 143–47, esp. 146. 159. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 6, 92/6; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 6, 93/6–7.



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itable.”160 She translates “pietas diuina” with a third doublet, “gostly loue & affection of god.”161 Margaret sees “love” as the cause and sustainer of “concord” when she translates “fraternae concordiae” in a fourth doublet as “brotherly loue & concorde.”162 Margaret uses the same phrase, though not a doublet, when translating “benignitate” as “tendre loue” in a human father and “pietati” as “tendre loue” in God the Father.163 Both the Precatio (1523) and the Treatise (lost 1524, 1526?, 1531) were first published before More began his polemic against William Tyndale in Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529, rev. ed. 1531).164 This debate includes arguments over the proper translation of key New Testament terms such as “agapē.” More, as a wise elder, knows that “love” can mean “lust” as well as “charity.” More’s dialogue partner, a youth attracted to Lutheranism, cites Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who had cried out, “Allas, allas, that evere love was synne[.]” But for Erasmus and Margaret, “love” has positive connotations: charity, piety, concord, and tender care. One of the most moving passages in Devout Treatise is Margaret’s treatment of the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11–32). She translates “prodacta . . . omni paterna substantia” as “spent and reuelled out all his fathers substaunce.”165 “Revel” ultimately comes from Latin rebellāre, so this kinetic verb implies the adolescent rebellion of the Prodigal Son. Erasmus plainly states that the son spent his father’s money “cum scortis,” that is, “with prostitutes” (Lk 15:30), but Margaret uses a circumlocution, “by vnthrifty and vngracious rule.”166 We might think that this doublet means “extravagant” (OED, 1.a.) and “discourteous” (OED, 6.a.), but Margaret’s words have a deeper meaning: “unthrifty” can mean “unchaste” (OED, 160. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 62/26; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 63/30. 161. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 66/1; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 67/1. 162. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 5, 88/17–18; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 5, 89/23. 163. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 4, 84/9, Petitio 5, 90/29; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 4, 85/14, Petition 5, 91/33. 164. More wrote a moderate polemic, partly against Tyndale, Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529, revised edition of 1531); in CW 6, parts 1 and 2, ed. Thomas Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard Marius (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). Tyndale replied with the relatively short Answere to Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge (1531), ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, SND, and Jared Wicks, SJ (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000). More responded with the longest religious polemic in English, Confutation of Tyndale: Part I was published in 1532, Part II in 1533; in CW 8, parts 1–3, ed. Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, James P. Lusardi, and Richard J. Schoeck (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). For More’s defense of the word “charity” and Tyndale’s preference for the word “love,” see More’s Dialogue (part 3, chap. 8, 286/35–288/6, and 1 Cor 13 passim), Tyndale’s Answer (19/24–20/27), and More’s Confutation (part 2, 199/20–203/18). The young man attracted to Lutheran ideas quotes the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, line 614 in More’s Dialogue (CW, vol. 6, part 2, 681). 165. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 6, 94/13; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 6, 95/15. 166. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 6, 94/13; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 6, 95/15.

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3.) and “ungracious” can mean “wicked” (OED, 1.b., obsolete). Margaret was a ­non-aristocratic woman breaking a social convention by appearing in print, so she was careful to preserve her moral character as a young but mature wife and mother. Herself a faithful daughter, she contrasts the errant son with the loving Father. Margaret further emphasizes the rich significance of her doublets by another special feature of her style: alliteration. Of the nearly ten doublets that contain alliteration, I discuss three notable examples: She translates “amicum” as “mylde & meke,”167 in which “mild” or “merciful” is applied to God, Christ, and Mary (OED, 1.b.) and “meek” or “patient” to good Christians (OED, 2.a.). Erasmus’s own doublet, “purum & integrum,” she renders as “safe and sounde,”168 a stock phrase since before 1137 (OED, Phrase 1.a.). Finally, in the parable of the Good Shepherd and the wandering sheep, Erasmus describes the saving actions of the Son as carry­ing the sheep back to the fold and curing the sick. In the first action the sheep are figurative, but in the second the sick are literal persons. Erasmus writes only “morbidam,” but Margaret expands “the sicke” into “the sicke and scabbe shepe,”169 from physical to spiritual illness with three stresses on “s.” An illustrated report on ­sheep-scab in England and Wales from the National Animal Disease Information Service (ca. 2019) analyzes the disease: cause (infestation by mites), effects (scratching, loss of wool), and remedies (quarantine, dipping in disinfectants, injections).170 Margaret could have learned about this pestilence from her father, who in Utopia deplores the shift from farming to s­ heep-raising.171 Margaret’s vivid metaphor helps the urbanite visualize the misery and helplessness of the s­ heep-sinner.172 Margaret’s extensive use of doublets—her choice to use two words to translate one of Erasmus’s—is important in the end because it reveals aspects of her character. To name just a few: first, Margaret’s intense devotion to God is expressed in this doublet: where Erasmus writes “hoc ardentius sitimus tui nominis 167. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 76/6; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 77/7. 168. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 3, 80/7–8; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 81/8. 169. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 7, 96/15; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 7, 97/18–19. 170. Emily Simcock, “Sheep Scab,” NADIS Animal Health Skills, published 2019, https://nadis.org.uk/­ disease-a-z/sheep/­sheep-scab/; accessed April 25, 2020. 171. St. Thomas More, Utopia, CW 4, ed. Edward Surtz, SJ and J. H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965): “in oues lue” (68/3); translation, “upon the sheep a murrain” (69/3); commentary (334–35). 172. Two repetitions of initial consonants occur in Erasmus: “philosophorum aut pharisaeorum” (Petitio 4, 86/1), “philosophers and pharises” (Petition 4, 87/1); “bonus ac beneficus” (Petitio 7, 96/14), “good and gentyll” (Petition 7, 97/17). See Tracy Peck, “Alliteration in Latin,” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1869–1896) 15 (1884): 58–65, https://doi.org/10.2307/2935800.



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gloriam” (we thirst all the more eagerly for the glory of your name),173 Margaret elaborates “we thy spirituall children / moche more feruently thurst and desyre the glory and honour of thy most holy name”174 Next, she illustrates through doublets the emphasis she places on parental and filial love, which formed much of her character. To Erasmus’s restatement of Nicaean dogma, “unigenito filio tuo” (your only begotten Son),175 Margaret adds paternal warmth in her doublet, “thy onely begotton & moost dere sonne.”176 Erasmus describes the kindly attitude of the Almighty towards his human children as “tua clementia” (your clemency),177 while Margaret stresses the compassionate nature of the Father in her doublet, “thy great gentylnesse & mercy.”178 She expresses More’s famous quality of merriness, which she admired if not shared, of living “uolentes ac lubentes” (willingly and gladly),179 as “with good mynde [purpose] and gladde chere [spirits].”180 Another virtue she learned from her father and exhibited in her own life is perseverance. Both Erasmus and Margaret advocate relying on the Holy Spirit in tribulation so we would be “inuictos” (indomitable)181 and, in Margaret’s alliterative doublet, “stedfast & sure.”182 Margaret exemplifies modesty when, instead of literally translating the phrase “with harlots” on whom the Prodigal Son spent his money, she chooses to soften this to his “vnthrifty and vngracious rule.” Her variations on the words “charity” and “love” always connote for her mutuality, affection, concord, and tenderness. Thus, Margaret Roper may be viewed as one of those writers, including Augustine, Erasmus, and More, in the long tradition of using doublets. 173. Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 61/29. 174. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 1, 66/2; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 1, 67/2–3. 175. Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 69/8. 176. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 3, 80/18; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 81/19–20. 177. Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 73/9. 178. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 5, 88/24; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 5, 89/25. 179. Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 70/9. 180. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 3, 82/22; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 3, 83/25–26. 181. Grant, “The Lord’s Prayer,” 66/20. 182. Erasmus, Precatio dominica, Petitio 2, 74/26; Roper, Devout Treatise, Petition 2, 75/29.

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Katherine G. Rodgers Dialogic Imagination in “The Letter to Alice Alington”

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Dialogic Imagination in “The Letter to Alice Alington” Kathe ri ne G. Rodg ers

One of the most intriguing documents to appear in the correspondence of Thomas More is addressed to Alice Alington, the wife of Sir Giles Alington and the daughter of More’s second wife. The work records a visit to More (then imprisoned in the Tower of London on a charge of misprision of treason) by his daughter Margaret Roper, one of the few members of More’s circle to be granted access to him during his imprisonment, who is represented as the letter’s author. The letter appears to reply to another written by Alington not long before; the two letters appear together as nos. 205 and 206 in Elizabeth Rogers’s 1947 edition of More’s correspondence, where both are assigned a date of August 1534.1 Alington’s letter recounts an incident that had occurred on the Alington estate before the two letters were composed. As reported in this letter, the visit of Sir Thomas Audley, More’s successor as Lord Chancellor, to the estate presented an opportunity for More’s family to plead on his behalf. Unmoved, Audley expressed contempt for More’s refusal to swear to the Act of Succession by recounting “a fewe of Esoppes fables,” whose moral was intended to point out the futility of an overly scrupulous conscience.2 “The Letter to Alice Alington” describes Roper’s failed attempt to use the Audley incident to persuade her father to swear to the Act of Succession. 1. All subsequent quotations of letters included in the More family correspondence are drawn from the Rogers edition, The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947). 2. The Act recognized Anne Boleyn as Henry VIII’s wife and their children as legitimate heirs to the crown.

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What are we to make of this letter? Because it takes the form of an intimate exchange between family members, it would appear to provide particularly valuable and revealing evidence for the nature of More’s argument against the crown with regard to the oath; the circumstances of its composition have in themselves led to modest but persistent interest in its contents. But, as evidence, the letter is problematic. To begin with, we do not know who wrote it: its authorship has been contested since the sixteenth century. According to Rogers, it exists in two ­mid-sixteenth-century manuscript copies and was printed by William Rastell in The Works of Sir Thomas More . . . in the Englysh tonge (1557).3 Its attribution to Roper is undermined in the Rogers edition by the inclusion, as a headnote, of this preface from the Bodleian manuscript copy: “. . . whether this answere were writen by Sir Thomas More in his doughter Ropers name, or by hym self it is not certainely knowen.”4 In a footnote, Rogers adds Rastell’s marginal correction to the scribal redundancy, changing “hym self” to “herself,” but in her shorter edition of More’s correspondence, Rogers omits the letter entirely, perhaps because of its contested authorship.5 The idea that More, not Roper, is the real writer of the letter has been reiterated as recently as 1998 in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of More, where we find the assertion that “it looks like the work of More himself, who had frequently employed [a] fiction of authorship in order to speak his own deepest truths.”6 Leaving aside the problem that any deepest truths disclosed by the letter are made obscure (perhaps designedly so) by this method of presentation, it is difficult, given the uncertainty of the letter’s authorship, to advance it as an authoritative justification of More’s refusal to swear to the Act of Succession. Another area of interest in the letter focuses on this very reluctance to attribute its composition to Roper. Discussion of the letter in the last two decades has been much concerned with the presumed anxiety about female authorship suggested by the contested attribution itself. This concern is central, for example, to the feminist readings of Peter Iver Kaufman and Nancy Wright, both of whom argue that unwillingness to attribute the letter with certainty to Roper undermines More’s reputation as a champion of women’s education and challenges the supposed progressive ideals of humanist educational reform.7 The 3. Rogers, preface to Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, x. 4. Rogers, Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, 514. 5. See Elizabeth Rogers, St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 6. See Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London: Chatto, 1998), 377. 7. See Peter Iver Kaufman, “Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and ‘Well Learned’ Men,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 443–56; and Nancy Wright, “The Name and the Signature of the Author of

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contested attribution that originated in the Bodleian manuscript, these scholars contend, may have masked the suspicions of some early modern humanists that their own promotion of women’s education may have led to an unintended subversion of patriarchal control.8 In more recent discussion of the letter by feminist scholars, the authorship problem has continued to be of interest, but there is little consensus about what this uncertainty means for understanding the letter’s importance from a feminist perspective. Mary Ellen Lamb, for example, has concluded that “Roper’s life and letters are too much a part of her father’s narrative to assume prominence in a critical literature that valorizes resistance to fathers and to patriarchy,” while Marion ­Wynne-Davies has proposed that such interpretations trap ­sixteenth-century women writers in an anachronistic notion of individuated authorship.9 These discussions of the letter undoubtedly help to advance our understanding of the role played by women in the development of early modern literature, but they do not exhaust readings of the letter itself and may even have the effect of shifting those readings from one agenda—the letter as evidence of More’s reasons of conscience—to another—the letter as evidence of male control over the composition and distribution of ­sixteenth-century writing. Striking a middle ground between these divergent perspectives, some scholars, notably Louis Martz, Stephen Foley, and Jaime Goodrich, have ingeniously proposed that in “The Letter to Alice Alington” we observe not a subjugation of Roper’s voice to More’s but a literary collaboration between father and daughter, one that consciously mingles the voices of its speakers.10 The letter’s literary qualities are Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1992), 239–57. 8. See Kaufman, “Absolute Margaret,” 456, and Wright, “Name and the Signature,” 241, respectively. 9. See Mary Ellen Lamb, “Margaret Roper: The Humanist Political Project and the Problem of Agency,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies; Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo, ed. Peter C. Herman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 83–108. See also Marion W ­ ynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 19. 10. See both Martz’s introduction to A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation in The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 12, ed. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), lxi–lxv, and his “Last Letters and A Dialogue of Comfort” in Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 59. See also Stephen M. Foley, “Scenes of Speaking and Technologies of Writing in More’s Tower Letters,” Moreana 35, no. 135–6 (1998): 7–24, and Jaime Goodrich, “Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: A Case for Rethinking Women’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39 (Winter, 2008): 1021–40. In a provocative but somewhat eccentric analysis, Jonathan Goldberg argues that Roper’s literary output, most evident in her translation of Erasmus, reveals a “textually incestuous” relationship with her father’s work; Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106.



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also the focus of a 1978 essay by Walter M. Gordon, who argues, largely on the basis of the apparent circumstances of the letter’s composition, rather than on form or style, that the work is essentially tragic.11 Various strands of these literary considerations of the work have recently been taken up by John Guy, in whose popular 2008 A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg, More and Roper are represented as working together to produce “an inflammatory political testament brilliantly camouflaged as an innocuous family ‘letter.’ ”12 Enclosing the word “letter” in scare quotes and calling Roper its “­co-author,” Guy characterizes the work as “a s­ emi-fictional dramatic realization” of Roper’s visit to her father’s prison cell and goes on to paraphrase some of its most vivid passages in modern English to recreate the episode as part of his own dramatic retelling of this famous ­father-daughter relationship.13 While it offers a happy, if finally unverifiable, solution to the attribution problem, Guy’s account also suggests that to the question of authorship we may add another source of puzzlement about The Letter to Alice Alington: is it a letter at all? As Guy’s dual characterization—“political testament camouflaged as a letter” and “­semi-fictional dramatic realization”—implies, authorship is not the only problem of assignment here, and an older tradition of scholarly h­ ead-scratching about the work has had as much to do with the letter’s genre as with the gender of its author. This question raises others about the letter’s formal characteristics and style with which I will be concerned in this essay. From a literary point of view, what kind of dialogue mingles the voices of its speakers? In what sense is the letter’s style both dramatic and ­semi-fictional? To answer these questions, I have turned to Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work The Dialogic Imagination.14 In what follows, I will not (regrettably) settle the ques11. See Walter M. Gordon, “Tragic Perspective in More’s Dialogue with Margaret in the Tower,” Cithara 17, no. 2 (May 1978): 3–12. Somewhat perversely, in my view, Gordon draws on Thomas Kyd’s definition of tragedy as “acts of death” to read the work as tragic in outlook and intent. Without denying the urgency and seriousness of More’s situation in 1534, the Elizabethan definition does not seem to apply to the stylistic or formal features of this Henrician work. 12. John Guy, A Daughter’s Love; Thomas More and His Dearest Meg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 239. 13. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 239–41. 14. For the suggestion to consult Bakhtin, I am indebted to the late Ronald R. McDonald, professor of English at Smith College until his death in 2002, who heard my talk on Margaret Roper presented at The Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies in Amherst, Massachusetts on October 16, 1999. The emphasis of Bakhtin’s work on the earliest forms and development of narrative style makes The Dialogic Imagination more relevant to my argument than other important discussions, such as Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. For a brief but useful overview of narrative criticism, see David Herman, “Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments,” and Monika Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to

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tion of who wrote the letter, although I think it altogether possible that Roper, a capable writer of English and Latin and the translator of a work by Erasmus, is its author.15 I will rather examine certain of the letter’s modes of discourse from a Bakhtinian point of view and suggest how these help to explain the complex formal and stylistic features that have been frequently observed, though rarely analyzed, by its readers. From this perspective, “The Letter to Alice Alington” can indeed be regarded as a s­ emi-fictional work, one whose dialogic style anticipates features of the English novel.

A Report of a Dialogue: Parody, Polyglossia, Heteroglossia Questions about the letter’s style and genre were first raised alongside problems of authorship by its earliest ­twentieth-century commentator, R. W. Chambers, who includes this assessment of it in The Continuity of English Prose: Perhaps the most remarkable proof of this dramatic power of the Chelsea household is in the ­so-called letter of Margaret Roper to Lady Alington. This is a report of a dialogue in prison between More and Margaret. It is about the length of Plato’s Crito, to which indeed, in many ways, it forms a striking parallel. Now when, after the death of More and Margaret, this letter was printed, More’s own circle could not decide whether the real writer was More or his daughter. And the letter remains a puzzle. The speeches of More are absolute More; and the speeches of Margaret are absolute Margaret. And we have to leave it at that.16

the Present,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 19–59. 15. Roper’s extant writings are few but regarded with interest even if they have historically been assimilated (as Wright and others have pointed out) into the canon of her father’s work. They consist of letters in Latin and English (which, of course, may or may not include the Letter to Alice Alington) and the 1524 A devout treatise upon the Pater noster, a translation of Erasmus’ s Precatio Dominica (1523). Sarah C. E. Ross has recently presented evidence to suggest that this list should be expanded to include a poem contained in a manuscript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; see “A Poem by Margaret More Roper?” in Notes and Queries (December 2009), 502–7. The most comprehensive assessment of Roper’s work remains Elizabeth McCutcheon’s “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449–80. Extensive analyses of Roper’s translation of Erasmus are offered by Goldberg in Desiring Women, 101–13, and Patricia Demers, “Margaret Roper and Erasmus: The Relationship of Translator and Source,” Women Writing and Reading (Spring 2005): 3–8, and in this volume, pp. 158–71. 16. On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His School, Early English Text Society original series, vol. 191 (repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), clxii. Chambers’s comment is reproduced in the headnote that accompanies the letter in Rogers’s edition.



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In this passage, Chambers notably hedges his bets on the possibility of female authorship; his doubt—at least grammatically—has to do with the nature of the “­so-called letter” itself. The source of uncertainty about the author is “More’s own circle”; Chambers’s doubt is reserved for the work’s uncertain genre. Like Guy, he calls it “dramatic,” paying tribute to the writer’s ability to render so persuasively the “absolute” voices of its speakers. Yet, at the same time, he refers to it as a “dialogue” or rather, and even more confusingly, “a report of a dialogue” reminiscent of Plato’s Crito. Although Chambers’s multiple characterizations of the work—dramatic power, ­so-called letter, report of a dialogue—conclude with a shrug of the shoulders, they may be more definitive than he knew. The mixture of genres and linguistic features he names suggestively coincide with what Bakhtin has termed “the ­pre-history of novelistic discourse.”17 Bakhtin argues that the novel is fundamentally the representation of the linguistic style or styles of multiple speakers, inclusive of and coterminous with the narrator’s own voice: “Every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of ‘languages,’ styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language.”18 According to Bakhtin, the representation in prose of the speech of others as “the images of languages” developed over the course of many centuries before the appearance of the novel as a distinct genre and can be fruitfully studied in what he calls the “­parodic-travestying” literature of the ­Greco-Roman world, late antiquity, and the medieval period in such comic, “low” forms as the satyr play, the mock epic, and the sermon joyeaux. Parody, by these lights, is not necessarily associated with ridicule; but in its appropriation of the words of others in a new context or register, it inevitably challenges or reinterprets the speech it parodies or represents, frequently tilting toward laughter or irony. Such discourse by nature incorporates more than one kind of speech pattern; it exploits dialects, high and low styles, sometimes multiple languages. Thus, parody (like the novel) is “an intentionally dialogized hybrid” in which “languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another.”19 Indeed, for Bakhtin, parody—the representation of another’s voice and style, often for comic purposes or with ironic effect—and polyglossia—the combination of multiple parodic voices and styles—are crucial to the development of novelistic discourse. 17. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 18. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 49. 19. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 76.

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Both parody and polyglossia, in their Bakhtinian sense, are evident in “The Letter to Alice Alington,” and the complexities of their employment are worth close examination. An opportunity for studying both is offered by the way in which Audley’s fables—recounted first to Alington by Audley himself, then to Roper and More in Alington’s letter, and finally incorporated in Roper’s reply to Alington—figure in the first half of the letter, or roughly 300 lines of the total 675 in the Rogers edition. As originally told to Alington, the fables involve the attempt of wise men to govern a country of fools, and the appetites of a lion, an ass, and a wolf.20 The author of “The Letter to Alice Alington” pictures More disputing the lessons of realpolitik that are meant to be derived from the fables. The layering of multiple voices—the voice of Roper, the letter’s primary narrator, the voice of More perusing and commenting on Alington’s letter—becomes an ironic parody of Audley’s words: And therefore shall I nowe come to thys Esopes fable, as my Lorde full merelye layde it furth for me. If those wyse menne Megge, when the rayn was gone at theyr coming abrode, where they found all men fooles, wished themselues fooles too, because they could not rule them, than semeth it that the foolysh rayne was so sore a showre, that euen thorowe the grounde it sanke into theyr caues, and powred downe vppon theyr heades, and wette theim to the skynne, & made theim more nodies than them that stoode abrode. . . . Howe be it daughter Roper, whome my Lorde here taketh for the wyse menne, and whome he meaneth to be fooles, I cannot verye well geasse, I cannot reade well suche ryddles. For as Dauus saythe in Therence: Non sum Oedipus. I may say you wot well: Non sum Oedipus sed Morus, which name of myne what it signi[f]eyeth in Greke, I nede not tell you. But I truste my lorde reckoneth me amonge the fooles, and so reckon I my self, as my name is in greke.21

The ironic representation of voices and styles in this passage works on a number of levels. On the surface, More is portrayed as taking Audley’s fable seriously, even appearing to endorse its intended meaning. In this vein, Audley’s advice, More says, is wittily expressed (“full merelye layde . . . furth”); indeed, More pretends to find it almost obscure, beyond his own intellectual abilities, and he appropriates bits and pieces of the fable in a correspondingly “unlearned” style epitomized by the awkward collocation of conjunctions (“and 20. Rogers, Correspondence, 512–13. More objects that “The second fable, Marget, semeth not to be Esopes,” on the grounds that in Audley’s telling, the three animals make their confession to a priest (520). Although many medieval and moralized fables not composed by Aesop were included in Caxton’s 1484 edition of Aesop’s Fables, the fables Audley tells are not among them. 21. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 107/20–108/6. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 518–19.



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powred . . . , and wette . . . & made”) and the folksy use of the word “nodies.” But More’s appropriation of the fable is really a way of parodying and ridiculing the moral assigned to it by Audley. The declaration “I cannot verye well geasse” means “I know perfectly well what he means—and I reject that meaning.” This ironic inversion is further enforced and articulated by polyglossia when More deploys a familiar multilingual pun on the family name. At once challenging Audley’s implication that More’s actions are foolish and pretending not to understand them, More concedes with a Latin tag that in Greek, he is a fool but not a s­ elf-destructive one (“Non sum Oedipus sed Morus”), a macaronic s­ end-up of Audley’s attempt at literary moralizing. We readily apprehend through the ­mock-serious ­pseudo-commentary that the real fool is Audley. The ironic treatment of Audley’s fable is parodied as well when the letter’s writer counters it with a merry tale—itself a genre appropriated for ironic purposes in this context. In this case, we may observe the effects of heteroglossia, which Bakhtin defines as the existence within a single language of “stratified” styles: “high” and “low” forms of speech, slang, professional jargon, dialects, official and unofficial styles, and the like.22 The tale is narrated by Roper but reported as having been invented by More and involves a rigged jury trial at an assize court held at Bartholomew Fair. Briefly, the tale is this. A London officer appointed to collect on properties confiscated by the treasury, having seized the goods of a northern outlaw, is in turn tried on t­ rumped-up charges by a stacked jury of eleven northerners, who are eager to convict the defendant and exact revenge on behalf of their countryman. The jury is prevented from rendering a unanimous verdict only by the presence of “Cumpany,” an “honest man of another quarter” and More’s s­ tand-in in this story. Earlier, the letter’s author parodied the intended moral of Audley’s fables and mocked the teller’s ignorance by representing More’s commentary on them. Now, Audley’s dubious moral is parodied in the form of the merry tale, articulated in a rich heteroglossia of voices and styles: What good felow (quod one of the northern men) whare wonnes thou? Be not we aleuen here, & thou ne but ene la alene, & all we agreed? whereto shouldest thou sticke? what is thy name gude felow? Masters (quod he) my name is called Cumpany. Cumpany quod they, now by thy trouth gude felowe playe than the gude companion, come theron furth with vs, & passe euen for gude company.23 22. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 67. 23. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 111/14–18. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 522–23.

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In context, the passage gives us not only the represented words of the corrupt jurors and the dogged Cumpany, but also Roper’s voice as the narrator of the tale, and in some sense More’s voice, as well, whose invention the tale is supposed to be. Put another way, the passage presents an “image of language” in the Bakhtinian sense: it offers imitations and refractions of other peoples’ words, a story told from within the report to one interlocutor (Alington) of the conversation between two others (More and Roper), all within a single framework, the letter itself, represented as the words of a single narrator (Roper). The effects of this appropriated speech are compounded by heteroglossia: Audley’s ignorance, vacuity, and morally compromised counsel are stylistically inscribed in the passage above by the “country bumpkin” accent of the corrupt jurors, and the parodic style thus conveys a double condemnation: Cumpany is asked to join the verdict of a corrupt jury, just as More is asked to swear against his conscience in supporting the Act of Succession.

“Absolute More and absolute Margaret”: Dialogue or Dialogized Discourse? This deft mixture of voices and styles is rendered even more remarkable by the way in which the tale is introduced to us as Roper’s retelling of More’s parodic tale. Here, what Bakhtin calls “dialogized” discourse in the prehistory of the novel bears further discussion and helps to account for at least one of the letter’s most curious stylistic features. As we have seen, many readers have remarked that “The Letter to Alice Alington” is more like a dialogue than a letter, and in this sense, its stylistic affinities with novelistic discourse should not be too surprising. Indeed, dialogue as a form is mentioned by Bakhtin as one of the many kinds of prose, ancient and medieval, in which novelistic discourse took shape.24 But the relationship between novelistic discourse and the use of dialogic exchange in the letter has not yet been fully analyzed—though Guy’s recent characterization of the work as “­semi-fictional” and Chambers’s comment that “the speeches of More are absolute More and the speeches of Margaret are absolute Margaret” appear to have such an analysis in view. Though they are helpful, these comments do not fully account for the way in which each speaker’s voice is represented at different points in the letter. 24. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 57 and 76.



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In fact, while the voices of More and Roper are often well realized, they are by no means “absolute,” if by “absolute” we mean not only “characteristic of” but also “unchanging, lacking dynamism.” The letter presents itself as recording a conversation, after all, and it is appropriately conversational—protean, dynamic, shifting.25 It renders the words of More, Roper, and others through direct and indirect quotation, often with ironic effect. It includes informal, familial exchanges between father and daughter, but it mingles these with other kinds of speech: legal terms, references to and quotations from scripture, Terence, Boethius, Chaucer, the conciliar record, and the works of the church fathers. In short, multiple styles are used to animate each speaker, they do not consistently evoke a fixed or flat (“absolute”) characterization of either one, and they produce an even more complicated discursive whole than, say, the Platonic dialogue. Furthermore, in defining parody as “an intentionally dialogized hybrid” in which “languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another,” Bakhtin means more than the obvious demarcation of speakers in dialogue form—“quod I” and “quod he.” Dialogized discourse in the Bakhtinian sense is rather “an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems.”26 (This definition, it is worth remarking, makes it clear why irony is so characteristic of ­pre-novelistic discourse in Bakhtin’s analysis, since irony by nature works on two planes of meaning.) The writer of “The Letter to Alice Alington” gives us speech that, in representing More’s mock commentary on Audley’s fable, has been “dialogized” in this sense: the pretense of confusion about and the subsequent endorsement of Audley’s fable are simultaneously contained within the speaker’s implicit understanding and dismissal of Audley’s advice. Two divergent belief systems, in particular, are evoked simultaneously by this passage: it is pragmatic to take an oath you don’t believe in if it will save your life; it is immoral and damnable to do so. In keeping with the heteroglot features already discussed, we might also say that two styles and speech patterns accompany these belief systems, a low style in which parts of the fable are incor25. In one of the few sustained analyses of the letter’s stylistic features, Martz has called this quality “improvisational.” The term is consistent with the multiplicity of styles that I am studying here: the appropriation and imitation of the speech of others are closely related to improvisation. But improvisation in written discourse is difficult to analyze and, in my view, does not account as fully for the letter’s style as parody, polyglossia, and dialogism. See Martz, introduction to More’s Dialogue of Comfort, lxi–lxv, and “Last Letters,” 59. 26. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 304.

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porated in More’s words and a learned style in which Terence is adapted for ironic purposes (“Non sum Oedipus sed Morus”). But perhaps an even more striking example of dialogized discourse is presented by the way in which the letter’s writer represents Roper’s narration of More’s Cumpany tale. Because of its dialogic complexity, it is worth quoting this passage at length: And with this, he told me a tale, I wene I can skant tell it you agayne, because it hangeth vpon some tearmes and ceremonies of the law. But as farre as I can call to mind my fathers tale was this, that ther is a court belongyng of course vnto euerye fayre, to dooe iustice in such thynges as happen within the same. Thys courte hath a prety fond name, but I canot happen on it: but it begynneth with a pye, & the remenant goeth much like the name of a knyght that I haue knowen I wis, and I trowe you too, for he hath been at my fathers ofte ere this, at such tyme as you wer there, a metely tall black man, hys name was syr William Pounder. But tut let the name of the court go for thys once, or call it if ye will a courte of pye syr William Pownder. But thys was the matter loe, that vpon a tyme, at suche a courte holden at Bartylmewe fayre, there was an eschetour of London that had arested a man that was outelawed, & had seased hys goodes that he hadde brought into the fayre, tollyng hym out of the fayre by a trayne. The man that was arested & hys goodes seased was a northern manne, whiche by his frendes made theschetour within the fayre to be arested, vpon an accion, I wot neer what, and so was he brought before the iudge of the court of py syr William Pounder. And at the laste the matter came to a certayne ceremonye to be tryed by a quest of .xii. men, a iury as I remember they call it, or elles a periury.27

At least two styles and perspectives can here be identified. First, there is a “low” style suitable for a narrator who claims to lack the legal knowledge to report More’s tale as he told it. In this style, Roper awkwardly strings together conjunctions (“but I canot happen on it: but it begynneth with a pye”) and comically garbles pied poudre, the Law French term applied to the fair courts, as “Pounder.” By the end of the passage, yet another style emerges with the sophisticated pun on legal terminology (iury/periury). This style belies the professions of deficiency expressed at the beginning of the passage and echoes the ironical, learned voice earlier assigned to More’s pseudo commentary. Finally, as we know, this learned style will merge a few lines later into the parodic country bumpkin style and northern accent of the corrupt juror. The tale of Cumpany thus becomes a “dialogized hybrid” of styles contained within Roper’s account. 27. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 110/7–24. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 521–22.



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The hybridization is made even more complex when we consider that the passage as a whole differs stylistically from the representation of Roper’s previous speeches in the first two hundred or so lines of the letter, which are typically precise, logical, and rhetorically perspicuous. Suddenly launching into the tale of Cumpany, this style undergoes a radical shift, though Roper is still, in the framework of the letter, the primary narrator. With the stylistic mixture of the tale of Cumpany, for example, we might compare Roper’s elegant precision at the beginning of the work: When I came next vnto my father after, me thoughte it both conuenient and necessary, to shew him your letter. Conuenient, that he might thereby see your louing laboure taken for hym. Necessarye, that sith he might perceiue therby, that if he stande still in this scruple of hys conscience, . . . al his frendes . . . shall finally forsake him.28

In one sense, it is implausible that the speaker of this passage, with its neat rhetorical divisio (“both conuenient and necessary”), is the same speaker who will retell the Cumpany tale with such comic ineptitude, unless we understand the styles of both speeches to be dialogized in the Bakhtinian sense, as the letter’s writer sets about undermining and parodying Audley’s fables. Because a single speaker does employ both styles, in fact, their incongruity is the more noticeable, the parody that much more effective: rhetorical precision is shown to conceal a hollow moral core when the supposed logic of convenience and necessity is upended by the garbled retelling of the tale of Cumpany.

Having the Last Word as Social Heteroglossia Thus far, my discussion has focused on the dialogized style of the first half of “The Letter to Alice Alington”; what about the second half? It might be argued that in the last three hundred or so lines of the work, many of the ­proto-fictional features I have been examining are abandoned in favor of a statement of More’s position with respect to the oath, represented without irony, though perhaps not without the ambiguity required of a document that presumably would have been seen by royal functionaries. Dialogue, it might be said, becomes near monologue in the second half of the letter, and heteroglossia is replaced by the singular voice 28. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 103/8–104/2. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 514.

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of reason as More’s counterarguments trump Roper’s attempts at persuasion. Indeed, readers have always assumed that the second half of the letter, in which More’s voice dominates Roper’s, offers a serious articulation of More’s refusal to take the oath, though feminist readers have objected (with some justification) that the dominance of More’s voice in the second half effectively discredits Roper’s integrity and amounts to a silencing of female discourse by male logic and rhetoric.29 In this regard, it must be admitted, the letter’s representation of an exchange between two speakers is maintained only by Roper’s occasional, increasingly truncated responses to More’s learned counterarguments from the church fathers and conciliar history. Eventually, the exchange and the letter simply end when the letter’s writer allows More to have the last word: “I shall full heartely praye for vs all, that wee maye meete together once in heauen, where we shall make merye for euer, and neuer haue trouble after.”30 Surely we are meant to understand such an ending not as dialogic s­ tory-telling but as direct reporting of the speaker’s piety and resolve, patriarchal though these may be. Does an analysis of the letter as ­proto-fiction, then, break down in the second half of the letter? I think not. For understanding More’s spiritual state of mind in the Tower, for establishing authorship, and for tracing the assimilation of a daughter’s composition into the father’s canon, it matters a great deal that More gets the last word. But from the Bakhtinian perspective I have here adopted, this last word is nonetheless incorporated into the letter as a dialogized representation of language, not a monologic statement of More’s views. Here it is useful to revisit Bakhtin’s conception of the fundamentally social and interactive nature of novelistic discourse. For Bakhtin, heteroglossia means not merely a diversity of speech types—dialects, languages of generations and age groups, languages of the authorities, languages that serve specific sociopolitical purposes—but the interaction of these various speech types throughout the whole.31 As we have seen, this interaction, or “social heteroglossia,” can take the form of mixed styles and genres in the represented voice of a single speaker, as is the case in the passages cited earlier from the first part of the letter. But it may also occur between speakers, in what Bakhtin calls “the stylistically individualized speech of characters” within the whole.32 Something like this strategy is suggested by 29. See especially Wright, “The Name and the Signature.” 30. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 119/25–27. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 532. 31. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 262–63. 32. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 262. This effect is surely what Chambers had in mind in commenting on the “absolute” speeches of father and daughter.



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Chambers’s dictum about the “absolute” speech styles assigned to More and Roper, but, as we have seen, the “absoluteness” of the speakers’ words is undermined by the characters’ own stylistic dexterity. In the framework of the whole, however, the narrator herself is not identified with a single style and is bound as the narrator to represent both her own and her father’s position. In this sense, it matters not so much that control of the argument shifts decisively from Roper to More in the second half of the letter. Rather, the types of speech represented and stylized within the letter are expanded in the second half to include the language of humanist polemic. And because Roper as the narrator of all the speeches and styles employed in the letter continues on one level to be the narrator of this polemic, polemical style is not differentiated from the letter’s other styles as in itself more authoritative or morally superior but instead facilitates the dispersion of the theme through the whole work. On one level, of course, this dispersion is obvious: the act of swearing to the oath has been rejected through the language of the merry tale; now it is rejected through the language of learned debate. In a speech of almost two hundred lines—by far the longest, with the notable exception of the tale of Cumpany, that is assigned to either of the letter’s interlocutors—More counters Roper’s suggestion that he ought to take the oath because other “learned men” have seen fit to do so, given that parliament has made it treasonable not to. In response to this suggestion, More examines the conditions under which learned men may disagree or yield to the persuasions of a majority opinion. Certainly, More explains, there is precedent for a difference of opinion among “the great learned men of christendom”; he cites at length the example of Saints Bernard and Anselm, who, he says, differed on whether the Feast of the Immaculate Conception should be observed by the church. However, More continues, a majority opinion, even of learned men, is not sufficient grounds to violate one’s conscience: “thys is of verye trouthe a verye good occasion to moue him, and yet not to compell him, to conforme his mynde and conscience vnto theyrs.”33 In any case, learning does not prevent learned people from forswearing themselves: “some of the best lerned before the othe geuen theym, sayde and playne affyrmed the contrarye, of some suche thinges as they haue nowe sworne in the othe.”34 The style of the speech—with its discussion of patristic debates on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, its expression of the idea that conscience 33. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 114/29–30. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 526. 34. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 115/2–3. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 527.

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must be shaped in accordance with “a well assembled general counsayle” of the church and “the common fayth of christendome,” and its predictable resistance to articulating “for what causes I refuse the othe”35—is in marked contrast with the style used to tell the tale of Cumpany, and even with the style of More’s earlier ­mock-commentary on Audley’s fables. But the meaning and effect are similar. Just as the commentary and merry tale use comic style to ridicule the dubious moral of Audley’s fables, this polemic employs a learned style to challenge the specious logic of the learned. The letter’s contrasting styles thus function together to expose as hypocrisy the false wisdom of taking the oath. But in so doing, they also create relationships among styles of speech that are as intricate as the relationships of their speakers; indeed, one could say that the styles themselves, as well as their speakers, are “in dialogue” with one another. Authoritative and “serious” forms of expression rub shoulders with ironic, “merry” ones. A lawyerly distinction between “moving” and “compelling” in the second half of the letter recalls Roper’s opening declaration that she found it both “convenient and necessary” to show Alington’s letter to their father. Both of these legalistic, official forms of expression are challenged by the garbling of legal language in the merry tale. Contained as they are within the framing device of the letter itself, which makes Roper the narrator of all these diverse forms of expression, none of them ever entirely cancels the others out. All of them are in some sense parodic and representational, coexisting to create a social “totality” of language. In the fully developed English comic novel, according to Bakhtin, this kind of social heteroglossia frequently allows narrators to expose the hypocrisy of conventional wisdom by parodying it in “concealed form”—that is, by employing official, ceremonial, or authoritative language without the conventional markers of indirect speech so that the narrator appears to endorse views that the work in fact holds up for derision.36 “The Letter to Alice Alington” does not, of course, employ this kind of fully developed novelistic narration, but it certainly suggests the narrator’s potential to parody the speech of others when it frames multiple styles interactively within a single, unified form. What this means is that even the learned style employed by More in the second half of the letter is part of the parody. 35. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 114/31. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 526. 36. Bakhtin provides numerous examples from Dickens’s Little Dorrit, among others; see The Dialogic Imagination, 301–31.



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To see this narrative strategy at work, let us also consider what superficially appears to be the least dialogical moment in the second half of the letter, the moment when More’s speech silences Roper’s. Here what interests me just as much as the extended representation of polemical style is the way in which it literally collides with Roper’s words: That might be father (quod I) and yet since they myghte see more, I will not (quod he) dispute daughter Margaret against that, nor misseiudge any other mannes conscience, whiche lyeth in theyr owne hearte farre out of my sighte.37

To be sure, Roper is here silenced by More. But the silencing itself is represented and parodic, the comma and missing quotation mark so manipulated as to capture the dynamic moment of interruption.38 Furthermore, while Roper’s failure to finish her sentence could be understood as acquiescence to the superior moral authority of More’s words, More’s interruption could equally be read as a parody of polemical excess. This representation of speech is made even more poignant by the fact that its main concern, the matter of such moment to both of its speakers, is the question of who says what to whom and how—that is, it is fundamentally about the very nature of represented speech. To examine the presence of parody, polyglossia, heteroglossia, and dialogized discourse in “The Letter to Alice Alington” is not to exhaust what might be said about its style and form, nor even to exhaust what might further be said about its participation in the prehistory of the novel. If, for example, we could determine the letter’s authorship, the possible contribution of the letter’s writer or writers to the development of the English novel would be of great interest. What is more, I suspect that the stylistic features here examined could be found in many late medieval and early modern letters and are not at all confined to this ­well-known work. A single document in the vast canon of humanist correspondence is surely the tip of the iceberg in tracing the p­ re-history of the English novel as a literary form. An even more intriguing site at which to investigate this p­ re-history may be offered by the work of ­lesser-known vernacular letter writers, both male and female; indeed, a growing body of scholarship on domestic epistolary exchange in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries has already begun to suggest that 37. “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 115/7–10. See also Rogers, Correspondence, 527 38. With regard to punctuation, Rogers says that her edition “preserves that of the earliest text, with very slight modifications. Commas replace s­ emi-colons, where we should not so punctuate” (preface, Correspondence, xi). The earliest text, in this case, would be the Bodleian manuscript copy. I take the comma here between “see more” and “I will not” to be original.

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the composition of letters of all kinds, including humanist correspondence but also family and business letters, participated in the development of vernacular fiction.39 So far, the link between ­letter-writing and the development of the novel has been identified but little analyzed, and much work remains to be done. In the meantime, even so preliminary a case study as I have attempted here provides a glimpse of how novelistic discourse might have taken shape in the workings of the dialogic imagination. 39. See, for example, W. Webster Newbold’s “Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter Writing Manuals,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 26, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 267–300. Newbold argues that the success of letter writing manuals such as William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) and Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586) derived partly from the entertainment value of the letters included in the manuals as models, which adopted fictional modes of discourse. For discussion of early modern vernacular correspondence, see David Baron and Nigel Hall, eds., Letter Writing as a Social Practice (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999), and James Daybell, ed., Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). No mention is made of The Letter to Alice Alington in either of these essay collections.



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Stephen Merriam Foley The Voices of the “Letter to Alington”

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Virtual and Absolute The Voices of the “Letter to Alington” St e phen Me rri am Fo ley

One would be foolish to dismiss entirely R. W. Chambers’s assertion about Margaret Roper’s August 1534 “Letter to Alice Alington”: “the speeches that are More’s are absolute More and those that are Margaret’s are absolute Margaret. And we have to leave it at that.”1 Chambers’s formula addresses key questions that arise from the letter. The Bodleian manuscript of the letter first articulates these questions in the ­well-known note later printed by William Rastell when he publishes the Tower letters in More’s 1557 Workes: “whether thys aunswer wer writen by syr Thomas More in his daughter Ropers name, or by her selfe, it is not certaynelye knowen.”2 One question—“who is speaking?”—arises from 1. R. W. Chambers, “The Continuity of English Prose,” in Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore Knight, Early English Text Society, o.s., vol. 186, ed. R. W. Chambers and Elsie Hitchcock (London, 1932), clxii. Quotations of the two Alington letters in this essay are from William Rastell, ed., The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght (London, 1557), 1434b–1444b, transcribed in this volume. Dual citations of these and other letters by More are from the modern edition by Elizabeth F. Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), in which the “Letter from Alice Alington” is number 205 (pp. 511–13) and the “Letter to Alice Alington” is number 206, (pp. 514–32). Page and line number references to the Rastell edition transcribed in this volume will be cited first, followed by page number of the same passage in Rogers’s edition. 2. Rastell, “The Letter of Alice Alington,” p. 103, lines 5–7; Rogers, Correspondence, 514. The Rastell online edition is located at https://thomasmorestudies.org/­wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Dialogue_on_Conscience. pdf; accessed April 5, 2022. Rogers follows the Bodleian manuscript (“or by him self”), noting however, that Rastell’s Workes contains the intended reading.

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intimate rhetoric. Another question—“do More and Margaret mean what they say?”— reflects how difficult and dangerous it is to say what one means under the circumstances that Margaret and More face. The letter begins as an exchange among three family members concerning the attempt by Thomas Audley, More’s successor as Lord Chancellor, to manipulate More politically while he was imprisoned in the Tower. His imprisonment is the result of his refusal to swear the oath of the Act of Succession, which established the right of the offspring of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to inherit the throne. The voice of the letter at this point is consistently Margaret’s, addressed to Alice, although Margaret clearly knows that it will be read by others. This household correspondence soon enfolds a staged, philosophical dialogue in which Margaret and More play parts, addressing the issues Audley had brought up to Alice. In this phase of the letter, each interlocutor clearly knows well the parts played by the other, leading readers to wonder when Margaret may be speaking—and writing—for More, and/or More for Margaret. Chambers’s formula of “absolute Margaret/absolute More” leaves the question of authorship open by shifting attention to the domain of rhetorical voice. If the textual evidence does not finally demonstrate a single definitive author, the distinctly individuated voices of Margaret and More, Chambers claims, speak for each of them absolutely in the dialogue, positively registering them as autonomous historical agents. In that sense, the speeches create the effect of two speakers who are absolutely themselves. But though it is easy to accept the plausibility of an “absolute Margaret” and an “absolute More,” we do not have to leave it at that, and scholars have not, even while accepting the general wisdom of Chambers’s approach, since his formula also leaves open questions concerning the authorship of the letter and its circumstances. One might argue, in good company, after all, that the historical Thomas More reveals himself most authentically by shifting roles, and that his daughter has learned this very well for herself. Indeed, one wonders if for Chambers himself the conclusion “we have to leave it at that” registers a gentle irony. Some scholars, like Peter Ackroyd, have favored More as the author of the letter and positioned Margaret as a literary foil constructed to advance his argument for conscience.3 Another important line of scholarship—by Peter Iver Kaufman, Jaime Goodrich, and Nancy Wright—argues for Margaret as author and as an authentic voice, examining the patriarchal gendering of authorship 3. Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (New York: Anchor, 1999), 377.



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and the power of women like Margaret to appropriate for their own the authority of “well learned men.”4 Kaufman argues that Margaret stands absolute as a dutiful daughter by aligning herself with the men who have accepted arguments for conformity with the oath, a consensus of the living that More turns away from and whose company Margaret joins and affirms. Louis Martz, one of the first and most influential modern readers of the “Letter to Alington” as central to the Tower works as a whole, argues, on the other hand, that the voices of Margaret and More are powerful in this as in the other Tower letters because they produce and are produced by art and artfulness. As Martz writes in his account of the art of improvisation in the Tower Works, The last letters are of the utmost importance, because they constitute the best account of More’s conduct during his interrogations and imprisonment, the best account of his state of mind, and, it is not perhaps too much to say, some of his finest works of art. They are indeed works of art in every sense of the word, for they show the most artful regard for the presence of two or three or more audiences.5

Martz, while agreeing that More’s voice is so much his own in the letter that the composition of it must be largely his, pictures a scene of collaborative improvisation: “One can imagine More and Margaret planning it together and speaking much of it aloud in More’s Tower Room” (lxi). For Marion W ­ ynne-Davies, the letter is part of a mutual discourse: it was produced by two members of an intimate group in terms that make individual identification difficult; it was addressed to a third member of that group and then circulated in manuscript form to other of the same company; and it was finally published twenty years later by yet another family member, . . . a culmination of collaborative textual productivity, and Rastell’s headnote, which conflates More’s and Margaret’s authorship, should be recognized for what it is, 4. See Peter Iver Kaufman, “Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and ‘Well Learned’ Men,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (Fall 1989): 443–56; Jaime Goodrich, “Thomas More and Margaret Roper: A Case for Rethinking Women’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39 (Winter, 2008): 1021–40; and Nancy Wright, “The Name and the Signature of the Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1992), 239–57, 443–56. For a thoughtful and thorough analysis of this work and other scholarship on the “Letter to Alington,” see Katherine Rodgers, “Dialogic Imagination in ‘The Letter to Alice Alington,’ ” in this volume, pp. xx–xx. 5. Louis Martz, introduction to A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, in vol. 12 of The Complete Works of Thomas More, ed. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), lxi, cited hereafter as Dialogue of Comfort. See also Martz’s “Last Letters and A Dialogue of Comfort,” in Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 59.

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an integral part of the familial contribution and not a spur to the critical investigation of authorship.6

I myself have argued that the scandal of authorship in the letter foregrounds the blending of voices as an important theme as well as method.7 The voices of “The Letter to Alington,” as I shall argue here, represent historical persons as products of the art of impersonation, successfully suggesting the presence of whole persons—Margaret and More—-their conduct, their states of mind. In that sense, the art of producing effective voices in the letter is also a politically artful application of language crafted to work within the constraints of More’s and Margaret’s dangerous historical situation. John Guy’s influential biography, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg, contends that Margaret and More worked brilliantly as ­co-authors to create “an inflammatory political testament brilliantly camouflaged as an innocuous family ‘letter’ ”8 that quickly shifts genre to become “a s­ emi-fictional dramatic realization” of Roper’s conversations with More in the Tower.9 Recent comments from Katherine Gardiner Rodgers and Joshua Avery on the Tower letters open up further windows into the strategic artfulness of the Tower letters. Rodgers argues that the potential trial testimony More provides in the letters also shields him from the implication that he has sought martyrdom.10 And Avery considers the extraordinary claims made by More in “The Letter to Alington” about accepting the reasoning of those who swore to the oath having previously opposed it.11 “Is More expressing ironic distance,” Avery asks, “or straightforward charity in his ambiguous language? The argument is that More, utilizing his legal and literary skills, carefully crafts a rhetoric that paradoxically joins remarkable charity with ­worldly-wise irony.”12 Viewed as literary art and as political artfulness, the words that Margaret reports as hers and her father’s are crafted to be understood relatively, depending 6. Marion ­Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 19. 7. Stephen M. Foley, “Scenes of Speaking and Technologies of Writing in More’s Tower Letters,” Moreana 135–6 (1998): 7–24 8. John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 239. 9. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 239–41. 10. Katherine Gardiner Rodgers, “Thomas More as Witness in The Tower Letters,” Moreana 46, no. 176 (June 2009): 31–38. 11. Joshua Avery, “ ‘Irony and Charity Are Met Together’: A Puzzle in Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington,” Moreana 46, no. 176 (June 2009): 65–76. 12. Avery, “ ‘Irony and Charity,’ ” 65.



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upon how they are heard and by whom. The voices of the letter develop personae for Margaret and More, and the performance of roles weaves the problems of authenticity, like those of voice and authorship, into the rhetorical fabric of the letter. How do the rhetorical personae correspond to the intentions of the corresponding historical persons? Was Margaret’s authorship of this family letter a mask for her father’s intervention on his own behalf? Did Margaret take the oath with some kind of mental reservation in order to continue to communicate with her father in the Tower? These open questions attend “The Letter to Alington” in its time and in ours because they circulate around the circumstances of its composition, the product of rhetorical modes that allow for ­self-expression without ­self-incrimination. The king, his ministers, the church at home and abroad, the courts of Europe, More’s family and friends, the general public—all were curious in the early months of his imprisonment to learn what Thomas More would chose to do, having been made a spectacle by the king he now defies. When More states that he speaks and acts only for himself, does he mean what he says, and only that? What are his friends and family to do for themselves and on his behalf? If they swear the oath, do they mean it a­ ll-in-all or only in part? More and his circle attract this attention because their circumstances reflect the choices that so many in the realm had been facing as a result of the state imposition of an act of conscience. Under these circumstances, the written speeches of the dialogue in the letter represent Margaret’s and More’s voices virtually and not absolutely, much as a computer technology simulates a virtual reality. The voices are “theirs,” but they are never merely or entirely More and Margaret. The finely articulated voices of the letter become part of the evidence of who the virtual “Margaret” and “More” are. And with all due respect to Chambers’s common sense, to state that the speeches “are” Margaret or More absolutely is to take a short cut around the artful ambiguities of rhetoric. This essay will explore some of the rhetorical conditions—impersonation, reportage, allusion, and argument—that allow the voices of the letter, through its art and artfulness, “virtually” to ring true. In this sense the “virtual Margaret” and “virtual More” of the letter stand for the totality of strategies that create its complex rhetoric. One such strategy is that Margaret’s voice, in contrast to More’s (though informed by his intellectual and spiritual discipline) echoes, virtually, the voices of family and friends, of the household and community, to represent a consensus of living voices, against which More has closed the wicket. Another is More’s stance for conscience that is carefully crafted in the dialogue by his appeal to the textual authorities he carries with

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him in the “virtual” library of his memory. His voice in the dialogue traces his writings and the writings of those he habitually cites in inscribing a consensus fidelium. His voice contains the textual traces of the voices of others. More’s role in the letter, which Gerald Wegemer calls a “dialogue of conscience,”13 emerges, like that of Socrates, as absolute for truth, but its absoluteness is inscribed by textual authority, returning ad fontes, and allowing the voices of the scripture and the fathers to speak virtually for More. Margaret’s role, like that of Crito (only more determined and vocal), is to advocate for the living voices that call More to consider carefully the choices he has made that have brought him to imprisonment and loss of property and that threaten worse. Through these voicings, Margaret and More parry one another in the dialogue. Each recognizes the distinctness of the other voice and acknowledges the power of the other’s argument, and so, in an artfully touching reversal at the climax of the dialogue, there is a partial exchange of virtual roles as Margaret turns to textual authority and More to Margaret’s rhetoric of family and friendship.

The Voice of the Huntsman and the Virtual World of the Letter Sir Thomas Audley, More’s shallow and calculating successor as Lord Chancellor, understood the dangerous circumstances of the moment with a keen sense of power. He knew More and his family well enough to manipulate their vulnerability by putting pressure on More to swear to the Act of Succession and using his family to do it. As he tests his rhetorical skills in the arts of power against his fallen predecessor, the fledgling chancellor stages a performance that foregrounds questions of determining who is speaking, saying what one means, and meaning what one says. Like Margaret and More, we learn of Audley’s work through the brilliant reportage of Alice Alington, More’s ­step-daughter, in her letter to Margaret.14 Assuming the pose of a friend of More and of his family, the contriving royal 13. Thomas More, Four Last Things / The Supplication of Souls / A Dialogue on Conscience, ed. Gerard Wegemer (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Scepter Publishers, 2002), 9. See also the excellent outline of the two Alington letters that Wegemer has prepared. Gerald Wegemer, https://essentialmore.org/­wp-content/uploads/­Dialogue-ofConscience-Study-Guide.pdf, accessed April 7, 2022. 14. Rastell, “Alice Alington to Margaret Roper,” pp. 100–102; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 205, pp. 511–13. This brief letter, from Alice Alington to Margaret Roper, is the prior companion piece to the much longer and b­ etter-known reply from Margaret to her ­step-sister Alice.



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servant chooses the right moment and rhetoric to ensure that his manipulations on behalf of Crown and Council will pass through the willing channels of the family to More. As a Cambridgeshire neighbor of the Alingtons, Audley arrived on their estate, Heathcoate Hall, to hunt, appealing to its master through the canons of hospitality. “Then when he had taken hys pleasure and kilde his dere,” Audley summons Alice to the neighboring house, where he had repaired for the night. Her curt account of Audley’s pleasure in his kill makes clear her recognition that this was an invitation she could not refuse: “the which I could not say naye to, for me thought he dyd byd me heartelye: and most especially, because I would speake to him for my father.”15 The meaning of “for” in the phrase “for her father” measures the dangers and uncertainties she faces. She wishes to speak with Audley because of her father’s situation, on behalf of her father, in defense of her father, in her father’s place. When her time to speak comes, she reminds Audley of how good he had recently been to her father in the hope that he would continue to be so. But instead of reassuring her, Audley redirects the conversation by impersonating a teller of merry tales, a stratagem so many times deployed by More to trace the ongoing inversions of wisdom and folly. Audley ventriloquizes such tales in the sight of his family in order to tweak More on his obstinacy, suggesting in his parody that More is not playing the right part. Audley will speak a part that sounds like one of More’s in order to bring More around to speaking as the state wishes him to. Alice renders for her readers, Margaret and More and all those to whom the letter might pass, the polite attention and discretion she showed to Audley. She at first lets Audley’s tales stand on their own. She recounts the first tale—the wise men who prove fools by staying out of the rain—as told by Audley in the first person, as if he were the author, a sign of misappropriation and a rhetorical positioning that allows his voice to ring all the more hollow when he laughs at himself: “When this tale was tolde, my Lord dyd laugh very merely.” Alice then seizes upon the moment of ­self-congratulation and false merriment to press for the hope that Audley “woulde be good lord vnto my father when he sawe hys tyme.” He curtly replies by alluding to her father’s obstinacy, followed by the recital of another tale—the lion, the ass, and the wolf—which ends in the ­first-person address of the wolf, clearly a veiled threat: “and than if that be so, than shall my conscience be thus, that the cowe doth seme to me now but woorth a grote. And than if the cowe be but woorth a grote, than is the calfe but woorth 15. Rastell, “Alice Alington to Margaret Roper,” 100/11–101/2; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 205, p. 512.

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.ii. pence. So did the woolfe eate both the cowe & the calfe.” She recognizes his disingenuousness: “Now my good sister, hath not my lord tolde me .ij. prety fables.” Indeed, she was so taken aback in surprise and distaste that she “wist not what to say, for I was abashed of this annswer.”16 Alice’s own voice, poised with reluctant hope and consuming fear, has repeated the unctuous and false wisdom of her powerful interlocutor and what she disparages as his pretty fables, since she recognizes that they were told in order to be transmitted to her father in the Tower. The pretext, then, for Margaret’s letter to her sister Alington is the close reading of her account of Audley’s “hunt” and the study of its virtual rhetoric. What will it mean to More, when he reads it over twice and points out “euery word”?17 How will More interpret Audley’s impersonation of a virtual More? As Audley had implied, this is an opportunity for the family to exert influence on More. But his low contrivance also opens up an opportunity for More’s defense. How can More assert his authenticity and become the owner of his own voice in response to his impersonation by Audley? The Crown wishes to appropriate More’s proper name by forcing him to swear to the oath. But might it be possible for him to reclaim his good name without incurring graver risk?

Margaret’s Familiar Letter Margaret’s letter opens without the usual epistolary niceties, unlike the conventional greeting of Alice, who was also writing to Margaret in a hurry: “SYster Roper with all my heart I recommend me vnto you. . . .”18 The salutation may have fallen off in manuscript transmission, as it has from other letters in the Tower correspondence—an occurrence more likely than that it was never composed. But in any case, the headless letter denotes a familiar understanding, since the rhetorical persons are well known to one another and, slowly and subtly, Margaret’s letter creates virtual reminders of the world that she and Alice and all More’s family and friends inhabit. Indeed, her general strategy in the letter is to allude to the certain positions held by family and friends in regard to More’s refusal of the oath but not to name them. There is no need to publish the names 16. Rastell, “Alice Alington to Margaret Roper,” 101/19–102/4; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 205, p. 513. 17. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 106/11; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 516. 18. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 100/7; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 205, p. 512.



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that she and More can refer to in conversation, after all. What is important is to demonstrate their unanimity and their reasoning. The letter begins with the reasons for disclosing to More Alice’s letter—“me thought it both conuenient and necessary.” Far from presuming to act naturally or “absolutely” as herself, Margaret carefully breaks down her virtual train of thought: Conuenient, that he might thereby see your louing laboure taken for hym. Necessarye, that sith he might perceiue therby, that if he stande still in this scruple of hys conscience, (as it is at the least wyse called by many that are his frendes and wyse) al his frendes that seme most able to dooe him good, either shall finally forsake him, or peraduenture not be hable in dede to do him anye good at all.19

It is convenient (appropriate and proper) that a loving father read the words of his loving stepdaughter. But More’s refusal to swear also makes approaching him necessary at this particular moment: Audley’s taunting interference may be the chance for More to consider once more the counsel and practical support of his family and friends and for them to act on his behalf. Margaret then establishes for Alice and for More himself (as well as other potential readers) a virtual account of the present circumstances in the Tower at this critical moment. She gives, for example, a description of More’s health. Alice needs to know, and More, by seeing his health represented, needs to be reminded that he is not well: And for these causes, at my next being with him after your letter receiued, when I had a while talked with him, fyrst of his diseases bothe in his brest of olde, & his reynes nowe, by reason of grauell and stone, & of the crampe also that dyuers nightes grypeth hym in his legges.20

This report is not exactly news, of course—More himself complains of these same symptoms in earlier correspondence—but the report grounds the letter by creating a virtual here and now. Margaret goes on to represent the routine of worship she and her father shared in the Tower, and she likens their prayers together with those of family and friends in their own homes, as if they were all present together and making merry in familiar conversation: 19. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 103/9–104/3; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 514. 20. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 104/4–7; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, pp. 514–15.

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and as one in his case mighte, metelye well minded, after oure .vii. Psalmes & the letany said, to sit & talke & be merye, beginning fyrst with other thinges, of the good coumfort of my mother, & the good order of my brother & all my sisters, disposing themself euery day more & more to set little by the world, & drawe more & more to God, & that his housholde, hys neighbors, & other good frendes abrode, diligently remembred him in their prayers. . . .21

Although prayers may set the world aside, Margaret virtually recalls the secular life (and here surely More is as much the audience as Alice) of family, household, neighbors, and friends. And while it may simply be the usual practice to pray for family and friends, this report of the daily prayers introduces the theme or argument of friendship and love that Margaret will offer in the letter. Indeed, Margaret extends the prayers to begin that argument, reminding her father of the common sense of friends, by asking him straight out how he thinks his ­well-learned friends would view him should he continue to refuse the king’s will, a rhetorical strategy that demands that he, even if momentarily, set aside his own habit and thoughts about himself and imagine how others think of him: I [Margaret] added vnto this: I pray god good father that theyr prayers & ours & your owne therwith, may purchase of god the grace, that you may in this great matter (for which you stand in this trouble, and for your trouble all we also that loue you) take such a waye by time, as standing with the pleasure of god, may content & please the king, whom ye haue alwaye founden so singularly gracious vnto you, that if ye shoulde stifly refuse to doe the thing that wer his pleasure, which god not displeased you might do (as many great wise & well learned men say that in this thing you may) it wold both be a great blot in your woorship in euery wise mannes opinion, and as my selfe haue heard some say (such as your selfe haue alway taken for well learned and good) a perill vnto your soule also.22

There are qualifications built into Margaret’s language—the uncertainty of the subjunctive and the recursive double negative of “God not displeased”—but the thrust of her argument is common sense and shared wisdom. She also makes her faith in God and her confidence in her father’s intelligence and learning the basis for ceasing to argue the case, a rhetorical ploy that again turns upon More, placing upon him the demand to think as others have been thinking.

21. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 104/10–15; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 515. 22. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 104/15–25 Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 515.



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But as for that point (father) wil I not be bolde to dispute vpon, sith I truste in God and your good mynde that ye will looke surely therto. And your learning I know for suche, that I wot well you can.23

The letter from Alice promises to be the instrument in Margaret’s letter that will bring More to change his mind, returning him to the practical faith and worldly wisdom that his family and friends inhabit: For I assure you father, I haue receiued a letter of late from my sister Alington, by whiche I see well that if ye change not your mind, you are likelye to lose al those frendes that are hable to do you any good. Or if ye leese not their good wils, you shal at the least wise lese the effect therof, for any good that they shalbe hable to dooe you.24

If Audley’s intervention suggested a threat, Margaret’s approach to her father is a warning.

The Virtual Library of Conscience More’s response begins with the startling biblical allusion, “what maistres Eue (as I called you when you came first) hath my daughter Alington plaid the serpent with you, & with a letter set you a woorke to come tempt your father again. . . ?”25 This is the first of several passages in which More replies to Margaret’s appeals to common sense by opening up the virtual library of his learning, letting other voices of authority be heard apart from the voices of family and friends. The reference to Eve and the serpent is a coy, patriarchal reminder of female frailty, of course, but the reference to Genesis 3 is also a gentle, teasing, and prudent reminder of the original sin to which More himself is heir. Any momentary sense of relief that his wit provides is canceled by the gravity of fallen nature: “And after that, he loked sadly agayne.”26 He explains that if he could in conscience take the oath, he would, but his conscience will not allow him to. Here, as throughout the letter, More demonstrates how his conscience is instructed by the labors of reason: 23. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 104/25–28; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 515. 24. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 104/31–34; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 515. 25. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 105/1–3; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 515. 26. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 105/5; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 515.

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But sith standing my conscience I can in no wyse dooe it, & that for the instruction of my conscience in the matter, I haue not sleightly looked, but by many yeres studied & aduisedly considred, & neuer could yet see nor heare that thing, nor I thinke I neuer shal, that could enduce mine own mind to think otherwise than I do.27

When More states that he looks only to God for guidance in this matter, while knowing that there are men who consider him to be following a “foolish scruple,” the letter carefully establishes the importance of taking that accusation seriously—“all the nobles of this realme, & almost all other men too”28—have sworn without scruple while More and Fisher alone refuse. This studied respect for Audley’s disguised accusations is clearly strategic: it creates a virtual record of More’s positioning of himself in relation to Crown and Council, and it thus forecloses any inference that Audley’s intervention was made in less than good faith. The virtual record also confirms Margaret’s good will towards Audley and the state, as well as her love for her father in her heartfelt plea that he attend carefully to actions and consequences. Yet it leaves open the possibility that there actually may be support for More’s position among his friends and family, albeit limited. The letter then supplies virtual reportage of how More reads Alice’s letter as she and Margaret had hoped he would—intently and with all the power of his learning. And with this word I toke him your letter, that he might see my wordes wer not fayned, but spoken of his mouth, whom he much loueth & estemeth highly. Therupon he read ouer your letter. And when he came to the end, he began it afresh & read it ouer again. And in the reading he made no maner haste, but aduised it laisorly, & pointed euery word.29

Before responding to the letter itself, More shows due respect for both Alice and Margaret by demonstrating that he does attend to the feelings of family and friends: the letter supplies a virtual account of its circumstances that reaffirms his love for his family. He recalls how he had brought Alice up as his own daughter and how she feels towards him as a natural daughter. He thanks God for Alice’s two children and holds them all in his prayers as their “daily bede man.” He also follows Margaret’s strategy in affirming his belief in Audley’s good will and his ongoing loyalty to his prince, and he addresses how fairly he had been 27. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 105/13–17; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 516. 28. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 105/28; 106/2–3; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 516. 29. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 106/7–11; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 517.



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treated in accusations arising from the matter of Elizabeth Barton, admitting that Audley had been his “good lord” at that time and offering praise for Cromwell for having been his “good master” in the case as well.30 Those two statesmen are likewise in his prayers. More then begins with slow, scholarly deliberation to take apart the case that Audley has made by returning ad fontes. He employs the method of humanist castigation, and the doors of memory open up within the walls of the Tower a virtual library of informed belief. Audley has made the argument for the oath on the basis of false learning. The first instance is a misunderstanding of Aesop’s fable of the wise men, the fools, and the rain and the importance of being more practical than wise. More places the fools and the rain in the context where he and Audley had heard the tale as recited by the late Cardinal Wolsey: “The fyrst fable of the rayne that washte away al their wittes that stode abrode when it fell, I haue heard oft ere this: It was a tale so often told among the kinges counsel by my lorde Cardinall when hys grace was chauncellour, that I cannot lightlye forgeatte it.”31 Wolsey used the fable to argue for funding a war on the French against counter arguments in Council, contending that just as the wise who took refuge in caves against the rains that make all men fools, hoping to rule over the fools left outside, were, when they emerged in the sunshine, to be sorely beaten by the foolish, so would the English be were they to refrain from an otherwise foolish continental conflict. More relished turning the jest on both the late cardinal and on the arrogant living chancellor: “this fable for hys parte, dydde in hys dayes help the king & the realme to spend manye a fayre penye. But that geare is passed, and hys grace is gone our lorde assoyle his soule.”32 More’s emphasis on loss and expense is clear. The fable is out of date, and the cost of the king’s greed—and Wolsey’s—is palpable. The implication here is that it is Audley who has played the fool. More has called Audley’s virtual, impersonating bluff. At this point once again, the prisoner in the Tower opens up his library of memory and turns the leaf from Aesop to Aeschylus to Terence, from fable to tragedy to comedy, creating a subtle argument from the virtual arts of allusion: Non sum Oedipus sed Morus, which name of myne what it signi[f]eyeth in Greke, I nede not tell you. But I truste my lorde reckoneth me amonge the fooles, and 30. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 106/26, 28; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 517. 31. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 106/36–107/3; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 518. 32. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 107/17–19; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 518.

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so reckon I my self, as my name is in greke. And I finde I thanke God, causes not a fewe, wherfore I so should in very dede.33

Again, More speaks with coy learning. He will not be an Oedipus, who, although he is able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, proves tragically wrong. Instead, he will assume the role of and recite the lines of the servant Davus in Terence’s Andria, who proclaims when asked to solve an unsolvable problem concerning adultery, “Davus sum, non Oedipus.”34 More will not be distracted by Audley’s riddles. Audley had crudely attempted to capitalize upon More’s role playing and on his ­well-known play on his name. More virtually reclaims his own good name, “which name of myne what it signi[f]ieth in Greke, I nede not tel you,” and its demonstration of folly as a Christian virtue: “But I truste my lorde reckoneth me amonge the fooles, and so reckon I my self, as my name is in greke.” The virtual strategy here, as More continues to unravel the implications of Audley’s impersonation, is that More will be saved from riddle and false reasoning and from tragic error by appealing not to Greek and Latin learning alone but to scripture and yet another fable of the fathers: I beseche our lord make vs all so wise as that we may euerye man here so wiselye rule our self, in this tyme of teares, thys vale of miserye, thys symple wretched world (in which as Boece sayth, one man to be prowde that he beareth rule ouer other men, is much like as one mouce wold be proude to beare a rule ouer other mice in a barne).35

More’s abbreviated reference to Boethius’s reflections, in the Consolation of Philosophy (Book 2, prose 6), on the differences between learning to rule over one’s self and desiring to rule over others captures Boethius’s Aesopian animal analogy: Suppose, now, that in the mouse tribe there should rise up one claiming rights and powers for himself above the rest, would ye not laugh consumedly? Yet if thou lookest to his body alone, what creature canst thou find more feeble than man, who oftentimes is killed by the bite of a fly, or by some insect creeping into the inner passage of his system!36

33. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 108/5–8; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 519. 34.Terence, The Woman of Andros, The ­Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch, ed. and trans. John Barsby, Loeb Classical Library 22 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1.2.34. 35. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 108/16–20; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 519–20. 36. Rogers cites Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, Lib II, Prosa VI.147; in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 63.1:703. The English is from The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, trans. H. R. James (London: Elliot Stock, 1897), 76.



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But More suppresses Boethius’s historical exempla, the first of several times More’s virtual strategy is to argue by omission, dropping a clue to his learned readers to supply the missing element: Canst thou force from its due tranquillity the mind that is firmly composed by reason? A tyrant thought to drive a man of free birth to reveal his accomplices in a conspiracy, but the prisoner bit off his tongue and threw it into the furious tyrant’s face; thus, the tortures which the tyrant thought the instrument of his cruelty the sage made an opportunity for heroism. Moreover, what is there that one man can do to another which he himself may not have to undergo in his turn? We are told that Busiris, who used to kill his guests, was himself slain by his guest, Hercules. Regulus had thrown into bonds many of the Carthaginians whom he had taken in war; soon after he himself submitted his hands to the chains of the vanquished. Then, thinkest thou that man hath any power who cannot prevent another’s being able to do to him what he himself can do to others?37

The passage on the assassination of the tyrant is suppressed by More out of strategic decorum, but it registers silently in textual memory among the w ­ ell-learned men and women of More’s circle and clearly suggests that More will continue ruling over himself and resisting tyranny. More closes his rebuttal of Audley’s fable by turning to Christian parable, a virtual layering of voices that confirms the words of learned men with the Word. Like the five wise virgins of Matthew 25:1–13, More has reserved the oil in his lamp for the moment it is needed: “god I say geue vs the grace so wisely to rule our self here, that when we shall hence in hast to mete that great spouse we be not taken slepers, & for lacke of light in our lampes, sh[u]t out of heauen among the .v. foolishe vyrgins.”38 More’s scholarly refutation continues to draw upon his virtual library as he rises to the defense of conscience by distinguishing it from mere scruple and asserts true textual scholarship against false, establishing his own authority as he dismantles Audley’s. In a swift humanist castigatio, More, like Valla or Budé, determines that the fable of the ass’s confession attributed by Audley to Aesop cannot have been written by the pagan Greek: The second fable Marget semeth not to be Esopes. For by that the matter goeth all vpon confession, it semeth to be fained since christendom began. For in Grece before Christes daies they vsed not confession, no more the men than, than the beastes now. And Esope was a Greke, & died long ere Christ was borne.39 37. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 76. 38. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 108/20–23; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 520. 39. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 108/24–27; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 520.

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The witty castigation establishes more than its surface claims, reaching toward a word—confession—that separates pagans from Christians, false from true faith. By doing so, it establishes an authentic virtual voice for More in contrast to the shallow ­role-playing of Audley. When More retells the tale of the wolf, the sheep, and the ass in his own words, he does so in order to make clear that Audley is effectively ignorant of the Christian dispensation and the origins of the forgiveness that makes confession, the conformity of man’s word to God, an efficacious sacrament. More then reshapes the moral to point to his own position on conscience. For whan [whom] his lordship vnderstandeth by the lyon & the woolfe, which both twayn confessed themselfe, of rauin & deuowring of al that came to their handes, & the tone enlarged his conscience at his pleasure in the construccion of his penance, nor whom by the good discrete confessor that enioyned the tone a little penance, & the tother none at all, and sente the poore Asse to the bysshop, of all these thinges can I nothing tel. But by the foolishe scrupelous Asse, that had so sore a conscience, for the taking of a straw for hungar out of hys maisters shoo, my lordes other woordes of my scruple declare, that his lordshyp merely meant that by me: signifying (as it seemeth by that similitude) that of ouersight & folye, my scrupulous conscience taketh for a gret perilous thynge towarde my soule, if I should sweare this othe, which thing as his lordship thinketh, wer in dede but a tryfle.40

More is also reclaiming the purloined genre of the merry tale as his own and reasserting his own signature role as the wise fool who tells it. This merry tale will also figure in the Dialogue of Comfort and be attributed to that simple Christian woman Mother Maud, though More omits out of prudence the character of the ­Lion-King, just as he had suppressed the Boethian tyrant. In this later retelling, he clearly foregrounds the overlap of the letter and the Dialogue by borrowing a classical adage on the very practice of imitation. More’s avatar in the Dialogue, Anthony, introduces Maud’s tale with a reference to Pliny. Anthony states: [Maud] was wont whan she sat by the fier with vs, to tell vs that were children many childish tale / but as plinius sayth that there is no boke so lightely bad, but that some good thyng a man may pyk out therof / so I think that ther is al most no tale so folysh, but that yet on one mater or other, to some purpose it may hap to serue.41 40. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 108/29–109/8. 41. Thomas More, Dialogue of Comfort, ed. Martz, 114.



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The reference is to Pliny the Elder, as recorded by Pliny the Younger: “Dicere etiam solebat nullum esse librum tam malum ut non aliqua parte prodesset.”42 (He used to say, No book was so bad but that some good might be got out of it). More began composing the Dialogue of Comfort at about the same time that the “Letter to Alice Alington” was being written,43 and its dialogue reflects in general the circumstances, words, and personae of the letter. Through the reference to Pliny’s commonplace, More signals that he has picked out the good from Audley’s words in the letter, putting a loaded version of the tale in the mouth of his homely spokeswoman.

Conscience and Error in the Tale of “Cumpany” More’s tale of “Cumpany,” told for Margaret’s benefit as he argues the case for conscience, occupies a large central place in the development of the letter. This tale of the surprising emergence of a single man of conscience on a jury dramatizes the doctrine of legal conscientia. The tale thus makes indirectly the argument that More eschews in his silence. His voice as the teller of the tale is mingled with the voice of Margaret as its audience and scribe. The tale of conscience is recited in a virtual rhetoric that connects its positive theme to the parallel problems of error, misrecognition, misnaming, and misunderstanding. Margaret retells it in the letter as if she did not at first fully recall it or entirely understand its legal implications. She has difficulty recalling even the name, and she makes much of her childish errors: I wene I can skant tell it you agayne, because it hangeth vpon some tearmes and ceremonies of the law. But as farre as I can call to mind my fathers tale was this, that ther is a court belongyng of course vnto euerye fayre, to dooe iustice in such thynges as happen within the same. Thys courte hath a prety fond name, but I canot happen on it: but it begynneth with a pye, & the remenant goeth much like the name of a knyght that I haue knowen I wis, and I trowe you too, for he hath been at my fathers ofte ere this, at such tyme as you wer there, a metely tall 42. C. Plini Caecili Secundi: Epistularum Libri Decem, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), Liber III, Epistula 5, section 10. 43. Martz and Manley view the overlapping tales as a terminus a quo for the Dialogue of Comfort, stating: “The date of Alice Alington’s letter . . . is the only piece of contemporary external evidence we have for the time of composition of any portion of A Dialogue of Comfort” (Dialogue of Comfort, 383–84). Guy writes in A Daughter’s Love: “During August [1534] More was hard at work on a new manuscript, A Dialogue of Comfort. . .” (237). He adds: “Margaret herself had inspired this fable after receiving a letter from Alice Alington . . . (238).

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black man, hys name was syr William Pounder. But tut let the name of the court go for thys once, or call it if ye will a courte of pye syr William Pownder44

Her errors are artful in foregrounding her affected confusion. She makes hash of the name of a court that makes a hash of justice, the “court of dusty feet” (in Law French cour pié poudré, also known in colloquial English as Pie Powder), occasional tribunals associated with seasonal markets like Bartholomew Fair. The connection she makes between the court and the knight known to her as Sir William Pownder is due to the arbitrary similarity in the sound of the names, hardly the basis for arguing the certainty of conscience. Margaret’s misnaming is a subtle preamble to what can be called “the play of misnaming” in More’s tale. The whole tale concerns justice and conscience misnamed—the figure of “Cumpany”” turns out to embody “conscience” rather than “going along”—and that misnaming is a virtual means of suggesting that by urging More to shape his conscience to the judgment of well learned men, Margaret has engaged in an error of misrecognition: keeping company with the judgment of one’s friends is a travesty of conscience. The theme of misrecognition is embodied in the cultural and linguistic differences among the characters of the tale. Some “northern men” are determined to deliver a guilty verdict on an anonymous man whom they believe has cheated them. They expect the quiet London man of the jury named Cumpany to agree with their verdict, and they are surprised when he does not. The scene of misunderstanding is marked by the use of phonetic spelling to represent their Northern dialect: “whare wonnes thou? Be not we aleuen here, & thou ne but ene la alene, & all we agreed?” 45 (Where do you come from? Be we not eleven here and you but one all alone, and all we agreed?). They do not understand why the good fellow refuses to go along, although ironically their own words are hard to understand. They are even more confused when they learn that he is ironically named “Cumpany.” One might expect a man named “Cumpany” to go along with the will of others like an agreeable fellow. He proves to the contrary to be a figure of conscience. More’s game of naming and misnaming continues in the argument that Cumpany makes. He observes that if he goes along with them, the eleven may expect themselves to go to heaven and he to the devil because they are presumably following their consciences but are asking him to violate his. When he asks them if they would play the role of good company if they were in his position, he reveals the name of one 44. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 110/7–16; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 521. 45. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 111/14–15; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 523.



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of the northern men, Maister Dykonson— “that was one of the northern mens names”46—which is a sign of his abject moral status, for “dickens” is a euphemism for the devil.47 If Cumpany is misnamed, Dykonson is a witty nickname on More’s part. More’s dizzying play of nomenclature here, which Margaret ventriloquizes so well (despite having protested that she misunderstands the legal situation), does not confuse or disconcert her: once again the rhetoric of the letter inscribes virtually the moral problems that it explores. When More asks her to tell him if he should act otherwise than that poor unlearned man Company, Margaret distinguishes between judging those who go along out of mere fellowship or company and giving respect to those of good faith and learning who have signed the oath, which is tantamount to a kind of general consensus of counsel that More has so often argued for: But father, they that thynke you shold not refuse to sweare the thyng, that you see so manye so good menne and so well learned sweare before you, meane not that you shoulde sweare to beare theym felowshyp, nor to passe with theym for good coumpanye: but that the credence that you may with reason geue to theyr persones for theyr aforesayde qualities, shoulde well moue you to thinke the oth such of it selfe, as euery man maye well sweare withoute perill of theyr soule, if theyr own priuate conscience to the contrarye be not the lette: and that ye well oughte and haue good cause to chaunge youre own conscience, in confyrmynge your owne conscience to the conscience of so many other, namely being such as you knowe they be. And syth it is also by a lawe made by the parlement commaunded, they thynke that you be vpon the peryll of youre soule, bounden to change and refourme your conscience, and confyrme your owne as I sayd vnto other mennes.48

Margaret’s reasoning is acute and anticipates her father’s. She does not ignore the validity of his conscience but insists that reason demands that he confirm it. “Confirm” is the key term here. The Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. confirm, 2a) provides the relevant usage, which relates to general validation: “To make valid by formal authoritative assent (a thing already instituted or ordained); to rati46. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 111/23; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 523 47. See the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. “dickens,” n2.: “Apparently substituted for ‘devil’, as having the same initial sound. It has been suggested to be worn down < devilkin or deilkin, but no evidence of this has been found. Dickin or Dickon, diminutive of Dick (compare Wilkin, Watkin, Jankin or Jenkin, Simkin) was in use long before the earliest known instance of this, and Dickens as a surname was probably also already in existence.” 48. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 112/20–32; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 524.

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fy, sanction.” Thus, in arguing for “confyrmynge [i.e., proving] your owne conscience to the conscience of so many other,” Margaret scores a point, and More recognizes her skill in the virtual arts of argument: “the part that you playe, you playe it not muche a mysse.”49 In arguing against him, Margeret has taken up a part—the man of law delivering an expert argument—much like those she has seen him play. In the exchange of roles, he has not so far outwitted her.

Conscience and Disputed Doctrine The next stage in the virtual action of the letter is for More to shift again from fable and tale to the Word and from simple moral error to questions of personal and doctrinal uncertainty. He turns another page and cites church fathers and scripture to establish the relation of conscience to consensus in response to Margaret. Here More shifts from satire to scholarship, from venal errors that may be castigated for ignorance or mocked with irony, like those of fictitious northern men, to problems that arise when doctrine remains uncertain, from errors of folly to those of reason, and finally to the case of secular law that may conflict with faith and doctrine, as More believes the Act does. Here, as John Guy observes, “More develops forcibly his opinion, already expressed during several of his conversations with Henry about Luther while he was still a royal secretary and councilor, that ‘conscience’ has to be shaped in line with the decrees of the General Council of the Church and the ‘general faith’ of Christendom as a whole.”50 Now if it so happe, that in anye particuler parte of chrystendome, there be a lawe made, that be suche, as for some parte thereof some menne thinke that the law of god cannot beare it, and some other thinke yes, the thing being in suche maner in question, that thorow diuers quarters of chrystendom, some that are good men and cunning, bothe of our owne dayes and before oure dayes thynke some one way, and some other of lyke learnynge and goodnesse thynke the contrarye, in thys case he that thinketh agaynste the lawe, neither maye sweare that lawe lawefullye was made, standynge hys owne conscience to the contrarye, nor is bounden vpon payne of Goddes displeasure to chaunge hys owne conscience therein, for anye particuler lawe made any where, other than by the generall counsayle, or by a general fayth growen by the woorkinge of God vniuersally 49. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 112/33–34; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 524. 50. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 241.



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thorowe all christen nacions: nor other authoritie than one of these twayne (except speciall reuelacion and expresse commaundement of God) sith the contrarye opinions of good menne and well learned, as I putte you the case, made the vnderstandynge of the scryptures doubtefull, I can see none that lawefully maye commaunde and compell anye man to chaunge his own opinion, and to translate his own conscience from the tone syde to the tother.51

When reasonable men, More argues, in our time and throughout Christian history, disagree and put the certain understanding of the Word in doubt, room is opened up for conscience. More’s virtual rhetoric here traces the difficulties and subtleties of his position. Note the appeal to the hypothetical (“if it so happe,” “anye particuler parte”), the avoidance of particularity (“for some parte,” “some menne”), and the long and complex sets of conditions that lead up to the final assertion of the case that one may not be compelled to depart from conscience, a single period of 223 words. More is constrained by caution, “covering his tracks,” Guy states, “for fear of the Act.”52 But, curiously, More’s interest falls on cases that are doubtful in terms of consensus and general faith. The example that More gives from the history of the disagreement in doctrine is one far removed from his own situation: the differences Bernard and Anselm held over the Immaculate Conception is indeed a dispute that is not regulated by council or consensus and that allows an appeal to conscience. But the parallel to More’s own case is skewed. Bernard and Anselm differed on the Immaculate Conception in different times and places: Bernard opposed the institution of the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1140, and Anselm, who died in 1099, was commonly believed to be the author of a treatise in support of the doctrine.53 There are differences in practice between England and France on this issue, but there is no conflict between secular law and the church—differences that More’s chooses to ignore. At this stage in More’s argument in the letter, he resorts at times to a rhetoric of withholding and incompleteness. When the law constraining More, the Act of Succession itself, comes up, More maintains his silence: “But Margaret, for what causes I refuse the othe, that thyng (as I haue often tolde you) I wil neuer shew you, neither you nor no bodye elles, excepte the kinges hyghnes should like to 51. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 113/13–29; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 525. 52. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 241. 53. Alvaro Da Silva, Last Letters of Thomas More (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 72, notes that De Conceptione Sanctae Marie was likely written by Eadmer, Anselm’s disciple and biographer, and that another Anselm, a nephew of Anselm of Canterbury, was among the early advocates of the feast.

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commaund me.”54 More affirms that were the king to command, he would obey, but he defends his refusal to swere “for mo causes than one” by pointing to the discrepant fact that of those best learned men who have sworn to the oath, many also had before “playne affyrmed the contrarye . . . and that vpon theyr trouthe and theyr learninge than [then, i.e., before swearing], and that not in haste nor sodaynely, but often and after greate diligence doone to seeke and fynde out the trouthe.”55 As More later explains, he takes as his example their prior resistance rather than their latter obeisance. He avoids accusing them of any potential breach of faith, hypocrisy, or betrayal, though he infers that some might have been afraid under the circumstances. This stance, as Joshua Avery has contended, is riddling: “While refusing to assert that the ‘wise and well learned men’ are being false to their consciences, he also avoids stating that they are behaving correctly.”56 More continues to argue from doctrine, but he employs a virtual rhetoric that introduces questions of doubt and error, appealing to the “holy doctors and sayntes, whiche to be with God in heauen long a go no good christen man douteth, whose bokes yet at his day remayn here in mens handes,”57 an argument that draws a line between prior truth and current belief, between the certainty of the holiness of the doctors and saints and the uncertain status of their writings in the minds of the present day readers. Finally, these oblique claims fall to the side and constitute a contrast to the directness of More’s virtual rhetoric when he concludes his response to Margaret’s request for “confirmation” by stating in effect that he alone can confirm himself. Here More’s language inscribes virtually the markers of an act of conscience. He has, as Margaret has asked, weighed his circumstances carefully, including the loss of “goodes, landes, and life both,” and his final affirmation is not based upon reasonable authority or other men’s words but upon his faith that he is as sure of his conscience in refusing the oath as he is that “god is in heauen.”58

54. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 114/31–33; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 526. 55. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 115/2–6; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 527. 56. Avery, “ ‘Irony and Charity,’ ” 73. 57. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 116/12–14; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 528. 58. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 116/27; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 528.



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Margaret on the Bridge of Fools, More and the Cost of the Tower At this climax of the dialogue, More at first attempts to return with gentle irony to the figure of Eve and the serpent. But he quickly recognizes that his riddling arguments and unyielding affirmation have saddened Margaret. Margaret reports the exchange by quoting his words and also by addressing Alice once more in order to explain her feelings in her own words, woman to woman: When he saw me sit with this very sadde, as I promise you sister my hearte was full heauye for the perill of his persone, for in fayth I feare not his soule, he smiled vpon me & said: how now daughter Marget? what howe mother Eue? where is your mind nowe? sit not musing with some serpent in youre brest, vpon some new perswasion, to offer father Adam the apple yet once agayne?59

Out of fear for her father’s life and pure love for him, she instantly counters his irony by shifting from her prior appeal to the voices of the living, which More has rejected by exposing their prior beliefs, to adopting More’s mode of textual or prior authority, another exchange of roles, which, in this case, also involves a shift in ground from church history to literary romance. Margaret compares herself to the compelling figure of the fallen Creseyde, who comes to a tragic recognition of her conflicted position even as she is powerless to change it: “In good fayth father quod I, I can no ferther goe, but am (as I trowe Cresede saith in Chaucer) comen to Dulcarnon euen at my wittes ende.”60 Rogers follows the example of earlier scholars in referring to Creseyde’s complaint in Book III of Chaucer’s Troilus and Creseyde: Criseyde answerde, “As wisly God at reste My soule bringe, as me is for hym wo! If that ich hadde grace to do so. And eem, ­y-wis, fayn wolde I doon the beste, But whether that ye dwelle or for him go, I am, til God me bettre mynde sende, At dulcarnoun, right at my wittes ende.”61 59. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 116/33–117/1; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 529. 60. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/1–3; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 529. 61. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Creseyde, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. R. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), lines 925–31. Here is a translation of the lines: “As I hope for God to bring my soul to rest, so I feel for his [Troilus’s] woe. And I should try to do the best for him, if I had the grace to do so. But whether you stay here or go for him, I am, until God sends me a clearer mind, at Dulcarnon, right at the end of my wits.”

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As Nancy Wright has argued, “Margaret’s comparison of herself to the fallen Creseyde is not merely another type of a fallen Eve but an alternative figure of her own discourse.”62 The comparison of herself to Creseyde as a virtual avatar allows Margaret to shift from her father’s patriarchal authority to a position from which she wins a kind of agency by recognizing her apparent powerlessness. In Chaucer’s tale, Pandarus has just conveyed Troilus to Creseyde’s chamber and attempts to persuade her to lure him to her bed against her better judgment. She recognizes that she can act only by consenting to conditions established by men. Margaret likewise recognizes that she is caught between her beloved father and the power of king and state. By “dulcarnoun,” Creseyde refers to the figure of the “­two-horned dilemma” (Arabic Dhū ‘l qarnain, “the owner of the two horns”) regarding the Pythagorean Theorem in book 1 of Euclid’s Elements, Proposition I.47, a term perhaps related to bifurcated illustrations of the theorem. Chaucer’s Pandarus conflates this theorem with the problem on the isosceles triangle commonly known as the pons asinorum (Elements I.5), which he calls the “elefuga,” or “flight [flemynge] of the wretches” (fancifully derived from Greek elegia “misery,” and fuga Latin for “flight”). Pandarus argues that Creseyde is giving in too soon: Quod Pandarus, Yee, nece, wol ye here? Dulcarnoun called is “flemynge of wrecches”; It semeth hard, for wrecches wol not lere For verray slouthe or othere wilful tecches. . . .63

Worthless scholars may be too lazy or stupid to solve such problems, Pandarus claims, but Creseyde is wise enough so that surely the problem is not too hard for her: But ye ben wys, and that we han on honde Nis neither hard, ne skilful to withstonde.64

Pandarus refers here to the metaphor implicit in the name pons asinorum (“bridge of asses”). And indeed, some have found that the diagram used looks like a truss bridge (see figure 10.1). 62. Wright, “Name and Signature,” 250. 63. Chaucer, Troilus and Creseyde, lines 932–35. “Said Pandarus, will you listen? Dulcarnon is called the flight of wretches. It seems hard, because wretches will not learn because of their own sloth or other willful defects.” 64. Chaucer, Troilus and Creseyde, lines 937–38. “But you are wise, and what we have to hand is neither hard nor reasonably put off.”



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A

B F D

C G E

As the first challenging theorem in the Euclid’s Elements, the pons asinorum was so called because it was viewed as a “bridge” to the harder geometry that follows, a test that separates the wise from the stupid, a bridge from which asses fall.65 The notion of a crossing point that separates the wise from fools also bridges Creseyde’s dulcarnon and Margaret’s resolution of her own dilemma. Having played the virtual role of Creseyde, she casts it off and turns to the present historical moment. She does not, like Creseyde, passively accept her fallen state. Instead she actively chooses to fall off the bridge of a dilemma with the fools— namely the More household fool Henry Pattenson—and takes their reasoning for her own, also appropriating her father’s signature pose as the fool: For sith thensaumple of so manye wyse men, cannot in this matter moue you, I se not what to say more, but if I should loke to perswade you with the reason that master Harry Patenson made. For he met one day one of our men, & when he had asked where you wer, & heard that you wer in the towre still, he waxed euen angry with you & sayd: Why? what eyleth him that he wil not sweare? wherefore shoulde he sticke to swere? I haue sworn the oth my self. And so I can in good faith go now no ferther neither, after so many wyse men whom ye take for no saumple, but if I should say like M. Harry: why should you refuse to swere father? for I haue sworn my self.66 65. Euclid 1.5. On the confusion of the dulcarnon and the pons asinorum, see, for example, D. E. Smith, History of Mathematics, vol. 2, p. 284, privately published by Smith in 1925 and available on Internet Archive, https: //archive.org/details/historyofmathema031897mbp; perhaps more easily accessed by the PDF download, https://ia802607.us.archive.org/22/items/historyofmathema031897mbp/historyofmathema031897mbp.pdf. See also A. F. West & H. D. Thompson, “On Dulcarnon, Elefuga and Pons Asinorum as Fanciful Names for Geometrical Propositions,” The Princeton University Bulletin 3, no. 4 (1891): 84–88. 66. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/3–12; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 529.

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According to her practical geometry, Pattenson and Margaret are fools, swearing the oath because they cannot conduct the higher mathematics of faith that Thomas More is calculating. She can go no further. And she does not understand why her father cannot follow her example. Margaret’s hard line here represents a turning point for herself and for More in the dialogue. For the first time, Margaret names two contemporary historical people, herself and Pattenson, as examples of authority for swearing the oath, in contrast to the example of anonymous, ­well-learned men and to More’s reliance upon the authority of the past. More returns briefly to the motif of Margaret as temptress, stating in response to Margaret’s justification of swearing this oath, “That woord was like Eue too, for she offered Adam no woorse fruit than she had eaten her self.”67 But when Margaret perseveres, insisting that More consider carefully again the “merueilous heauy trouble” his refusal to swear entails and the fact that he can still change his mind, since, as Audley had suggested, “the parlement lasteth yet,”68 there is a subtle shift in More’s rhetoric. He leaves aside the trope of wise folly, for Margaret has exhausted it, and he returns instead to the figure of a riddle, thus expanding upon his riddling reliance on the prior faith of those who had sworn, to gospel narratives of spiritual crisis, and also to the very intimacies of family love that Margaret has asked him to take to heart. His w ­ ell-considered stance is not a fool’s dilemma, for “I left not this geare vnthought on,” but an example of how faith and conscience only appear to invert common sense: And albeit I knowe well that if they would make a lawe to doo me any harme, that lawe coulde neuer be lawfull, . . . that concernyng my duetie to my prynce, no man shall dooe me hurte but if he doo me wronge (and than as I tolde you, thys is lyke a ryddle, a case in whiche a man may lese his head and haue no harme). . . .69

The gospel makes sense of such riddles as “a man may lese his head and haue no harme,” and More insists that he has fully accounted for the cost of his decision: “I forgat not in thys matter, the counsell of Chryst in the gospell, that ere I shold begynne to buylde thys castell for the sauegarde of myne owne soule, I shold 67. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/13–14; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 529. 68. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/17; Correspondence, no. 206, p. 529. 69. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/19–23; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, pp. 529–30.



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sytte and rekon what the charge would be.”70 More here virtually reshapes the passage from Luke (14:28) to his circumstances. quis enim ex vobis volens turrem aedificare non prius sedens conputat sumptus qui necessarii sunt si habet ad perficiendum ne, posteaquam posuerit fundamentum, et non potuerit perficere, omnes qui vident, incipiant illudere ei, dicentes: Quia hic homo coepit aedificare, et non potuit consummare? (Biblia Sacra Vulgata) For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish. (King James Version)

The tower of Christ’s metaphor resonates virtually with the tower of More’s imprisonment, which his faith has transformed into a castle preserving his soul. More’s introductory litotes in introducing the passage (“I forgat not in this matter”) is a virtual index to what he has strategically left out. What More suspends in the allusion to the passage is telling, for it recalls both his political position—“what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand” (Lk 14:31)—and the sacrifice of family that More is prepared to make—“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). It is precisely the sacrifice of family that More has fully considered, as he recounts in a moment of domestic realism: I coumpted Marget full surely many a restles night, whyle my wyfe slept, and wente I had slepte too, what peryll were possible for to falle to me, so farre furth that I am sure ther can come none aboue. And in deuisyng daughter thervpon, I had a full heauy heart. But yet I thanke oure Lorde for all that, I neuer thought to change, though the very vttermoste shoulde happe me that my feare ranne vpon.71

This touching memory demonstrates that More has experienced deep fear of danger and loss and has taken account of that danger in thoughts as obsessive as anyone can claim. Before building the castle of his conscience, he has “coumpt70. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/26–29; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 530. 71. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 117/29–118/2; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 530.

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ed” the cost. Before turning aside from his family at Chelsea, before turning against his king, he has “deuised”72 or resolved upon these matters and their consequences and is saddened. He knows what he has to lose. He has fulfilled Margaret’s and Alice’s request that he contemplate just that: his virtual rhetoric of authority and faith beginning to join with Margaret’s domestic argument of family and love. In the last words Margaret attributes to herself in the dialogue, she does not slacken in her resolve to make her father reconsider. She reminds him that things do not always fall as we expect and that he should act now before it is too late: “No father (quod I) it is not lyke to thinke vpon a thynge that may be, and to see a thynge that shalbe, as ye shoulde (our Lorde saue you) if the chaunce shoulde so fortune. And than shoulde you peraduenture thynke, that you thinke not nowe, and yet than peraduenture it woulde be to late.”73 Her words hover between the admonitory and the consolatory. In admonishing More not to confuse what he anticipates with what will ultimately happen, Margaret brings the word “fortune” into the letter for the first time, and with it comes a sense of resignation, that “peradventure” it is already too late. The close of the dialogue and of the letter belongs to More, as Margaret here yields her voice to pure reportage. But as W ­ ynne-Davies comments: “In these final paragraphs the speech belongs utterly to More, but the letter remains in Margaret’s name. The printed text is simultaneously authored by the daughter and spoken by the father, and this complete intermingling is achieved precisely at the moment when one of the subjects (More) was so deeply imperiled. . . .”74 The intermingling occurs through the exchange of virtual rhetoric. Margaret has turned to textual authority, linking it to her own witness and Pattenson’s, and More continues to appropriate the virtual markers of Margaret’s own rhetoric. He closes the letter by reversing Margaret’s warning that fortune will soon make it too late for More to change: “To late daughter (quod my father) Margaret? I beseche our Lord, that if euer I make suche a chaunge, it maye bee to late in dede.”75 Under the aspect of eternity, the suffering that Margaret fears is the cause of joy, and her resignation is converted to resolve in More’s words: 72. OED, s.v. “devise” 6b: “to resolve or decide upon.” This usage, now obsolete, appears to have arisen in More’s time. But see also 4: “To assign or give by will. Now technically used only of realty, but formerly of all kinds of property that could be disposed of by will, = bequeath.” 73. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 118/3–6; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 530. 74. ­Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse, 19. 75. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 118/6–8; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 530.



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“For so muche as I take harme here, I shall haue at the leastwise the lesse therfore when I am hence.”76 More acknowledges that his judgment may slip, but he trusts in God’s providence and prays that he may continue to have the strength to conform his will to the example of the Christ’s bitter Passion. He views his imprisonment as a gift, and he trusts that the merciful goodness of God will continue to “kepe the king in that gracious mynde still, to doe me none hurt” or, if not, that God’s grace will allow him to bear his suffering and release him from pain in purgatory looking forward to increase in heaven.77 In the final two paragraphs of More’s speech, the argument from authority (More’s) and the argument from love (Margaret’s) virtually coalesce, and this joining of their habitual modes enables the emergence of our sense of an absolute More speaking as if from the Tower, as an absolute Margaret attends in loving silence. More draws his attention to authority and the Word of God together with the words of family and friends that Margaret has spoken through. He makes his case for conscience and the Church through glimpses of the gospel, comparing himself to Peter in two instances in which the apostle faltered but was ultimately sustained by the power of God. As recounted in Matthew 14:22–33, the disciples, tossed by the storm, see Jesus walking on water and are terrified. When Peter, who has asked Jesus for assurance that it is indeed he, hears Jesus call “Come,” he leaves the boat, walks on the water, and comes to Jesus. But Peter “with a blaste of a wynde, beganne to synke for his faynt fayth,” and More prays that God will support him as he did Peter: “And than I truste he shall sette his holy hande vnto me, and in the stormy seas, hold me vppe from drowning.”78 More further trusts that “if he suffer me to playe Sayncte Peter ferther” and fall utterly to the ground, as Peter did in denying Christ, that the goodness of God will “make me stande vppe agayne, and confesse the trouth of my conscience a freshe, and abyde the shame and the harme here of myne own faulte.”79 By foregrounding his roleplaying, More links his own defense of the historical church to its founding by Peter: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever 76. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 118/10–12; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 530. 77. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 118/25–26; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, pp. 530–31. 78. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 118/35–119/2; Rogers,Correspondence, no. 206, p. 531. 79. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 119/6–8; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 531.

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thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16:18–19). By acting on conscience to defend the church, More is in effect playing St. Peter. But he is also assuming his own historical role as father, grounding his conscience in love and transforming Margaret’s plea that he listen to those that love him into a vision of salvation that incorporates that very familial love. Against her fear of fortune and mortal pain, he opens a vision of providence and joy that embraces the celebration of family and friends that had been the basis for Margaret’s argument: And finally Marget, thys wotte I verye well, that withoute my faulte he will not lette me be loste. I shal therfore with good hope, committe my selfe wholye to him. And if he suffer me for my fautes to perish, yet shal I than serue for a prayse of his iustice. But in good fayth Meg, I trust that his tender pitie shal kepe my pore soule safe & make me commend his mercy. And therfore mine own good daughter, neuer trouble thy mind, for anye thyng that euer shall happe me in this worlde. Nothyng can come, but that that God wille. And I make me verye sure, that what soeuer that bee, seme it neuer so badde in sight, it shal in dede be the best.80

Margaret has begun “The Letter to Alice Alington” with accounts of prayers, More’s and Margaret’s in the Tower and those of the family at home. More now embraces in his final prayer the entire family, adapting her virtual rhetoric to his absolute embrace of family and conscience under the aspect of eternity: And with thys my good chylde I pray you heartely, be you and all your sisters and my sonnes too, comfortable and seruisable to your good mother my wyfe. And of youre good housbandes mindes I haue no maner dout. Commende me to theym all, and to my good daughter Alington, and to all my other frendes, sisters, neces, nephewes, and alies, and vnto all our seruauntes, man, woman, and chylde, & all my good neyghbours and oure acquayntance abrode.81

Margaret, Alice, and their husbands had sworn the oath that More now refuses, but that difference of judgment does not infect the love that continues to bind them together. More may lose his life, as Margaret fears he will, but he looks forward to life together in heaven: “And if any thing happe me that you would be lothe, pray to god for me, but trouble not your self: as I shall full heartely praye for vs all, that wee maye meete together once in heauen, where we shall make merye for euer, and neuer haue trouble after.”82 80. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 119/9–17; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 531 81. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 119/17–23; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 532. 82. Rastell, “Margaret Roper to Alice Alington,” 119/24–27; Rogers, Correspondence, no. 206, p. 532.



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With this, the letter has come full circle. Margaret had begun the letter by using the prayers of family as a virtual image of the family voices she urges her father to attend to. More closes the letter by making that appeal to love his own, joining it to the truth of scripture. Earlier he had mockingly repossessed the purloined rhetoric of the merry tales from Audley. Now he suggests that Margaret’s adaptation of his own rhetoric of folly to argue against his refusal of the oath must be absolutely compatible with his continued refusal. Just as her absolute love, and Pattenson’s, speaks from the Bridge of Fools, More can contemplate death from the Tower by speaking and recognizing that the truth of love lives in the promise of heaven. The absolute truth of love in and through the Word becomes the final guarantee of the faith that has motivated the virtual struggle toward truth in the dialogue.

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Eugenio M. Olivares Merino Emendation of a Letter to St. Cyprian

E l ev e n √

Margaret More Roper’s Emendation of a Letter to St. Cyprian and Its Textual Afterlife1 Eu ge ni o M . O li vares M eri no

When Margaret Roper read Erasmus’s edition of St. Cyprian’s works, Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginensis, first printed at Basel in 1520, she came across a passage that did not make sense. And so, says Nicholas Harpsfield in his biography of Thomas More, she corrected it “without any helpe of other sample, or any instruction.”2 Almost ­twenty-five years after Margaret’s death in 1544, Jacobus Pamelius acknowledged Margaret’s emendation in his 1568 edition of Cyprian’s works; five years before, Paulus Manutius included the corrected passage in his edition of Cyprian. In this essay, I present overlooked evidence of the editorial impact of Margaret’s correction, together with a careful review and evaluation of all the sources of this episode. I also deal with an issue that, surprisingly, has not aroused the curiosity of scholars: why did Erasmus, who had praised Margaret as 1. The present paper has been completed within the Research Project “Thomas More and Spain (16th and 17th centuries): Ideological and Textual Construction” (FFI2017–­83639-P), funded by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain]. Again, I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their support and guidance. 2. The problematic words were “nisi vos,” which Margaret emended to “nervos.” See pp. 257–61, below. Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, o.s. 186 (1932; repr. London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 81. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. I want to express my gratitude to my colleague and friend Dr. Raúl Manchón (University of Jaén) for his valuable help in my efforts to translate some Latin texts.

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“Britanniae tuae decus” (the honor of your Britain) in September 1529, not include her correction at once in his later editions of Cyprian’s Opera?3 Caecilius Cyprianus (ca. 200–258), or Cyprian, was an African by birth, who converted to Christianity in middle age. He became bishop of Carthage (ca. 248) and is considered the first great Latin father of the church. The editio princeps of his letters and other works was published in Rome in 1471 by Giovanni Andreas de Bossi (1417–1475), bishop of Aleria (Corsica).4 Although this edition did not include all ­eighty-one letters usually ascribed to Cyprian, it was the starting point for later editions. Between 1477 and 1479 a new edition was published in the Dutch city of Deventer.5 In 1486 an anonymous German printer published Cecilij Cipriani Episcopi cartaginensis et martiris dignissimi Libri et epistole[sic], in which some authentic letters were also missing.6 In 1512 Berthold Remboldt (d. 1519) made a significant contribution by separating the treatises from the epistolae in his Paris edition.7 Then followed Erasmus’s edition. For his text, he is known to have consulted two manuscripts as well as three printed editions.8 Ultimately, 3. P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 8: 1529–1530 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 274. Margaret, More’s oldest daughter, was four when she and Erasmus first met in 1509. Her name subsequently appears in his letters, and they also corresponded with each other. After the birth of Margaret’s first baby (before December 25, 1523), Erasmus sent his congratulations in a letter that included a commentary, dedicated to the young mother (“clarissimae puellae Margaretae Roperae”), on two hymns by Prudentius; P. S. Allen, ed., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 13/2–4. For the relation between Erasmus and Margaret and, more specifically, their interaction in 1523 and 1524, see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “ ‘A Young, Virtuous, and ­Well-Learned Gentlewoman’: Margaret More Roper in the Republic of Letters,” in the present volume, pp. 138–42. 4. Cyprian, Epistolae et opuscula (Rome: Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz, 1471); Incunabula Short Title Catalog number [hereafter ISTC]: ic01010000; http://textinc.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/tic01010000, accessed July 28, 2022. This edition was dedicated to Pope Paul II. 5. Cyprianus, Opera (Deventer: Richard Pafraet); ISTC: ic01012000; http://incunables.bodleian. ox.ac.uk /record/­C-505, #copynumber2, accessed July 28, 2022. 6. [Stuttgart: Printer of the Erwählung Maximilians, ca. 1486]. ISTC ic01014000. According to the Library of Congress webpage for this edition, “Hans Scheffer (Johann Scheffler?), whose name appears in Stuttgart tax records for the period, has been suggested as the printer—probably the only one in that city in the fifteenth century”; https://lccn.loc.gov/72221686, accessed July 28, 2022. See also F. Geldner, Die deutschen Inkunabeldrucker: Ein Handbuch Der Deutschen Buchdrucker Des 15. Jahrhunderts Nach Drucktorten, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Goff, 1968), vol. 1, p. 271. According to the digital record of this volume in the Shoults Collection at the University of Otago, “Conrad Fyner at Urach about 1481” is another printer candidate; “Cyprianus,” ourheritage.ac.nz | OUR Heritage, http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/6341, accessed July 28, 2022. Also see Donald Kerr, Incunabula in Special Collections, University of Otago Library (2009), 26–27; https://www.otago.ac.nz/library /treasures/incunabula/UnivOtago_Incunabula.pdf. 7. Beatissimi Cecilii Cypriani carthaginensiu[m] pr[a]esulis . . . opera ([Parisiis]: B. Remboldt, [1512]). Bishop Tunstall’s copy is in the library of the University of Durham; https://library.dur.ac.uk/search, accessed July 28, 2022. 8. The three printed editions are the ones already cited: Rome, 1471; Deventer, 1477–1479; and Paris, 1512. “[T]he smaller [manuscript] was from [the Abbey of] Gembloux,” whereas the other has been identified as “Paris MS. N.f. Lat. 12126”: P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 4,

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his version is closest to Remboldt’s, though he added other unpublished texts by Cyprian, plus several apocryphal works.9 The edition was first published at Basel by Froben in 1520, and it saw several reprints and corrected editions through the next decades, before and after Erasmus’s death in 1536.10 The final edition was published in 1558.11 It is striking that Erasmus of Rotterdam did not include Margaret’s emendation of the corrupt passage in any of the three later editions [1521, 1525, and 1530] of Cyprian’s Opera before his death, especially since each had to be revised because of other errors, as explicitly stated in the titles:—ab innumeris mendis repurgata (cleansed of countless errors) (1521); a mendis repurgatiora (more clean of errors) (1525 and 1530). However, Margaret’s correction was never incorporated; even in his last edition of Cyprian’s Opera (1558), the corrupt passage was still included. In this essay, I contextualize Margaret Roper’s emendation of the corrupt passage. First, proof is given to show the high regard for Cyprian in More’s household. Then, I focus on the correction itself, emphasizing that, even though modern editions of this church father include Margaret’s wording, it took a long time before it was finally adopted by editors. Finally, I interrogate Erasmus’s 1519–1521 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 23–24. Near the end of May 1519, Erasmus asked Antonius Papinus, abbot of Gembloux, to send him “duo codices manu descriptos peruetustos, opuscula diui Cypriani continentes” (two manuscripts, considered very old, containing opuscula by St. Cyprian); P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 3, 1517–1519 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 600. Before the month had ended, the abbot sent him “volumina Cypriani, quaecumque reperimus in nostra bibliotheca” (those volumes by Cyprian which I found in our library) (Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarium, 3:609). 9. Erasmus’s prefatory letter to Lorenzo Pucci was written on July 31, 1519: Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 4:23–29. Robert Peters has stressed the speed with which Erasmus finished his edition, on which he started working in 1519: Robert Peters, “Erasmus and the Fathers: Their Practical Value,” Church History 36 (1967): 254–61, here 257. 10. For the changes to the Paris edition, see John C. Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus and a Translation of Erasmus’ Letter to Carondelet, 1523 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 41. Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginensis, ab innumeris mendis repurgata (Apud inclytam Basileam ex Officio Frobeniana, 1520). Froben’s other editions of Cyprian’s writings by Erasmus are Opera Divi Caecilii Cypriani Episcopi Carthaginensis ab innumeris mendis repurgata . . . (Apud inclytam Basileam ex Officina Frobeniana, 1521); Opera sanctissimi martyris Caecilii Cypriani Episcopi Carthaginensis: a mendis repurgatiora, ex uariarum aeditionum, ac uetustissimorum codicum collatione . . . (Basileae: ex officina Froben, 1525); and Divi Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginiensis, et martyris, Opera . . . (Basileae: Ex Officina Frobeniana, 1530). 11. D. Caecilii Cypriani, episcopi carthaginiensis & martyris, Opera: per Des. Erasmum Roterodamum saepius à mendis summa uigilantia repurgata . . . (Basileae: Per Ioannem Heruagium, et Bernardum Brand., 1558). Reprints of Erasmus’s Cyprian edition by other publishers include Operum Divi Caecilii Cypriani Episcopi Carthaginensis (Coloniae: apud Heronem Alopecium, 1524); D. Caecilii Cypriani Episcopi Carthaginensis et martyris opera (Lvgdvni Seb. Gryphium, 1537); Divi Caecilii Cypriani, episcopi Carthaginensis et martyris Opera (Basileae: ex officina Hervagiana, 1540); Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani (Parisiis: apud A. Langelier, 1541); Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani episcopi (Parisiis: Apud Stephanum Petit, 1541); D. Caecilii Cypriani Episcopi Carthaginiensis et martyris opera (Lugduni: Apud Sebastianus Gryphium, 1544 and 1550).



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failure to incorporate Margaret’s restoration, a conundrum that is unresolved at present.

St. Cyprian, Novatian, and More Generally, More preferred the Greek fathers to the Latin, but he had a particular interest in “the great stylist St. Cyprian,”12 so much so that “in a list of More’s favorite ancient authorities Cyprian would have to rank second only to Augustine.”13 As one of his Yale editors points out, “Like More, he [St. Cyprian] possessed a keen sense of the unity of the Church, of the abiding control of the Holy Spirit, and a consequent abhorrence of heresy and schism.”14 More’s humanist letters and other works composed by 1524 attest to his interest in St. Cyprian. In his letter to the University of Oxford in defense of the study of Greek, written March 29, 1518, he lists several church fathers, Cyprian among them.15 In his long “Letter to a Monk” (1519–1520),16 he specifically names the saint as a colleague (socium) of Erasmus17 and as the author of De oratione dominica.18 In the same letter, in order to defend Erasmus, More quotes 12. Introduction to The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15, In Defense of Humanism: Letters to Dorp, Oxford, Lee, and a Monk, ed. Daniel Kinney (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), lxxiv. Further references to this edition of More’s complete works, after the first full citation of an individual volume, are abbreviated CW and followed by the volume and page/line numbers. 13. CW, vol. 8, parts 1, 2, and 3, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, ed. Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, and James P. Lusardi (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 8.3:1352. See also Richard Marius, “Thomas More and the Early Church Fathers,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1977), 402–420, here 407. 14. CW 8.3:1483. I have contextualized More’s interest in this author within the general appreciation that humanists showed for the fathers of the church, further providing an assessment of the presence and relevance of St. Cyprian and his writings in the works of the English humanist: “Cyprian in Thomas More’s Writings,” Moreana 57, no. 1 (2020): 23–47. 15. Elizabeth Rogers, The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (1947; repr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), letter 60, 116/153; CW 15:140/13. 16. Rogers, Correspondence, letter 83, 165–206; CW 15:198–311. 17. CW 15:234/31. 18. CW 15:578. In this work, More says, Cyprian wrote “ ‘remitte nobis debita’ quam ‘dimitte’ ” (CW 15:236/1–2), (“condone our debts” instead of “forgive”), as Erasmus had done in his translation of Matthew 6:12: “remittito nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos remittimus debitoribus nostris”; Novum instrumentum omne diligenter ab Erasmo Roterodamo recognitum & emendatum . . . (Apvd inclitam Germaniae Basileam, 1516). See Sr. Anne O’Donnell’s discussion in this volume of this word choice, “Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster: Patristic and Linguistic Sources,” 188–89. Eventually, Erasmus would publish his own Precatio Dominica in septem portiones distributa (Basel, 1523). According to H. M. Pabel, “Erasmus’ Esteem for Cyprian: Parallels in Their Expositions of the Lord’s Prayer,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 17 (1997): 55–69, “[St. Cyprian’s]

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from Cyprian’s Testimonia adversus Iudaeos twice19 and refers to St. Cyprian as “athletam Christi.”20 In later works More refers specifically to Cyprian’s opposition to the opinions of Novatian, another third century theologian, who came to be considered a heretic by the church. In A Dialogue concerning Heresies,21 More refers to “ye holy doctor & gloryous martyr saynt Cypryan / in his epistle against Nouacyan.”22 This allusion is particularly relevant, since the passage that Margaret corrected was, in fact, by Novatian. In book 4 of The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, More again mentions Cyprian’s opposition to “the olde heretyke Nouaciane the fyrste author of that abominable heresaye,”23 namely, that no repentance is possible after baptism, so anyone committing a sin after it is damned. The likelihood of Margaret’s access to Erasmus’s edition of Cyprian’s works within the More household rests on the church father’s importance to the English humanist.

Margaret’s Emendation of the Corrupt Passage I am assuming, as John Guy does, following Harpsfield and Stapleton (see pp. 259 and 272 below), that Margaret had access to Erasmus’s edition of Cyprian’s works.24 After having read the letter addressed “Cypriano papae presbyteri et diaconi Romae consistentes salutem,”25 which might have been already a matter of discussion in More’s circle, Margaret’s proficient Latin would have enabled her De dominica oratione may have influenced Erasmus as he wrote the Precatio dominica” (69). Margaret translated into English the second text, and, consequently, if Pabel is right, she would be again dealing indirectly with this father of the church. See O’Donnell, “Erasmus and Margaret Roper on the Pater Noster,” 173, 178, 185–86, 188, 199, for references to Cyprian in the Precatio Dominica of Erasmus. 19. CW 15:242/12–29 and CW 15:246/4–17. The Testimonia passages are from book 2, chapters 3 and 5, as referenced in CW 15:580, and Rogers, Correspondence, 181n613. 20. CW 15:246/13. In the abovementioned 1519 prefatory letter to his Opera addressed to Lorenzo Pucci, Erasmus refers to Cyprian as an athlete of Christian piety, “christianae pietatis athletam” (Allen and Allen, Opus Epistolarum, 4:27/115). 21. CW, vol. 6, parts 1 and 2, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard C. Marius (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 6.2: 4. 22. CW 6.1:202/12–14. 23. CW 8.1:427/26–28. 24. John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 141–42 and 300. 25. “The presbyters and deacons at Rome send their greetings to Pope Cyprian.” Cyprian was never elected pope. This word was used as a fatherly address of bishops. The term “presbyter” is used as a synonym of priest; “deacon” is a sacred ministry instituted by the Apostles (Acts of the Apostles 6:1–7). See Liber Secundus, Epistola VII in Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani (1520), 64–67.



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to notice an obscure sentence.26 The passage reads as follows: “Absit enim ab ecclesia Romana uigorem suum tam profana facilitate dimittere, & nisi uos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dis/soluere”27 (see image 11.1). As stated in its title, the letter was not by Cyprian but addressed to him by the presbyters and deacons of Rome. Guy assumes that Margaret also understood that the letter was, in fact, by Novatian, a conclusion at which she probably arrived after reading Eusebius’s account in his Ecclesiastical History, a work in More’s library and a source for his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.28 The passage, as it stood, was meaningless.29 The problem can be isolated in the central section of the sentence in the words nisi uos. Could there be a misspelling? However, the editor was no common one, but the redoubtable Erasmus of Rotterdam, who reproduced the exact words in Remboldt’s Paris edition: “Absit eni[m] ab ecclesia Romana vigore[m] su[u]m ta[m] p[ro]fana facilitate dimittere: & nisi vos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere”30 (see image 11.2). Margaret found a way out of the crux by “[r]eading like her father with an eye to the meaning and significance of whole sentences, not the individual words.”31 As already stated, Nicholas Harpsfield, “a canonist, a theologian, and a historian,”32 was connected with Thomas More’s circle. He dedicated his biography 26. Margaret’s intellectual acumen “was grounded in a mastery of Latin and Greek, includ[ing] training in dialogues, disputations, and declamations,” among other disciplines. Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper’s Translation of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica,” in “Liber Amicorum: A Collection of Essays by Elizabeth McCutcheon,” Moreana 52, no. 201–202 (2016): 237–248, at 239. 27. Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani (1520), 65. 28. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 142. I have suggested elsewhere that Thomas More probably owned a copy of Tyrannius Rufinus’s Latin translation of Eusebius’s Greek Ecclesiastical History, published at Rome in 1476. This was probably the source used by one of Margaret’s daughters, Mary Basset, for her translation of Eusebius. See Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, “Some Notes about Mary Roper Clar(c)ke Bassett and her Translation of Eusebius,” Moreana 46, no. 177–178 (2009): 146–180, here 166n70; Jaime Goodrich, “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clarke Basset’s Translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History,” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 3 (2010): 301–28; and Jamie Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 29–66. 29. My parsed translation begins as follows: “Far be it from the Roman Church to abandon her vigor with such unholy readiness” (Absit enim ab Ecclesia Romana uigorem suum tam profana facilitate dimittere). So far, this is coherent. The second part is more confusing: & nisi uos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dis/soluere. The infinitive verb, dissolvere, at the end of the sentence is balanced with the previous infinitive dimittere, “to abandon,” by et; thus, “to abandon . . . and to loosen.” An accusative is needed that parallels vigorem; vos seems like it will work: “. . . and dissolve you . . . ,” but what about nisi?: “if not.” Adding to the puzzle is a genitive, severitatis, “of severity.” And what about eversa fidei maiestate? This is clearly an ablative absolute and means something like “by overturning the majesty of the faith.” Putting these pieces together from the beginning—“Far be it from the Roman Church to abandon her vigor with such profane easiness, and/or if not to dissolve you of severity by overthrowing the majesty of the faith”—results in a degree of nonsense. 30. Beatissimi Cecilii Cypriani, (1512), fol. xxxii. 31. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 141. 32. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (1935; repr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 31. Nicholas Harpsfield

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Image 11.1

Image 11.2

of More to William Roper, Margaret’s husband. Roper’s biography of More was completed roughly at the same time as his,33 though Harpsfield was the first to mention Margaret’s solution to the crux: Which place when mistris Margarete had read, without any helpe of other sample, or any instruction: “These words nisi vos should be,” quoth she, “I trowe” (wherein she saide a very troth) “neruos.”34

Her supposition was correct. Neruos (neruus, -i; “sinews”, “nerves”, “strength”, “vigor”), an accusative plural, was the right word, resulting in this more sensible reading: “Far be it from the Roman Church to abandon her vigor with such unholy readiness, or to loosen the sinews of severity, by overthrowing the majesty of the faith.”35 There could be no doubt that this was the solution,36 and yet it (1519–1575) was an English historian and a Roman Catholic apologist and priest under Henry VIII, whose policies he opposed. Three years after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, he left England and went to study at the University of Louvain. Upon the accession of Mary I in 1553, Harpsfield returned to England, took the degree of Doctor of Canon Law at Oxford in 1554, and became archdeacon of Canterbury. 33. Roper composed Thomas More’s first biography before 1557, but it was not published until 1626: The mirrour of vertue in worldly greatnes. Or The life of Syr Thomas More Knight, sometime Lo. Chancellour of England, At Paris [i.e., S­ aint-Omer: Printed at the English College Press], MDCXXVI. Roper does not mention this incident. 34. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, 81/13–17. His work was not printed until 1932. His testimony concerning the present issue deserves credibility, for he was acquainted with those who had lived with Margaret, both before and during his exile in Louvain. Also see the descriptions of this incident in two later biographies of More by Thomas Stapleton and “Ro. Ba.” below, pp. 271–72. 35. Hallett translates “Far be it from the Roman Church to relax its vigour with such culpable negligence or to weaken the bonds of severity in a manner so unbefitting the dignity of the faith.” See Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, trans. P. E. Hallett, ed. E. E. Reynolds (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), 104. See also note 78. 36. It is worth mentioning here a very similar (almost exact) expression found in a f­ ourteenth-century document, the Acta Henrici VII Imperatoris Romanorum. Henry VII (1269/74–1313) was count of Luxembourg, also Henry IV, German king from 1308, and Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor from 1312. See image 11.3. His army besieged the city of Brescia from May 19 to September 19, 1311. In one of the acts issued by him against the city, dated 1311, we read, “vigorem suum profana falcitate* [facilitate] dimittere et nervos severitatis Imperii eversa maiestate, dissolvere. . .” (my italics) (to abandon its vigor with such unholy readiness, or to loosen the sinews of severity, by overthrowing the majesty of the Empire). See Wilhelm Doenniges, Acta Henrici VII Imperatoris



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would never be included in any of Erasmus’s editions of Cyprian before or after his death. It is not possible to date precisely Margaret’s emendation; we can only know for certain that it took place between 1520, when Erasmus’s first Cyprian edition was published (she would have been fifteen), and 1544, the year of her death at age ­thirty-nine. According to Elizabeth McCutcheon,37 the years immediately after Erasmus’s edition seem to offer a probable time frame. Given More’s interest in Cyprian, the new edition by Erasmus would certainly have been welcome news to Margaret and her father, and, if they had access to a copy, they would immediately have started reading it. As McCutcheon shows, the period 1520–1524 was particularly intense for Margaret in terms of scholarly undertakings. Not only did she complete her translation (1524) of Erasmus’s Precatio Dominica, but she was actively composing texts in Latin, witnessed to and praised by Cardinal Reginald Pole (1521) and John Vessey (1522), not to mention the lost treatise on the Novissimi (“Last Things”) that she wrote after her father’s invitation (1522).38 Finally, this picture of intellectual activity at the More household during the period 1520–1524 is supplemented by a visit from Juan Luis Vives (1523), with the proofs of his De institutione foeminae Christianae under his arm, to their home in Bucklersbury.39 Vives was very fond of St. Cyprian, owned a copy of Erasmus’s edition,40 and might have participated in conversations with More and Margaret about them. Several unexpected problems severely affected Margaret’s life after 1524: William Roper’s involvement in the Steelyard affair (1525), the noncompliance with prepublication licensing of her Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster (around the end of 1524 or early 1525), her sweating sickness (1528), and the births of three children before 1532, the year that her father resigned the chancellorship.41 Romanorum et Monumenta Quaedam Alia Media Aevi, Pars II (Berolini: In officina libraria nicolai, 1839), 23; see image 11.3. This coincidence in the combination of words seems to point at some kind of stock phrasing, which I have not been able to track any further. 37. See in this volume McCutcheon, “ ‘A Young, Virtuous, and ­Well-Learned Gentlewoman,’ ” 134–35. 38. As reported in Rogers, Correspondence, letters 128 and 108, 301–2 and 257/15, respectively; and Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom, 103. 39. Too often it is claimed that Vives frequented the Chelsea household during his first visit to England, but More did not buy that estate until 1524. 40. The Flemish bibliophile and patron Marcus Laurinus (1530–1581) had owned a copy of Erasmus’s edition of St. Cyprian’s Opera, which he later sold to Vives; see: H. Schulte Herbrüggen, ed., Morus ad Craneveldium literae Balduinianae novae [More to Cranevelt: New Baudouin Letters], Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 11 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1997), 86. The Spanish scholar also had a keen interest in this Latin Father, as proved by references to him in his writings; see Olivares Merino, “Cyprian in Thomas More’s Writings,” 35n56. 41. For more detail, see my chronology in this volume for 1525–1532. Also see the further discussion of dating Margaret’s emendation in note 95 below.

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Image 11.3

When she appears holding a book in Holbein’s sketch of the family (1526–1527),42 a feature that the German painter no doubt considered an emblem of her scholarly character, it may be imagined her correction of the letter to Cyprian had already taken place. Certainly, the years after 1524 seem to contain too many pulls on her attention away from scholarship. Another detail, as prosaic as it might appear, also seems to point to an early date for the emendation: the family’s move from Bucklersbury to Chelsea. Although the Mores and the Ropers were already living at Chelsea by October 1524, the chaos of moving, followed by the rearrangement of the library, would have made it easier for Margaret to have made her correction at Bucklersbury before the move. After More’s resignation, Margaret helped her father with his apologetic works and was absorbed in the uncertainties of the approaching misfortunes. While she never abandoned her intellectual pursuits, she reoriented them mainly to the education of her children, as the accomplishments of her daughter Mary would later prove.43

The impact of Margaret’s emendation on four editions As late as 1543, a year before Margaret’s death, reprints of Erasmus’s edition of St. Cyprian continued to include the corrupt passage (see image 11.4).44 As might be expected, it was also being reproduced elsewhere.45 Furthermore, four42. The ­family-group portrait has not survived, only Holbein’s preparatory draft. Before it was destroyed, Reverend John Lewis (1697–1743) of Maidstone, the editor of Roper’s biography of More in 1729, was able to see Holbein’s family portrait in 1717 at Well Hall, the Roper’s manor in Eltham (Kent); see: T. E. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More (London: Burns & Oates, 1891), 146. 43. For further details on these topics, check the relevant years of the chronology in this volume, especially from 1532 to 1534 and onward. 44. D. Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginiensis et martyris Opera, 2 vols. (Lugduni: apud Seb. Gryphium, 1543), 1:98–104, here 100. 45. For example, in the Concilia omnia, tam generalia, quam particularia . . . (Coloniae: Petrus Quentel excudebat, 1538), fol. lxxi, edited by Petrus Crabbe (1471–1554) (see image 11.5). However, by 1551, in the augmented



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Image 11.4

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teen years after Margaret’s death, the last reprint of Erasmus’s Opera (1558) still contained the nisi vos (see image 11.7).46 And yet, by 1552 Margaret’s emendation was known beyond her family circle. The first person to credit Margaret’s correction of the locus obscurus seems to have been Ioannes Costerius (1515–1559), a priest from the Flemish town of Oudenaarde and prior of the monastery of Sint Maartensdal (Louvain), who had taken refuge in Douai.47 In his 1552 Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, pro Catholicae fidei antiquitate et veritate, an edition with commentary of Vincent Lérins’s Commonitorium (first half of fifth century),48 Costerius refers to the letter to Cyprian and its difficult passage. The author considered the epistle worth reading as it was and revised edition, Conciliorum omnium, tam generalium quam particularium . . . (Coloniae Agrippinae: Ex officina Ioannis Quentel, 1551), [Tertius Tomus] 122, Crabbe had detected the problem (see “Locus obscurus” in the margin), though the passage remained unresolved (image 11.6). 46. D. Caecilii Cypriani, Opera: per Des. Erasmum Roterodamum (1558), 45. 47. Geert H. Janssen, “Quo Vadis? Catholic Perceptions of Flight and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1566–1609,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2011): 472–99, here 484. Arnoud Visser, “How Catholic was Augustine? Confessional Patristics and the Survival of Erasmus in the C ­ ounter-Reformation,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, no. 1 (2010): 86–106, here 92n22, and 96n35. 48. Ioannes Costerius, comm., Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, Pro catholicae fidei antiquitate et veritate, adversus prophanas omnium haereseon liber elegantißimus . . . (Lovanii: ex officinal Bergagne, 1552), fol. C. Lérins aptly quotes Pope St. Stephen’s words, “Nihil nova[n]dum, nisi quod traditum est” (Let nothing be innovated, but what has been passed down). The issue at stake was the refutation of the doctrine held by Agrippinus, bishop of Carthage, that baptism ought to be repeated.

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evidently erudite and exhaled that old gravity of the Roman Church (“nimiru[m] et erudita, et antiquam illam Romanae ecclesiae gravitatem spirans”49). Unfortunately, however, no edition so far had succeeded in emending the corrupt passage. Such was the case of the 1544 edition of Erasmus’s Cyprianii Opera, published at Cologne, with comments by Henricus Gravius; despite his erudition, Costerius adds, Gravius only spotted the problem and marked it,50 but he could not go any further to correct the passage (“interim tamen nihil adferens, quod eam tabe[m] sanare queat”51). Then, Costerius narrates his meeting with John Clement, a ­long-time friend of the Mores and tutor of the children. According to Reynolds, the conversation between Costerius and the Englishman must have taken place during the Clements’ first exile at Louvain (1549–1553).52 49. Costerius, Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, K. vii/21–23. 50. Thus, “Absit e[ni]m ab ecclesia Romana, vigore[m] suu[m] tam prophana facilitate dimittere, & nisi *vos *seueritatis, euersa fidei maiestate, dissoluere.” Gravius marked the problem with asterisks. (See image 11.8.) From D. Caecilii Cypriani, episcopi Carthaginensis Ac Martyris, vniuersa, quae quidem extare sciuntur, opera iam nouissime ex castigatione Des. Erasmi Roterod. diligentius multo quam hactenus vnquam, exemplarium manuscriptorum subsidio, a mendis vindicata (Coloniae: ex Officina typographica Petri Quentel, VIII, 1544), Liber II, 55, folio Eiiii. Hilmar Pabel, Herculean Labours: Erasmus and the Editing of St. Jerome’s Letters in the Renaissance, Library of the Written Word, vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 96, says this was Gravius’s first publication. Henricus Gravius (1536–1591), a native of a small town in Guelders, joined the Order of Preachers at a young age. He mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and was “renowned and highly distinguished for his interpretation of Sacred Scripture and of the ancient Fathers of the Church” (Pabel, Herculean Labours, 96). Antonio Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum in Historia, In Disciplinis, in salute omnium procuranda, vol. 2 (Romae: at Typographia Apostolica Vaticana, 1593), 16, states that Gravius was invited to Rome by Pope Gregory XIV, and there he was extremely successful (“mirifice se probavit”). According to Visser, Gravius was Regius professor of catechism at Louvain. He died in 1591 while ­sub-prior of the friary in Nijmegen (Visser, “How Catholic Was Augustine?,” 93). 51. Costerius, Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, L/­iii-iv. 52. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom, ed. Reynolds, 104n2. After Henry VIII’s death, the ­nine-year-old heir, Edward, was crowned. Thomas Cranmer took control of the kingdom’s religious policy and introduced “­full-blooded Protestantism” (Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 271). The Clements moved to Louvain until 1553, when the Catholic Mary Tudor was crowned queen.



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Then, an English Doctor of Medicine by the name of Clement, a most distinguished man and a fine expert in Greek literary works, would very kindly discuss with me about literary matters. He spoke much of Sir Thomas More, a most excellent man with whom he had lived on terms of intimacy, of his gentleness, his piety, his wisdom and his learning. Often, too, he talked of Margaret, More’s daughter, whose talents and attainments he highly celebrated. ‘To show you,’ he said, ‘that the things I am saying are true, I will quote you a very corrupt passage from Cyprian, which she, without any help from the text, restored most happily’. It was the sentence that I quoted above. And so, instead of reading nisi vos severitatis as we did before, she said it should be neruos seueritatis.53

Apart from explicitly naming Margaret as the author of the correction, Costerius also clarified the possible genesis of the misreading, perhaps as originally suggested by Margaret herself. It seems possible, since Costerius’s informant was John Clement. Costerius speculated that the incorrect transcription was due to copyist error or ambiguity, owing to nisi being frequently abbreviated. As Costerius put it—“Verum quia et haec dictiu[n]cula, nisi, hac ratione contractius pingi solet” (Because truly this small word, nisi, is thus usually depicted more contractedly)—nisi was often abbreviated n. Thus, nuos could be misread as n[isi]uos. The copyist had failed to distinguish the abbreviated word nuos (nervos) from nuos (nisi vos).54 Margaret must have suspected that the abbreviation in a Cyprian manuscript codex was nuos, and, as a conventional authority demonstrates, the letter “n” with a small mark can abbreviate ner.55 53. Costerius, Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, ­Kvii-Li: “Igitur quum Clemens medicinae doctor natione Anglus vir ornatisimus, ac Graecarum literarum peritisimus, mecum subinde pro sua humanitate de literis conferret, atque harum occasione multa de praeclarissimi viri Thomae Mori, quo familiariter dum viueret usus erat, humanitate, pietate, prudentia ac eruditione diceret, meminit quoque subinde Margaretae Mori filiae: cuius ingenium atque doctrinam mirifice praedicabat. Vt autem cognoscas, inquit, vera esse quae dico, adferam tibi ex Cypriano locum deprauatu admodum, quem illa citra exemplaris subsidium, sola ingenii sui foelicitate restituit. Erat autem sententia, quam supra posui. Nam pro eo quod ibi legimus, nisi vos seueritatis, neruos seueritatis responendum esse dicebat.” 54. See also Hitchcock in Harpsfield, Life and Death of More, 332n81/6–17. 55. There are different types of scribal abbreviations. The simplest, the ­so-called abbreviation by pure contraction, does not use contraction symbols but instead “the first and last letters of the contracted word [are preserved], omitting all the middle letters,” as in ds or dm (deus or deum). See Adriano Cappelli, The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography, trans. David Heimann and Richard Kay (Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1982), 7. Another type of abbreviation would be indicated by one of the general symbols, as in image 11.9 (ibid., 2). Similarly, an abbreviation might be indicated by what Cappelli calls “abbreviation marks significant in themselves . . . that indicate which elements of the abbreviated word are missing, no matter what letter the symbol is placed above or joined with as a ligature” (ibid., 13). Of the seven types he illustrates in Type III, one

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Image 11.9

Images 11.10 a & b

Image 11.11 a & b

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Image 11.13 Image 11.14

Finally, a hypothetical scenario: Costerius had been a disciple of the Flemish Martin Lipsius (1492–1555), a “devoted friend and admirer” of Erasmus, who helped him with his 1528–1529 edition of St. Augustine. According to Allen and Allen, in 1543, Lipsius proposed a revision of Erasmus’s Cyprian edition, though the plan was not carried out.56 If Costerius had advised Lipsius on this project (they had been collaborators on one volume of a later edition of Augustine’s works),57 very similar to the third type was used to mark the omission of er but never at the end of the word (ibid., 13 and 15; see image 11.10). On rare occasions, type V abbreviations could also stand for er but, as in the previous case, never at the end of the word (ibid., 13 and 17; see image 11.11). Next are “abbreviation marks significant in context . . . whose meaning is not set and constant but varies relative to the letter with which the sign stands” (ibid., 18). The third sign (ibid., 19) (see image 11.12) usually marks the omission of ar, er, or ter (ibid., 23); thus, with n (ibid., 26) (see image 11.13). One final possibility is the case of abbreviation by superscript letters: “a vowel written above a consonant generally stands for that vowel and the letter r, which can precede or follow it. The vowels when superscript can stand for ar, er, ir, or, ur, . . .” (ibid., 30; see image 11.14). 56. Allen, P. S., and H. M. Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 3, 1517–1519 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 185. 57. In 1576–77 Christopher Plantin published in Antwerp a complete edition of St. Augustine’s works in



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Margaret’s correction might actually have appeared in a posthumous edition of Erasmus’s Opera divi Caecilii Cypriani. However, it was not until 1563, when Paulus Manutius (Paolo Manuzio, 1512–1574) published his edition of Cyprian’s works, a text based on Erasmus’s, that the corrupted phrase was finally corrected.58 In his prefatory letter to Cardinal Borromeo,59 Manutius refers to his new edition as “emendatissima.”60 This new version had been arranged by Latinus Latini, a formidable scholar, who used the now lost codex Veronensis of Cyprian: his collation is thus a very reliable source for Cyprian’s letters.61 However, Latini’s name appears nowhere in Manutius’s edition, though it could be considered his most important work.62 The Cyprian letter in question (Liber Secundus, VII) included the correction for the first time in the editorial history of his Opera: “Absit enim ab Ecclesia Romana uigorem ten folio volumes entitled Opera D. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi et doctoris praecipui, tomis decem comprehensa . . . (Ex Officina Christophoro Plantini, 1577). In his address to the reader, Ioannes Molanus (1533–85), the chief editor of this work, names Costerius and Lipsius as the main collaborators (together with John Vlimmer) of the tenth book (Opera D. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis: no page number). 58. In 1561 Manutius moved to Rome and established his press there, the Stamperia del Popolo. See Paul F. Grendler, “The Adages of Paolo Manuzio: Erasmus and the Roman Censors,” in In laudem Caroli: Renaissance and Reformation Studies for Charles G. Nauert, ed. James V. Mehl, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 49 (Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998), 1–21, here 6–7. Shortly after, Manutius set about to publish the works of Cyprian. The Vatican was fighting back against the growing influence of Protestantism, and the Council of Trent was debating over the primacy of the pope in Rome, a topic dealt with by Cyprian. 59. St. Charles Borromeo (1538–1584) was an Italian cardinal and archbishop of Milan (1564–1584). Together with St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Philip Neri, he was one of the leading ­counter-reformers. 60. D. Caecilii Cypriani Episcopi Carthaginiensis . . . Opera: (Romae: apud Paulum Manutium, 1563), folio Aiii. 61. Latinus Latini (1513–1593) was an Italian Renaissance scholar and humanist. Two works containing his writings were published posthumously, both edited by Domenico Magri (1604–1672). The first was published in two volumes: Latini Latinii Epistolae, conjecturae et observationes sacra, profanaque eruditione ornatae . . . (Romae: typis Tinassii, Apud Jo. Casonum, sub Signo S. Pauli, 1659), and Latini Latinii Viterbiensis Epistolæ, Coniecturæ, & Obseruationes Sacra, Profanaq[ue] Eruditione Ornatæ: A Dominico Magro Melitensi (Viterbii: ex Typographia Brancatia, apud Petrum Martinellum Franciscus, 1667). The other was Latini Latinii Viterbiensis Bibliotheca sacra et profana, sive Observationes, correctiones, conjecturae et variae lectiones in sacros et profanos scriptores e marginalibus notis codicum ejusdem, a Dominico Macro . . . (Romae: Sumptibus Pontii Bernardon, 1677), a book containing his collected philological and critical remarks on textual editions of various classical authors, plus a biography, “Latini Latini Viterbiensis Vita.” In 1552 Latini took holy orders at Rome. Soon he entered the service of Cardinal Santiago dal Pozzo, for whom he was Latin secretary. The cardinal’s sickness and death (1563) affected Latini’s work on Cyprian. He then became librarian to Rudolfo Pio, an Italian cardinal, humanist, and patron of the arts, who died in 1564, leaving his extensive library to Latini. Doubtless, he thoroughly examined all the authors in this library. For further information, see Pierre Petitmengin, “Latino Latini (1513–1593): ‘Une longue vie au service des Pères de l’église,’ ” in Humanisme et Eglise en Italie et en France meridionale (xve siècle–milieu du xvie siècle), ed. Patrick Gilli (Rome: École française de Rome, 2004), 381–407. 62. As stated by Turner, Latini must have started working on the text by April 1559; C. H. Turner, “Prolegomena to the Testimonia and Ad Fortunatum of St Cyprian,” The Journal of Theological Studies 29, no. 114 (1928): 113–136, here 118.

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suum tam profana facilitate dimittere, & neruos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere”63 (see image 11.15). However, I do not think that Latini adopted—or was even aware of—Margaret’s correction. It might be the case that the now lost codex Veronenis included the original wording. Another line of research has recently come to my attention. In the Decretum Gratiani, compiled around 1140, Cyprian’s letter is quoted with the correct wording.64 The oldest manuscript containing the Decretum Gratiani that survives is the t­ welfth-century BSB Clm 17161 from Schäftlarn Abbey (south of Munich). In the Distinctio L, C.XXVI [p. 24], we read “Absit a romana eccl[esi] a vigore[m] suu[m] tam p[ro]fana facilitate dimittere & neruos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere . . .”65 (see image 11.16). Gratian’s text had been frequently published since the fifteenth century. There are ­forty-five incunable editions printed before 1501, the earliest in Stras-

63. D. Caecilii Cypriani Opera (apud Paulum Manutium, 1563), 50/2–3 (my emphasis). 64. Gratianus (fl. ­mid-twelfth century) was “a Benedictine monk from Italy, who taught at the monastery of Sts. Felix and Nabor in Bologna. He is known as the father of the study of canon law” (see notes 66 and 67). Initially known as Concordia discordantium canonum (“The Harmony of Discordant Canons”), the Decretum Gratiani attempted to solve the contradictions among the church canons, by the s­ o-called dicta Gratiani. Even though this text was fundamental in the Middle Ages and beyond, the church did not officially promulgate it until, following the Council of Trent, a commission known as the Correctores Romani was appointed to revise the Corpus iuris canonici, which included the Decretum by Gratian, among other works. The result was the editio Romana published in 1582; see Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5. 65. Gratian’s Decree, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/demnbsb.14708, image 51, p. 24. Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek, Bayerische Staatsbibliotek. Accessed May 20, 2020. This wording is slightly different from that in the Opera: “Romana ecclesia” instead of “ecclesia romana.”



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Image 11.17

bourg (1471). Over 150 editions were printed after that date.66 In an edition published in 1514, the neruos severitatis is preserved (see image 11.17).67 Latinus Latini was one of the scholars designated by Pope Gregory XIII in 1573 to revise Gratian’s text. By the time Latini started working with the Decretum Gratiani, ten years had passed since Manutius’s D. Caecilii Cypriani (1563), which he arranged, was published. Latini devoted thirteen years of his life to editing Gratian’s decretals.68 No doubt he would notice the textual harmony between the two editions of Cyprian’s letter, Manutius’s and Gratian’s. The Decretum Gratiani testifies that there was thus another editorial tradition that did not include the widespread misreading. One year after Manutius’s version, Guillaume Morellius (1505–1564) published his own edition of Cyprian’s works in Paris.69 Since Manutius had already included more letters by Cyprian, Morellius decided to reorder them. Thus, the letter in question is numbered XV instead of VII, and it includes the cor66. Peter Landau, “Gratian and the Decretum Gratiani,” in The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, ed. Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 22–54, here 50. 67. Decretum Gratiani Cum glossis . . . ([Florence]: Lucas Antonius de Giunta Florentinus impressit, 1514), L: lxxxiii. 68. As Domenico Magri puts it: “Romam reuersus Ann. MDLXXIII in Gratiani Decretorum immensam syluam purgandam, . . .” (“[Latini,] [h]aving returned to Rome in 1573 to clean the vast forest of Gratian’s decretals . . .”); Latini Latinii Viterbiensis Bibliotheca (1677: n. p). Since its compilation in the twelfth century, the Decretum Gratiani had grown into a massive work that needed careful revision. 69. After acting as proofreader in a Paris firm, he set up for himself, and subsequently succeeded Adrianus Turnebus as the French king’s printer for Greek works in 1555.

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Image 11.18

rection: “Absit enim ab ecclesia Romana, vigorem suum tam profana facilitate dimittere, & neruos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere, . . .”70 (see image 11.18). This edition has little relevance to Margaret’s emendation, since Morellius never specifies the manuscripts or editions he used, and he does not refer to Margaret. But the Belgian scholar Jacobus Pamelius was the first editor of Cyprian to mention Margaret Roper. He includes all of Cyprian’s letters in his edition; he also attempted to arrange them chronologically.71 As stated on the title page of his 1568 edition, he collated the two previous editions by Manutius and Morellius, as well as very old manuscripts (manuscripta vetustissima). In Pamelius’s new order, our letter is now number XXXI, and it includes the emended wording: “Absit enim ab Ecclesia Romana vigorem suum tam profana facilitate dimittere, & neruos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere”72 (see image 11.19). Pamelius’s edition is particularly relevant, because the editor explicitly attributes the emendation to Margaret, something that no other editor had done before him. Thus, in the “Adnotaniones in epistolam XXXI,” we read & neruos seueritatis] Hunc locum feliciter prima sic restituit Margareta Thomae Mori filia vt testator Costerius Commentariolo in Vincentium Lirinensem. Antea erat: nisi vos] corruptissime, error natus negligentia operarum, nam & Gratianus illud legit dist[inctio]: 50.c. Absit.73 (see image 11.20) 70. D. Caecilius Cyprianus ope veterum librorum repurgatus, et libris auctus, Gul. Morellii diligentia et labore apud Gul. Morel (Parisiis: apud Gul. Morellium, 1564), 100–103, here 101. 71. Jacobus Pamelius (1536–1587) was educated at the Cistercian Abbey of Boneffe (province of Namur) and studied philosophy at Louvain. In March 1553, he was promoted magister atrium, and he studied theology for nine years with Ruard Tapper and Josse Ravestein. After being made canon of St.-Donatien at Bruges (1561), he was ordained a priest (1562). A regular visitor to the libraries in the Low Countries in search of unedited works, he became a specialist in the publication of rare texts. 72. Opera D. Cæcilii Cypriani Carthagiensis episcopi, collatione facta editionum Pauli Manutii & Guilielmi Morelii ad exemplaria aliquot manuscripta vetustissima; Adnotationes Jacobi Pamelii (Antuerpiae: apud Viduam & Haeredes Ioannis Stelsij, 1568), 57. 73. Ibid., 59: “& neruos seueritatis]: Margaret, Thomas More’s daughter, was the first one who thus



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It seems that Pamelius got this information directly from Costerius. But there is more to say about this. In his Epistola Dedicatoria, Pamelius writes that he was helped not only by the already mentioned John Clement (see p. 264 above), but also by John Harris, Thomas More’s secretary: A task that, if I later considered pleasant, I will not (God willing) burden myself with in regard to Tertullian, something that learned men have started asking me about, if John Harris, the Englishman and former secretary to Thomas More, does not get to it first in the same way I anticipated him with Cyprian. For his kindness (and let me add by the way that several others brought me some help), in some passages that I could hardly unravel, he helped me in no small part with several different readings of his copy; and no less helpful was, another man skilled in both languages, Doctor John Clemens, an Englishman too.74 happily restored this passage, as reported by Costerius in his Comments on Vincent Lérins’ work [see Costerius, Vincentii Lirinensis Galli, 3.1]. “Before it was: “nisi vos] terribly wrong, an error caused by the negligence of the copyists, and Gratian [in Decretum Gratiani] indeed gave the former reading in his dist[inctio]: 50.c. Absit.” 74. Opera D. Cæcilii Cypriani (1568), 3: “Quam si gratam postmodum intellexero, non gravabor Deo auspice idipsum in Tertulliano aliquando adtentare, iuxta quod a me postulare coeperunt viri quidam eruditi; nisi (quod malim) me praeuertat Ioannes Harrisius Anglus Thomae Moro quondam a Secretis, sicuti ego illum in D. Cypriano anteuerti. Qui pro sua humanitate (vt obiter insinuem qui aliquid mihi opis contulerunt) in aliquot locis vnde me extricare vix poteram, variis quibusdam sui exemplaris Lectionibus haud parum me iuuit; neque minus, vir vtriusque linguae peritiss[imus] Ioannes Clemens Medicus, etiam Anglus.”

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Harris was married to Dorothy Colley, Margaret Roper’s former maid. His entire family went into exile in 1565. Initially, he worked teaching Latin and Greek. Eventually, when the English College was founded at Douai, he moved there and then on to Rheims afterwards.75 Thus, it can be safely assumed that it was the English exiles who informed Pamelius about Margaret’s correction and possibly about Costerius’s reference to her. Harris was alive at the time of the edition and so was his wife, who survived him by more than ten years; their daughter, Ann, married John Fowler, another exiled Englishman and a notable printer in Louvain and also in Antwerp, precisely the city of Pamelius’s edition.76 To repeat, Pamelius was also familiar with the correct rendering of the letter in the Decretum Gratiani, as explicitly stated in the above referenced “Adnotaniones in epistolam XXXI” (see notes 72 & 73).77 Like the earlier Tudor biographer, Nicholas Harpsfield, two later ­sixteenthcentury Englishmen recorded the story of Margaret Roper’s emendation in their respective biographies of Thomas More. In 1588 Thomas Stapleton published his Tres Thomae in Douai, a triple biography of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Becket, and Thomas More. In the Vita Thomae Mori, he devoted an entire chapter to Margaret. Stapleton also refers to Margaret’s emendation, emphasizing again the credit given to her both by Costerius and Pamelius: The learned John Coster in his commentaries on Vincent of Lerins writes thus of her. “At one time an English Doctor of Medicine, named Clement, a man of great eminence and a fi ­ rst-rate Greek scholar, used very kindly to talk over literary matters with me. He spoke much of Sir Thomas More, with whom he lived on terms of intimacy, of his gentleness, his piety, his wisdom and his learning. Often, too, he spoke of Margaret, More’s daughter, whose talents and attainments he highly extolled. ‘To show you,’ he said, ‘the truth of what I say, I will quote you a very corrupt passage from St. Cyprian, which she, without any help from the text, restored most happily. This was the sentence. Absit enim ab ecclesia Romana vigorem suum tam prophana facilitate dimittere, et nisi vos severitatis, eversa fidei majestate dissolvere. This text was so corrupt as to be meaningless, but Margaret, by proposing nervos for nisi vos, gave to the passage an easy and obvious sense, thus: “Far be it from the Roman Church to relax its vigour with such culpable negligence or to weaken the bonds of severity in a manner so unbefitting the dignity of the faith.”’ ” Jacobus Pamelius acknowledges the emendation made by Margaret in his notes upon this passage of Cyprian.78 75. E. E. Reynolds, Margaret Roper: Eldest Daughter of St. Thomas More (London: Burns and Oates, 1960), 135. 76. Reynolds, Margaret Roper, 135. 77. Opera D. Cæcilii Cypriani (1568), 59. 78. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom, trans. Hallett, 104. Thomas Stapleton, Tres Thomae seu: De



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Little else remains to be said about Stapleton’s work regarding the present issue. Certainly, his work was instrumental in the transmission of this episode in ­non-academic or editorial circles. In the anonymous biography of Thomas More, The Life of Syr Thomas More (1599), the last of the Tudor era, the episode is related in detail, though it adds little new. Her [Margaret’s] witt was sharpe and quicke, and to giue you a tast thereof, knowe this: Sainct Ciprians workes had bene in those dayes oftentymes printed, yet there remained amongst other faults one notable vncorrected, and thereof no perfect sence [c]ould be made, to the laming and blemishing of a most notable sentence and testimonie of so ancient and sacred a writer. The wordes were these: Absit enim ab Ecclesia Romana vigorem suum tam prophana facilitate dimittere, et nisi vos seueritatis, euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere. Which place when mistris Margaret red, presentlie, without any helpe of other example or instruction, ‘These wordes nisi vos must be,’ saith shee, ‘neruos.’ So the sentence, by mending of that worde nisi vos into neruos, is made plaine and perspicuous. This correction of hers is noted of Iohn Costerus in his commentaries vpon Vincentius Lirinensis, and Pamelius in his annotations on Sainct Ciprian epistle 31.79

Erasmus and the Roper Emendation It has been stated that a majority of texts printed during the sixteenth century “are far from accurate,” since in many cases the manuscripts had only passed S. Thomae Apostoli rebus gestis; De S. Thoma [sic] Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi & Martyre; D. Thomae Mori Angliae quomdam Cancellarij vita (Duaci: Ex officina Ioannis Bogardi, 1588), 238–39. De hac Margareta sic in suis ad Vincentium Lyrenensem commentariis vir doctissimus Ioannes Costerius scribit. Quam Clemens medicina Doctor natione Anglus, vir ornatissimus ac Graecarum literarum peritissimus, mecum subinde pro sua humanitate de literis conferret, atque barum occasione multa de praeclarissimi Thomae Mori, quo familiariter dum vineret, vsus erat, humanitate, pietate, prudentia, ac eruditione dicerat meminis quoque subinde Margareta Mori filiae cuius ingenium atque doctrinam mirifice[m] praedicabat. Ut autem cognoscas, inquit, vera esse quae dico, adferam tibi ex Cypriano locum deprauatu admodum, quem illa citra exemplaris subsidium, sola ingenii sui foelicitate restituit. Erat autem hac sententia. Absit enim ab ecclesia Romana, vigorem suum tam profana facilitate dimittere, & nisi uos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere. Hunc locum ita corruptum vt nihil ex eo colligit queat, sic restituit Margareta vt diceret, pro eo quod ibi legimus nisi vos seueritatis, responendum esse neruos seueritatis: quo posito integrum & apertum sensum sententia habet. Hoc modo Absit enim ab ecclesia Romana, vigorem suum tam profana facilitate dimittere, & nisi uos seueritatis euersa fidei maiestate dissoluere. Hanc huius loci restitutionem a Margareta factam agnoscit Iacobus Pamelius in suis Ciprianum annotationibus ad locum citatum. 79. Ro. Ba., The Life of Syr Thomas More, Early English Text Society, o.s. 222, ed. E. V. Hitchcock and P. E. Hallet (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 141/16–143/2.

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a “surface inspection, correcting obvious errors of grammar, spelling and the like.”80 However, the partnership between Erasmus and his publisher, Froben, was respected and approved of by the greater number of humanists in Europe. We do not know the actual process of emendation that Erasmus followed, but we do know that he was so eager to publish new works that he always worked in a rush. In his editions, we see the results of that difficult balance “between his desire for accurate texts and the need for some sort of printed text as soon as possible.”81 According to Froude, “[h]aste made him careless: and this fault always clung to him. In later life he was never able to endure the bore[dom] of correcting his books.”82 Thus, Margaret Roper’s correction of the nisi vos severitatis phrase was evidently ignored by Erasmus. However, it is still difficult to explain why he never included the emendation of his friend’s daughter in any of his later editions of Cyprian, a question that lies at the basis of this paper and one for which I have no conclusive answer. Confronted with this discrepancy, some scholars claim that Erasmus did adopt Margaret’s correction.83 How­ 80. Eileen Bloch, “Erasmus and the Froben Press: The Making of an Editor,” The Library Quarterly, 35, no. 2 (1965): 109–20, here 112. 81. Bloch, “Erasmus and the Froben Press,” 119. 82. J. A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893–4 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 8. 83. Rogers states that the correction “was adopted by Erasmus” (Correspondence, 96). Again, in her edition of St. Thomas More: Selected Letters (1961; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 91–92, she refers to Foster Watson, ed., Vives and the Renascence Education of Women (New York: Longmans Green & Co., 1912), 188, and to Allen and Allen, eds., Opus epistolarum, vol. 4, letter 999, 174n, to support her claim. However, Watson simply says that “she corrected by her wit a place in Saint Cyprian corrupted, as Pamelian and John Coster testify, instead of ‘nisi vos sinceritatis,’ restoring ‘nervos sinceritatis.’ To her, Erasmus wrote an epistle, as to a woman not only famous for manners and virtue, but most of all for learning” (Watson, Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, 188–89). As for Allen and Allen, what it said is the following: “John Coster . . . in editing Vicentius Lirinensis’ Pro Catholicae fidei antiquitate, Paris, M. Julianus, 1569, cites f. 47: (from information received from John Clement) an emendation by her in Cyprian’s Ep. 30. 3, neruos for nisi vos: which is the reading of Erasmus editions” (Opus epistolarum, 4:18/174n), meaning precisely that Erasmus had used nisi vos. Rita Verbrugge, “Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1985), 30–42, notes 260–64, adopts the same stance: “a correction that was incorporated by Erasmus in his edition of St. Cyprian’s work” (34). To prove this, she refers (n. 262) to the letter in question but quotes it from Wilhelm von Hartel’s 1871 edition of Cyprian’s works: S. Thasci Caecili Cypriani Opera Omnia (Vienna: Geroldi, 1868–1871), 3.2:551. This claim also seems to be the assumption in Carmel ­McCallum-Barry, “Learned Women of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period in Italy and England: The Relevance of Their Scholarship,” in Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly, ed. Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 29–47: “we learn from More’s biographers that she had helped Erasmus with a textual emendation for a meaningless passage in the letters of St Cyprian” (40–41; my italics). See also Debbie ­Barrett-Graves, Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Jo Eldridge Carney (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001): “Erasmus also accepted



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ever, I have checked all the editions and reprints, and I can state that he did not. It could be the case that Erasmus simply did not want to include Margaret’s correction. Though he admired and praised learned women, the Dutch humanist could have residually suffered from the prejudice of his time about the female sex. Yet, he believed they had the same right to education as men, a view that he shared with, if not owed to, his friend Thomas More.84 Margaret was a woman to whom he was affectionate, having addressed her in one of his letters as Britanniae decus—“and not in mere flattery.”85 Though a remote possibility, perhaps male pride deterred him from adopting her emendation. But why would he go to the trouble of praising learned women if he was not sincere? As J. K. Sowards remarked, the Dutch humanist “was especially fond of Margaret Roper, . . . whom Erasmus had known all her life. He later corresponded with her as an intellectual equal.”86 One might also argue that Erasmus was simply too busy or forgetful to include Margaret’s neruos seueritatis emendation. Similarly, there is a strong possibility that he depended on some outside assistance; perhaps someone else overlooked this detail.87 In any case, the 1520s were a time of frenetic activity for him, and Erasmus was hard pressed:88 and used in his edition of St. Cyprian’s work Margaret’s emendation of a corrupt passage” (302); and Carole Levin et al., Extraordinary Women of the Medieval and Renaissance World: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000): “Erasmus also accepted Margaret’s emendation of a corrupt passage from St. Cyprian” (254). 84. In a letter to Guillaume Budé (September 1521) Erasmus acknowledges: “Iam neminem fere mortalium non habebat haec persuasio, sexui foeminino literas et ad castitatem et ad famam esse inutiles. Nec ipse quondam prorsus ab hac abhorrui sententia: verum hanc mihi Morus penitus excussit animo” (letter 1233, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 4:578/103–16). (Besides, there was almost no single mortal being who did not share this conviction: that literary studies by the female sex are useless with regard to their chastity and good name. And I myself did not reject completely this opinion in the past. Truly, More completely changed my mind about this [my translation]). For further information on Erasmus’s views about women’s education, see J. K. Sowards, “Erasmus and the Education of Women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 4 (1982): 77–89; and Elizabeth McCutcheon, “ ‘Tongues as Ready as Men’s’: Erasmus’ Representations of Women and their Discourse,” “Liber Amicorum: A Collection of Essays by Elizabeth McCutcheon,” Moreana 52, no. 201–202 (2016): 301–31, especially 309–11. 85. Craig R. Thompson, ed. and trans., Colloquies, vols. 39–40 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 514. 86. Sowards, “Erasmus and the Education of Women,” 82. 87. This interpretation was suggested by Elizabeth McCutcheon in personal communication. On Froben’s staff there were probably two types of correctors. On the one hand, the proofreaders needed to be well educated to revise the Latin texts; on the other, the ­so-called “learned correctors” were humanist scholars who carried out a more delicate process of selection of manuscripts, collations, and emendations, especially for the first editions: see Percy Simpson, P­ roof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 110. Earle Hilgert, “Johann Froben and the Basel University Scholars, 1513–1523,” The Library Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1971): 141–69, provides a list of university scholars “who contributed to Froben’s press during the decade between . . . 1513 and the beginning of the Reformation at Basel in 1523” (145). Although Hilgert refers to the connection between some of these scholars and some of Froben’s publications, no reference is made to Erasmus’s edition of St. Cyprian. 88. The second edition of his Novum Testamentum was published in 1519, and within eight years, two more

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The incessant reprints of his books, the attacks upon his New Testament, and the corrections and additions found necessary obliged Erasmus to remain on the spot [Louvain]. He had to make Louvain his ­head-quarters, within easy reach of Brussels, and for several years his time was divided between Louvain and Froben’s printing establishment at Bâle.89

Erasmus was constantly revising his works, and he was by no means reluctant to include modifications, which he then sent to his printer. As Froude puts it: “He was always adding and correcting; while new tracts, new editions of the Fathers show an acuteness of attention and an extent of reading which to a modern student seems beyond the reach of any single intellect.”90 By 1521, Erasmus had moved to Basel, working closely with the Froben press on more editions of the Adagia. It is in his preface to the 1526 revised edition of this work that he shows a less kind face toward those eager to track down errors in his editions: However, since in this type of subject matter there is no end to correcting and enriching, if I am granted a longer life, and if something is found out from authoritative sources—those new ones which come out to light often nowadays— my work will not remain blemished but rather a pleasing colophon will be added to it. Thus, it will be done so that the reader will neither be burdened with the costly efforts, nor deprived of some fruit, of my studies. However, if God takes me out of this world, I beg and implore the future generations again and again to preserve intact the things restored by us with so much labor; and if they come upon something either different or better than what we have rendered, let them not do to other’s work what we see done in lexicons nowadays, and what we learned was done in the past in the Decretals and the Sentences: that the latest one to alter another’s work receives universal praise. Quite on the contrary, whoever wants to publish a new book, let him do so in his own name, or if someone has anything either to correct or to explain, let him include whatever in an Appendix, following our example.91 came out. The third and fourth editions appeared in 1522 and 1527, respectively; the fifth (and final) edition was published in 1535. Other editions by Erasmus in this period include St. Hilary of Poitiers (1523), St. Irenæus of Lyons (1526), St. Ambrose (1527), St. Augustine (1528), the Epiphanius (1529), and St. Chrysostom (1530). In the same period, he issued theological and pedagogical treatises. In 1528 he published his dialogue Ciceronianus. Erasmus was also involved in a ­time-consuming polemic with Luther about the issue of free will, as well as in defending the orthodoxy of his writings against the Spanish Inquisition. When the city of Basel officially took sides for the Reform, Erasmus moved to Freiburg (1529). 89. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, 183. 90. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, 219. 91. Erasmus, Adagiorum per eundem exquisitissima & locupletatum, correctis ubique citationum numeris, ac restitutis indicibus. Hanc supremam manum putato, & securus emito. Si plura cupis nosse, vette paginam, & lege autoris epistolam (Basel: Froben, 1526), n.p.:



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Hence, his intense workload could have prevented him from including Margaret’s correction among those he did make to his Cyprian edition. In a different explanation of this issue, John Guy has speculated that “Margaret sent word of her discoveries to Erasmus, who—a trifle shamefacedly but genuinely impressed—acknowledged her to be one of Europe’s leading women intellectuals, rattling off a glowing tribute in the shape of a thinly veiled colloquy about her.”92 That is, when Erasmus came to know about her Cyprian emendation, he acknowledged it through compliments and a present: his colloquium “Antronius, Magdalia” was published in March 1524, and it was later called Abbatis et eruditae.93 It is generally assumed that in this conversation between an ignorant abbot and a learned lady, Magdalia, Erasmus based the latter on Margaret.94 However, I do not see a connection between the dialogue and the textual emendation, as Guy does. It seems more likely that Erasmus never knew about Margaret’s correction, and that is the reason why he did not include it in any of his Cyprian editions. When he died in 1536, he had not seen More in over fifteen years, since August 1521.95 With Margaret the period was even longer. If Erasmus was informed about her emendation by letter, no proof of this is found in their correspondence, comprised of the three letters that are preserved.96 Quoniam autem in hoc argumenti genere corrigendi locupletandique nullus est finis, si vita longior dabitur, et si quid occurret in auctoribus, qui nunc subinde novi proferuntur in lucem, non contaminabitur opus, sed grata coronis adjicetur. Ita fiet ut lector nec sumptu gravetur nec aliquo studiorum fructu fraudetur. Quod si me Deus terris eripuerit, etiam atque etiam obsecro et obtestor posteros, ut integra conservent quae tantis laboribus a nobis restituta sunt; et si quid nacti fuerint vel aliud vel melius his, quae nos tradidimus, ne faciant in opere alieno quod nunc in lexicis fieri videmus et olim in collectaneis decretorum et sententiarum theologicarum factum didicimus, ut postremus operis alieni contaminator laudem universam ferat: sed aut novum opus edat suo nomine qui velit, aut si quid habet quod vel corrigat vel doceat, nostrum imitatus exemplum appendicibus rem agat. 92. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 142. 93. Thompson, Colloquies, 499. 94. Thompson, Colloquies, 499, and Sowards, “Erasmus and the Education of Women,” 83. 95. The Emperor Charles met and received Cardinal Wolsey at the city gates of Bruges, almost as an equal, as Erasmus, who was with Charles, puts it in his letter to Budé (ca. September 1521; Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 4:575–80, letter 1233). This would be the last time that Erasmus saw More, who was with Wolsey. This fact conjures up yet another scenario. Given that 1520–1524 were the years when Margaret was particularly active, she might have solved the nisi vos crux before More left for Bruges. If so, Erasmus would have been informed by her proud father. This speculation still leaves two possibilities: either Erasmus did know, but Margaret’s emendation was never included in his Cyprian volumes, or Margaret had not yet solved the crux before Thomas More left London, suggesting a possible terminus a quo of August 1521 for dating her achievement. 96. Erasmus to Margaret Roper, letter 1404, Basel, 25 December 1523, in Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum, 5:366–67; Erasmus to Margaret Roper, letter 2212; Freiburg, 6 September 1529, in Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum 8:274; Margaret Roper to Erasmus, letter 2233, Chelsea, 4 November 1529, Allen and Allen, Opus epistolarum 8:299–300).

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Margaret More Roper, as Elizabeth McCutcheon puts it, “emended a corrupt passage in Saint Cyprian, and thus acquired a small but secure place in ­sixteenth-century scholarship.”97 However, this small place, as I have shown, took a long time to be secured. I do not think it is an overstatement to claim that Margaret was one of the most learned English women of her time, as Erasmus once stated. Even so, despite some welcome exceptions,98 some recent works on women writers have remained silent about the scope of her scholarly acumen. In this essay, I have tried to show that Margaret Roper is not only to be remembered as a translator of Erasmus, and her correction does more than reiterate her good command of Latin. Scholars might also rediscover her as a critical reader and as a woman with a solid philological background and considerable knowledge of the history of the church.99 97. Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 449–479, here 459. 98. See, for example, Sarah G. Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). As Micheline White puts it, “[t]here has been some recent scholarship on Margaret Roper, Mary Bassett, Margaret Clitherow, Elizabeth Grymeston, and Lady Elizabeth Cary, but Catholic women and literary traditions are often absent from discussions of Tudor and Jacobean women’s writing”; Micheline White, ed., Women and Gender in the Early Modern World: English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2011), 5n13. 99. To a considerable extent, her daughter Mary Roper Bassett inherited these skills from her. See Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, “Mary Roper Clarke Bassett and Meredith Hanmer’s Honorable Ladie of the Lande,” SEDERI: Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 17 (2007): 75–92; idem, “Some Notes” (2009): 146–80; Ross, Birth of Feminism, 79–81, 161–166; Goodrich, “Dedicatory Preface,” 301–28; and idem, Faithful Translators, 29–66.



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David R. Smith The Roper Miniatures

T w e lv e √

Narrative and Tableau Reading the Roper Miniatures within Holbein’s Tudor Portrait Career Davi d R . S mi t h†

This essay takes a ­non-literary view of Margaret More Roper (1505–1544) by looking at her portrait (p. 287, fig. 12.2), her outward guise, for what it tells us about the woman within. For those ensconced in the Republic of Letters, that may seem too wayward an approach to so supremely literary and thus inward a figure. Without question, the common presumption among literati that visual images deal with externals alone has a certain limited validity where portraits are concerned. No portrait can tell the whole truth about its subject by relying wholly on description rather than narration. For selfhood rests at least as much in stories, real or imagined, as on appearance. This partly explains the reference to narrative and tableau in my title. For the best portraits are as much about absence as about presence—things suggested, but unseen. Yet that is precisely why Margaret Roper’s outward image deserves more attention than it has received, for her portraits, here as elsewhere, do indeed fall into that category of “best,” especially for that relative rarity, the Renaissance woman intellectual. True, that’s not her doing, but her painter’s, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), one of the greatest portraitists in the Renaissance. In Margaret’s case, though, his importance lies not just in his talent for capturing features and expressions, but in the fact that he seems to have known her so well, allowing him to give form to the most elusive sides of her character. He knew

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those around her well, too, including, most ominously, King Henry VIII, who also sat for him (p. 307, fig. 12.11). Considering that so much of what we know of Margaret has come down to us in reflected light in the responses and recollections of those who knew her, Holbein’s perspective sheds at least as much reflected light as those of fellow humanists like Desiderius Erasmus or Juan Luis Vives. After all, apart from the aura of praise cast by her father, Sir Thomas More, the surviving record of her learning and her literary gifts remains frustratingly thin. Far too much has been lost. Holbein may help. The painter was closely engaged with the More family from the moment he first arrived in London in 1526, dodging the turmoil of Reformation Basel. In search of commissions, he came bearing a letter of introduction to Sir Thomas from the latter’s great friend and collaborator Erasmus, for whom the artist had worked in Basel. Thanks to More, Holbein quickly found work as a portrait painter, most famously in his huge, e­ ight-by-thirteen-foot Portrait of the More Family and in the state portrait of his patron as Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, now in the Frick Collection, both from the spring of 1527. The Family Portrait perished in a fire in 1752 but survives in a preparatory drawing in Basel that Margaret sent along to Erasmus as a gift when Holbein returned home in 1528. There are a number of late ­sixteenth-century copies too. Elsewhere, I’ve shown that it carried layer upon layer of witty and learned allusions that derive as much from the painter as his patron.1 Both were brilliant, funny men, and Holbein was also well educated enough, for an artist of his time, to be able to share insights and ideas with his learned client. His abilities show forth especially well in his marginal drawings in a copy of The Praise of Folly owned by his Latin tutor Oswald Myconius, done when he was just a teenager.2 Thomas More, in turn, knew more about the latest developments in Renaissance portraiture than is generally recognized.3 All the evidence suggests that the Family Portrait was a close col1. David R. Smith, “Portrait and C ­ ounter-Portrait in Holbein’s The Family of Sir Thomas More,” Art Bulletin, 87 (2005): 484–506. On Holbein in England and his relations with the More-Roper family, see above “Life Records,” pp. 3, 16–18, and 26. 2. See Erica Michael, The Drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus’s “Praise of Folly” (New York: Garland, 1986). Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 14–15, note that Holbein’s rendering of the Chimaera in one of those drawings is based on a passage in Horace’s De arte poetica that Erasmus alludes to in only the briefest of terms, which suggests that Holbein must have been familiar enough with Horace’s text to be able to recreate this mythical beast. See also Lothar Schmitt, “Education and Learning among 1­ 6th-Century German Artists,” in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 73–81, and Hans Reinhardt, “Erasmus und Holbein,” Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 81 (1981): 58–59. 3. The best evidence of Thomas More’s sophistication in this regard are the pendant portraits that



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laboration, which must have drawn the two men together. As Margaret, or Meg, Roper plays the role of her father’s “double” in that portrait as I’ve demonstrated,4 she too was most likely closely involved in bringing it to pass.5 But for this essay the Family Portrait only serves as background for another, far smaller work: Holbein’s portrait miniatures of Meg and her husband, William Roper, which are now kept in the Metropolitan Museum (figs. 12.1 and 12.2).6 These paintings come from a more troubled time eight years later and in their way tell just as intriguing a story. Renaissance family structure being what it was, we can be sure that William, not Margaret, commissioned the portraits. As the artist had already become a celebrity of sorts among the noble and the rich after his return to London in 1532, we can also presume that William’s motives were at least partly ulterior. He certainly recognized that such miniatures carried elite, courtly associations, particularly among the English. Husbandly ambitions and prerogatives aside, though, he too must have known the painter well, for they had all lived together in the More household during Holbein’s first English sojourn. To be sure, they could not have considered one another friends or equals in the ordinary sense. In his patrons’ eyes Holbein still had only the status of an employee, albeit one with m ­ uch-prized gifts. But the intellectual engagement manifest in the Family Portrait and the conversations it must have fostered in the More circle surely created warmer, more personal bonds as well, especially for Margaret and her father, the prime family intellectuals. Those personal considerations matter greatly for any attempt to come to grips with the miniatures’ meaning. The inscriptions give the Ropers’ ages as ­forty-two and thirty, or rather, as John Guy observes, in their ­forty-second and thirtieth years, in ­sixteenth-century parlance, hence making them ­forty-one and Erasmus and Pieter Gillis commissioned the Antwerp master Quentin Massys in 1517 to paint of them to send to their friend More to celebrate the publication of Utopia. On these portraits, see Lorne Campbell, Margaret Mann Phillips, Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen, and J. B. Trapp, “Quentin Massys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gilles and Thomas More,” Burlington Magazine, 120 (1978): 716–25. 4. See Smith, “Portrait and ­Counter-Portrait,” 492–93. 5. The picture held great meaning for the More family, for at the end of the century, in the wake of the disastrous turn in their fortunes, their descendants had the English miniaturist Rowland Lockey paint copies of the original. The best of them survives at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire and was apparently done for Margaret’s branch of the family. See Otto Kurz, “Rowland Locky,” Burlington Magazine 99 (1957): 13–16; Lesley Lewis, The Thomas More Family Group Portraits after Holbein (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 1998); Stanley Morison and Nicolas Barker, The Likeness of Thomas More: An Iconographic Survey of Three Centuries (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963). 6. Graham Reynolds with Katharine Baetjer, European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 69–70, nos.4 and 5.

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­twenty-nine.7 As Margaret was born between August and October 1505, this means that Holbein painted the portraits between late 1534 and m ­ id-1535, the most traumatic year of her life. For Thomas More was beheaded for treason on July 6, 1535, and had spent all of the previous year in the Tower of London, imprisoned for refusing to accept the legitimacy of Henry VIII’s claim to supremacy over the Church of England or of his second marriage to Anne Boleyn. For much of that year, Margaret had been a constant visitor to his cell, and it was she who retrieved his severed head from Tower Bridge the month after his execution. Not surprisingly, many have seen her gaunt features in the miniature as evidence of her suffering following her father’s death. She looks ten years older than she was. But more likely, her gaunt, somber face instead reflects the anxieties of the year before. Strong character that she was, it hardly seems conceivable that she would have consented to sit for her portrait so soon after the execution of the man she most loved and revered. At the very least, it would have been disrespectful, and there is no evidence whatever that her undeniably s­ elf-centered husband would have demanded such a sacrifice from her.8 But how much actual biography are we entitled to infer in interpreting these portraits? As both Margaret and William strike rather formal poses, are not spontaneous, modern reactions to their faces almost intrinsically anachronistic? Perhaps another way of looking at them, acknowledging, as we must, Margaret Roper’s sorrowful state of mind at any time in 1535, is to consider Hans Holbein’s thoughts as portrait painter. Did he simply paint the face he saw before him, or did the act of describing call forth deeper levels of connotation and meaning? Here the fact that he knew his sitters well becomes critical, just as much as the stratified web of social connections that bound both the artist and his sitters. Later in this essay I intend to argue that those charged relationships also affected the artist’s unfolding vision of Henry VIII, the source of Margaret’s woes. The issues are as much aesthetic as social or psychological. No matter how scrupulously descriptive, works of art demand coherent formal vocabularies to communicate in any depth, but especially so in this case. Although it may not be apparent on the printed page, the Renaissance miniature is quite a distinctive 7. John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More & His Dearest Meg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 234. Most sources date the pendants 1536 on the assumption that the inscription to William and Margaret’s present ages rather than to their ages in the year to come: e.g., Paul Ganz, Holbein, The Paintings, Complete Edition (London: Phaidon, 1956), 175–76, nos. 134–35. 8. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 274, notes that in spite of Roper’s e­ ver-worsening relations with Margaret’s family, he kept faith with her, never remarrying after her death and asking to be buried by her side.



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form, with b­ uilt-in imperatives and constraints due to its tiny size. From early on it also became an English specialty, remaining so well into the nineteenth century. As such, it posed a new problem for Hans Holbein after his return to London in 1532, when he quickly set about establishing himself as the unrivalled portrait master in England. In fact, if we date the Roper pendants to 1535, as very likely we should, they may well be Holbein’s earliest experiment with the form. According to Karel van Mander’s Het Schilderboeck (1604), he learned the basic technique of m ­ iniature-painting around 1535 from the Flemish artist Lucas Horenbout (ca.1490–1544), the reigning Tudor specialist, whom he quickly surpassed.9 Horenbout came from the Ghent/Bruges School of manuscript illuminators, which had dominated court art in the Duchy of Burgundy since the late fifteenth century. As part of his campaign to raise the Tudor dynasty’s cultural standing, Henry VIII brought him to London with his father, Gerard, and sister, Susannah, around 1525 to decorate manuscripts for the royal library. From the beginning the Horenbouts served the royal family and their courtly circle. So when Lucas branched out from manuscript pages to portrait miniatures, those were his prime clientele. In his hands it remained an almost exclusively royal art. “Limning,” then the going term for f­ace-painting “in little,” derives from “illumination,” and the images themselves soon became exquisite collector’s items, hence William Roper’s interest.10 The technique Horenbout developed, which became standard practice, entailed painting in watercolor on a vellum surface pasted to a playing card. Also standard is the round or oval frame, which consistently sets miniatures apart from portraits in larger, rectangular formats. Where the rectangle conjures up Leon Battista Alberti’s analogy of the picture frame to a window, 9. Karel van Mander, Het Schilderboeck (1604; Amsterdam: Wereld Bibliotheek, 1946), 74. Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander, Hans Holbein 1497/98–1543: Portraitist of the Renaissance, Mauritshuis, The Hague, 2003, exhibition catalog, p. 126, argue, however, that Holbein learned the technique of miniature painting earlier, by 1528, as evidenced by decorated initials he added to a manuscript by his friend Nicolaus Kratzer, the king’s astronomer, in that year. The technique as such, however, is a different problem than that of the aesthetics of the portrait miniature, so the special place of the Roper pendants in the unfolding of Holbein’s art remains intact. 10. John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon, and Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 29–33; Janet Backhouse, “Illuminated Manuscripts and the Development of the Portrait Miniature,” in Henry VIII, A European Court in England, ed. David Starkey, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 1991, exhibition catalog, pp. 88–90. With Simon Bening, the son of Sanders Bening, the Master of Mary of Burgundy, Gerard Horenbout was the primary illuminator of the famous Grimani Breviary, a beautiful and luxurious devotional book that passed into the hands of Cardinal Domenico Grimani of Venice around 1520. Sanders Bening, in turn, was the b­ rother-in-law of Hugo van der Goes, the greatest ­fifteenth-century Northern painter after Jan van Eyck. The Tudors were tapping into a rich tradition.

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the circle is insistently decorative, as much a matter of surface as of illusion. Not only does it weaken the sense of the frame as window, hence bringing more closure to the image, it also cancels implicit analogies to the vertical and horizontal coordinates of the human body and leaves the image less grounded in an implied gravitational field. In miniatures another corollary of circular frames is that the figure almost always hugs the central axis of the composition so as to counteract the shape’s intrinsic “rolling” effect and keep a tenuous hold on gravity in the most basic, physical sense. One way of gauging Holbein’s achievement within these strictures is to compare Meg’s portrait to Horenbout’s of the young Henry VIII (p. 289, fig. 12.3) in the Royal Collection, done a decade earlier, about 1526.11 The king was famously handsome in his youth, tall, strong, athletic, charming, and his attractiveness remains very much intact here in his ­mid-thirties. Yet the portrait is as flat as it is pretty: nice clothes, nice color accords, but with no modeling shadows and the eyes unfocused in an empty stare. Here and elsewhere, Horenbout simply “limns” the features before him directly onto the vellum surface in a straight copy. There is no sign of a sketch or ­under-drawing to work out preliminary ideas. No drawings survive for Margaret Roper’s image either, but they very likely once existed. Holbein considered himself a portrait painter, not a limner, and did not change the essential character of his art in moving to a miniature scale and technique. More than enough of his drawings do survive to show that he first sketched out his composition in a larger scale on paper and only then transferred it to the tiny decorative surface. That is to say, the face leads an independent artistic existence in his mind, separate from either the j­ewel-like final object or the ­flesh-and-blood original. The artist recreates reality in a deeper sense rather than simply replicating it as Horenbout does. And Meg’s image fully reflects his thoughtful mediation. Set at a three-quarter angle, she belongs to an illusionary space separate from the picture surface that the frontal pose of Horenbout’s Henry only accentuates. And though they share the same decorative formula of a flat blue picture field inscribed with gold words and numerals, the shadows on her countenance make her far more illusionistic, more real. Just as importantly, Holbein, as he most often does, includes her hands, as Horenbout never does. Not only do her hands enhance the portrait’s ­three-dimensionality, but they create a dialogue with her face, a counterpoint of body and spirit that further deepens and enlivens Margaret Roper’s character. 11. Murdoch et al., The English Miniature, 31–32.



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That dialogue, in turn, parallels the one built into the formula of the marriage portrait as pair portrait. Especially in Northern European art, pendants of husband and wife are as old as portraiture itself. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, social identity was largely a function of dynastic identity, particularly for those wealthy and s­ elf-conscious enough to commission portraits. Even more than for men, women’s sense of self depended on having a spouse, there being so few other articulate social roles to play. That institutional framework also accounts for why the woman’s image is usually on the right and her husband’s on the left. In the fifteenth century most portraits were devotional diptychs or triptychs, in which those portrayed look toward an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. The man belongs on the left because that is the right, or dexter, side of the holy focus of devotion, while the woman’s lower status casts her on the sinister side. There are exceptions to this rule, but reversals of left and right usually mean that the sitter was unmarried at the time. Married or not, the woman stays on the right in devotional portraits in the interests of humility, whereas a man on the right seems almost invariably to have been unmarried, called to the humbler side in the absence of a yet humbler, more sinister wife. On the other hand, a woman facing right means, first, that the portrait never had a devotional wing, hence is secular, and second, that this may be an engagement portrait. On rare occasions, the man may have been placed on the right as suppliant, before his marriage and afterwards matched with a wife on the left after marrying her, so as to save the expense of yet another portrait. History and marriage can be like that.12 That the ­dexter-sinister rule lasts well into the modern world, long past the decline of devotional portraiture, speaks to a d­ eep-rooted force of habit, but also to another, more psychological kind of dialogue that is likewise evident in the Roper pendants. All human beings scan left to right visually, even when they may have been taught to read and write in the other direction, as with Hebrew. It is not just a culturally ingrained habit. This is another, more subliminal reason why the husband, customarily the stronger, more masterful spouse, so often appears on the left. He acts, she reacts. In early portraits the two images are most often held together by a simple, mirror–image symmetry, which often 12. Victor Schmidt, “Diptychs and Supplicants: Precedents and Contexts of 1­ 5th-Century Devotional Diptychs,” in Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, ed. John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 2006), 15–31. On the conventions of pair portraiture, see David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, ­17th-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 13–56.

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seems to reflect the rather narrow thinking of both artists and sitters in a less ­self-conscious age dominated by dynastic abstractions. But Holbein thought dialogically from the very beginning of his career. In 1527, soon after first settling in London, he painted an especially provocative pair portrait of Sir Henry Guildford, the king’s Master of Revels and Comptroller of the Household, and his second wife, Mary Wotton (p. 291, fig. 12.4). As a good friend of Sir Henry, Thomas More very likely helped arrange the commission for his new i­ n-house artist. Regrettably, though, because the husband’s likeness today hangs in the Royal Collection,13 hers in the St. Louis Art Museum, their complex dialogue is effectively lost. But originally, they posed a contrast of large (in fact, huge) man and petite wife, he filling the frame, she framed by background architecture. Moreover, her calm, ­self-possessed pose and expression are countered by a screaming Medusa face on the capital of the column behind her, wittily suggesting that Lady Guildford’s calm comes of being turned to stone.14 Likewise, fig branches fill both backgrounds, alluding to one supposed fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 2–3 does not, in fact, specify the apple) and hence to original sin, countering their sumptuous, gilded attire.15 And while an illusionary curtain rod runs across both panels, it rests on different spatial planes in each, yet another unsettling discord.16 Hemmed in by frames and edges, Mary Wotton looks a bit edgy. What precisely inspired these discrepancies remains guesswork, 13. Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/400046/­sir-henry-guildford-1489-1532; accessed January 15, 2022. 14. The notion of a stony Lady Guildford arises both from her proximity to the Medusa face and from a preparatory drawing for the portrait, now kept in Basel’s Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kupferstichkabinett, which Holbein must have taken back with him when he returned to Basel in 1528. There Mary Wotton’s face wears a sly smile as she looks toward her husband, not the viewer. One might conjecture that she objected to his initial hint of levity, leading him to give her a more serious expression, but also adding the Medusa as a joke at her expense. But this can be no more than conjecture. See Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 169; Andreas Beyer, “The London Interlude,” in Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, ed. Christian Müller (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 69; Susan Foister, Holbein & England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 243–46; Stephanie Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1997), 158–59. 15. Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 106, 154 16. Ganz, Holbein, 232, nos. 44 and 45; John Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger, Complete Edition (Boston: Godine, 1985), 133, nos. 35 and 36; Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 64–67, no. 6. In his catalogue entry Peter van Ploeg suggests that the commission arose in connection with the banquet hall and theater at Greenwich built by Henry VIII in 1527 for the reception of a French ambassador. Guildford and Holbein collaborated closely on the project, as did Sir Henry Wyatt and the astronomer Nikolas Kratzer, of whom the artist also painted portraits around the same time. On the commission, see also Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 170–72. On Holbein’s portrait of Sir Henry Wyatt, see also Holbein at the Court of Henry VIII, The Queen’s Gallery, London, 1978–79, exhibition catalog, pp. 40–42, nos. 12 and 13.



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but they testify to Holbein’s keen wit, insight, and again his taste for dialogical oppositions. Tiny as they are (4.5 cm), the Roper pendants (figs. 12.1 and 12.2) leave no room for such speculative gymnastics, but they nonetheless seize upon contrasts we know William and Margaret presented. In his biography of Thomas More, written during the Catholic revival of Queen Mary’s reign in the 1550s, William appears as the most loyal and dutiful of s­ ons-in-law. There More affectionately calls him “son Roper.”17 Yet while that book remains one of our most important sources, other records paint a less congenial picture of William Roper as proud, greedy, and litigious, frequently at odds with his More relatives, even with his ­father-in-law at one point. Evidently, Margaret sometimes had to intervene to mend strained family bonds. Still, after her death he did not remarry and asked to be buried beside her.18 Not surprisingly, none of the derogatory qualities shows through in his firm, composed features, but his unusually expressive hands tell a somewhat different story. By grasping his fur lapels, he assumes a rhetorical, almost confrontational posture that projects a potentially unsettling dialogue with the implied social space beyond the frame. He looks to be a natural, even compulsive, litigant. Margaret, on the other hand, appears more passive. Partly, this just reflects her customary role as wife, partly her sorrowful disposition in 1535. Proud though he was of her accomplishments, Thomas More had raised his daughters to be dutiful, submissive women, an attitude Meg might occasionally have balked at otherwise, given her strong character and intellect. Both love and deference kept her from breaking with her imprisoned father’s expectations, which were, of course, the universal standard of the time. Accordingly, she had not even named herself as author of her surviving Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, (1524).19 Anything more would have violated feminine modesty. Yet she certainly showed courage enough in daring to visit Sir Thomas in the Tower, even more so afterwards in undertaking the grisly task of retrieving his head. In fact, “passive” is really too tame a word for her, as it suggests an absence, a lack, when Holbein has painted her as very much the manifold expressive presence he knew her to be. As with her husband, black dominates Margaret’s costume, sounding a note of understatement, restraint, and likely of sorrow. But 17. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 197, 208, 210, 216–17. 18. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 131–34, 139, 162–64, 168, 190, 199–201, 251–52, 267–74. 19. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 249–52.

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Figure 12.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Miniature of William Roper (pendant to no. 2), 1534–35, watercolor on vellum laid on card, diam. 4.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1950, New York. Photo: Museum.

Figure 12.2 Hans Holbein the Younger, Miniature of Margaret More Roper (pendant to no. 1), 1534– 35, watercolor on vellum laid on card, diam. 4.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1950, New York. Photo: Museum.



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the red and gold embroidery of her gable hood bespeaks a muted elegance suited to a gentlewoman, as do her pink sleeves, ferret-skin ruff, and the delicate gold stitching on her blouse. More telling, though, is the gold medallion of St. George and the Dragon adorning her breast, probably an intentional echo of the frame. Apparently, it carries a personal meaning, as her patron saint, Margaret of Antioch, wrestled with dragons and devils too, as she herself was figuratively doing at this difficult moment in her life.20 Which is to say that there is a strong narrative undertone to the miniature, especially in light of her serene, but gaunt face. In the eyes of a sensitive observer, there lurks a persistent friction between a calm demeanor and the life behind it. With her thumb marking the page, the green prayer book in Meg Roper’s quietly crossed hands makes the storyline still stronger. Holding a prayer book is common enough in women’s portraits of the time, a conventional mark of piety. Mary Wotton does so too in Holbein’s portrait in St. Louis (fig. 12.4). Nor is it unprecedented for women to read or look up from a book in their portraits. In the versions of the lost Family Portrait too, she holds on her lap an open book, which figures in that picture’s unfolding story.21 But the way Margaret marks her page looks to be a subtle new departure, as it suggests that she’s more than just learned or emblematically pious. While posing she has only momentarily interrupted her reading and the ongoing narrative to which it belongs, effectively splitting her state of mind, making her ambivalent. This is the first time that provocative little detail appears in Holbein’s portraits or, as far as I know, in Renaissance portraiture in general, and it appears to have been inspired by Meg Roper’s distinctive character as both wife and humanist intellectual.22 Subtler still is the way the miniature’s narrative seems to intrude upon the 20. Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 14, 234. 21. In Smith, “Portrait and C ­ ounter-Portrait,” 492, I note that More and Margaret differ from all the other family members in the portrait in looking abstractedly off into space, a similarity compounded by their closely similar features. She is his “double,” but also in a sense his opposite, or so the open book, Seneca’s Oedipus, suggests. The page opened closest to Sir Thomas speaks of pride and rashness, countered by marginal lines about moderation and gentleness on the other, which would seem to apply to the humbler, meeker figure of his daughter. That opposition, in turn, speaks to a more pervasive opposition in the portrait between the family as centripetal dynastic order and a looser, more centrifugal pattern of relationships. 22. Holbein’s only other surviving work in which a sitter places a finger between the pages of a book is his Portrait of an Unknown Man at His Desk, dated 1541, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Aged 27, this sitter too belongs to a learned, humanist milieu. In a book heavily influenced by Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing, Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 1–3, sees this portrait as paradigm of the artist’s descriptive mode, though she fails to grasp the narrative implications of the man’s interrupted reading. See also Ganz, Hans Holbein, 253, no. 115; Rowlands, Holbein, 147, no. 73.

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Figure 12.3  Lucas Horenbout, Miniature of King Henry VIII, ca. 1526–27, watercolor on vellum laid on card, diam, 4.7 cm. Supplied by the Royal Collection Trust © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012. Photo: Royal Collection.

very structure of the image. Unlike her husband’s portrait and virtually all other miniatures of the time, Margaret’s head does not coincide with the central axis of the frame but is pitched a little to left. Where their erect postures establish stable gravitational fields, hers gives in, as it were, to the circle’s curve, an effect enhanced by the backward curve of her black hood. Consequently, Margaret’s pose shows a slight, almost subliminal tendency to roll forward, to yield to the force of gravity in her otherwise decorative picture field. In a sense, history and temporality win out over a formal outward convention. This aura of personal narrative in Meg’s pendant endows her with a sense of privacy, an interiority that is only underscored by William Roper’s rhetorical,



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o­ utwardly-directed public self. One effect of their dialogue is that her calm, composed face effectively becomes a mask, in Latin a persona. Hans Holbein was not alone among early ­sixteenth-century masters in using pendant compositions to create a complex dialectic between portraits of a husband and wife. Among other places one finds that effect is in his Flemish contemporary Jan Gossaert’s unidentified donor portraits on the wings of his Norfolk Triptych, from around 1528, now in the Musée d’Art Ancien, Brussels.23 As with Holbein’s own Guildford pendants of about the same year, where the oppositions cut yet deeper, Gossaert’s prayerful, but sharply contrasted, husband and wife belong to a public setting of classical architecture, here presumably a church. Setting plays almost no role in the Roper portraits, but by using an implied hidden narrative to define Margaret’s character, Holbein sets her outside her husband’s s­ elf-consciously public time and space. Behind her outward façade she dwells in what is in effect a novelistic, prose time that is intrinsically private.

Privacy and Its Variations In this respect, artist and sitter here stand on the threshold of a profound change in Western sensibilities.24 Today we take privacy for granted as a primary condition of life and selfhood, so much so that rhetoric and persona as functions of public life often seem tainted with theatricality, artifice, insincerity. Hardly anyone in s­ ixteenth-century London or Chelsea, the More family less than most, could have shared that sentiment. For them privacy scarcely existed, even in the most rudimentary physical sense. Utopia too is a supremely public world, where everyone seems constantly in the presence of others. Yet the restlessness with the old order that Thomas More’s ambivalent social fantasy sets forth belongs to the forces that would inexorably bring modernity to pass.25 23. Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2010), exhibition catalog, pp. 281–85, no. 55. The husband, on the left before an open window, looks out at us while turning the pages of his prayer book and laying his other hand on his heart. His wife maintains a more formal prayerful demeanor, while looking toward him and the Virgin and Child between them in what is effectively a ­four-way conversation with the viewer. 24. On this issue see especially David R. Smith, “Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture,” Dutch Crossing, no. 41 (1990): 72–109. 25. Some scholarship has concluded that Utopia was intended not just as the recipe for an ideal alternative to Tudor society that it is widely taken to be, but as a more ironic, ambivalent social vision, as it appears to harbor subtle flaws that reflect Thomas More’s sense of human fallibility. See J. H. Hexter, More’s “Utopia”:

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Figure 12.4  Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Mary Wotton, Lady Guildford, 1527, oil on panel, 83 x 67 cm, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis. Photo: Museum.

Whatever Meg Roper or her father may have glimpsed of that other brave new world, Hans Holbein appears to have been well placed to explore the possibilities of the coming ruptures of public and private. As far as one can tell, this is not so much a matter of his own private situation as an alien living abroad but, at least in this context, of the intrinsic dynamics of miniature portraiture as he practiced it. By virtue of its size alone, the form caters to privacy and seclusion. Miniatures lend themselves to being held in the palm, wrapped in fine cloth or The Biography of an Idea (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), 99–152; Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 50–74; and R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 155.



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paper, and tucked away in a cabinet or drawer, out of sight. Only in modern museums do they go on public display, and even there they are all too easily overlooked and very rarely handled, if at all. ­Sixteenth-century records show that the only groups that viewed them together were very small and had to gather tightly around a candle in the wealthy owner’s bedroom or “closet.”26 Socially and aesthetically, it is an inherently intimate, interior art form, and Holbein appears to have been the first to discover its real potential in this respect, as Lucas Horenbout (fig. 12.3), with his flat faces, clearly did not. Words like “privacy” and “intimacy” can have different connotations, however, depending on their social context. Lucas Horenbout’s royal clientele did not call for social or psychological inwardness in his portraits of them. As will shortly become evident, neither did Holbein’s, at least in miniature painting. On the other hand, the Roper pendants fit neatly within a broader, less elevated social class, which for that very reason appears to have lent itself to intimacy as interiority. Especially where Meg’s image is concerned, the single most provocative analogy among the miniatures is to Holbein’s Portrait of Jane Small (fig. 12.5) from around 1540, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Long mistakenly identified as a Mrs. Robert Pemberton, she has proved instead to be Mrs. Small, née Jane Pemberton, who married Nicholas Small, a wealthy London cloth merchant. In fact, though, she may well still be Miss Pemberton here, as the inscription says she is only in her ­twenty-third year and, more importantly, because she turns to her left, the dexter side, suggesting that this is a betrothal portrait. Moreover, the red carnation, or “pink,” hanging from her neck is a traditional symbol of love and betrothal, and the sprig in her left hand may carry some medicinal or emblematic love symbolism too.27 But it is her state of mind that matters most here, for 26. Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 67–77. The passage begins with Mary Queen of Scots’ ambassador Sir James Melville’s account of Queen Elizabeth bringing him, in 1564, into her most private state apartment in Whitehall Palace to see her miniatures of the favorite men in her life, during his mission to arrange the marriage of Mary to Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, the most favored of those favored males. Just such squinting at the miniatures then ensues; the marriage did not. 27. Foister, Holbein & England, 34–36, 255–56; Ganz, Hans Holbein, 259, no. 140. Lorne Campbell, “Hol­ bein’s Miniature of ‘Mrs. Pemberton’: The Identity of the Sitter,” Burlington Magazine 124 (1987): 366–71; Campbell, “Holbein’s Miniature of Jane Pemberton: A Further Note,” Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 213–14. Jane Pemberton appears to have been born around 1518 and married around 1540. Campbell notes that she wears no ring on her wedding finger, indicating that this is a betrothal portrait. She died at an advanced age in 1602. She and her husband lived near the Steelyard at the time the painting was made, which might account for their acquaintance with Holbein, who lived nearby and painted a number of portraits of his German countrymen in the Steelyard, including possibly the two young men alluded to in note 28, below. Another possible connection is that the Smalls apparently knew Robert Cheseman, another and considerably more distinguished

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Figure 12.5  Hans Holbein the Younger, Miniature of Jane Small, ca. 1540, watercolor on vellum laid on card, diam. 5.3 cm, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Museum.

she turns in upon herself in a conspicuous moment of interior reflection. There is a close comparison in the artist’s miniature Portrait of a Young Man in the Dutch Royal Collection in The Hague, also likely from around 1540, in which he too looks down with a reflective, possibly melancholy, expression.28 Over the course of the past three hundred years, it has become ever more common for portrait sitters to assume such introspective poses and expressions. of Holbein’s sitters, whom he had painted in 1533. For the older identification as Mrs. Robert Pemberton, see Rowlands, Holbein, 150–51, no. M5. 28. Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 138, no. 35. In his catalogue entry Quentin Buvelot suggests that this young man may have been a German connected to the London Steelyard, based on his close resemblance to another miniature of a young man, dated 1543, which disappeared from Gdansk in the wake of World War II. Both men turn to their left, and the latter of the two portraits shows the sitter’s hands, as the figure in The Hague does not.



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But that is decidedly not the case in Renaissance art, even in Hans Holbein’s portraits, which are more sensitive to psychological nuance than most. Either the sitters look out at us, or they turn away to the left or right. That does not necessarily diminish their psychological depth, but it does reflect on the fundamentally public, rhetorical character of p­ re-modern understandings of selfhood.29 In a sense, they live in one another’s eyes, as William Roper does (fig. 12.1). Moreover, the most prominent exception to this relative ­other-directedness in Holbein’s portraits is one that touches him personally and deeply: his Portrait of his Wife, Elsbeth Binzenstock, and their Children Philipp and Katharina in Basel (fig. 12.6), done after his return to the city in 1528. Although the inscribed date, “152–”, lacks the last numeral (the same trimming cut off the fingers of Katharina’s left hand), the picture obviously was painted closer to 1528 than to 1532, when he returned to London. From their distinctly g­ rief-stricken expressions and Elsbeth’s averted, downcast eyes, it is hard to see in his family a spirit of “Welcome home, Dad!” Not unlike Meg Roper’s miniature (fig. 12.2), the portrait’s emotional tenor indicates that if nothing else, there is a story here, but one outside the frame.30 Jochen Sander has suggested that before being cut down on the right the painting showed the artist himself, possibly in the act of portraying his wife and children, either as themselves or as characters in some sacred narrative.31 This intriguing notion, if true, would broaden still further the scope of the artist’s genius. That narrative and any autobiographical specifics necessarily elude us. But whatever the tale it tells, the painting does provide a context for quite advanced notions of portraiture as inner narrative. That is, it belongs to Holbein’s own 29. In addition to the Guildford pendants, particularly striking examples of psychological complexity within an outward guise are Holbein’s The Ambassadors of 1533 and his Portrait of Christina of Denmark of 1538, both in the National Gallery, London. 30. Ganz, Holbein, 234, no. 52; Rowlands, Holbein, 135, no. 32. Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 172–77, note that a Renaissance copy of the painting shows a niche in the background, with flanking columns and pilasters, which suggests some abstract, perhaps allegorical significance, though this might raise frictions with his family’s relatively humble attire in the picture. Analogies with images of the Virgin with Christ and St. John as children have also been drawn, but that seems most unlikely, given the genders of the children and the character of the narrative they appear to enact (though see note 29). This does not mean that the artist might not have had some other narrative analogy in mind, but the nature of the moment he has chosen here seems closely related to “real life” in some fashion. Derek Wilson, Hans Holbein, Portrait of an Unknown Man (London: Phoenix, 1997), 148–50, sees the painting as a straight portrait, done out of love, but by a man incapable of flattery at a difficult time when Elsbeth knew her husband planned to return to London. He notes too that Holbein had to return to Basel after his t­ wo-year leave of absence from the Basel town council, for otherwise he and his family would lose their citizenship. Wilson is not an art historian, however, and he fails to take into account the sheer novelty of so “realistic” a portrait by the standards of the time, which continues to render the work problematic. 31. Jochen Sander, in Müller, Holbein: The Basel Years, 403–4, no. 140.

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Figure 12.6  Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of the Artist’s Family (Elsbeth Binzenstock and their Children Philipp and Katharina, 1528–29 (inv. No. 325), oil on paper on panel, 79.4 x 64.7 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin Bühler.

personal world of experience in the most literal and tangible sense, but also to a larger social framework that suits his empirical, narrational approach to the self here. In essence, it reflects what we would call a m ­ iddle-class outlook, in which selfhood and identity depend on inner narratives more than on titles and fixed social status. That same attitude helps explain the artist’s miniature Self Portrait, a copy of which survives today in the Wallace Collection. Dated 1543, the year of his death, it shows him in simple studio attire with brush in hand as he looks out at the viewer and himself.32 32. https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org:443/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=64391&viewType=detailView; accessed July 10, 2022. Ganz, Holbein, 260, no. 149, accepts the miniature as Holbein’s work; Rowlands, Holbein, 239–40, no. R.M.3, rejects it, but sees it as based on a lost original.



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If nothing else, that copy confirms the link between the miniature format (here only 3.6 cm) and the personal intimacy of his Basel Family Portrait in Hol­ bein’s own mind. In both he is speaking to his own social world, which amply embraces the miniatures of Mrs. Roper and Mrs. Small too, both in their interiority and their outward appearance. Admittedly, all these people belong to the same social category only in the broadest and, yes, vaguest sense, one open to endless nuances and variations. Both of the two English women were better off socially and financially than Elsbeth Binzenstock, and they look it. As the daughter of Sir Thomas More, Meg had—or had until her father’s imprisonment— social standing and money enough for one whose family still had to work for a living, and clearly she could dress the part. Jane Small cuts a less classy figure, as befits her more middling background, but she too had connections, and wealth besides.33 As with Meg’s portrait, though, the signs of prosperity lie more in small details of fabric, stitching and the like, than in the air of extravagance and ostentation so common among English royalty and aristocracy. Both wear mainly black, relieved in Mrs. Small’s case only by her white bonnet and shawl. Issues of class aside, Meg’s relatively simple taste may also be an inheritance of sorts from her father, who according to Erasmus shunned pretense and outward show in his behavior and mode of dress.34 From his surviving work it seems significant that Holbein initially began to explore this interior, narrative self in family portraits, first of the More clan and then of his own wife and children. They appear to have provided the social frame for his emerging vision of the miniature as intimate, beginning with the Roper pendants. Yet neither the Margaret Roper nor the Jane Small fits the language of miniature portraiture laid down in Lucas Horenbout’s Henry VIII (fig. 12.3), where the personal and the narrational play no role at all. Nor is this simply because Horenbout was so much the lesser of the two artists. Hans Holbein himself went on to paint miniatures that are far less personal, less narrational than either of those m ­ iddle-class women, in large part because their sitters belong to a higher social caste. His Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Audley (fig. 12.7) in the Royal Collection 33. Campbell, “Jane Pemberton: A Further Note,” 214, notes that Jane’s husband, Nicholas Small, was master of his guild in 1578–79 and that Jane later owned and passed on to her sons the Great House at Paddington, apparently a very wealthy piece of real estate. 34. Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus, trans. R. A. B. Myers, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz, vol. 7 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 18: “Simple clothes please him best, and he never wears silk or scarlet or a gold chain, except when it is not open to him to lay it aside.” See also Smith, “Portrait and ­Counter-Portrait,” 486, 501n19.

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Figure 12.7  Hans Holbein the Younger, Miniature of Lady Elizabeth Audley, ca. 1538, watercolor on vellum laid on card, diam. 5.7 cm. Supplied by the Royal Collection Trust © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012. Photo: Royal Collection.

nicely illustrates the difference. Like Jane Small, she poses in the dexter position in what is likely another betrothal portrait, done for her marriage in 1538 to Thomas Audley, who in that year became the first Baron Audley of Walden, a confiscated monastery. A nemesis of Thomas More, he had replaced Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor in 1533 and presided over his conviction and execution, as well as those of Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Thomas Cromwell in 1540.35 With a husband so powerfully positioned at the center of Henry VIII’s court, Lady Elizabeth manifestly belongs to a far higher, more glittering social world than Meg Roper or Jane Small, despite their outward similarities of pose and tiny medium. With her hands quietly folded and a sedate gaze, Elizabeth Audley’s bland, 35. Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 126–29, no. 32.



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pleasant face gives no hint of the interior life behind the other women’s portraits. She is what she appears to be, a wholly outward being, defined by the canons of court etiquette and the latest, quite gaudy fashions—bright red dress, new French hood, ample jewelry. But for their inner selves, Mrs. Roper and Mrs. Small look positively dowdy in comparison. Much of Lady Elizabeth’s visual presence is vested in her jewels, as confirmed by Holbein’s preparatory drawing, also in the Royal Collection. Aside from her detailed facial features, the sketch takes note only of her necklace and brooch.36 Set against the same blue background as the other miniatures, her red dress and sparkling accessories in the painted version make her an extension of her material possessions, with no room for understatement or interiority. In a real sense she becomes a jewel. Much the same is true of another Holbein miniature in the Royal Collection, portraying a young woman long thought to be Catherine Howard, Henry’s flighty, ­ill-fated fifth wife, who fell beneath the ax in 1542, possibly as young as seventeen.37 Here, around 1541, she wears cloth of gold, expensive furs, and once again the many jewels with which the king delighted to adorn his women and himself.38 The best evidence of this analogy of ladies in miniature to jewelry is the Anne of Cleves (fig. 12.8) in the Victoria and Albert, probably painted about the same time, around 1540, as the Jane Small in the same collection. A workshop piece based on the artist’s equally bejeweled, ­knee-length portrait in the Louvre, the little roundel (4.5 cm) of Henry’s disastrous, quickly abandoned fourth wife cuts her down to ­bust-length while retaining her iconic symmetry and frontal, empty gaze. Portrayed without hands, she is all face, and because her face so fills the surface of the roundel, she becomes virtually inseparable from the miniature as object, or as jewel. In the words of Pascal Griener, “The sitter’s face is akin to a cheap stone mounted in too rich a setting; it disappears under the wealth of the jewels.” Plausibly enough, some, like Griener, think Holbein flattened and objectified Anne’s image as a subtle warning to the king, who failed to take the hint, possibly because he was himself so smitten with baubles, bangles, and bright shiny beads.39 That mistake led to the beheading of Cromwell in 1540, 36. Buck and Sander, Portraitist of the Renaissance, 124, no. 31; Holbein at the Court of Henry VIII, 79, no. 44. 37. Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/422293/­portrait-of-a-lady-perhaps-katherinehoward-1520-1542. Accessed January 17, 2022. 38. Foister, Holbein & England, 199–200; Rowlands, Holbein, 151, n.p., M8. The identification as Catherine Howard lacks confirmation by any other known portraits of the queen, but dates back to 1668. Some of the sitter’s jewelry also seems to have belonged to Queen Jane Seymour before her, a further sign of her royal status. 39. Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 192. See also Rory MacEntegart, “False Matrimony: Henry VIII

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Figure 12.8  Hans Holbein the Younger, Miniature of Anne of Cleves, ca. 1540, watercolor on vellum laid on card, diam. 4.6 cm, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Museum.

another More nemesis, whose political miscalculation as Henry’s Principal Secretary caused the fiasco.40 Anne’s flat, mindless stare is so exceptional among the artist’s miniatures that suspicions that he had ulterior motives are unavoidable. In effect, Holbein’s Anne of Cleves, both the ­full-sized original in Paris and the tiny London copy, amounts to a parody of works like the Lady Elizabeth Audley (fig. 12.7). Visually and psychologically, he reduces Anne to an object, a thing, and the Marriage to Anne of Cleves,” in Henry VIII, A European Court, 140–43, who speaks, somewhat questionably, of “Holbein’s famous, flattering portrait of Anne.” 40. Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 192. They see the intentionality of Holbein’s parody of “Anne’s plain features” in his Louvre portrait in its obvious contrast to the Portrait of Christina of Denmark from the year before (see note 29). Their assessment seems accurate.



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far more blatantly than with Lady Audley’s portrait or any of his others. But the parody works as well as it does in the London Anne of Cleves because of qualities intrinsic to the miniature as an art form. For as a tiny image held in the hand, it generates an inescapable tension between the picture as object and as representation, as this brilliant artist fully understood. In her indispensable book On Longing, Susan Stewart sorts out the problems involved here with subtlety and insight. A poet and literary critic, she is more concerned with literature than with art, but on key points the semiotic issues are much the same. They revolve around questions of discrepancy, which arise from the gap between the miniature world posited by the image and the much larger world of our own experience: “exaggeration [or diminution] . . . in relation to the scale of proportion offered by the body . . . as the instrument of lived experience.”41 Granted, differences of scale in artistic representations are relative and allow considerable latitude before the overly small becomes the miniature as discrepant or abnormal. But a portrait only 4.5 cm in diameter, like Meg Roper’s (fig. 12.2), certainly qualifies as minute in that categorical sense. Like the gigantic, such tiny dimensions violate the normal order of things, but from the opposite direction. As Stewart observes, what keeps the miniature’s tiny scale from becoming disorienting and grotesque, as the gigantic so readily does, is its quality of closure, which makes for a parallel, equivalent universe that does not intrude disruptively on our own. Quite the contrary, the world of the miniature presents itself as more orderly, more s­ elf-contained than ours, which helps explain its attractiveness to elite Tudor audiences with a vested interest in such things.42 The circular frame of the portrait miniature plays a critical role in establishing closure by resisting the window analogy of the rectangular border, with its more tangible sense of connection to a larger spatial world. That same circular field also enhances the separation of husband and wife in miniature pendant portraits like those of the Ropers, underscoring their isolation and hence the tenuousness of the illusion of continuous shared space and shared experience. 41. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), xiii. “The body is our mode of perceiving scale and, as the body of the other, becomes our antithetical mode of stating conventions of symmetry and balance on the one hand, and the grotesque and the disproportionate on the other” (xii). 42. Stewart, On Longing, 46: “. . . the miniature must constantly assert a principle of balance and equivalence, or . . . become grotesque. This space is managed by simile and by the principles of equivalence existing between the body and nature. Scale is established by means of a set of correspondences to the familiar.”

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More than in other formats and sizes, the sitters’ primary environment remains the tiny surface space of the work of art as object or, again, as jewel. In this respect the miniature’s reality becomes almost wholly spatial, its equivalence to the viewer’s world established by description, not narration. Stewart sees this effect of closure tied to a primacy of descriptive space as one of tableau, a term I’ve borrowed in my title to allude to frictions it can create with inferred narrative realities in portrait miniatures like those of William and Margaret Roper: . . . in the miniature we see spatial closure posited over temporal closure. The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time. The miniature offers the closure of the tableau, a spatial closure which opens up the vocality of the signs it displays. . . . In none of these roundels is there space or occasion for action, and the tiny, socially charged details of jewelry, furs, embroidery, inscriptions, and the occasional explicit symbol carry most of the meaning.43

At another point in her book, Stewart speaks of the miniature “as a metaphor for the interior space and time of the bourgeois subject.”44 What she says works well enough for Holbein’s bourgeois subjects. Meg Roper (fig. 12.2) and Jane Small (fig. 12.5) possess an interior, temporal dimension that is stilled, but not canceled by spatial closure. Quite the contrary, Margaret’s ­half-closed prayer book fits in neatly with another of Stewart’s striking analogies, whereby she likens the miniature to a closed book. With its covers shut, a book can function as a virtual emblem of piety or intellect, as in the case of Mary Wotton’s closed ­prayer-book as static attribute (fig. 12.4). Likewise, Stewart notes that “gemlike” miniature books, occasionally bound in precious metals, were sometimes worn as ornaments, as were miniature portraits. Once opened even a crack, though, the book ceases to be a static, abstract symbol, instead conjuring up an interior, narrational world of reading that breaks all boundaries, all frames—“it threatens infinity.”45 This latent expansive potential for mystery and depth in the miniature most likely first drew Hans Holbein to the form in portraying Meg Roper and her spouse (p. 287, figs. 12.1 and 12.2), people he knew deeply and sympathetically. Earlier works like Lucas Horenbout’s Henry VIII (p. 289, fig. 12.3) would not have moved him. 43. Stewart, On Longing, 48–49. 44. Stewart, On Longing, xii. 45. Stewart, On Longing, 37–44. See especially p. 38: “The closure of the book is an illusion largely created by its materiality, its cover. Once the book is considered on the plane of its significance, it threatens infinity.”



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Tudor Space, Tudor Time But this is also where Stewart’s literary concern for interior, bourgeois time collides with the other artistic realities of the Tudor miniature. Works like the Lady Elizabeth Audley (fig. 12.7, notes 37 and 38 above) or the ostensible Catherine Howard (note 38 above) have nothing bourgeois about them, either of time or of taste. While Holbein himself left the genre on the margins of his oeuvre and did his most ­far-sighted experiments with it for humbler sitters like Meg Roper and Jane Small, these courtly commissions show him fully grasping its potential as aristocratic icon. They coincide with his becoming the king’s painter, sometime in the later 1530s, when he was growing ever more conscious of the political uses of art.46 But the true flowering of the English court miniature took shape later, under the last and greatest of the Tudors, Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603). She made the form into an instrument of power and policy by expanding its role in an old aristocratic cult of g­ ift-exchange between sovereigns and courtiers. Beautiful, exquisite, and manifestly about persons, if not the deeply personal, miniatures made excellent gifts, easily transported and bound to elicit reciprocation. In fact, one of Henry VIII’s motives for bringing Lucas Horenbout to London in the 1520s was likely to enable him to respond to such presents from Francis I of France, with whom he constantly competed in matters of culture as much as of politics.47 In any case, its role as a gift made the portrait miniature’s value as an object at least as important as any purpose it served as representation. For Queen Elizabeth, though, it also became a pawn in the courtly and poetic game she played to bind powerful males to herself as an object of unrequited love and devotion, as “Gloriana” in the Faerie Queene. As Patricia Fumerton puts it: 46. Foister, Holbein & England, 12–23, sees the first evidence of Holbein’s assuming this office in a document of 1536, a letter from the French humanist poet Nicolas Bourbon in which he calls him “Hans, the King’s painter, the Apelles of his age.” But she goes on at some length to describe the difficulties of determining the workings of Henry VIII’s extensive artistic patronage, in which Holbein seems to remain a favored foreigner rather than a true insider at court till the end of his life. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 27, notes that the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber are lost between 1532 and 1537, the most critical period for Holbein’s beginnings at court. On the other hand, Roy Strong’s earlier book, Holbein and Henry VIII (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 13–14, names the following year, 1538, as the start of Holbein’s career as court painter, presumably for want of earlier evidence. He also speculates that the reason the artist’s royal career began so late is that he had spent too much of the previous decade in the company of those opposed to Henry’s imperial ambitions and autocratic behavior: i.e., in the humanistic circle of Thomas More and then among the German merchants of London’s Steelyard. 47. Dana ­Bentley-Cranch, The Renaissance Portrait in France and England: A Comparative Study (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2004), 141–53; Backhouse, “Illuminated Manuscripts and the Portrait Miniature,” 89–90.

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Figure 12.9  Nicholas Hilliard (?), The Armada Jewel, outer face, ca. 1588, enameled gold, table-cut diamonds, Burmese rubies, rock crystal and miniature of Queen Elizabeth I, 7.1 x 5.2 x 1.1cm, Given by the Rt. Hon. Viscount Wakefield CBE, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Photo: Museum.

In both foreign and domestic relations, Elizabeth played on the interface between public and private self, handling threats from foreign princes by dangling the possibility of marriage with herself and managing her courtiers at home by encouraging the revival of courtly love: “Her lovers were her ministers, and her ministers were her lovers.” She was being private in public. And in the process of making intimacy political and politics intimate, Elizabeth maintained an essential hiddenness: “Hir wisest men and beste Councillors were ofte sore troubled to knowe hir wyll in matters of State,” Sir John Harrington complained, “So covertly did she pass hir judgmente.”48

Possibly the single best example of the sexual politics of the Elizabethan miniature is the Armada Jewel in the Victoria and Albert Museum, given by the queen to Sir Thomas Heneage in 1588 following the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Possibly, but not certainly the work of her favorite painter Nicholas Hilliard 48. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 68. See also Sir John Harrington, Nugae Antiquitae; Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers in Prose and Verse, Written in the Reigns of King Henry VIII, Queen Mary, Elizabeth, King James, Etc., ed. Henry Harington, Jr., 3 vols. (London, 1769–79), 2:217.



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(ca. 1547–1619) and as lavishly ornamental as it is emblematic, the jewel shows Elizabeth in both her public and private guises. The public queen (fig. 12.9) appears in imperial profile as a sculpted relief in enameled gold, with its lid showing the ark of the Reformed Church sailing troubled seas: the Latin inscription reads “calm through the savage waves.” Then the back of the locket opens on a painted portrait (fig. 12.10) of the private Elizabeth, inscribed “Alas! that virtue endued with so much beauty should not uninjured enjoy perpetual life.” Enhancing the jewel analogy, diamonds and rubies adorn the frames.49 Privacy means something altogether different here than it does in Hol­bein’s Margaret Roper (fig. 12.2) or Jane Small (fig. 12.5). Like almost all Elizabethan miniatures, The Armada Jewel replaces intimacy with secrecy, so much so that even after penetrating the queen’s golden public shell, she remains opaque in the painted interior version, flattened onto the closed circular picture surface, her idealized features framed by the curve of her elaborate ruff, her many flowers and jewels. Both portraits of Elizabeth are pure tableau, which is what makes them instruments of power under the rubric multum in parvo: “much in little.” Or, to return to Susan Stewart: “The multum in parvo is clearly rooted in the ideological; its closure is the closure of all ideological discourse, a discourse which speaks to the human and the cultural but not to the natural except to frame it.”50 This is what makes the Armada Jewel and miniatures like it work so well as images of Elizabeth the queen, intrinsically an ideological construct, as opposed to the suppressed “natural” woman within. In his treatise, The Arte of Limning (1599), Hilliard, the professional miniaturist, claims that “Holbein’s manner I have ever imitated, and hold it for the best.”51 There is no reason to doubt the English artist’s admiration for his great predecessor at the Tudor court, nor to question the latter’s influence on his miniature technique. The Elizabeth Audley (fig. 12.7) sets a clear precedent. Yet whether the German master would have approved the direction the miniature took in Hilliard’s hands is another question. Though perhaps more admirable, the painted queen of The Armada Jewel (fig. 12.10) much resembles Holbein’s Anne 49. Graham Reynolds, Nicholas Hilliard & Isaac Oliver, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1971, exhibition catalog, no. 103. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 72–74 50. Stewart, On Longing, 53: “. . . one might add that the multum in parvo must offer a kind of univocality, a form of absolute closure; its function is to close down discourse and not to open the wounds of its inadequacies. We should remember that the word aphorism comes from the Greek ‘to set bounds’ and ‘boundaries.’ ” 51. Nicholas Hilliard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, together with A more compendious discourse concerning ye art of limning by Edward Norgate, ed. R. K. R. Thornton and G. S. Cain (Ashington: The Mid Northumberland Arts Group, 1992), 48–49. See also Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 195–99.

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Figure 12.10  Nicholas Hilliard (?), The Armada Jewel, inner face, ca. 1588, enameled gold, table-cut diamonds, Burmese rubies, rock crystal and miniature of Queen Elizabeth I, 7.1 x 5.2 x 1.1cm, Given by the Rt. Hon. Viscount Wakefield CBE, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Museum.

of Cleves (fig. 12.8): a woman as object, as much a jewel as the locket to which she belongs. Both are tableaus in the full sense, and, in that respect, they contradict the narrative values, the m ­ iddle-class ethics, and the intimacy intrinsic to the miniature vision in the Portrait of Margaret Roper (p. 287, fig. 12.2). Some historians and critics would see no real conflict here, assuming as they do that the artist was a thoroughly practical man, who saw his main task as meeting his patrons’ expectations, giving value for money. Given that so much of Holbein’s work, especially in the later London years, lies in portraits of wealthy, powerful, but not always admirable clients, it has been all too easy to explain his art in terms of ulterior motives alone. ­Cause-and-effect explanations of this sort also make interpretation easier, with no need to delve into deeper, more elusive motives and meanings. The method has worked especially well in “new historicist” art history, which so often explains meaning away in just such terms.52 52. See, for example, Peter Cornelius Claussen, “Holbein’s Career between City and Court,” in Müller, Holbein: The Basel Years, 46–53: “What little that we know about the circumstances surrounding the life of the



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No doubt, Holbein had to exercise caution and practical wisdom to survive and flourish in the shifty, perilous environment of the Tudor court. But beneath the inevitable adjustments and compromises that are the portrait painter’s lot, his art shows a deep, consistent vein of purpose and conviction, especially where his core values are concerned. Those values lie behind his portraits’ most striking innovations, where they so often mean breaking with conventions that are as much social as artistic. A readiness to part with prevailing norms also accounts for his gift for irony and parody, which he shared with humanists like Thomas More and Erasmus.53 As I’ve tried to show, only parody can adequately explain the patent incongruities of a miniature like the Anne of Cleves (fig. 12.8). Finally, there is one more picture that makes this argument especially sound, albeit with an inevitable element of conjecture. This is Holbein’s great Portrait of Henry VIII (fig. 12.11) in the Museo T­ hyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.54 An icon of the early modern absolutism that Henry himself did so much to create, the painting presents a memorably uncanny image of the man’s power. More to the point, it bears both directly and obliquely on many of the questions raised in this essay. Though not strictly a miniature, it is surprisingly small (28 x 20 cm), in inverse proportion to the physical and psychological presence it projects: a powerful example of multum in parvo. In fact, Holbein based the work’s aesthetic on the language of the miniature, as he himself had only just learned to use it in Meg Roper’s portrait. Both images hinge on the discrepancy between narrative and tableau. To be sure, he borrowed the composition, no doubt on the king’s orders, from a little portrait of Henry’s French counterpart, Francis I, on the Confirmation of the Treaty of Amiens of 1527, sent to him by the latter in that year. Set in the upper left corner of a gold page of elaborately ornamented parchment, Francis appears in a square frame in the same basic pose as the Thyssen Henry. Probably the work of Jean Clouet (1480–1541), the French king’s painter and an painter and his oeuvre was already largely known by the end of the 19th century. What have certainly changed are the questions concerning his life and work, and thus also the way we view them. National characteristics or a timeless genius are no longer seen as the essential driving forces that form an artist’s work, but rather the strategies he employed to set himself apart from the competition, and to fulfill or even to surpass the expectations of his clientele. . .” (46). Invoking the corporate “we” is part of the n­ ew-historicist formula. On pp. 52–53, Claussen puts this formula to work on Holbein’s works of the 1530s, some of which undeniably show “strategies” to some degree. But in the process he ignores portraits that do not fit his paradigm and forces others, such as The Ambassadors, into overly narrow frameworks of expedience at the expense of meaning. 53. See Smith, “Portrait and ­Counter-Portrait,” 488–89, 493–501; Smith, “Irony and Parody in Hans Holbein’s ‘­Two-Faced’ Humanist Portraits,” paper presented at Colloque International, Rire en Images à la Renaissance, Paris, March 10, 2012. 54. Rowlands, Holbein, 144, no. 61; Ganz, Holbein, 248–49, no. 94.

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Figure 12.11  Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of King Henry VIII, ca. 1536, oil on panel, 28 x 20 cm, Museo Thyssen–Bornemisza, Madrid. Photo: Museum.

accomplished miniaturist, the portrait presents a far more courtly and sophisticated image of royalty than Horenbout’s roundel of Henry (fig. 12.3) from around the same time.55 It was bound to elicit envy and inspire imitation. Although generally dated in the m ­ id-to-late 1530s, the Thyssen portrait 55. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 97–98, plate 1. Starkey, “The Banqueting House: The Reception of 1527,” in Henry VIII, A European Court, 54–57, also features a good color illustration of this painting on p. 55, as does Foister, Holbein & England, 193, fig. 196. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Document_of_ Francis_I_and_Henry_VIII,_in_1527.jpg; accessed July 9, 2022.



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has long provoked controversy about its purpose and precise date. In Vienna is Holbein’s Portrait of Queen Jane Seymour, and it was long assumed that it and the Thyssen one of Henry were painted as pendants to celebrate his and Jane’s marriage in 1536. In the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague is a workshop version with very similar dimensions.56 But while the Mauritshuis Jane probably was created as a mate to the Henry, it now looks to have been an afterthought, for it is generally thought to date around 1540, and she appears somewhat dumpy compared to the original Queen Jane in Vienna.57 Stephanie Buck makes the more plausible argument that the Madrid portrait belongs instead in the company of the artist’s f­ull-length, monumental mural Portrait of the Tudor Dynasty in the Privy Chamber of Whitehall Palace. Lost in the catastrophic fire that destroyed the palace in 1698, it survives in a copy by Remigius van Leemput in the Royal Collection, made for King Charles II in 1667. Remarkably, the left half of Holbein’s original cartoon (fig. 12.12) has also survived and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Against an elaborate classical architecture, Leemput’s copy shows Henry VIII and Jane Seymour standing on either side of a great stone block, with his parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, standing above and behind them. And while the copy carries the date 1537, the composition probably took shape earlier, possibly while Anne Boleyn was still queen. For Jane had little enough time to pose, let alone inspire, having died in childbirth in October of 1537, after marrying Henry in early summer of the previous year. It makes sense to suppose that Henry asked his painter simply to switch queens while carrying on with his overriding dynastic project.58 The Thyssen Henry and its counterpart in the Whitehall cartoon are virtually identical in demeanor, costume, and, but for the different formats, in pose. So the question is which portrait came first: which provided the initial idea? What further complicates the issue is that in the Leemput copy the other three figures all turn away from the viewer in a standard, objective, ­three-quarter pose. Only Henry looks out toward us in the cartoon and the copy, establishing his majesty. With his legs spread wide, arms akimbo, massive girth, and powerful countenance, he 56. See Ganz, Holbein, 244–49, nos. 94 and 95, who believes the painting in The Hague to be the original and the one in Vienna to be a copy, as does Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII, 37. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 83, notes that inventories of Henry’s possessions of 1542 and 1547 mention a portrait diptych of the king and queen, but they do not cite the name of the artist. 57. Rowlands, Holbein, 121, no. R.23; Ganz, Holbein, 249, no. 97. 58. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 101–24. See also Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII, 34– 42; Foister, Holbein & England,175–91

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Figure 12.12  Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Kings Henry VIII and Henry VII (Cartoon for the left side of the Privy Chamber mural of the Tudor Dynasty in Whitehall Palace, destroyed 1698), ca. 1536–37, brush drawing mounted on canvas, 258 x 137 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo: Museum.

lays down the swaggering image as absolute monarch he would thenceforth assume in portrait after portrait. “With this image of Henry VIII,” says Roy Strong, “the use of royal portraiture in England as propaganda in the modern sense of the word begins.”59 In a further twist, the Henry in the final version looks us straight in the eye, a refinement of power and mastery borrowed from Holbein’s portraits of the king’s two most recent French ambassadors, Charles de Solier and Jean de Dinteville, who assume the same stance.60 In the Madrid portrait and the cartoon, 59. Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII, 44. 60. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 134–36; Rowlands, Holbein, 139–40, no.47, 141–42, no.53.



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Henry turns his head to his left and casts us a shiftier, oblique gaze. Buck believes that the cartoon’s version of the king came first and that Holbein borrowed it for the Thyssen version because that work was meant as a gift to Francis, in which Henry sought to express his power, though I think otherwise.61 Certainly, the painting’s sophisticated French connections ring true, whether to Francis’s portrait or those of his ambassadors. Monarchal politics and the pathology of envy hang heavy over Tudor portraiture. Stephanie Buck’s intelligent, thorough study of Holbein the ­courtier-painter also pays due attention to some artistic subtleties of the Thyssen Henry VIII (fig. 12.11).62 Most of the connections she makes, however, are essentially external, either in terms of influences on the artist from other works or of the motives of his patron, all of which is standard, causative a­ rt-historical method. Among the questions she overlooks, however, are the aesthetic imperatives of the miniature as an art form. Contrary to what she and most other scholars assume, it is not simply a smaller, more intimate version of a larger image, especially where the miniature is so much in the dialogue with the monumental and the gigantic. Nor is that just a matter of quantitative dimensions. As with Meg Roper’s image, too much is present as absent. Moreover, in Henry’s case, discrepancy has connotations not unrelated to the grotesque, or to menace even. Susan Stewart rightly sees the gigantic “as a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state and the collective, public life.”63 Few artists were as well equipped to grasp the implications of such metaphors as Hans Holbein. So however closely based on the miniature of Francis I in the Treaty of Amiens, the Thyssen Henry strikes a different, more ominous note. Most obviously, he fills the frame far more tightly, forcing the image to the surface and producing an effect of tableau not unlike the artist’s miniature of Anne of Cleves (fig. 12.8) of 61. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 93–102. The basis of her conclusion is a detail of Henry’s right hand that differs slightly in the two versions. In the Whitehall cartoon the king tucks his thumb in his belt, whereas in the Thyssen painting he holds a glove in that hand, as he also does in the Leemput copy. Ergo, the glove seems to be a later addition, though in fact there is no reason why Holbein could not have added the glove to the final version as an afterthought, after basing the cartoon on the painted portrait, as I believe was the case. Buck’s belief that the Thyssen portrait was meant as a gift also rests on the fact that the Thyssen portrait inspired no copies, as royal portraits painted for general consumption routinely did, and it is too subtle a work to be understood by anyone other than a fellow king. That last conclusion, however, seems open to question, especially as Henry himself may not have fully understood Holbein’s invention (see below). 62. Buck, Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII, 83–93. 63. Stewart, On Longing, xii. For an exploration of the meanings of the gigantic in visual art, see David R. Smith, “Inversion, Revolution, and the Carnivalesque in Rembrandt’s Civilis,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 27 (1995): 89–110, where I draw on her chapter on the gigantic in On Longing, 70–103.

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a few years later. Henry’s image too is studded with jewels, and the elaborately stitched ornamental tracery that mingles with the jewels on his gray tabbard adds to the surface effect, all the more so in the almost complete absence of shadow. Likewise, the horizontal of his right arm and the vertical of the fur lining on his left underscore the closure of the frame. Yet there and elsewhere his massive body overlaps the border, and though the lack of shadow flattens his face, the turn of his head makes it more ­three-dimensional, more ­block-like, than the flat rectangle of his torso. At once identified with the picture surface and distant in his cold, remorseless expression, his countenance radiates narratives of a rather unsettling sort. By an exquisite paradox Holbein has discovered in the miniature latent meanings that are quintessentially monumental. The portrait likely inspired him to turn Henry’s head toward the viewer in the Tudor Dynasty mural. But it is also quintessentially a miniature, for as Holbein discovered in the Privy Chamber at Whitehall (fig. 12.12), that same face writ large demands a direct gaze, obliqueness in l­ ife-size dimensions only flattens it and makes it less awesome. Brilliant though the king was in so many ways, did Henry VIII really want to present so unsettling a presence? How would it enhance his power? Swaggering doubtless came naturally to him, like his lust for women and power. But while he loved jewels and other pretty things, surrounded himself with art work, and clearly recognized Holbein’s genius, his eye seems not to have been terribly discerning. If it were, he probably would not have missed the artist’s irony in the Anne of Cleves, nor might he have kept the pedestrian Lucas Horenbout in his employ. The king did indeed choose Francis I’s portrait as the model for his Thyssen portrait, but surely for its suave, courtly charm, not for any potential to beget nightmares. The deepest meanings of the Thyssen picture come from Hans Holbein and were not meant to be shared with Henry. In fact, the artist probably did not much like his patron, despite the wealth, prestige, and connections he derived from being painter to the king. Stephanie Buck says much the same in an excellent essay on Holbein’s miniature of The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Apparently done between 1532 and 1535, when the king’s divorce was coming to a head, the miniature has long been understood as a reference to Henry’s claims to be head of the Church of England—like Solomon, responsible only to God.64 But 64. John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 81–83; Foister, Holbein & England, 152–54; Rowlands, Holbein, 92



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she shows that the figure of Solomon is not really a true portrait of Henry after all, but a far more equivocal “portrait allusion.” Nor does Sheba kneel before this somewhat w ­ impy-looking king, as she ought. To explain these contradictions, Buck draws on the example of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, which Holbein had illustrated in his youth and where images of kings as wise fools and simple fools abound.65 The book was dedicated to Thomas More, who, she suggests, would have grasped and shared this miniature’s satire of Henry.66 Why, after all, should Hans Holbein have thought highly of the Tudor king? Especially given his necessary proximity to Henry, must he not have seen him as ostentatious, egomaniacal, crafty, manipulative, treacherous, not to mention ever more obscenely obese? For all the impressiveness of his pomp and grandeur, he was an odious man to many of his subjects and had done hateful things in his megalomaniacal pursuit of absolute power. Moreover, among his victims were people the artist had known well, notably Sir Thomas and members of his family and his circle. Tellingly too, the violence and the outrage were coming to a head at just the time, between 1534 and 1536, when Holbein was painting both Henry’s portrait and Margaret Roper’s (p. 287, fig. 12.2). Given the sympathetic tenor of Meg’s miniature, could he have been oblivious to the causes of her gaunt face and the interior world of thought behind it? And her father and others close to him had already perished by the time Holbein got around to painting what seems to have been this first, seminal portrait of Henry VIII. Ambiguous, but nonetheless pressing, questions and conjectures are at work here. For one thing, the web of intrigue and ­cross-purposes at the Tudor court makes simple readings of cause and effect difficult at best. And what are we to make of Hans Holbein’s conversion to Protestantism after his return to Basel in 1529? Thomas More and his daughter could hardly have approved, but then they were surrounded by people caught in the same difficult and inescapable sectarian choices, as they fully recognized.67 But as I have repeatedly emphasized, the 65. See note 2. 66. Stephanie Buck, “Text versus Bild: Holbeins Interpretation Heinrichs VIII am Beispiel der ‘­Salomo-Miniatur,’  ” in Hans Holbein der Jüngere. Akten des Internationalen Symposiums, Kunstmuseum Basel, 26.–28. Juni 1997, ed. Matthias Senn (Zurich: Schwabe, 1999), 281–92: “Setzt man Heinrich von vornherein mit Salomo gleich und die Kőnigin von Saba mit England oder auch mit der englischen Kirche, wird Holbein zum scharfen Kritiker von Heinrich und dessen Politik . . .” (286): (If one equates from the start Henry with Solomon, and the queen of Sheba with England, or with the English Church, Holbein becomes a sharp critic of Henry and his policy). 67. On Holbein’s relatively equivocal position as a Protestant artist in England of the 1530s, see Foister, Holbein & England, 149–69.

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Mores and their painter knew one another closely. And the pendants of William and Margaret, which are the most solid evidence available, show that the artist’s view of Meg was deeply sympathetic, so much so as to open up a new vision of interiority in subsequent portraits like the Jane Small (fig. 12.5). Those works also articulate what appears to be a personal vision of his own that differs markedly from the court style he was well paid to use for what amounts to very artful Tudor propaganda, but propaganda all the same. I believe that by another exquisite paradox, the Portrait of Margaret Roper effectively inspired the Thyssen Portrait of Henry VIII (fig. 12.11), which Holbein likely painted about a year later, in 1536. The evidence to this point supports that conjecture. More importantly though, the two works’ relationship helps resolve a nagging problem in Holbein scholarship. For some there have long seemed to be two Hans Holbeins: the artist as witty b­ urgher-humanist of his Basel years and the Tudor propagandist, the painter to the king, of his later London career. The first is a paradigm of the Renaissance artist; the second, one too willing to sell his talents to the highest bidder in the vain, slippery world of the Tudor court. Between those two supposed identities is the Chelsea Holbein of 1526–28, living and working in the household of Thomas More. The seemingly irresolvable discrepancies have nurtured a vein of new historicist criticism that reduces interpretation to a search for ulterior motives.68 Yet there is no sign that he turned away from the values of More and Erasmus upon returning to London from Basel in 1532, as Meg Roper’s portrait confirms. No doubt he had to watch his step around the dangerous, increasingly paranoid Henry VIII of 1535–36 and after. But his moral conflicts, such as they were, appear only to have brought out the subtle irony he shared with his humanist friends, which has too often been overlooked by art historians. This essay indicates that Hans Holbein stuck to his values and his beliefs, perhaps chuckling on his way to the bank.69 68. See note 52 and my critique of Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of The Ambassadors in Smith, “Portrait and ­Counter-Portrait,” 500 and 506. 69. See Smith, “Irony and Parody.”



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Selected Bibliography Selected Bibliography

SELECT ED BIBLIOGRAPHY Biographical Sources

Ballard, George. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts, and sciences. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752. 38–61. https://archive.org/details/memoirsofseveral00ball/page/38/mode/2up, accessed October 29, 2022. Bridgett, T. E. Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More. London: Burns & Oates, 1891. Chambers, R. W. Thomas More. 1935; repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962; repr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. D.O.M.S. The life and death of Sir Thomas Moore Lord high Chancellour of England. Written by M.T.M. and dedicated to the Queens most gracious Maiestie. Douai: Printed by B. Bellière, 1631(?). Guy, John. A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More. London: Fourth Estate, 2008; A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. For the famous sketch of the More family by Holbein, see the plate following p. 108. Harpsfield, Nicholas. The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, o.s. 186. 1932; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Hitchcock, E. V., ed. William Roper: The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, knighte. Early English Text Society, o.s. 197. 1935; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1958. Leland, John. Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum: encomia, trophaea, genethliaca, et epithalamia. . . . London: Apud Thomam Orwinum, typographum, 1589. 67–68. Marc’hadour, Germain. L’Univers de Thomas More: Chronologie critique de More, Erasme, et leur époque (1477–1536). Paris: J. Vrin, 1963. More, Cresacre. The Life of Sir Thomas More by his great Grandson Cresacre More. Ed. Joseph Hunter. London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane, 1828. Pole, Reginald. De unitate ecclesiastica. Rome: apud Antonium Bladum Asulanum, 1536. Abstract of in Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/ letters-papers-hen8/vol10/pp402-420, accessed October 30, 2022. Reynolds, E. E. Margaret Roper: Eldest Daughter of St. Thomas More. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960; London: Burns and Oates, 1960. ———. Sir Thomas More. London: Burns and Oates, 1953; repr. London: Longmans, Green 1970.

315

———. The Field Is Won: The Life and Death of St. Thomas More. London: Burns and Oates, 1968. Ro. Ba. The Life of Syr Thomas More. Early English Text Society, o.s. 222. Ed. E. V. Hitchcock and P. E. Hallet. London: Oxford University Press, 1957. 141/16–143/2. Roper, William. The mirrour of vertue in worldly greatnes: Or The life of Syr Thomas More Knight, sometime Lo. Chancellour of England. Paris [Saint-Omer: Printed at the English College Press], 1626. Stapleton, Thomas. Tres Thomae: Sev de S. Thomae apostoli rebus gestis. De S. Thoma Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi & Martyre. D. Thomae Mori Angliae quondam Cancellarij vita his adiecta est oratio funebris in laudem R. P. Arnoldi de Ganthois Abbatis Marchennensis. Douai: Ex officina Ioannis Bogardi, 1588. ———. The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More. Tans. P. E. Hallett, ed. E. E. Reynolds. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966. [Translation of the Thomas More section of Tres Thomae]

Textual Sources Alington, Alice. “Letter to Margaret Roper.” In Rastell, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght . . . wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge. 1433b–1434b. Also in Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More. 513–14, no. 205. A facsimile of Rastell’s edition is available at https://thomasmorestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Dialogue_ on_Conscience.pdf (accessed October 30, 2022). Sponsored by The Center for Thomas More Studies, directed by Professor Gerald Wegemer. Devereux, E. J. “Some Lost English Translations of Erasmus.” The Library, 5th series, 17 (1962): 254–59. Donnelly, Sr. Gertrude-Joseph. “Correspondance entre Erasme et Margaret Roper.” Moreana, no. 12 (1966): 29–46 (37–39). Erasmus, Desiderius. “The Abbot and the Learned Lady.” Colloquies. Vol. 39: Collected Works of Erasmus. Ed. Craig R. Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. ———. The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1122 to 1251 (1520–1521). Vol. 8, no. 1233: Collected Works of Erasmus. Ed. R. A. B. Mynors, by Peter G. Bietenholz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. 297–98. ———. “The Lord’s Prayer / Precatio dominica.” Trans. and annot. John N. Grant. In Spiritualia and Pastoralia. Ed. John W. O’Malley and Louis A. Perraud. Vol. 69: Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 55–77. ———. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. 11 vols. and index. Ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58. ———. Latin letters to Margaret Roper: letter 1404 (Basel, 25 December 1523). In Erasmus. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Ed. Allen and Allen. Vol. 5:366–67. Letter 2212 (Freiburg, 6 September 1529). In Erasmus. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Ed. Allen and Allen. Vol. 8:274.

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———. The Colloquies of Erasmus. Trans. Craig R. Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. ———. Precatio Dominica in septem portiones distributa per D. Erasmum. Basel: Joan. Frobenius, 1523. [British Library copy] Reprinted in Moreana 2, no. 7 (1965): 10–62 [evennumbered pages]. Ed. Fr. Germain Marc’hadour. Gairdner, James. “A Letter Concerning Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More.” The English Historical Review 7 (1892): 712–15. Hodnett, Edward. English Woodcuts: 1480–1535. 1935; repr. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1973. Hyrde, Richard. “Richard Hyrde on the Education of Women—1524.” In Vives and the Renascence Education of Women. Ed. Foster Watson. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912; repr. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971. 159–73. ———. Preface to A devout treatise upon the Pater noster. Ed. Fr. Germain Marc’hadour. Moreana 4, no. 13 (1967): 6–22. Kelly, Henry Ansgar, Louis W. Karlin, and Gerard B. Wegemer, eds. Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2011. Includes “More’s Encounter with Margaret.” Document 17, Guildhall Report, Section 14. 193–94. Lakowski, Romuald I., comp. International Thomas More Bibliography, Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas. Access the “Margaret Roper” link under the “More’s Family heading” https://essentialmore.org/bibliographies, or directly at https://essentialmore.org/wp-content/uploads/Margaret-More-Roper.pdf. McCutcheon, Elizabeth. “‘The Apple of My Eye’: Thomas More to Antonio Bonvisi; A Reading and a Translation.” Moreana 18, no. 71–72 (1981): 37–56. ———. “Thomas More’s Three Prison Letters,” In Henry Ansgar Kelly, et al. Thomas More’s Trial by Jury. 94–110. More, Thomas Sir. “The Four Last Things.” English Poems, Life of Pico, The Last Things. Vol. 1: The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). ———. Latin Poems. Vol. 3, part 2: The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Ed. Clarence Miller, et al. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. No. 264, pp. 280–81. Rastell, William. The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellor of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge. London: At the costes and charges of Iohn Cawod, Iohn Waly, and Richarde Tottell, 1557. Rogers, Elizabeth F., ed. The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More. Princeton University Press, 1947; repr., New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. ———. St. Thomas More: Selected Letters. 1961; repr. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967. Roper, Margaret More. A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster, made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus, and tourned in to englisshe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of. Xix. Yere of age. London: In fletestrete, in the house of Thomas Berthelet, 1526.



Selected Bibliography 317

———. “A devoute treatise upon the Pater noster.” Ed. Germain Marc’hadour. Moreana 2, no. 7 (1965): 11–63 [odd-numbered pages]. Edition based on the British Library copy C.37.e.6.(1.). ———. “Letter to Alice Alington.” In Rastell, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght . . . wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge. 1434b–1443b. Manuscript sources: Bodleian MS. Ballard 72, fol. 86v; British Museum MS. Royal 17 D xiv, fol. 404r. Printed also in Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More. 514–32, no. 206. A facsimile of Rastell’s edition is available at https://thomasmorestudies.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/08/Dialogue_on_Conscience.pdf (accessed October 30, 2022) as well as a study guide at https://essentialmore.org/wp-content/uploads/Dialogueof-Conscience-Study-Guide.pdf?msclkid=b195dd1cce4f11eca1b35da79af556b3 (accessed October 30, 2022). Sponsored by The Center for Thomas More Studies, directed by Professor Gerald Wegemer. ———. Latin letter to Erasmus. Letter 2233, (Chelsea, 4 November 1529). Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Ed. Allen and Allen. Vol. 8:299–300. The manuscript copy resides in the archive of the University of Wroclaw in Poland (MS. Rehd. 254. 129). S. H. “Thomas More and John Fisher.” Notes and Queries 4, no. 109 (1851): 417–18. Vives, Juan Luis. De institutione feminae Christianae. 2 vols. Ed. Charles Fantazzi and Constantinus Matheeussen. Leiden: Brill, 1996–1998. ———. A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n], made fyrst in Laten, and dedicated vnto the quenes good grace, by the right famous clerke mayster Lewes Vives, and turned out of Laten into Englysshe by Rycharde Hyrd. Whiche boke who so redeth diligently shal haue knowlege of many thynges, wherin he shal take great pleasure, and specially women shall take great co[m]modyte and frute towarde the[in]creace of vertue [and] good maners. Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete, in the house of Thomas Berthelet nere to the Cundite, at the signe of Lucrece, [1529?]. ———-. The Instruction of a Christen Woman. Trans. Richard Hyrde, Ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, Margaret Mikesell, et al. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Criticism and Interpretation Ackroyd, Peter. The Life of Thomas More. London: Chatto, 1998. Avery, Joshua. “‘Irony and Charity Are Met Together’: A Puzzle in Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington.” Moreana 46, no. 176 (2009): 65–76. Baetjer, Katharine. European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. 69–70, nos.4 and 5. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barrett-Graves, Debbie. Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620: A Biographical Dictionary. Ed. Jo Eldridge Carney. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.

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Bätschmann, Oskar and Pascal Griener. Hans Holbein. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Bayne, Diane Valeri. “The Instruction of a Christian Woman: Richard Hyrde and the Thomas More Circle.” Moreana 12, no. 45 (1975): 5–15. Beilin, Elaine V. “Learning and Virtue: Margaret More Roper.” In Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. 3–28; rprt. Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700: Vol. I: Early Tudor Women Writers. Ed. Elaine V. Beilin. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Béné, C. “Cadeau d’Érasme à Margaret Roper: Deux hymnes de Prudence.” Moreana 26, no. 100 (1989): 469–80. Benson, Pamela Joseph. “The New Ideal in England: Thomas More, Juan Luis Vives, and Richard Hyrde.” In The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Beyer, Andreas. “The London Interlude.” In Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532. Ed. Christian Müller. Munich: Prestel, 2006. Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons: A Play of Sir Thomas More. Scarborough, Ont.: Bellhaven, 1963. Brace, Patricia. “Speaking Pictures: Margaret Roper and the Representation of Lady Rhetoric.” Moreana 50, no. 193–94 (2013): 93–130. Bradbrook, M. C. Review of The Paradise of Women, ed. Betty Travitsky. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1 (1982): 89–93. [Importance of translations by Renaissance women] Buck, Stephanie, and Jochen Sander. Hans Holbein 1497/98–1543: Portraitist of the Renaissance. Mauritshuis, The Hague, 2003. Exhibition catalog. Campbell, Julie D. and Anne R. Larsen, eds. Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Campbell, Lorne, Margaret Mann Phillips, Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen, and J. B. Trapp. “Quentin Massys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gilles and Thomas More.” Burlington Magazine, 120 (1978): 716–25. Chambers, R. W. On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His School. Early English Text Society, original series, vol. 191. Repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Curtright, Travis. “Thomas More as Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington.” Moreana 56, no. 211 (2019): 1–27. Demers, Patricia A. Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 69–73. Ezell, Margaret J. M. “The Social Author.” Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Foister, Susan. Holbein & England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. 243– 46. Foley, Stephen M. “Scenes of Speaking and Technologies of Writing in More’s Tower Letters.” Moreana 35, no. 135–36 (1998): 7–24.



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Ganz, Paul. Holbein: The Paintings, Complete Edition. London: Phaidon, 1956. 175–76, nos. 134–35. Godin, André. Érasme, lecteur d’Origène. Trauvaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance no. 190. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1982. Goodrich, Jaime. “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clarke Basset’s Translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History.” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 3 (2010): 301–28. ———. Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014. ———. “Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: A Case for Rethinking Women’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere.” Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 4 (2008): 1021–40. Gordon, W. M. “Tragic Perspective in Thomas More’s Dialogue with Margaret in the Tower.” Cithara 17, no. 2 (1978): 3–12. Hammerling, Roy. The Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church: The Pearl of Great Price. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Harris, Barbara J. “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England.” The Historical Journal 33, no. 2 (1990): 259–81. Hosington, Brenda M. “Translation in the Service of Politics and Religion: A Family Tradition for Thomas More, Margaret Roper and Mary Clarke Basset.” In Between Scylla and Charybdis: Learned Letter Writers Navigating the Reefs of Religious and Political Controversy in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Jeanine De Landtsheer and Henk Nellen. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 93–108. ———. “Women Translators and the Early Printed Book.” In A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558. Ed. Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell. Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 2014. 246–71. [For Margaret Beaufort, see 249–52; for Margaret Roper, see 252–56.] Jones, Judith P. and Sherianne Sellers Seibel. “Thomas More’s Feminism: To Reform or Re-Form.” In Quincentennial Essays on St. Thomas More: Selected Papers from the Thomas More College Conference. Ed. Michael J. Moore. Boone, N.C.: Appalachian State University, 1978. 67–77. Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism; Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Kaufman, Peter I. “Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper and ‘Well Learned’ Men.” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 3 (1989): 443–56. King, John N. Tudor Royal Iconography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. 81–83. King, Margaret. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Lakowski, Romuald I. “Another Poem by Margaret More Roper?” Moreana 53, no. 203– 204 (2016): 293–294. ———. “Two Neglected Poems of Thomas More and a Poem of Margaret Roper’s.” Moreana 50, no. 191–92 (2013): 285–290. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

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———. “Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project, and the Problem of Agency.” In Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies: Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 83–108. Repr. in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, vol. 1, Early Tudor Writers. Ed. Elaine V. Beilin. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. 47–72. Levin, Carole, et al. Extraordinary Women of the Medieval and Renaissance World: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Lewis, Lesley. The Thomas More Family Group Portraits after Holbein. Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 1998. Maber, Richard. “Une Machabée Moderne: Magaret Roper vue par le Père Pierre Le Moyne (1647).” Moreana, no. 82 (1984): 30–35. Marc’hadour, Germain. “Erasmus Englished by Margaret More.” Clergy Review 43, no. 2 (1958): 78–91. _________. “Funiculus Triplex: Margaret Roper and Thomas More.” Moreana 20, no. 78 (1983): 93–97. Martz, Louis L. “Last Letters and A Dialogue of Comfort.” In Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. 55–64. McCallum-Barry, Carmel. “Learned Women of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period in Italy and England: The Relevance of Their Scholarship.” In Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly. Ed. Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 29–47. McCutcheon, Elizabeth. “Margaret More Roper: The Learned Woman in Tudor England.” Women Writers of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Ed. K. M. Wilson. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987. 449–80. ———. “Thomas More’s Three Prison Letters Reporting on His Interrogations.” In Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents. Ed. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Louis W. Karlin, and Gerard B. Wegemer. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011. 94–110. ———. “Margaret More Roper’s Translation of Erasmus’ Precatio Dominica.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Guelpherbytani. Ed. Stella P. Revard, F. Radle, and M. A. Di Cesare. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1988. 659–66. Repr. in Liber Amicorum: A Collection of Essays by Elizabeth McCutcheon. Moreana 52, no. 201–202 (2016): 237–248. ———. “Life and Letters: Editing the Writing of Margaret Roper.” In New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society. Ed. W. S. Hill. Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 1993. 111–17. ———. “The Education of Thomas More’s Daughters.” In East Meets West: Homage to Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr. Ed. Roger L. Hadlich and J. D. Ellesworth. Honolulu: Department of European Languages and Literature and College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, 1988. 193–207. ———. “The Humanism of Thomas More: Continuities and Transformations in His Latin Letters.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International



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Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Ed. J. F. Alcina, et al. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998. 25–40. ———. “’Tongues as Ready as Men’s’: Erasmus’ Representations of Women and Their Discourse.” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 12 (1992): 64- 86. Meulon, Henri. “La pensée du ciel chez Thomas More.” Moreana 7, no. 27–28 (1970): 5–13. ———. “Un poème inédit de Thomas More?” Moreana, no. 23 (1969): 66–68. Michael, Erica. The Drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus’s “Praise of Folly”. New York: Garland, 1986. Mitjans, Frank. “Non sum Oedipus, sed Morus: A Paper on the Portrait of Sir Thomas More.” Moreana 43–44, no. 168–70 (2006–7): 12–67. [illustrated] Murdoch, John, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon, and Roy Strong, The English Miniature. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. 29–33. Murphy, Clare M. “Review of Paula A. Vogel, Meg: A Play in Three Acts.” Moreana, no. 82 (1984): 114–16. Murray, Paul, OP. Praying with Confidence: Aquinas on the Lord’s Prayer. New York: Continuum, 2010. O’Donnell, Anne M., SND. “Contemporary Women in the Letters of Erasmus.” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 9 (1989): 34–72. Olin, John C. “Erasmus and the Church Fathers.” Six Essays on Erasmus. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979. Olivares Merino, Eugenio. Padre Mío Bueno: Margarita More Roper: perfil biográfico y epistolario. Madrid: Rialp, 2007. ———. “Mary Roper Clarke Bassett and Meredith Hanmer’s ‘Honorable Ladie of the Lande.’” SEDERI: Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 17 (2007): 75–91. ———. “Some Notes about Mary Roper Clar(c)ke Bassett and her Translations of Eusebius.” Moreana 46, no. 177–78 (2009): 146–80. ———. “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Margaret More Roper: Similarities and Differences.” In “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”: Homenagem a Maria Helena de Paiva Correia. Ed. A Pinheiro de Sousa, et al. Lisbon: Departamento de Estudos Anglisticos da Universidade de Lisboa, 2009. 227–45. ———. “Cyprian in Thomas More’s Writings.” Moreana 57, no. 1 (2020): 23–47. ———. “A Month with the Mores: The Meeting of Juan Luis Vives and Margaret More Roper.” English Studies 88, no. 4 (2007): 388–400. Pabel, Hilmar M. Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus’ Pastoral Writings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. ———. “Erasmus’ Esteem for Cyprian: Parallels in Their Expositions of the Lord’s Prayer.” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 17 (1997): 55–69. ———. Herculean Labours: Erasmus and the Editing of St. Jerome’s Letters in the Renaissance. Library of the Written Word, vol. 5. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Divine Rhetoric: The Sermon on the Mount as Message and as Model in Augustine, Chrysostom, and Luther. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 2001.

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Pender, Patricia. Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Reed, Arthur W. “John Clement and His Books.” The Library, Fourth Series, vol. 6, no. 4 (1926): 329–39. ———. “The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538.” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 15 (1917–1919): 157–84. Robineau, M.-C., et al. “Correspondance entre Érasme et Margaret Roper.” Moreana, no. 12 (1966): 29–46. Rodgers, Katherine Gardiner. “Thomas More as Witness in The Tower Letters.” Moreana 46, no. 176 (2009): 31–38. Ross, Sarah C. E. “A Poem by Margaret More Roper?” Notes and Queries 56 (2009): 502–7. Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Rummel, Erika, ed. Erasmus on Women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Smith, David R. “Portrait and Counter-Portrait in Holbein’s The Family of Sir Thomas More.” Art Bulletin, 87 (2005): 484–506. Sowards, J. K. “On Education: More’s Debt to Erasmus.” In Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour. Ed. Clare Murphy, et al. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989. 103–22.tin, 87 (2005): 484–506. ———. “Erasmus and the Education of Women.” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 4 (1982): 77–89. Starkey, David, ed. “The Banqueting House: The Reception of 1527.” Henry VIII, A European Court in England. Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1991. Exhibition catalog. [Contains a good color illustration of this painting on p. 55.] Stevenson, Jane. Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Stevenson, Kenneth W. The Lord’s Prayer: A Text in Tradition. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2004. Strong, Roy. Holbein and Henry VIII. New York: Pantheon, 1967. Sylvester, R. S. “Conscience and Consciousness: Thomas More.” In The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism. Ed. Louis L. Martz and A. Williams. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978. 163–74. Trill, Suzanne. “Sixteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Mary Sidney’s Psalmes and the ‘Femininity’ of Translation.” In Writing and the English Renaissance. Ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill. London: Longman, 1996. 140–58. Verbrugge, Rita M. “Margaret More Roper’s Personal Expression in the Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster.” In Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985. 30–42, 260–64. Vocht, H. de. “Vives and his Visits to England.” Monumenta Humanistica Lovaniensia 4 (1934): 1–60. Vogel, Paula A. Meg: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1977.



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Watson, Foster, ed. Vives and the Renascence Education of Women. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912. Wayne, Valerie. “Some Sad Sentence: Vives’ Instructions of a Christian Woman.” In Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985. 15–29. Weinberg, Carole. “Thomas More and the Use of English in Early Tudor Education.” Moreana, no. 59 (1978): 20–30. White, Micheline, ed. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World: English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625. Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2011. Wright, N. E. “The Name and the Signature of the Author of Margaret Roper’s Letter to Alice Alington.” Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene. Ed. D. Quint, M. W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, W. A. Rebhorn. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992. 239–57. Wynne-Davies, Marion. Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values. Houndmills: Basingstoke, 2007.

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About the Contributors About the Contributors

A bo ut th e con t ri buto r s

Patricia Demers, Professor of English, University of Alberta, received her PhD from the University of Ottawa. Her research includes Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, seventeenth-century poetry, children’s literature, and contemporary Canadian women’s writing. She has published Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press). Honors include being made a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada and a Member of the Order of Canada for “her insightful contributions to the study of early works of English literature and for her service to the academic community.” Stephen Merriam Foley, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brown University, graduated from of Brown with a degree in Classics and English and received the PhD in English from Yale University. His research interests include European Renaissance culture and letters, classical traditions, literary theory, and aesthetics. He has co-edited Sir Thomas More’s Answer to a Poisoned Book, a work of religious controversy, for the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More and a collection of essays on More and Erasmus in an issue of Moreana. William Gentrup is Associate Director emeritus, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University (PhD, English Renaissance Literature, ASU). His research fields include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, the Bible as literature and the Bible in literature, and C. S. Lewis studies. In addition to this volume, he has edited Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice (Scolar Press), with Jean R. Brink; Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Brepols), and Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal (2007–). Elizabeth McCutcheon, Professor emerita of the English Department, University of Hawaii (PhD, University of Wisconsin). She is the author of many studies of Thomas More, Margaret Roper, and Erasmus, including an edition of

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the modernized texts of Margaret Roper for the Toronto Other Voice series (in progress). She has also written on rhetoric, humanism, as well as utopian fiction, devotional writing, and the writings of early modern women. Offices and honors have included the editorial board of Moreana; Lifetime Achievement Award, Center for Thomas More Studies, University of Dallas (2006); and Liber Amicorum, a special issue of Moreana (2015) that reprints twenty of her essays about Thomas More and his circle. Anne M. O’Donnell, SND, is ordinary professor emerita of the English Department at Catholic University of America (PhD, Yale University). She is a major authority on William Tyndale and has also published widely on Erasmus, Thomas More, and classical rhetoric and the church fathers as they relate to Renaissance religious writers. Offices have included the Board of Directors, Thomas More Society of America; Executive Council, Renaissance English Text Society; and Editorial Board, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook. Eugenio M. Olivares-Merino is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Jaén, Spain (PhD, University of Granada). He is a specialist on Thomas More and Spain and has published many articles on Juan Luis Vives, Margaret More Roper, and Mary Roper Clarke Bassett in Moreana and elsewhere. He is the lead investigator of “Thomas More and Spain (16th and 17th centuries),” about the relations between Thomas More and the first Spanish Habsburgs (Charles I, Philip II, Philip III and Philip IV), funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities and the European Union’s “The Making of Europe” project. Katherine G. Rodgers is emerita Professor of English, American River College, Sacramento (PhD, Yale University), where she also directed the Honors Program. She has worked extensively on major texts of Thomas More, including English Poems, Life of Pico, The Last Things, vol. 1 of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, and has contributed essays to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More and The Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature. David R. Smith (deceased 2016), Professor of Art History, University of New Hampshire, received his PhD from Columbia University. He taught northern Renaissance and Baroque art for thirty-six years. His articles and reviews in The Art

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About the Contributors

Bulletin frequently treated subjects related to portraiture, particularly “double” or marriage portraits, and he was a specialist in Holbein’s art. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.



About the Contributors 327

Index Index

Index

Alington, Alice, letter from, xii, 23, 100–102, 227; fables in, 211, 228–29 Alington, Alice, letter to, xii, xiv, 23, 103–19, 156, 229: “absolute” speeches, 210, 218, 222–23; authorship issue, 158n1, 206–9, 217, 222–25, 226; Bakhtin, Mikhail, 208– 10, 212, 213, 217, 219; biblical allusions in, 232, 236, 244, 247, 248, 250; conscience theme in, 226–27, 232, 237, 238–43; as a dialogue, 208–10, 213, 214, 216, 220, 223, 227, 247, 249; fables in, 211, 212, 216, 219, 234–35, 237; genre of, 208, 210; humanist polemic in, 218, 220; irony in, 214, 215, 225, 239; novelistic features, 213–14, 217, 219, 220–21; parodic elements, 210, 215 216, 219; polyglossia (and heteroglossia), 211–13, 216, 217, 219, 220; voices of, 211, 213, 217, 220, 223, 225, 226–27, 232, 238 Alington, Alice (stepsister), 5, 9, 23, 37, 44, 156, 158n1, 205, 227–30, 232–33, 244 Alington, Sir Giles (husband to Alice), 38, 40, 205 Alleyn, Joan (servant to Margaret Roper), 19 Ascham, Roger: invited to tutor Margaret’s children, 37–38, 40–41 Audley, Thomas, Lord Chancellor, 23, 26, 205, 211, 219, 223, 227–28, 233–34 Barton, Elizabeth, “the Maid of Kent,” 20, 234 Basset, Mary Roper Clarke (Margaret’s daughter), 37–38, 40, 49–50, 137n49, 156, 161– 62, 258n28, 277n99 Beaufort, Lady Margaret (mother of Henry VII), 4n4, 145, 162, 196n130 Berthelet, Thomas (publisher), 11, 14–15, 16n72, 17, 33n178, 42n208, 99, 143, 195 Blount, William, 4th Baron Mountjoy, 18, 38

Clement, John (tutor to More’s children), 5, 6, 16, 21n109, 31, 36–37, 39, 130, 263–64, 270–71, 273n83 Clement, Margaret (née Giggs), 4, 5, 6, 10, 16, 31n175, 36, 39, 140, 144, 155, 199 Cole, Henry (tutor to Margaret’s children), 37, 40n204 Coley (Colley), Dorothy (Margaret’s maid), 22, 30–31, 271. See also Harris, John. Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 20, 263n52 Cromwell, Sir Thomas, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30, 33–34, 36, 47, 234, 297, 298 Cyprian, St., 254, 255, 258; adopted textual emendation by Margaret Roper, 253, 262, 266–70; correct readings before Roper’s, 267–68; editors of his works: anonymous (Stuttgart, 1486), 254; Costerius, Ioanes, 262, 264–65, 270, 271; de Bossi, Giovanni Andreas, 254; Erasmus, Desiderius, 253–54, 255, 260, 261, 265, 272–76; Latini, Latinus, 266, 268; Manutius, Paulus, 253, 266–68; Morellius, Guillaume, 268–69; Pamelius, Jacob, 253, 269–70, 271; Remboldt, Berthold, 254, 255’ A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, xi, xii, 11, 11n51, 14–15, 42–43, 61–99 (odd-numbered pages), 143; doublets, 164, 197, 200–204; frontispiece, 145, 160; Lollards, 195; theological errors, 175–76; translation style, 148–51, 162–71, 199–200; vocabulary, 196–98 dialectic (disputation), 132, 33; 142 Drew (Druum), Roger (tutor), 8, 130 education of women, xii, 11n50, 53n1, 125–32, 135, 142–43, 144–47, 156, 157, 162n24, 206–7, 261, 273n83, 274, 276n94; and patriarchy, 207

329

Erasmus, Desiderius, of Rotterdam, xii, 4, 5, 7, 8, 16, 18, 19, 123, 125, 279; The Abbot and the Learned Lady (Abbatis et eruditae), xii, 11, 141–42, 160, 276; commentary on Prudentius hymns dedicated to Margaret, 10, 139–40, 159; Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly), 5, 139, 279, 312; De Copia (On Copia of Words and Ideas), 166 Eusebius of Caesarea, 40n203, 49–50, 130, 156, 161–62, 190, 191n103, 258 Fabor, John, bishop of Vienna, 19 Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester, 4n4, 14, 20n102, 22n118, 24, 25, 26, 33, 35, 44–45, 143, 154, 233; creation as cardinal, 28 Foxford, Richard (vicar-general to bishop of London), 14–15, 143 Gardiner, Stephen, bishop, 16, 195 Giggs, Margaret. See Clement, Margaret Gold, George (Tower of London servant), 27–28 Gonnell, William (second tutor of More’s children), 6, 126, 128, 129, 130, 146, 162 Harpsfield, Nicholas (biographer of More), 258–59, 271 Harris, John (More’s secretary) and Dorothy (née Colly), 31–32, 155, 270–71 Henry VIII of England, 13, 20, 32n178, 35, 132, 137, 153, 159n1, 205n2, 263n52, 279, 281–83, 285n16, 289f3, 297, 298nn36,39, 299n39, 301–2, 306, 307f11, 308–13; divorce, 19, 311 heresy, 13, 14, 15n68, 38, 143, 168, 195, 202, 256–57 Heron, Giles (brother-in-law, husband to Margaret’s sister Cecily), 21n109, 36 Holbein, Hans, xi, xiii, 16, 17, 26, 278–313; individual portraits: The Ambassadors, 294n29, 306n52, 309–10, 313n68; More as Lord Chancellor, 279; Henry VIII’s patronage, 302n46; Holbein’s family’s portrait, 294–96; The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba, 311; portrait of Henry VIII, 306–8, 310–11, 313; Portrait of the Tudor Dynasty, 308–10; Thomas More family portrait, 3n2, 16,

138, 160, 161, 261, 279–80 (for miniature portraits of William and Margaret Roper and others, see entry under “portrait miniatures”) humanism and humanist(s), xi, xiii, 5n9, 8, 10, 37, 43n208, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131–32, 135–40, 144–47, 153, 156–57, 159, 168, 172, 187, 195, 200, 206–7, 218, 220–21, 234, 236, 256n12, 266n61, 273–74, 279, 288, 302n46, 306, 313 Hyrde, Richard (tutor and physician), xii, 6, 11, 12, 16, 17, 126, 130, 137, 144, 195, 199; Preface to A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, 53–59, 145–46, 163; Instruction of a Christen Woman (translator), 16n75, 129n20, 130–31, 144–45, 199 Kratzer, Nicholas (tutor, later royal astronomer), 8, 9, 130, 282n9, 285n16 Leland, John, epigrams celebrating More’s daughters’ learning, 41–42 Lewis, John, Reverend, 16, 261n42 Lutheranism, 8, 14n67, 15, 143, 167, 201, 143, 167, 201–2, 241, 275n88; in London, 13–14 More, Cresacre (More’s great-grandson and biographer), 6, 34, 47, 49 More, Dame Alice Middleton (second wife, stepmother), 4n4, 5 More, Joanna (Jane, Joan) (née Colt), (Margaret’s mother), 4, 5, 126 More, Sir Thomas, xii, 6, 7, 9, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 35, 44, 123; Act of Supremacy, 25, 27; Acts of Succession (first and second), 21, 25, 205, 223, 227, 242, 246–47; and St. Cyprian, 256–57, 260; associates imprisoned in Tower or executed, 37–38; burial, 31–32; educational views, 125–27, 130–33; execution, 30–31, 33; “The Four Last Things,” 9, 135; friendship with Erasmus, 138–39; gender and education, 127–30; imprisonment, 226, 230, 281; interrogation and trial, 28–29; Paris Newsletter (foreign reaction to execution), 30, 153; relation of Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation to the Alington letters,

330 Index

24–25, 237–38; Tower Letters, 158n1, 159, 207n10, 217, 222, 224–25, 229; Utopia, 290 Mountjoy, Lord. See Blount, William Palgrave, John (royal tutor), 13 Patenson (Pattenson), Henry (More’s fool), 23, 117, 246–47, 249, 252 Pole, Geoffrey (brother to Cardinal Pole), report to Cromwell about Margaret, 36, 155 Pole, Reginald, cardinal, 8, 33, 47n236, 155, 260; and Margaret Roper, 35–36, 134 portrait miniatures: of Anne of Cleves, 298– 300, 299f8, 310; as marriage portraits, 284; Nicholas Hilliard, 303; Lucas Horenbout, 282–83, 289f3, 292, 301, 302, 307; interiority in miniatures, 293–94, 296, 313; and irony, 306, 313; of Jane Small, 292, 293f5, 296, 298, 301, 313; of Lady Elizabeth Audley, 296–98, 297f7, 299, 302; and privacy, 290–92, 293–94; public and private aspects, 303–4; of Queen Elizabeth I (the Armada Jewel), 303–5; Sir Henry and Lady Mary (Wotton) Guildford, 285–86, 290, 291f4; tableau, 301, 306; of William and Margaret Roper, xiii, 3n2, 26, 280–81, 283, 286–90, 294, 296, 300–201, 305, 313 Precatio dominica, xii, 11, 60–98 (even-numbered pages), 123, 137, 143, 162–71; and baptism, 178–80; and the Jews, 167–68; patristic and medieval commentary: Abelard, 190; Ambrose, 173, 179; Augustine, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 184, 186, 188, 189; Cyprian, 173, 178–86, 188; Eusebius, 190; Jerome, 173, 174, 186, 191; John Chrysostom, 174, 181–82, 192; Origen, 190–91; Tertullian, 184–85; Theophylactus, 173, 192; Thomas Aquinus, 181n49, 190; scholastics, 187; substitution of dimitte for remitte, 188 Quintilian, Paries Palmatus, 8–9, 48–49, 131–32, 158 Rastell, William (printer, Thomas More’s nephew, Roper’s cousin), 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 38, 47–48, 100n1, 103, 110n7, 156, 206, 222, 224

Republic of Letters, xi, xiii, xiv, 123, 125, 157, 200, 278 rhetoric, xii, 130, 132, 157, 171 Rich, Richard, 27 Roper, Margaret More. For individual works, see separate entries Roper, Margaret More: age, 26n148; and agency, 123–24, 136–37, 144, 223–24, 245; assistance to More in prison, 154–57; birth, 3, 3n2, 138; burial, 38–39; Catholicism, 36; character, 37, 124, 128, 157, 163; children, 10–11, 16, 18, 21, 28, 140–41, 156, 261; compositions, 46–47, 48–49, 135; death, 38; and Erasmus, 138–42, 151–53, 157, 159; in fiction, 161; last meeting with her father, 29–30, 153; learning and education, 8, 35, 39, 125, 126–27, 156, 277; letters of (Latin and English), xii, 18, 22, 23, 26, 43–44, 47–48, 132–33, 140, 277; lost works, 46–50, 158; marriage, 8; naming, 4n4; period of scholarly activity, 260–61; poems of, xi, 44–45, 46, 48; pregnancy, 10, 27; property inheritance, 32; readership, 135–37, 195–96; reputation, 35, 41–42, 125, 133–36, 152–53, 159, 160–61, 264; rescue of More’s head, 32, 34, 281, 286; siblings, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 18, 34, 126, 140, 144; sickness, 17; textual emendation in a letter to Cyprian, xiii, 7, 131, 253–77 Roper, William, 4, 4n3, 7, 9, 11, 13–14, 17, 20, 24, 27, 34, 280, 282; biography of More, 153, 259; death, 41; imprisoned, 36–37, 156; as a Lutheran, 8, 14 Staverton, Frances (Margaret’s cousin), dedicatee of A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, 12n53, 53, 145–46 The Steelyard (Hanseatic trading base in London), 13, 260, 292n27, 293n28, 302n46 Talesius, Quirinius (servant and pupil of Erasmus), 18 Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of Durham, 13, 15n68,70, 143, 254n7

Index 331

van Cranevelt, Frans, 10, 13n56, 14 Veysey, John, bishop of Exeter, 9, 47n235, 48, 49, 134 Vives, Juan Luis, 8–10, 12–14, 49n250, 53n1, 125–26, 129, 130n21, 132, 137n52, 147, 157, 173, 260, 273n83, 279; De conscribendis epistolis (reference to Margaret), 34; De institutione feminae Christianae, 10, 17, 131, 144–46, 199, 260 von Hutten, Ulrich, 7, 139

Walsingham, Sir Edmund, 27 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, 10n40, 13–14, 16, 143, 195, 234, 276n95 women as authors and translators, xii, 131, 144–48, 156–57, 162, 163, 169, 170–71, 196, 206, 277 Wood, John à (Thomas More’s servant in the Tower of London), 22, 28

332 Index

∞ A Companion to Margaret More Roper Studies: Life Records, Essential Texts, and Critical Essays was designed in Nassim Latin and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Maple White Offset and bound by Maple Press of York, Pennsylvania.