Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More: Pursuing the Common Weal 9780820705002

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Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More

Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies

General Editor: Albert C. Labriola Advisory Editor: Foster Provost Editorial Board: Judith H. Anderson Diana Treviño Benet Donald Cheney Ann Baynes Coiro Mary T. Crane Patrick Cullen A. C. Hamilton Margaret P. Hannay Michael Lieb Thomas P. Roche Jr. Mary Beth Rose John T. Shawcross John M. Steadman Humphrey Tonkin Susanne Woods

De optimo statu reipublicae deque noua insula Utopia sermonis quem Raphael Hythlodaeus uir eximius, de optimo reipublicae statu habuit liber primus, per illustrem uirum Thomam Morum inclitae Britanniarum urbis Londini et ciuem, et uicecomitem. cum non exigui momenti negotia quaedam inuictissimus Angliae Rex Henricus eius nominis octauus, omnibus egregii principis artibus ornatissimus, cum serenissimo castellae principe Carolo controuersa nuper habuisset, ad ea tractanda, componendaque, oratorem me legauit in Flandriam, comitem et collegam uiri incomparabilis Cuthberti Tunstalli, quem sacris scriniis nuper ingenti omnium gratulatione praefecit, de cuius sane laudibus nihil a me dicetur, non quod uerear ne parum sincerae fidei testis habenda sit amicitia, sed quod uirtus eius, ac doctrina maior est, quam ut a me praedicari possit, tum notior ubique atque illustrior, quam ut debeat, nisi uideri uelim solem lucerna, quod aiunt, ostendere. occurrerunt nobis Brugis—sic enim conuenerat—hi, quibus a principe negotium demandabatur, egregii uiri omnes. in his praefectus Brugensis uir magnificus, princeps et caput erat, ceterum os et pectus Georgius Temsicius Cassiletanus Praepositus, non arte solum, uerum etiam natura facundus, ad haec iureconsultissimus, tractandi uero negotii cum ingenio, tum assiduo rerum usu eximius artifex. ubi semel atque iterum congressi, quibusdam de rebus non satis consentiremus, illi in aliquot dies uale nobis dicto, Bruxellas profecti sunt, principis oraculum sciscitaturi. ego me interim—sic enim res ferebat—Antuerpiam confero. ibi dum uersor, saepe me inter alios, sed quo non alius gratior, inuisit Petrus Aegidius Antuerpiae natus, magna fide, et loco apud suos honesto, dignus honestissimo, quippe iuuenis haud scio doctiorne, an moratior. est enim optimus et litteratissimus, ad haec animo in omnes candido, in amicos uero tam propenso pectore, amore, fide, adfectu tam sincero, ut uix unum aut alterum usquam inuenias, quem illi sentias omnibus amicitiae numeris esse conferendum. rara illi modestia, nemini longius abest fucus, nulli simplicitas inest prudentior, porro sermone tam lepidus, et tam innoxie facetus, ut patriae desiderium, ac laris domestici, uxoris, et liberorum, quorum studio reuisendorum nimis quam anxie tenebar—iam tum enim plus quattuor mensibus abfueram domo—magna ex parte mihi dulcissima consuetudine sua, et mellitissima confabulatione leuauerit. hunc cum die quadam in templo diuae Mariae, quod et opere pulcherrimum, et populo celeberrimum est, rei diuinae interfuissem, atque peracto sacro, pararem inde in hospitium redire, forte colloquentem uideo cum hospite quodam, uergentis ad senium aetatis, uultu adusto, promissa barba, penula neglectim ab humero dependente, qui mihi ex uultu atque habitu nauclerus esse uidebatur. at Petrus ubi me conspexit, adit ac salutat. respondere conantem seducit paululum, et uides inquit hunc!—simul designabat eum cum quo loquentem uideram—eum inquit iam hinc ad te recta parabam ducere. uenisset inquam pergratus mihi tua causa. immo, inquit ille, si nosses hominem, sua. nam nemo uiuit hodie mortalium omnium, qui tantam tibi hominum, terrarumque incognitarum narrare possit historiam. quarum rerum audiendarum scio auidissimum esse te. ergo inquam non pessime coniectaui. nam primo aspectu protinus sensi hominem esse nauclerum. atqui inquit aberrasti longissime; nauigauit quidem non ut Palinurus, sed ut Ulysses; immo uelut nempe Plato. Raphael iste, sic enim uocatur gentilicio nomine Hythlodaeus, et latinae linguae non indoctus, et graecae doctissimus—cuius ideo studiosior quam Romanae fuit, quoniam totum se addixerat philosophiae; qua in re nihil quod alicuius momenti sit, praeter Senecae quaedam, ac Ciceronis extare latine cognouit—relicto fratribus patrimonio, quod ei domi fuerat—est enim Lusitanus— orbis terrarum contemplandi studio Amerigo Vespucio se adiunxit, atque in tribus posterioribus illarum quattuor nauigationum quae passim iam leguntur, perpetuus eius comes fuit, nisi quod in ultima cum eo non rediit. curauit enim atque adeo extorsit ab Amerigo, ut ipse in his xxiiii esset qui ad fines postremae nauigationis in castello relinquebantur. itaque relictus est, uti obtemperaretur animo eius, peregrinationis magis quam sepulchri curioso. quippe cui haec assidue sunt in ore, caelo tegitur qui non habet urnam, et undique ad superos tantumdem esse uiae. quae mens eius, nisi deus ei propitius adfuisset, nimio fuerat illi constatura. ceterum postquam digresso Vespucio multas regiones cum quinque castellanorum comitibus emensus est, mirabili tandem fortuna Taprobanen delatus, inde peruenit in Caliquit, ubi repertis commode Lusitanorum nauibus, in patriam denique praeter spem reuehitur. haec ubi narrauit Petrus, actis ei gratiis quod tam officiosus in me fuisset, ut cuius uiri colloquium mihi gratum speraret, eius uti sermone fruerer, tantam rationem habuisset, ad Raphaelem me conuerto, tum ubi nos mutuo salutassemus, atque illa communia dixissemus, quae dici in primo hospitum congressu solent, inde domum meam digredimur, ibique in horto considentes in scamno cespitibus herbeis constrato, confabulamur. narrauit ergo nobis, quo pacto posteaquam Vespucius abierat, ipse, sociique eius, qui in castello remanserant, conueniendo atque blandiendo coeperint se paulatim eius terrae gentibus insinuare, iamque non innoxie modo apud eas, sed etiam familiariter uersari, tum principi cuidam— cuius et patria mihi, et nomen excidit—grati, carique esse. eius liberalitate narrabat commeatum, atque uiaticum ipsi et quinque eius comitibus affatim fuisse suppeditatum, cum itineris—quod per aquam ratibus, per terram curru peragebant—fidelissimo duce, qui eos ad alios principes, quos diligenter commendati petebant, adduceret. nam post multorum itinera dierum, oppida atque urbes aiebat reperisse se, ac non pessime institutas magna populorum frequentia respublicas. nempe sub aequatoris linea tum hinc atque inde ab utroque latere quantum fere spatii solis orbita complectitur, uastas obiacere solitudines perpetuo feruore torridas. squalor undique et tristis rerum facies horrida atque inculta omnia feris habitata, serpentibusque, aut denique hominibus, neque minus efferis quam sint beluae, neque minus noxiis. ceterum ubi longius euectus sis, paulatim omnia mansuescere. caelum minus asperum, solum uirore blandum, mitiora animantium ingenia, tandem aperiri populos, urbes, oppida, in his assidua non inter se modo, ac finitimos, sed procul etiam dissitas gentes, terra marique commercia. inde sibi natam facultatem multas ultro citroque terras inuisendi, quod nulla nauis ad iter quodlibet instruebatur, in quam non ille, comitesque eius libentissime admittebantur. naues quas primis regionibus conspexerunt, carina plana fuisse narrabat. uela consutis papyris aut uiminibus intendebantur, alibi coriacea. post uero acuminatas carinas canabea uela reppererunt. omnia denique nostris similia. nautae maris ac caeli non imperiti. sedPmiram Duquesne University ress se narrabat inisse gratiam, tradito magnetis usu, cuius antea penitus erant ignari. ideoque timide pelago consueuisse sese, neque alias temere, quam aestate credere. nunc uero eius fiducia lapidis Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania contemnunt hiemem, securi magis, quam tuti, ut periculum sit, ne quae res magno eis bono futura putabatur, eadem per imprudentiam magnorum causa malorum fiat. quid quoque in loco se uidisse narrauit, et longum fuerit explicare, neque huius est operis institutum, et alio fortasse loco dicetur a nobis, praesertim quicquid ex usu fuerit non ignorari, qualia sunt in primis ea,

Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More •

Pursuing the Common Weal

A. D. Cousins

Cousins title page.indd 1

7/29/10 1:00 PM

Copyright © 2010 Duquesne University Press All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS 600 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282 No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner or form whatsoever, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical articles or reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cousins, A. D., 1950– Pleasure and gender in the writings of Thomas More : pursuing the common weal / A. D. Cousins. p. cm. — (Medieval & Renaissance literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Analyzes the ways in which Thomas More’s writings treat the major cultural categories of the individual in civil life — including pleasure and gender, chance, friendship, and role play — as central to More’s own views on the common weal, the common good, and the good state”— Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-0-8207-0438-8 (alk. paper) 1. More, Thomas, Sir, Saint, 1478–1535—Criticism and interpretation. 2. More, Thomas, Sir, Saint, 1478–1535—Political and social views. 3. Civil society in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. 5. Pleasure in literature. I. Title. PR2322.C68 2010 828’.209—dc22 2010021434 ∞ Printed on acid-free paper. I am grateful to the following journals, in which parts of some chapters, in earlier versions, have appeared: Moreana, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Christianity and Literature.

To David and Matthew Filii atque Amici

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE

Pleasure, Gender, and the Pursuit of the Common Weal

11

Chance, Gender, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of the Common Weal

37

Being a Woman, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Whose Common Weal?

63

Masculinity, Friendship, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Which Common Weal? Role-Play, Masculinity, Pleasure — In and Beyond Pursuit of the Common Weal

101

CONCLUSION

125 139

Notes

143

Index

173

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For help of many kinds I am grateful to Michael Ackland, Helen and Neil Cadzow, Patrick Cheney, Jim and Maureen Cahillane, Robyn Carlisle, Conal Condren, the late Valerie Cousins, Mauro Di Nicola, Heather Dubrow, Geoff and Penny Hiller, Arthur F. Kinney, Philip Levine, Manfred and Janet Mackenzie, Germain Marc’hadour, Kathy Meyer, Clare Murphy, Dani and Tony Napton, Alison Scott, and the late Boyd Vickery.

Introduction There have been studies of Thomas More as the fashioner of an influential political fiction, as a historian, a devotional writer, a writer of religious polemic, a parent, and as many other things.1 Directly or otherwise, most of those studies have touched upon More’s views on the common weal, that is to say, on the common good and correlatively on the (good) state. None, however, has focused primarily and closely on More’s interpretations of the major cultural categories informing those views. That is what Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More attempts, although it does not aim at completeness. For example, it does not consider “truth” as a category: doing that would lead to a study of More and Catholic tradition, of More and the idea of the Logos, and of his anti-Protestant polemic. Further, it does not offer an account of the polemical works, to which reference is nevertheless made throughout the book. This book focuses on categories that relate chiefly to the individual in civil life, categories that are pervasive and interconnected within the nonpolemical writings. Thus it studies pleasure and gender, considering chance, friendship, and role-play as it does so. How More’s Utopia engages with Epicurean views on the human desire for pleasure has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention.2 Here I argue that, in fact, from what appears to be his earliest nonpolemical work until what we know to be his last, More either identifies the will to pleasure as the primary human impulse or, at the least, emphasizes its compelling power within the human consciousness. Therefore, in his nonpolemical writings More recurrently examines the will to pleasure because he 1

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Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More

sees it as central to the experience of being human: it must be acknowledged and understood — especially, of course, if it is to be beneficially constrained or directed for the individual and the general good. From apparently first to certainly last More puts forward a neo-Epicurean analysis of human behavior. Thus in the ensuing chapters I study neo-Epicureanism’s diverse presence in More’s works and its influence on his thought about the common weal. Tracing how More examines the will to pleasure in our lives, I focus at the same time on his recurrent concern with gender’s inflecting and expressing it. Particular attention is given to those respects in which More views gender as restrictive or as empowering. More often seems resigned to the predictability of restriction: resigned to gender-specific vanities and carnalities enticing almost all humankind into becoming victims of the will to pleasure in its simplest forms. It is hardly surprising, then, that he seems intrigued by instances of empowerment — infrequent or ironic though he usually implies them to be. There he contemplates gender taking the will to pleasure beyond a quest for simple self-gratification.3 Yet as one would expect, interactions between the will to pleasure and gender do not by themselves preoccupy More in his pondering the common weal throughout his nonpolemical works. So too, as I have indicated above, do the relations of pleasure and gender with chance, friendship, and role-play concern him, for each of the three latter categories likewise appears in his writings from early to late. What I wish to suggest about the functions and interplay of all those categories in More’s writings will become clearer when I outline how they are discussed as Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More unfolds. A useful and brief preliminary to my doing that is consideration of a moment in Utopia. At one point, Morus tells Raphael that a functional philosophia civilior suits public discussion of political or other civic matters, whereas a less widely effective philosophia scholastica is appropriate to formal philosophic engagement amid the “private conversation of close friends.”4 I

Introduction

3

am not about to propose, of course, that Morus is More’s spokesperson in Utopia; on the other hand, I am claiming that Morus’s distinction between modes of philosophic discourse reveals something helpful to readers of the nonpolemical works. What the distinction draws attention to is More’s concern with communication that aptly conveys knowledge of immediate benefit to human experience. Throughout the nonpolemical works he indicates a preference for knowledge that directly assists in the right conduct of life.5 This knowledge might, or as is more usually the case, might not be simple knowledge; it might be a cunning mix of both; it might be the knowledge that, in a particular context, knowledge is limited or certainty impossible. It is seldom knowledge of a remote kind. Further, and concordantly, knowledge is seldom delivered by abstract theorizing; it is far more likely to be conveyed through wit and the dramatic interplay of personas. Knowledge is, in short, shared rather by means of philosophia civilior than by means of philosophia scholastica. The first chapter of this study focuses mainly on More’s epigrammatic and emblematic “Pageant Verses,” which seems to have been his earliest literary work. The chapter proposes that there, well before he assesses both in Utopia, More evaluates Epicurus’s, and maybe Valla’s, views on pleasure. It suggests that he implicitly puts forward a Christian revision of Epicurus’s views on pleasure and, in effect, concurs with but diverges from those of Valla. It suggests, too, that he indicates the authoritativeness of Cicero’s thoughts on right reason and prudence when they are relocated within an intellectual framework that is Christian. The chapter also examines More’s stress, early in his “Pageant Verses,” on human hostility or indifference to reasonableness, the causes of which he identifies as both the universal will to pleasure and a coexistent but chiefly male will to power. Thus it argues that the “Pageant Verses” obliquely presents a neo-Epicurean account of human behavior. In addition, it argues that the very notion of the common weal is made problematic by what the poem’s neo-Epicureanism implies about humankind’s obsession

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Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More

with seeking personal pleasure, the private and almost always imperfectly good.6 The “Pageant Verses” gives little support to the Ciceronian concept of society as folk joined in “a partnership for the common good” — despite the poem’s affirming some other elements of Cicero’s thought.7 The chapter concludes that More’s poem seems, rather, to harmonize with Augustine’s commentary on Cicero’s idea of society than with that idea itself. From the “Pageant Verses” one could rightly guess that More was far less interested in refining definitions of society or the state than in portraying how as a given each works, and might work or should.8 His early Fortune verses, Utopia, Tower works, and other writings often display a preoccupation with the effects of chance, both on individual experience and on the common weal, accompanying his concerns with pleasure and gender. The second chapter suggests that More’s Fortune verses appear to offer what is his earliest formal critique of chance as symbolized by the figure of the goddess Fortuna, with whom he, like so many of his contemporaries, was evidently fascinated. It is thus an emphatically gendered critique, hostile in being so. And it is one that connects with the neo-Epicurean view on humankind presented in his “Pageant Verses,” for More closely links subjection to Fortuna with the will to pleasure. It is also a critique, the chapter suggests, that Utopia develops and locates explicitly within a discussion of good government. Fortuna’s absence from Utopia, which is to say, the lack of reference to the goddess in Utopia, is a result of the island state’s concerted attempt to minimize or manage the effects of accident on the community. Utopia’s social-welfare policies both attest to and facilitate that attempt, but it is supported, at a deeper level, by the “religious principles” (Utopia, 161) underlying those policies and guiding individual behavior.9 They are the sources of conventional beliefs such as this: “[Providing ‘those public laws which control the distribution of vital goods, such as are the very substance of pleasure’] are observed, to pursue your own interests is prudent; to pursue the public interest as well is pious; but to pursue your own pleasure by depriving

Introduction

5

others of theirs is unjust.”10 The Utopians’ endeavor to manage chance is inseparable from their efforts to control the will to pleasure. Moreover, the Utopians understand that the human desire for false pleasure is ultimately linked to pride — a point developed in book 2 and considered likewise in the parerga. The initial chapters of Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More show that More sometimes represented pleasure and chance by drawing on the mythographies of Venus and of Fortune. The third chapter considers what More thought women other than goddesses were or should be or might become: for example, how he associated actual women with issues of pleasure. It begins by exploring More’s poem To Candidus: How to Choose a Wife (Versus . . . ad Candidvm, qvalis vxor deligenda). In that ambitious work, as nowhere else, he wrote about educating women, those women newly entering into what was then considered the major female role — wife and household manager. Relating the poem chiefly to Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman and Erasmus’s Marriage, chapter 3 proposes that, even though the Morean speaker is not describing a goddess, he nonetheless mythologizes the woman whom he images and also himself. Unwittingly he reveals himself as a type of Pygmalion when he portrays the woman who would be Candidus’s ideal wife, for he fashions her in terms of what are evidently his and indeed were More’s own priorities. He identifies the ideal wife for Candidus as someone who is being, or who will be, transformed by a humanist education. Such a prospective bride, according to More’s speaker, will in turn transform her home into a microcosmic eutopia. He implies that she will be a source of lasting pleasure to Candidus; in fact, he implies that the benefits of her metamorphosis — and the pleasure consequent upon it — will ultimately be her husband’s. More’s poem thus implies that the ideal wife for Candidus would contribute not to the common weal but to the domestic. Chapter 3 goes on to study notions of femaleness in Utopia and in Historia Richardi Tertii. It argues that although women in Utopia are pictured as advancing both the private and the public

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Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More

good, in their society they are subjected to transformation neither more nor less than are their male counterparts. Yet the chapter demonstrates that the equalities Utopia offers women with men are in the end illusory, for ultimately in Utopia men rule. Suggesting that the representations of womankind in More’s text form a collection of paradoxes and contradictions, I propose that Utopia plays with various notions of femaleness which, in keeping with the decorum of Menippean satire, it does not seek to reconcile but leaves intriguingly dispersed. On the other hand, contradictory notions of femaleness are brought powerfully together in Historia Richardi Tertii, informing the characterizations of the queen and of Shore’s wife. I argue that both women are depicted as flawed in ways supposedly typifying their gender but, nevertheless, as heroically defiant of a singular threat to the common weal, Richard of Gloucester. The queen is typically female in her ambitiousness, for example, and atypically female in the eloquence directed by her against Richard’s agents. “Jane Shore,” likewise, unites a female susceptibility to pleasure with a woman’s capacity for compassion. Further, as regards her characterization and its interactions with that of Edward IV, the chapter traces ambiguities of the will to pleasure in a life drawn sympathetically though not uncritically and highlights More’s shrewd and unsentimental study of the relations between the will to pleasure and caritas humana. More’s representations of women are diverse, at times deliberately simple, but tend to be elusive. So it is also with his representations of men — of being male. Chapter 4 considers More’s views on masculinity. The many-sided portrayal of masculinity in More’s “Pageant Verses,” particularly through the icons of Manhood and of Old Age, has distinct and important affinities with his depiction of Edward IV in Historia Richardi Tertii. That portrayal also has significant links with his characterization of Richard, although differences between the two are clear since, of course, More sought to image Richard as both a proto-tyrant and an embodiment of the monstrous. To evoke the figures of Edward

Introduction

7

and of Richard is, however, to evoke the roles that seem especially to have interested More when identifying himself and others as men, that is to say, fatherhood and friendship. Chapter 4 focuses on them when examining More’s views on masculinity. I suggest that much of Edward’s characterization in More’s text makes him seem virtually a mix of the benign Saturn who ruled the Golden Age, Silenus, and Priapus — but that in his great speech of farewell he plays out the role of failing father and king. Richard’s portrayal seems to align him with the malevolent Saturn in his (proto-)tyrannic cunning, his cold destructiveness, and his murder of children related to him. Further, in line with Cicero’s opinion on tyrants, Richard lacks the capacity for forming true friendships. Edward, in line with an idea on kingly rule stressed by Xenophon, has the ability to draw people to him and to keep them as friends. More’s narrator implies that near the very end of the king’s life his talent for friendship helped sustain the fragile common weal, soon to be overturned by the friendless and dissonant Richard. The masculinities of the king and of the usurper are in large part defined through their relations to fatherhood and friendship. The failure of Edward as father and king is in no small part attributed to his debilitating yet often benevolent indulgence of his impulse to pleasure. From considering More’s portrayals of Edward and Richard, chapter 4 then turns to his self-portrayal in the letter to Peter Giles that prefaces Utopia. There More presents himself as a charitable paterfamilias who has been unable to get on as he would like with the business of writing. Legal and other business have taken up his time, he says, as has the business of his household. His eliding the public and domestic spheres is quite deliberate, and through it he intimates that in microcosm as in macrocosm he busily pursues the common weal. Amid his brief yet elaborate self-presentation as at once paterfamilias and vir civilis, More reveals something further, however: that friendship frames fatherhood. In the letter, More’s male identity as a friend is established as a frame for his identity as a father. Subsequently I consider

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Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More

the Life of Pico as itself an act of friendship — as an expression of that chiefly Augustinian yet also Ciceronian concept of friendship implicit in More’s prefatory letter to Leigh, where friendship and the will to pleasure are interestingly examined together from a Christian perspective. The concept is crucial if one is to understand the representations of friendship — and therefore the staging of masculinity within the republic of letters — in the Letter to Dorp and the letters framing Utopia, with discussion of which the chapter ends. Chapter 5 also reflects on masculinity and the will to pleasure but does so in relation to role-play, a cultural category that, like the others considered in this study, seems to have engaged More’s attention from virtually first to last in his nonpolemical works: from the “Pageant Verses” through to De tristitia Christi. In particular I discuss how selection, interplay, and performance of role form a dominant though not exclusive strategy of self-presentation throughout A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. The roles adopted by More’s speaker sometimes indicate what it is to be specifically a man but, at other times, imply what one should seek to become insofar as one is a human being. Thus, for instance, More casts his alter ego in A Dialogue, Antony, as a beloved paterfamilias and has him aspire to what he sees as the master role-play of imitatio Christi. With regard to the latter, More repeatedly has Antony focus on people’s insatiable desire for pleasure, their failure to distinguish true pleasure from false, their eagerness to set their own pleasures before the pleasure of God. Repeatedly he has Antony indicate the relevance to A Dialogue of the neo-Epicureanism implicit in the “Pageant Verses.” My main argument here is, however, that with typical cunning More seems to have designed a self-portrayal that would both memorialize him and turn him into an exemplum of fidelity to the old religion, thereby allowing him to transcend constraint by imprisonment and execution, to continue his resistance to Henrician religious policy from beyond the grave. Antony/More becomes a holy Proteus who, variously embodying the wise and

Introduction

9

the sacred, appropriates much and therefore denies much to his persecutors. To them remain the tyrannic, the heretical, the infidel, the alien.

D As I propose above, More’s notion of the common weal is practical in emphasis. His nonpolemical works do not show him theorizing abstractly about the common good or the nature of the (good) state — even Utopia, notwithstanding its full title. They show him fashioning versions of philosophia civilior through which he considers those topics in a more broadly effective way: philosophia civilior is a sophisticated, humanist enactment of accommodatio. He appears to have had a determinedly clear understanding of humankind’s desire for pleasure — and of how it might be inflected by gender. If his thinking about pleasure was discriminatingly neo-Epicurean, his thought on gender was often conventional, although it could be in some cases unexpected. Exploring pleasure and gender in relation to issues of the common good and of the (good) state, he astutely examined how people make sense of chance (and how they do not), how friendship works interpersonally and beyond national boundaries, what roles people play (and to what roles they can aspire). Pursuing the common weal was for More both necessary and desirable; sometimes it must have seemed to him not unlike pursuit of the horizon. Be that as it may, it was not least through his nonpolemical writings that More persevered in pursuing the common weal on behalf of his country, of the republic of letters, and of the Church Militant.

ONE

Pleasure, Gender, and the Pursuit of the Common Weal To focus on More’s “Pageant Verses” is to study his first, formal representations of life in community and pursuit of the common good.1 Many years ago Samuel C. Chew briefly but influentially noted that the poem has links both with “ages of man” literature and with Petrarch’s portrayal of human life as caught in a series of “Triumphs.”2 Since then other aspects of it have also received attention, for example its associations with Horace’s Art of Poetry, its numerological associations, and its fashioning of characterization.3 Here, however, I shall suggest that More’s poem, in seriocomically exploring basic human impulses and weaknesses, skeptically considers humankind’s aptness for community and very warily honors its pursuit of the common weal. The most important elements of my suggestion are as follow. First, in the “Pageant Verses” More evaluates Epicurus’s and perhaps Valla’s views on pleasure — long before he critiques both in Utopia. Second, at the same time he evokes Ciceronian notions of right reason and of prudence (along with the lore of mythography). Next, More indirectly but distinctly offers a Christian correction of Epicurus’s views on pleasure, in effect affirming but also diverging from those of Valla, and implies Ciceronian concepts of right reason and of prudence to be authoritative when relocated within a Christian context. Further, he portrays humankind as demonstrating a 11

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hostility or indifference to reasonableness, whether of thought or of action. He connects this with the will to pleasure and also with a coexistent, especially male, will to power. The educability of human beings is brought into question. Last, More offers an unconventional view of where the high point of human life — of course, a man’s life — is to be identified. By proposing these things I am necessarily indicating ties between the “Pageant Verses” and other writings by More, continuities of style and genre as well as of attitude and value. Before I can present that argument, I must mention the term “pageauntes” since there has been disagreement about what it means.4 The most persuasive gloss seems still to be R. S. Sylvester’s. In his 1976 selection from the English poems he renders “pageauntes” as “pictorial representations.”5 In the last of the “Pageant Verses” the Poet refers to “Has fictas . . . figuras” (109) in speaking of what the epigraph mentions, namely, “a goodly hangyng of fyne paynted clothe, with nyne pageauntes, and verses ouer euery of those pageauntes: which verses expressed and declared, what the ymages in those pageauntes represented: and also in those pageauntes were paynted, the thynges that the verses ouer them dyd (in effecte) declare, which verses here folowe.” The “Pageant Verses” is thus at once epigrammatic and emblematic.6 As a poet, More begins and ends with the epigram.7 Yet there is, nevertheless, another aspect to More’s use of “pageauntes,” one that enlarges the term’s allusion to the pictorial. In his The Last Things More wrote, “now thou thinkest thy selfe wyse ynough whyle thou art proude in thy players garment, and forgettest that whan thy play is done, thou shalt go forth as pore as” an actor who will shortly return from illusory splendor on stage to the poverty of his everyday life. “Nor thou rememberest not that thy pageant may happen to be done as sone as hys.”8 At the same time as it images an archetypal history of human existence, the “Pageant Verses” displays scenes from the drama of this stageplay world. If early and late More is a writer of epigrams, so too is he conscious of people as actors. Early and late he is sensitive

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to the theatricality of temporal life.9 His sensitivity to that, his disillusioned delight in it, are not merely those of someone selfconsciously observing and participating in staged illusions. Within the world’s layers and networks of illusion, as More conveys to his readers again and again, are impelling desires that must be understood (even though the objects of desire may themselves be fantastic), real duties and therefore real imperatives.10

This Worldly Life Having considered what the term “pageauntes” tells us, I want now to focus on the strategies and concerns of More’s emblematic and dramatic sequence. The first four of the “Pageant Verses” form at once part of that sequence and a unit within it. Those are the poems where More focuses on the “ages of man” — and that does not imply their discreteness within the “Pageant Verses,” for the motif of “triumphing” bonds the initial eight poems into a lucid, unrelenting progression. As has been indicated earlier, one of More’s preoccupations in essaying his brief history of human life is the unreasonableness of humankind, its hostility or indifference to reasonableness. His emphasis on that appears with the first of his speakers, Chyldhod. Chyldhod’s speech of self-identification, inasmuch as it is just such a speech, resembles the speeches by all the other personas except the Poet, and, as has been widely remarked, it therefore resembles speeches through which many characters in the drama of More’s time identify themselves to their audiences. A pertinent example can be seen when, in Mundus et infans, the “fair child” whom Mundus renames Wanton identifies himself to himself and to the audience: Ha, ha, Wanton is my name: I can many a quaint game. Lo, my top I drive in same, See, it turneth round! I can with my scourge-stick My fellow upon the head hit,

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And lightly from him make a skip, And blear on him my tongue.11

Wanton shares some familiar “ages of man” motifs of childhood with More’s Chyldhod: after naming himself, each implies that play is the business of his life; each has a top; and each is, after his fashion, cruel and anarchic. Juxtaposing Wanton’s speech with that of Chyldhod elucidates, however, the ways and extent to which More goes beyond the mere use of dramatic convention or “ages of man” commonplaces from the very start of his “Pageant Verses.” At the outset one sees a small though striking difference between the two speeches and thus their characterizations of childhood. Wanton’s first dozen words suggest naïve, gleeful energy. Chyldhod’s opening line is designed by More to suggest, I think, simplicity rather than anything else: “I am called Chyldhod, in play is all my mynde.” But at the outset a greater difference between the two characterizations can also be seen, a difference that points to the intricacies of Chyldhod’s simplicity as presented by More. Both Wanton and Chyldhod identify themselves initially by way of an enthymeme. In each case, the enthymeme associates childhood with play and leads to the similarities of iconography and characterization listed above — the top, the cruelty, the wildness. Yet in scope and in emphasis the two enthymemes are quite unalike. The first, spoken by Wanton, implies that the knowledge of games interests him and play is the business of his life. Chyldhod’s enthymeme implies that his (male) consciousness, his whole existence, is focused on play. That he speaks hyperbolically affirms, rather than denies, thus interpreting his words if one recalls accounts of hyperbole (dementiens) from the rhetorical manuals.12 Chyldhod uses the same trope, combined with the figure optatio, in the middle of his speech in order to heighten his point (15). In his final words he deploys the identical combination of trope and figure in order to emphasize it conclusively (18).13 What the monologue of Chyldhod thereby reveals

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is not simply More’s going beyond a conventional view on the mentality of childhood — one here cited from a work written, as seems most likely, after his poems for his father. On the contrary, Chyldhod’s speech reveals that from the very beginning of the “Pageant Verses” More draws attention to and proceeds to analyze the impulse to pleasure, an impulse which, like Epicurus, he posits as ingrained in the human consciousness. That is not the only thing More indicates to be embedded in the human mind, but recognizing the attention he draws to it is crucial to understanding the history of human life that he stages. That “play” is a metonym for “pleasure” in Chyldhod’s speech — though of course he does not know it — can be readily demonstrated. The child opposes play in the forms which please him most to the constraints which, he apparently thinks, chiefly deny him his pleasure and hence arouse his displeasure: the labor of study and the disciplines enforcing that labor. Both are themselves indicated metonymically by his reference to “hateful bookes” (15). Chyldhod’s insistently if unwittingly revealing that the impulse to pleasure dominates the very start of our lives does not alone show how emphatically More stresses human unreasonableness from the first of his “Pageant Verses.” But it does show this when viewed in conjunction with Chyldhod’s tactics for organizing his celebration of what he takes to be the good life. As I remarked above, Chyldhod’s monologue opens with an enthymeme. It then proceeds to an aptly simple division (distributio, in lines 13–14) followed by a second, more expansive enthymeme (15–17).14 Chyldhod’s speech implies, then, his natural will to pleasure and his natural capacity to reason about pleasure and the pursuit of it, a capacity already being influenced, of course, by the “hateful bookes.” Yet what Chyldhod’s reasoning most distinctly reveals in its focus on the life of pleasure is opposition to his disciplined intellectual development. Unknowingly (for could his stated view of the contradiction between “play” and “bookes” be simpler?) he reasons to voice a will to pleasure

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hostile to growth in reason. With the allusive artlessness assigned him by More, Chyldhod portrays the first stage of human life in terms of a comprehensive, insistent unreasonableness — a resistant educability.15 Perhaps More’s indirect yet clear identification of the impulse to pleasure as innate to the human mind is only a chronological and therefore accidental following of Epicurus, in other words, just a coincidence.16 However, on the balance of probabilities, that seems unlikely. Epicurus’s view that the desire for pleasure dominates human life from infancy to death was available to More from several sources with which he seems to have been familiar. For example, his seventy-seventh Latin epigram, Dilemma Epicuri (“The Dilemma of Epicurus”), apparently draws on De finibus, a work in which Cicero has one of the speakers recount and examine Epicurus’s notion of pleasure as life’s chief good.17 More’s identification of the will to pleasure as dominant in the human mind at childhood (by implication, from childhood) accords with what Cicero has Torquatus say, in De finibus, when the latter recounts Epicurus’s view on the importance of pleasure: “[Epicurus] holds [pleasure] to be the Chief Good, pain the Chief Evil. This he sets out to prove as follows: Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure, and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils from pain as the Chief Evil, and so far as possible avoids it. This it does as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of Nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict.”18 But to suggest that More appears to evoke Epicurus from the start of the “Pageant Verses” is likewise to suggest that, in a sense, he immediately departs from his predecessor. Further, considering how he does so invites consideration of his poem’s relation to Valla’s De voluptate, since Valla is a predecessor with whose revision of Epicureanism he engages in Utopia and to whose writing on pleasure the “Pageant Verses” can be seen as a brief though shrewd counterpart.19 The point of departure from Epicurus is obvious, and the departure itself is revealing. Chyldhod’s last words, “Whiche lyfe god

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sende me to myne endyng day” (18), are a prayer to the personal God who does not at all resemble the remote, self-absorbed gods of Epicurus. Chyldhod’s concern with God is, however, incidental rather than devout: for a start, his words form a wish rather than a petition, and the wish is emphatically about his desire for pleasure. As a consequence, the invocation of God also emphasizes the secularity of Chyldhod’s speech, of Chyldhod’s consciousness, and foreshadows the secularity that pervades the remaining portraits of the ages of human life. Epicurus’s thinking appears therefore to be evoked at the beginning of the “Pageant Verses” only to be set, almost at once and ambiguously, within a Christian context. No less ambiguous is the relationship between More’s text and Valla’s writing on pleasure. It seems far from clear whether, when More wrote his “Pageant Verses,” he had read Valla’s De voluptate. Whatever the case, his poem both agrees and disagrees with views put forward in that dialogue. In book 3 of Valla’s work, as has been much discussed, Raudense places Epicurus’s philosophy within a Christian framework.20 In that respect, De voluptate and the “Pageant Verses” are in accord. Moreover, each proceeds to identify true pleasure with God. There are significant differences between the two, even so. For example, Valla has Raudense say of boys that “they seek the corporeal good that they understand, and in them this is not considered a vice. . . . Moreover, if boys are properly trained day by day, they will become devoted to praiseworthy things and lose their childish disposition.”21 More’s poem is much less optimistic, as its subsequent portrayal of manhood makes plain. The consequences of childhood’s comprehensive and insistent unreasonableness are clarified and amplified in that portrayal of (male) adult life. When More imaged manhood he could have chosen to diminish the importance of those consequences. He could have suggested, for instance, that childhood’s unreasonableness ceases to matter much, one way or another, once childhood is left behind. But the “Pageant Verses” indicates that More chose otherwise. The consequences that he makes yet clearer and heightens

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in his depiction of adult life are, chiefly, these: First, childhood’s hostility to reasonableness implies its weakness in, and innate resistance to becoming stronger in right reason.22 Second, its weakness in right reason necessarily implies its slight capacity to acquire prudence: “the practical knowledge of things to be sought for and of things to be avoided,” in Cicero’s words.23 Both those things are writ larger, not diminished, in the monologue assigned to Manhod. Manhod’s speech suggests that the impulse or will to pleasure ingrained in the human consciousness throughout childhood remains embedded there. In addition, his speech resembles that of Chyldhod because it reveals an indifference, at least, to reasonableness. As Chyldhod seeks pleasure through “coyte,” “ball,” and “toppe,” so likewise does Manhod through “grayhounde,” “hawke,” and “stede” (28–29). Just as the child indicates his existence to be focused on the pursuit of simple, physical pleasures, so too does the adult. Whereas the pleasures of the former include cruelty — casting “a cokstele” is second in his list of games (13) — those favored by the latter are pervasively cruel. The child is father to the man in his attitude to pleasure; so he is as well in his attitude to reasonableness, to the mind. More portrays the child, compelled to intellectual growth, reasoning against disciplined intellectual development through contact with “hateful bookes.” He then depicts the young man as oblivious of books, as unconcerned with pursuit of the cerebral. In fact, Manhod not only reasons rather like Chyldhod, he reasons no better. He too begins his speech with an enthymeme and an uncomplicated division (distributio, as in Chyldhod’s speech). He goes on to use other figures, of course; again like Chyldhod, however, he ends with an enthymeme — yet one that is dismissive and double-edged in being so. “But what, no force, his reason is no better” (32), he says in reference to Chyldhod’s thinking games preferable to the sports of the field. Manhod’s speech argues aggressively, unlike Chyldhod’s, and nowhere is it more clearly aggressive than at its end; on the other hand, his reasoning is no more sophisticated

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than his counterpart’s.24 Therefore, when Manhod says of the child, “his reason is no better,” he unconsciously draws attention to the limitations of his own thinking, for he argues no more complexly than the child whose “reason” he impugns. There is not only a disconcerting sameness between More’s picture of childhood and his sequential image of adult life.25 Manhod’s description of himself in terms of the sports of the field suggests as much. His references to hound and hawk and horse indicate, clearly enough, that Manhod is Iuventus: young manhood rather than Virilitas.26 But Manhod’s list of beasts does not have a solely iconographic implication. It implies for a start (and has been mentioned earlier) that whereas Chyldhod’s will to pleasure is marked by cruelty, Manhod’s is pervaded by it. So in his self-description Manhod reveals that, while his reasoning is no better than a child’s, his pursuit of pleasure is certainly more cruel: More depicts Manhod as being at once childish and worse than childish.27 Manhod is, yet is not merely, a case of arrested development. His description of himself in terms of the sports of the field has a further implication, too, indicating the will to power of adult male life as manifested in young manhood. Chyldhod’s will to pleasure manifests the stirrings of a will to power that is powerless, at least with regard to his education (15–16). Manhod’s celebration of his sporting life implies that, in young manhood, the will to pleasure and the will to power are inseparable.28 In that respect he resembles Manhood in Mundus et infans: Manhood Mighty am I named in every country. ......... There is no emperor so keen, That dare me lightly tene, For lives and limbs I lene, So mickle is my might. For I have boldly blood full piteously dispilled: There many hath left fingers and feet, both head and face. I have done harm on heads, and knights have I killed; And many a lady for my love hath said alas. (170)

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That voice of young manhood links the very violent and the erotic.29 Manhod in the “Pageant Verses” is altogether a milder figure: he does not spill human blood, and his pleasures do not for the moment include those of a sexual relationship. Nevertheless, in him as in Manhood the will to power and the will to pleasure are linked. They are also more than just that, for they do more than simply exist in conjunction — which is not what one sees in the characterization of Manhood.30 Manhod’s speech indicates from the start the coexistence and connection of the two. Assertively inverting the first words of Chyldhod, he proceeds to list the pleasures that, as he then blusters, identify a real man (“These thynges become a very man in dede” [30]). Those pleasures involve dominating some animals in order to kill others.31 Yet the link between the will to pleasure and the will to power in his speech is more revealing, which brings one back to the notion of Manhod as a case of arrested development. I argue above that Manhod’s speech concerns the exercise of power over animals (in the pursuit of pleasure) and against Chyldhod. Likewise I argue that in each case Manhod reasons like a child — in other words, like Chyldhod. Insofar as he is young manhood, however, insofar as he is Iuventus, Manhod represents what was often taken to be the high point of human life. Many medieval and Renaissance writers on the “ages of man” affirmed such a view of young manhood.32 More’s icon of young manhood suggests that, in what was frequently held to be the prime of life, the will to pleasure and the will to power facilitate maturation of the body but deny concomitant maturation of the mind. They do not so much occlude as minimize adult reasonableness. In the young manhood of the “Pageant Verses” can be discerned no large, adult sense of the reasonable in human life. Cicero’s views on that topic are at once illuminating and relevant, for they comment so aptly on More’s satiric characterization of Manhod. Further, they seem to be evoked or, at least, harmonized with in the icon of old age that More sets against

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his image of young manhood. Early in De officiis the Ciceronian speaker remarks, the most marked difference between man and beast is this: the beast, just as it is moved by the senses and with very little perception of past or future, adapts itself to that alone which is present at the moment; while man — because he is endowed with reason, by which he comprehends the chain of consequences, perceives the causes of things, understands the relation of cause to effect and of effect to cause, draws analogies, and connects and associates the present and the future — easily surveys the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct.33

According to Cicero’s speaker, both the possession of reason and its appropriate, prudential use separate humankind from the beasts; that is to say, he identifies human life in terms that distinctly elucidate the limitations and failures of young male adulthood as portrayed by More. It is not, of course, that More characterizes Manhod as lacking reason, but he does characterize Manhod as lacking developed, human reasonableness. By way of further clarifying Manhod’s limitations of mind, one might add an observation on right reason made in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: “since therefore virtue is an equable and harmonious disposition of the soul making those praiseworthy in whom it is found, and is of its own nature and by itself praiseworthy, apart from any question of expedience, there spring from it good inclinations, opinions, actions and all that makes right reason; though indeed virtue itself can best be summed up as right reason.”34 In More’s icon of Iuventus, Manhod reveals only a trivial sense of the appropriate use of reason for the conduct of life. Nurturing, training, controlling his beasts, Manhod exercises power in the pursuit of pleasure with no larger regard to analyzing his experience, to making ethical or other decisions, to making plans. His life, inasmuch as it seems to manifest right reason and prudence, expresses them narrowly. If a tolerant amusement may be discernible

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in More’s satiric portrayal of young manhood, a suggestion of Manhod’s inconsequentiality appears unmistakable. More’s concise study of the impulses to pleasure and to power in the young male adult life has another dimension as well. The subsequent icon of Venus and Cupyde implies the ultimate dominance of the will to pleasure over that to power within Manhod: a triumph of love in which the libido conquers all, in which Venus Victrix and Cupid the Conqueror overcome young manhood’s proud joy in mastery. More does not present here the Celestial Venus, and it seems certain that Manhod will now virtually be, as Petrarch’s speaker says in the Trionfi, “to every other pleasure blind and deaf.”35 From a Petrarchan perspective, it seems very unlikely that for Manhod there could be any triumph of chastity, for “Prudence and Moderation” are “near by” when Laura defeats Love.36 Be that as it may, since this pageant is concerned with Venus and Cupyde as well as with Manhod, some further attention must be paid to them. More sketches his Cupyde as the Cupid familiar from the Greek Anthology and, for example, from Propertius: a Cupid who is indomitable, domineering, malicious, or cruel rather than mischievous, a thief of reason, and a maker of men into boys. His Venus is no less familiar a figure and one likewise aptly chosen for his purpose: a Venus Victrix who is at the same time Venus Vulgaris.37 Perhaps she also has an additional guise. More’s stress on Chyldhod’s and Manhod’s preoccupations with pleasure evokes the medieval notion of Venus as symbolizing the life of pleasure itself.38 Through his use of mythography, More heightens his portrayal of Manhod as a case of arrested development, for Venus and Cupyde rob Manhod of the mastery of which he was so proud and make him a powerless player of what Age calls the “childish game” of love (57). As Cupid’s closing words to Manhod announce, “Now thou whiche erst despysedst children small, / Shall waxe a chylde agayne and be my thrall” (44–45). More’s portrait of Manhod, therefore, distinctly though implicitly contradicts Raudense’s opinion in De voluptate that education

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will at last erase childhood’s flaws, leading the child from harmless imperfection to dignified, mature adulthood. Further, his portrayal of manhood implies no less clearly that young adult male life in general fails to gain what Epicurus identified as true pleasure — in other words, its childishness is self-injury twice over. First, Manhod’s childishness is obviously demeaning.39 Second, Manhod’s writing large the unreasonableness of Chyldhod indicates that young adult males typically do not understand, nor choose to accept, the nature of pleasure as (authoritatively) theorized by Epicurus. More’s Manhod would presumably neither rejoice to know nor wish to believe, allowing for some differences of emphasis, that “The pleasurable life is not continuous drinking, dancing and sex; nor the enjoyment of fish or other delicacies of an extravagant table. It is sober reasoning which searches out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and rejects those beliefs which lay open the mind to the greatest disturbance.”40 Nor, likewise, might Manhod care for Epicurus’s related idea that “It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives well and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.”41 Just so, Of all this, the beginning and chief good is care in avoiding undesired consequences. Such prudence is more precious than philosophy itself, for all the other virtues spring from it. It teaches that it is impossible to live pleasurably without also living prudently, honestly and justly; [nor is it possible to lead a life of prudence, honor, and justice] and not live pleasantly. For the virtues are closely associated with the pleasant life, and the pleasant life cannot be separated from them.42

When measured against Ciceronian standards of right reason and prudence, Manhod’s exercise of reason looks unimpressive. When viewed from an Epicurean perspective, his pursuit of pleasure seems to have gone almost nowhere. Since Epicurus’s thinking on

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pleasure links the achievement of true pleasure with the exercise of reason-born prudence and with virtue, then from an Epicurean point of view Manhod’s lack of developed, human reasonableness and his failure to gain true pleasure are inseparable. The concordant Epicurean and Ciceronian notions of prudence emphasize his limitations. The imprudence of Manhod, his regressive and self-defeating unreasonableness, are highlighted by myth, as has been seen above. Now although only the third of the initial four pageants directly sets myth before the reader, what might be called an aura of myth surrounds More’s three images of human life, an aura, as one would expect, emanating from the ages of man tradition and from the related tradition of mythography. After his portrayal of Age, More again directly sets myth before the reader through the figures of Deth, Fame, Tyme, and Eternitee. What I want to consider for a moment here, however, are some of the mythic, or mythic as well as astrological, associations evoked by and lending power to his human characterizations. The intrusion of Venus and of Cupid into the sequence of childhood, manhood, age serves to reveal a force that emerges from within, but is larger than, individual human existence. More’s portrayals of the three stages of life indicate other forces at work on human experience. For example, More’s focus on learning as a part of childhood reminds the reader that, notionally before one encounters Venus and Cupid, Mercury is encountered as at once a symbolic and an astrological influence.43 An example of greater interest and significance concerns Manhod. Prior to Venus and Cupyde’s triumphing over him Manhod proudly rejoices in his dominance over his beasts and his triumph over Chyldhod. His assertive voicing and aggressive enactment of the will to power associate him mythographically and astrologically with Mars.44 Thus More’s Venus truly is Venus Victrix, for she overcomes a type of young male adulthood characterized in terms suggestive of both the will to power and her lover the war god. She and her son are overcome in their turn by

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Age, but the triumph of Age is a Saturnine victory. More associates old age with wise deliberation, with self–control and a compelling desire for good governance (53–54) — though not solely with those things. Thereby he links Age with the mythography of Saturn, that is to say, with the positive images of Saturn no less familiar to More and his contemporaries than were the negative.45 Some features of the latter appear subsequently in the figure of Tyme, and so the “Pageant Verses” retains, in effect, the ambiguity typical of Saturn’s portrayal by mythographers. Nonetheless the implicit connections between More’s Age and the elder god emphasize old age’s importance and its benevolence. The characterization of Age, those connections notwithstanding, is primarily Ciceronian and Epicurean in its affinities. More has his representative of life’s last phase describe himself in terms suggestive of right reason manifested as prudence. It seems that the will to power is now exercised through governing for the common good. It seems, too, that the will to pleasure is subordinated to the desire for good government. A higher, transformed will to power overcomes the will to pleasure. Age says, “Wyse and discrete: the publike wele therefore, / I help to rule to my labour and smart” (53–54). And he dismisses Cupyde with the remark: “Chargeable matters shall of loue oppresse / Thy childish game and ydle bysinesse” (56–57). His self-portrait harmonizes with Cicero’s views on human reasonableness quoted earlier and, in particular, with these observations on old age by the Ciceronian speaker in De senectute: Those, therefore, who allege that old age is devoid of useful activity adduce nothing to the purpose, and are like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of the ship, because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller. He may not be doing what younger members of the crew are doing, but what he does is better and much more important. It is not by muscle, speed,

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or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgement; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but is even richer. . . . We come now to the third ground for abusing old age, and that is, that it is devoid of sensual pleasures. O glorious boon of age, if it does indeed free us from youth’s most vicious fault!46

And, likewise, in De officiis Cicero writes, “The old, on the other hand, should, it seems, have their physical labours reduced; their mental activities should be actually increased. They should endeavour, too, by means of their counsel and practical wisdom [consilio et prudentia] to be of as much service as possible to their friends and to the young, and above all to the state.”47 Again, also in De officiis: “the life of retirement is easier and safer and at the same time less burdensome or troublesome to others, while the career of those who apply themselves to statecraft and to conducting great enterprises is more profitable to mankind.”48 According to More, then, only in old age does humankind — or, at least, male humankind — look beyond its own interests to pursue the common weal. Only near life’s end does a man put his impulses to pleasure and to power in the service of others.49 Old age is, as More portrays it, the time of intellectual and ethical maturity, when wisdom is achieved and exercised in at once self-rule and good governance: civic virtue.50 Age describes himself as being “of our short lyfe, the last and best part” (52). Within the “Pageant Verses,” and especially by contrast with the figure of Manhod/ Iuventus, he certainly seems to be so.51 Yet the portrait of Age is neither simple nor unproblematic. If Age’s self-portrayal aligns him with Ciceronian notions of right reason and prudence, of benign, responsible, altruistic maturity, it likewise distances him from Epicurus’s thinking on the way to true pleasure. According to Epicurus, “We must release ourselves from the prison of affairs and politics.”52 Also, But given that pleasure is the primary and natural good, we do not choose every and any pleasure, but often pass by many if they are outweighed by the discomforts they bring. And similarly

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we consider pain superior to pleasure when submission to the pains for a significant time brings a greater pleasure as consequence. Thus every pleasure, because it is naturally akin to us, is good, but not every pleasure is fit to be chosen — just as all pain is an evil and yet not all is to be avoided. It is by comparison and by looking at the advantages and disadvantages, that all these things must be judged. For under certain circumstances we treat the good as an evil, and conversely evil as a good.53

From a Ciceronian perspective, Age’s self-sacrifice for the common weal is admirable; from an Epicurean perspective, his selfsacrifice is radically mistaken. Age has chosen to commit himself to “the prison of affairs and politics,” for a start. Further, he gives no indication that he derives pleasure from doing so — that is to say, a pleasure higher than the pleasure(s) that he foregoes by imprisoning himself in public life. Perhaps he indicates that he derives a certain satisfaction from sacrificing himself, for his speech seems to suggest his pride both in experiencing pain for the good of others and in exercising command. Yet if Age is indeed revealing self-satisfaction, if he is more or less quietly glorying in martyrdom by politics, then nonetheless he is in error by Epicurus’s standards. Epicurus insists that the truly pleasurable life and public life are antithetic. He counsels retreat from public life into a private life of moderation, friendship, philosophy.54 The outcome would be the same even if the satisfaction won from the pains of public service were to be inferred as being, from Age’s point of view, more pleasurable than the pleasure(s) that he has foregone (and not merely a compensatory pleasure). In the portrait of Age, More diverges from Epicurus and in effect corrects him. The pursuit of pleasure, he seems to suggest, is to be valued less in the last phase of male life than is use of a developed mind in pursuit of the common weal. Age’s self-portraying speech tacitly interplays the Epicurean and the Ciceronian to the advantage of the latter. Just as the speech by Age brings together the Ciceronian and the Epicurean, so too it brings together the epideictic and the satiric. The hybridity of Age’s speech emphasizes, among other things,

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the hybridity of the “Pageant Verses” as a whole. The poem is quite clearly in a mixed mode, mingling as it does elements from ages of man literature with others derived from Petrarch’s Trionfi, satire with praise. Its various nature indicates that More’s interest in fashioning literary hybrids — evinced notably by his Life of Pico, Utopia, and The Last Things — was present from very early in his career as a writer. Greater in importance, however, than such connections of form are the conceptual links between the “Pageant Verses” and some other of More’s writings. For example, the study of pleasure that is presented in the first four icons of the “Pageant Verses” clearly anticipates the analysis of it given in Utopia. Raphael says of pleasure as the Utopians understand it, And so they [the Utopians] conclude, after carefully considering and weighing the matter, that all our actions, including even the virtues exercised within them, look toward pleasure as their happiness and final goal. By pleasure they understand every state or movement of body or mind in which we find delight according to the behests of nature. They have good reason for adding that the desire is according to nature. By following our senses and right reason we may discover what is pleasant by nature: it is a delight that does not injure others, does not preclude a greater pleasure, and is not followed by pain. (Utopia, 167)55

That famous speech need be quoted no further since there are evident affinities between the study of pleasure implicit in the “Pageant Verses” and Raphael’s account of the Utopians’ views on pleasure. Nor do the Utopians’ views on that subject need to be discussed at length, for they have already been discussed with care in other commentary.56 My aim has been to show that, from even his earliest works, More identifies the impulse to pleasure as basic to human existence and therefore as demanding consideration when one analyzes pursuit of the common weal — and that he does so in terms he will revisit. Consequently, some specific connections between the account of pleasure in Utopia and that presented in the “Pageant Verses” might be briefly mentioned at this point. Mention could be

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made first of how the Utopians prioritize pleasures. According to Raphael, they “seek primarily those of the mind, and prize them most highly” (175). The “Pageant Verses” indicates that, in Europe, childhood and at least early adulthood are given over to preference for pleasures of the body. The Utopians are in that respect more truly Epicurean than are the Europeans, for whom Epicurus had articulated a foundational philosophy of pleasure. Moreover, that contrast between Utopian and European priorities illuminates the Utopians’ view on hunting, which in turn illuminates the treatment of animals by Chyldhod and by Manhod. Raphael says, And so the Utopians, who regard this whole activity of hunting as unworthy of free men, have accordingly assigned it to their butchers, who, as I said before, are all slaves. In their eyes, hunting is the lowest thing even butchers can do. In the slaughterhouse, their work is more useful and honest, since there they kill animals only out of necessity; whereas the hunter seeks nothing but his own pleasure from killing and mutilating some poor little creature. (Utopia, 171)

The cruelty cognate with physical pleasures prized by Chyldhod and Manhod is regarded by the Utopians with utter disdain as being beneath a member of the common weal. Something else Raphael says, however, suggests likenesses as well as differences between the portrait of Age and the Utopians’ view on denying themselves pleasure for the sake of the common good. He remarks, with reference to “those public laws which control the distribution of vital goods, such as are the very substance of pleasure” (Utopia, 165), So long as they are observed, to pursue your own interests is prudent; to pursue the public interest as well is pious; but to pursue your own pleasure by depriving others of theirs is unjust. On the other hand, to decrease your own pleasure in order to augment that of others is a work of humanity and benevolence, which never fails too reward the doer over and above his sacrifice. You may be repaid for your kindness, and in any case your consciousness of having done a good deed, and recalling

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the affection and good will of those whom you have benefited, gives your mind more pleasure than your body would have drawn from the things you forfeited. Finally, as religion easily persuades a well-disposed mind to believe, God will requite the loss of a brief and transitory pleasure here with immense and never-ending joy in heaven. (165–66)

Age certainly does “decrease [his] own pleasure in order to augment that of others”; and he knows his doing so to be “a work of humanity and benevolence.” Yet he does not allude to being “repaid for [his] kindness” and it is not certain whether his “mind” gains “more pleasure than [his] body would have drawn from the things [he has] forfeited.” Most important, the portrayal of Age makes no allusion to reward in the afterlife — a point to which I shall return in discussing the icon of the Poet.

Beyond the World Although Age is presented as the high point of human life he is nonetheless subjected to satire: satire from without as well as unwitting self-satire, like most of the other figures in the “Pageant Verses.” The mockery directed against him by another introduces the second phase of More’s poem. With the advent of Deth, who succeeds and satirizes Age, the “Pageant Verses” moves from imaging the ages of man to voicing contemptus mundi, leading the reader gradually to contemplation of the last things. Deth is, in fact, carefully placed within the nine pageants: medially positioned for the obvious reason that he mediates between life in the world and the life beyond. Excepting the icon of the Poet, the icons following the image of Deth are abstractions individuating forces that both encompass worldly life and affect modes of the afterlife. Through those abstractions More raises questions concerning authority, questions that will be resolved by the words of the Poet. Resolving those questions, he simultaneously completes More’s portrayal of the ages of man. Deth’s courteously imperious and ironic summoning of Age satirizes the magisterial self-importance of the latter — the vanity

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that, as More seems to imply, is inseparable even from wise selfgovernance and the pursuit of others’ good. It emphasizes, too, the little time within which rule for the common weal may be pursued. The icons of Age and Deth interact to reveal pursuit of the common weal as valuable, flawed, and, in one basic sense, precarious. Yet More’s allusion to the danse macabre, with its wryly grotesque wit, suggests something further. The characterization of Deth as himself blindly vain in exercising power and condemning the vanity of Age implies that so powerful an ironist can nevertheless in turn be subjected to irony. Deth subverts his own assertion of authority: More discredits the notion that death is absolute, invulnerable.57 Of course the reader sees this confirmed in the ensuing procession of symbolic forces. A Virgilian figure of Fame usurps the authority of Deth or, at least, does so in part. She says to Deth, “When thou a noble man hast brought to grounde / Maugry thy teeth to lyue cause hym shall I, / Of people in parpetuall memory” (“Pageant Verses,” 77–79). Yet here, as in the case of Deth, More disallows a perception of final authority. The point is not merely that Fame, being caught in a series of subordinations, will inevitably have her own authority usurped. Rather, the point is that Fame reveals herself as unstable and, therefore, as a contingent force acting upon human life, as inconclusively authoritative. The mundane, secular afterlife offered by Fame is flawed precisely because of the defects in and limitations to her power indicated by the Virgilian ancestry allotted her. Virgil presents Fama (Rumour), “than which no other evil is swifter,” as a monstrous being who broadcasts “fact and fiction equally”: she is malign, destructive, hybrid, unreliable.58 More’s Fame almost immediately flaunts her Virgilian lineage. “Fame I am called, maruayle you nothing, / Though with tonges I am compassed all rounde,” she says in allusion to Aeneid 4.183 (73–74). To that evocation of Virgil, More has her add an explanation: “For in voyce of people is my chiefe liuying” (75). Vox populi being chiefly what gives her life, her use of “confounde” becomes unwittingly ironic at her own expense (“O cruel death, thy power I confounde” [76]),

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since if she lives chiefly in the voice of the people then she must be confused and confusing, as is her archetype in the Aeneid.59 “Parpetuall memory” — the afterlife assured by her — is, then, neither necessarily true nor perpetual. The succession of a Virgilian Fame by an Ovidian Tyme certainly confirms the latter. This is Time the Destroyer of Metamorphoses 15 if not its Time the Devourer.60 Tyme twice identifies his power in terms of total destruction: “I shall in space destroy both see and lande” (86); “When I shall in process distroy the world and all” (90). He is Deth magnified, snuffing out human afterlife in the world and ultimately the world itself. With his advent a second, and greater, Saturnine presence enters the “Pageant Verses.” Nonetheless, More characterizes Tyme so as to repeat the strategy of authority deferred: foretelling the end of all things, Tyme necessarily foretells his own end and that of his power. He unknowingly announces Eternitee with her infinite authority (“myne empyre infinite shalbe” [99]). Her last words tell of Tyme’s obliteration, her final word leaving the reader to contemplate the extinction not simply of Tyme but of everything mutable. She says to Tyme, “thou shalt be brought, / For all thy pride and bostyng into nought” (104). The speech of Eternitee emphasizes again one of the most evident and also important aspects of the “Pageant Verses” to this point: its secularity. Of course, Chyldhod briefly prays, although it can hardly be called that, and the icon of Deth evokes the notion of the last things. Yet Eternitee makes no mention of judgment and, well before she speaks, Age makes no allusion to either personal virtue or service of the state as having a religious dimension. Only at the very end of the pageants, which seems apt to their imaging human life as focused on the here and now, does More have his Poet confront the reader with the sacred. The Poet explicates the authority of Eternitee in religious terms and, in doing that, completes the portrayal of the ages of man. His speech sets before the reader what might be called the moralitas to the pageant of human life, and there is no mystery to what he says. He

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may raise the language of the “Pageant Verses” from the vernacular to Latin, from the common tongue to one less common though notionally more enduring. For all that, his Latin accommodates enduring truth to the reader, lucidly presenting it (accommodatio). The first truth he presents is that “the elusive goods of this perishable world do not come so readily as they pass away” (“fragilis bona lubrica mundi, / Tam cito non veniunt, quam cito pretereunt” [113–14]) and, therefore, “Pleasures, praise, homage, all things quickly disappear — except the love of God, which endures forever” (“Gaudia, laus & honor, celeri pede omnia cedunt, / Qui manet excepto semper amore dei” [115–16]).61 By implication, then, the authority of Eternitee derives from and resides in God. Further, it is implicit that the will to pleasure should be directed toward God as his love transcends all other sources of delight, all other goods.62 Finally, it is implicit that every human activity must be seen in the context of God, which means of necessity that Age’s exercise of virtue and pursuit of the common weal are to be seen, despite the secularity of his self-description, as having their context in God. The Ciceronian image of human life at its imperfect best is, in effect, completed by placement within the sacred. Nor could it be viewed otherwise, for the Poet’s speech indicates that human life’s meaning and fulfillment lie ultimately in the divine alone. Thus More’s portrayal of the ages of man is now itself complete, ending with that consideration of the last things foreshadowed by the icon of Deth. Now completed, too, is More’s apparent engaging with Epicurus, who famously held that the gods were unconcerned with human life, and who condemned “the yearning for immortality” as a harmful desire.63 In addition, as quoted by Cicero, he observed, “No greater pleasure could be derived from an eternal life than is actually derived from an existence we can see to be finite.”64 The last of the pageants emphatically denies such a view, for it alludes to a God unlike the indifferent gods of Epicurus and implicitly links that God with true pleasure and therefore with human

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pursuit of it. In effect More has now comprehensively amended and Christianized Epicurus. He writes, in The Last Things, If vertue wer al painfull, and vice al pleasant, yet sith deth shal shortly finish both the pain of the tone and the pleasure of the tother, gret madness wer it, if we would not rather take a short pain for the winning of euerlasting pleasure, than a short plesure for the winning of euerlastyng pain. But now if it be true as it is in dede, that our sin is painful and our vertue pleasant, how much is it than a more madness, to take sinnefull paine in thys world, that shal win vs eternal pain in hell, rather than pleasant vertue in this world, that shal win vs eternall plesure in heauen?65

The “Pageant Verses” indicates More’s ruefully amused interest in as well as his understanding of that “madness.”

D To follow More’s various strategy of representation and play of ideas in his “Pageant Verses” is to recognize that there he essayed an archetypal history of human life in which he could explore the will to pleasure and its interaction with the will to power — and, thence, the stubborn unreasonableness, the myopic secularity, of human life.66 His “Pageant Verses” suggests a critique of the will to pleasure both related to views on pleasure expressed elsewhere in his writings and, in particular, anticipatory of that unfolded in Utopia: a critique forming, as it seems, a corrective analysis of Epicurus. Valla is, in effect, also (though differently) critiqued; perhaps Boethius was More’s starting point or inspiration.67 Whatever the case, in developing that critique his poem cautiously celebrates pursuit of the common weal, yet the very notion of the common weal is made problematic by what More implies about the human obsession with pursuing personal pleasure, the private and imperfectly good. There is little indication in the “Pageant Verses” of society as people “associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.”68 In other words, no Ciceronian view of the state

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accompanies or environs Age’s Ciceronian remarks on pursuing the common weal. Further, More indicates that pursuit of the common weal becomes a preoccupation only in life’s last and most fragile phase, albeit the phase that is also presented as the “best” in life. It is true, as regards the fourth of the “pageauntes,” that the Ciceronian values and attitudes evoked in the icon of old age are set ultimately in the context of the sacred by the speech of the Poet (a contextualizing that hints at ancient wisdom’s need for baptism). However, his speech emphasizes contempt of the world and remembrance of one’s finiteness, not just of one’s mortality, as elements of a truly Christian wisdom. Thereby his speech highlights Augustinian categories that seem penumbral but immediately relevant to the “Pageant Verses.” Age manifests what appears to be Manhod’s libido dominandi — maybe, too, the latter’s concupiscentia carnis — refined by or sublimated into caritas humana, but merely that. The Poet’s speech intimates as well that uti non frui has been a concept not much understood or followed by the human speakers preceding him. Thus the “Pageant Verses” at once affirms the values of the heavenly city within the saeculum and accords with Augustine’s commentary on Cicero’s view of the state rather than with that view itself.69

TWO

Chance, Gender, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of the Common Weal The “Pageant Verses,” like Petrarch’s Trionfi, does not explore the power of chance over human life. There More was concerned with focusing on impulses that he represented as powerfully directing the individual, as all but irresistibly shaping the self. Further, he was concerned with their relationship to the forming and civilizing of the individual by education — and to the pursuit of the common weal. Chance was by no means his concern, but the Fortune verses and Utopia imply that he was deeply interested in that phenomenon (as do his final poems and A Dialogue of Comfort, all written in the Tower). To be more accurate, they imply that he was fascinated with how people make sense of chance, respond to it, deal with it, or not. The two works do so most obviously through his dealings with the goddess Fortune, in particular through his using her to consider the authority that people may knowingly or unwittingly accord to chance. The Fortune verses seem to put forward what is More’s earliest formal critique of chance as symbolized by the figure of the goddess, a critique that interestingly connects with the neo-Epicurean view on humankind presented in his “Pageant Verses.” Utopia, written well

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over a decade later, develops that critique and locates it explicitly within discussion of good government. How did More draw on the lore of chance — that is, how did he align himself with the wisdom literature on Fortune? In addition, how does his thinking about chance contribute to his thinking on pursuit of the common weal? By way of trying to answer the first question, one needs to examine the Fortune verses in the contexts of Stoicism and Augustinianism. Then one may start to seek an answer to the second.

Augustine, Boethius, and the Fortune Verses Every day we are at war within ourselves, Augustine argued in The City of God, and all the Stoics do is offer us misinformation. In his words, “We are engaged in [an] internal war” where “‘the spirit lusts against the flesh.’”1 The Stoics, he continued, deny that the ills produced by and accompanying our self-division (which, in any case, they do not accurately perceive) are in fact ills and so their philosophy is misleading rather than merely unhelpful: Now I am amazed that the Stoic philosophers have the face to argue that these ills are no ills, though they admit that, if they should be so great that the wise man cannot or ought not to endure them, he is compelled to inflict death on himself and depart from this life. But such is the stupid pride of these men who suppose that the supreme good is to be found in this life, and that they can be the agents of their own happiness, that their wise man, — I mean the man whom they describe as such with astounding inanity, — whom, even if he be blinded and grow deaf and dumb, lose the use of his limbs, be tortured with pain, and visited by every other evil of the sort that tongue can utter or fancy conceive, whereby he is driven to inflict death on himself, they do not scruple to call happy. What a happy life, that seeks the help of death to end it!2

That outburst against the Stoics implicitly emphasizes, of course, the antipathy between two views on personal agency: theirs,

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that reason can direct and perfect the will; the later Augustine’s, derived from Scripture, that the free though corrupted will can be made sound and empowered by grace alone.3 Two views on personal agency and, as a consequence, the worldviews to which they belong are indirectly set in opposition. It does not take much historical imagination to see why those conflicting visions could have made powerful counterclaims on the allegiances of humanist scholars when they reevaluated or rediscovered Stoic texts and pondered afresh the writings of Augustine. Just how widespread and enduring those counterclaims in fact were on humanists has been documented by William J. Bouwsma. His study, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” pioneered the concept that “the two ideological poles between which Renaissance humanism oscillated may be roughly labelled ‘Stoicism’ and ‘Augustinianism.’”4 Observing that neither term indicated a smooth continuum of thought or doctrine, Bouwsma traces clusters of notions or doxa connected with each term from, approximately speaking, Petrarch to Calvin and Lipsius. He states his “general conclusions” as follows: At least two general conclusions emerge from this contrast between Stoic and Augustinian humanism. The first comes out of the fact that we can illustrate either with examples drawn indiscriminately from anywhere in the entire period of our concern, and this suggests that the tension between them found no general resolution in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. But it is equally striking that we have often cited the same figures on both sides. Neither pure Stoics nor pure Augustinians are easy to find among the humanists, though individual figures may tend more to one position than the other. Erasmus, for example, seems more Stoic than Augustinian; Valla appears more Augustinian than Stoic. A closer study of individuals may reveal more personal development, from one position to another, than it has been possible to show here.5

Looking back at the conclusions of Bouwsma’s magisterial study, one sees an unacknowledged possibility. Not included is the

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prospect that, within one text or a related group of texts, a writer may interplay the Stoic with the Augustinian — deliberately, as far as the reader can tell (and which is not to say unambiguously), or in such a way that the reader cannot tell to what extent the interplay and its consequences are deliberate (which need not imply that the text or group of texts is therefore confused). Now it may be questioned whether Stoicism and Augustinianism are indeed “the two ideological poles between which Renaissance humanism oscillated” or are better seen as preeminent alternatives recurring throughout humanist attempts to make sense of the world. Leaving that question aside, however, I wish to explore the possibility of the two worldviews being interplayed. First I shall focus on Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy — one of the landmark sources of Stoic and other concepts for Renaissance as for medieval readers — and then on More’s poems written apparently to preface a volume called The Boke of Fortune.6 Just as it may be difficult to ascertain whether Boethius is alluding to Scripture or not in The Consolation, so it may be hard to know whether he is alluding to Augustine, to whose writings he acknowledges a debt in his Theological Tractates.7 His text at times speaks ambiguously to us, not necessarily because what he writes may have divergent meanings but, rather, because the words and (or) sentiments of his syncretic text may at some moments closely resemble those of, say, both Augustine and Plotinus. Hence there are times when The Consolation seems not unlike a whispering gallery, where the Augustinian and the Stoic can both be heard among the mingled voices. My main argument about The Consolation, nonetheless, is that Boethius’s view on personal agency — an issue crucial to his analysis of human dealings with Fortune — appears both to differ from and to resemble Augustine’s. In considering More’s Fortune verses I shall argue that they present what seems at once a Stoic and an Augustinian critique of Fortune and of human responses to her. Proposing that the Stoic elements of More’s poems seem Boethian rather than otherwise,

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though their absolute identification with Boethius is not crucial to my thesis, I shall argue primarily four things. First, More’s characterization of Fortune resembles Augustine’s account of God and the depiction of Fortune by Boethius. Second, Stoicism and Augustinianism are used in More’s portrayal of Fortune to reinforce each other despite their contradictions. Third, personal agency is a major issue in the poems, one that More treats primarily in Stoic terms. Elsewhere he would write on personal agency in terms that are thoroughly Augustinian; the Fortune verses indicate his choosing not to do so for reasons associated with his parodically Augustinian portrayal of Fortune.8 Given that he writes of personal agency in mainly Stoic terms but that Boethius’s thinking on the issue — although in some respects like that of the Stoics — also resembles Augustine’s in some ways, his consideration of personal agency at once accords with and also departs from that of Boethius. Fourth, in interplaying the Stoic/ Boethian with the Augustinian, More’s “To them that tristith in ffortune” ends by implicitly displacing the latter in favor of the former, thereby appearing to make another strategic departure from Augustine and, in part, from Boethius. It seems that in the most substantial of his Fortune verses More follows after his own fashion — or, at the least, independently recreates — Boethius’s example of interplaying the Stoic and the Augustinian in The Consolation. The Stoicism in his poems replicates or accords with the Stoic elements in Boethius’s work, but their Augustinianism has independence from, if some connection with, the Augustinianism that Boethius appears to deploy. By way of clarifying and specifying what I have outlined above, I should like to begin with a moment in The Consolation of Philosophy when Philosophy, as she praises God, sings in a voice that reminds the reader distinctly of other voices. She sings: “You are truly tranquility, / You are quiet rest” (“Tu namque serenum, / Tu requies tranquilla” [3.met.9.26–27]). Throughout that hymn her singing echoes Plato and Proclus, as has been discussed with reference to Timaeus and to Proclus’s commentary upon

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it.9 But, uttering these words, her voice seems likewise to echo Augustine’s in his celebrations of quies, as for example when, at the start of his Confessions, he considers the human impulse to praise God: “you [God] have made us for you and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (“fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te”).10 A further example is the end of the Confessions, where Augustine says in anticipating that “we may rest in you [God] in the Sabbath of eternal life” (“sabbato vitae aeternae requiescamus in te”): “You [God] yourself are rest” (“quies tu ipse es”).11 The reader, perceiving the Augustinian resonances of Philosophy’s words, cannot know whether that is as Boethius planned or whether Plato’s vision of the soul’s return home and that of Augustine are being unwittingly juxtaposed. Whichever may be the case, there is an Augustinian as well as a Platonic inflection to what is in some respects also a Stoic text. In harmony with the Augustinian note ending 3.met.9 is the tone that Boethius gives to spiritual nostalgia in The Consolation. To read 4.pros.1. 31–38, for instance, against Augustine’s commentaries on Psalms 86 and 148 — and also against Plotinus’s Enneads 1.6.8 and 5.9.1 — is to recognize the echoes when Philosophy speaks of the soul’s homesickness and way of reaching home.12 Yet a more important similarity is that between Boethius’s and Augustine’s views on personal agency. Early in The Consolation, Philosophy sings that because the Stoic wise man overcomes Fate and cannot be unsettled by Fortune, he will not be disturbed by hostile forces of nature or by fear of the rage of tyrants (1.met.4; cf. 1.pros.3.31–49).13 Through reason’s control of the will he achieves transcendence. For everyone else, as Boethius later explains, things are different. In 4.pros.7.49–50 Philosophy urges, after the Stoic fashion, “Hold on to the middle way with steadfast strength” (“Firmis medium viribus occupate!”). She adds, “Indeed it is placed in your hands, what kind of fortune you prefer to shape for yourself” (“In vestra enim situm manu qualem vobis fortunam formare malitis” [52–54]).14 She nonetheless subsequently points out that although to have

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reason is therefore to have freedom of will, “this [freedom] is not equal in all” (“hanc non in omnibus aequam esse” [5.pros.2.13; cf. 11–12]).15 As she considers that inequality of freedom, which was a concept familiar to the Stoics, Philosophy draws close to the thought of Augustine. Human souls, she continues, lose some of their freedom when they cease to contemplate the divine mind, “fall into” (dilabuntur), and thereafter are bound by the flesh (ibid., 16–20). They lose more, as is self-evident, if they experience the “final slavery” (“extrema . . . servitus”) of giving themselves over to vice and so lose possession of the reason proper to them (19–21). Then they wholly become victims of their desires, strengthening the servitude that follows from their flawed and mistaken choices (22–29). If one sets aside Philosophy’s portrayal of those who have lost reason, the antithesis to her evocation of the Stoic sage, what does she say about how people in between the extremes make good the loss of unimpaired freedom — about how they overcome the damaging impairment of free will? Part of the answer has been evident from almost the start of The Consolation, for there Boethius suggests the remedial power of philosophic education or, to be exact, re-education. But near the end of his work he suggests, too, that philosophy alone cannot make good the depletion of the will’s freedom. In fact, Philosophy points to the rest of the answer and thereby to the source of perfected healing. The rest of the answer is prayer, which links the petitioner to God and so to the source of healing’s completion. Through aptly humble prayer, Philosophy teaches, grace may be obtained and vice avoided (see 5.pros.3.84–112, esp. 102–07). She adds, “Not in vain are hopes placed in God — and prayers, which when they are befitting cannot be ineffective” (“Nec frustra sunt in deo positae spes precesque; quae cum rectae sunt, inefficaces esse non possunt” [5.pros.6.170–72]). Boethius’s view on personal agency, as expressed directly or otherwise throughout The Consolation, differs from yet also markedly resembles some of Augustine’s views as expressed in

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various works. Both Augustine and Boethius write of the soul’s inhabiting the body as a fall into and entrapment in matter. Augustine may not always use that Neoplatonic topos when he describes the relationship between soul and body; still, he does use it (compare The Consolation 5.2.18–20 with Confessions 13.8 and 12.10).16 Both suggest — in line, too, with biblical precedent — that the flesh hinders the soul’s capacity to reason and to will freely (The Consolation, 5.2.14–18, and, for example, The City of God, 19.27).17 Both emphasize that, in particular, the fallen soul’s unrelenting acquisitiveness impairs its freedom of will, although Augustine’s cupiditas is not identical to Boethius’s cupido or rapacitas (the thinking of both may be further linked through connection with Cicero’s “caeca ac temeraria dominatrix animi cupiditas” or his overtly Stoic “cupiditatis sitis”).18 However, Augustine and Boethius each insist that the will is free. They likewise insist that, if reason may enable the will to overcome vice to some extent, ultimately grace obtained through prayer enables the free though impaired will to choose what is truly the good (The City of God, 19.27; The Free Choice of the Will, 2.20.54, 3.18.50–19.53; Grace and Free Will, 15.31–16.32). There are clear affinities, then, between Boethius’s and Augustine’s views on personal agency; the last of those identified above is arguably most important among them. If Boethius does not openly acknowledge Augustine when he writes of the will’s freedom, neither in other contexts does he acknowledge Plato, Plotinus, or Proclus. That aside, the range and nature of the affinities imply a deliberate rather than an accidental similarity between Boethius and the predecessor whose theology he certainly knew and respected. To identify the interplay of Stoic and Augustinian concepts in The Consolation is to suggest their interaction in what was, for Renaissance as for earlier readers, a major account of how to understand and deal with life’s uncertainties. It suggests that Boethius’s text was for humanist writers not merely a wisdom text and an example of how to manage a dialogue about Fortune; it was also an example of interplaying the antithetic worldviews

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that tended to shape their efforts to make sense of experience. Given that Boethius’s text was an example of the kind described, what was its availability to More and to what extent did he use it when he wrote his Fortune verses? Any answer is necessarily influenced, although only in part, by the date one assigns the poems. The most accurate date seems to be before “the beginning of 1505.”19 The fact that no more precise date can be given the poems does not greatly matter. In 1478 Caxton had published Chaucer’s rendering of The Consolation, so More had access to Boethius’s text in that English form, whatever the totality of versions available to him.20 Also, in 1501, More had given a series of lectures on The City of God; thus, some of Augustine’s views on free will, Stoicism, and other topics were known to him from the work that was the focus of his attention — and there is not much likelihood that, when preparing his lectures, he did not know or choose to read anything else by Augustine. Availability of the Boethian example, to put it that way, is not really at issue; neither is knowledge of Augustine independent from knowledge of the Augustinian elements to be discerned in The Consolation. Use of the example is the issue, of course, and can be seen from several angles. I shall argue below that the most substantial poems among More’s Fortune verses seem at times to evoke Stoic concepts presented in The Consolation. Likewise, I shall argue, they seem to evoke a number of Augustinian categories, some of which are implicit also in Boethius’s work but some of which are not. Their interplay of Boethian Stoicism and Augustinianism thus appears deliberate, although absolute identification of the Stoic elements in the poems with those of The Consolation is not crucial to my thesis. Before that interplay of worldviews in the most substantial of the Fortune verses is considered, however, a few things should be said of all the poems. More wrote up to perhaps seven prefatory poems for The Boke of Fortune; attribution is not uniformly uncontested. But no one has questioned his authorship of the three longest and most ambitious: “The wordes of Fortune to the people,” a sermocinatio and virtually also a suasoria

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(42 lines); “To them that tristith in ffortune,” an admonitio and adhortatio (168 lines); “To them that seketh ffortune,” also an admonitio and adhortatio (49 lines). The remainder include a brief prologue, two short poems in French, and another brief poem in English. They state quite simply some ideas shrewdly developed or positioned within their longer companions. The reader first encounters Fortune’s self-presentation to humanity. Throughout “The wordes of Fortune to the people,” chance is at once conventionally gendered female and characterized in terms of misogynic cliché, being attributed with overweening and illegitimate ambition, unreason, instability, malice, and seductiveness to ill. Yet there are elements to her characterization in the poem beyond simply those of misogynic commonplace. More has her present herself as the divine principle ruling this world: its Unmoved Mover who offers, in parody of the Christian God, material salvation and spiritual perfection derived from it (lines 53–66). His strategy is to suggest that committing oneself to the chance of such salvation and perfection is to worship one’s preferred divinity. The categories through which Fortune specifies her own godhead — in other words, the things that would persuade people to see chance as the solely ruling principle of this world — are mainly Augustinian and Stoic. Where they are either of those, they tend also to be Boethian. Presenting herself implicitly as the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover yet likewise as a personal deity, Fortune suggests that she causes change without herself being subject to it, and that she intervenes in individual lives: With owt my ffauour ther is no thyng wonne. Many a mater haue I browght alaste To good conclusion, that fondely was begonne And many a purpose, bownden sure and faste With wyse provisioun, I have over caste

(60–64)

Immediately before those lines, she has specified her interventionist godhead in terms that reveal her as a parodically Christian

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deity, a parody because self-consciously a double. She says, seeking worship, That riches, worshipe, welth, and dignite Ioy, reste, and peace, and all thyng fynally, That any pleasure or prophet may cum by, To mannys comfort, aid, and sustynaunce, Is all at my devise and ordeynance.

(55–59)

Fortune in effect declares herself to be the source of material salvation, for she indicates that not to honor her — hence not to gain material goods and not to accrue honor — means condemnation to perpetual “shame, penvry, and payn” (76). From material salvation by her, as she indicates, follows spiritual perfection, in the sense of one’s gaining “Ioy, reste, and peace,” along with all “pleasure” (56–58). Fortune’s reference to pleasure suggests an important affinity between More’s poems on Fortune and his “Pageant Verses.” Both emphasize to virtually the same degree that the desire for pleasure drives humankind. After Fortune has highlighted pleasure, which she mentions climactically with — yet before — “prophet” in line 57, she compares her “dedly ffooys” to “the ffox” that “gan for to defye” the “plesant grapis” beyond his reach (68, 71–72). Her “ffooys” are imaged as embittered by failure to have their wills to pleasure gratified. Further, when More’s speaker elides Fortune with Venus, in “To them that tristith in ffortune” (103–05), he implicitly identifies Fortune with (sexual) pleasure — an identification made explicit in lines 229–32 of that poem. (Sexual pleasure, romancing chance in this case, is there troped as “a ffoolis paradise,” in line 232; see as well lines 243–44). Also in that poem, Poverty’s philosophic servants are said to have “more plasure” by far than the servants of Fortune (213), a notion at once Stoic and Epicurean. There is subsequently a brief but significant allusion to pleasure in “To them that seketh ffortune” (267). What people seek from chance is that which pleases them, More’s speaker observes, saying, Who so deliteth to prove & assay, / Of wauering

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fortune the full vncertayn lot, / Yf that the answere plese the not alway, / Blame not me” (265–68). In the three most substantial of the Fortune verses, then, human greed is linked closely to an innate desire for pleasure, even though human greed is not linked exclusively to that desire. The fact that it is linked — a link not made in the “Pageant Verses” but subsequently made in Utopia — accords with both Augustinian and Stoic thought, and likewise with that of Boethius. Fortune claims, of course, that she confers rest and peace as well as pleasure. And that claim clearly if indirectly has two aspects: first, it is a claim that she supplants God; second, it is a claim made in Augustinian terms. Augustine identifies God alone as conferring rest (quies), and Boethius repeats that argument. In addition, Augustine associates peace with God alone and so, too, does Boethius.21 Moreover, Augustine proposes that pleasure and happiness come only from love focused on God, and Boethius concurs.22 With reference to both “pleasure” and “prophet” (57), Fortune implies she confers identity. Through granting both, according to her — in other words, through granting material salvation and thence spiritual perfection — she fulfills interior and public selfhood. Should she withhold both, inner selfhood is disrupted and public selfhood all but erased (75–80). When she denies her “ffauour” (60), her victim becomes a self-divided nobody, an outcast. Fortune parodies, then, Augustine’s notion that to move from God is to move toward nonbeing. At the same time, she obliquely mocks the Stoic notion (iterated by Boethius) that the essential self, the rational and integral consciousness, lives in defiance of Fortune and all her works. The Augustinian categories evoked in Fortune’s presentation of her divinity tend to be the same as, or to agree closely with, categories of Boethian thought in The Consolation. The Stoic categories evoked by Fortune are also among those used in Boethius’s text. The most obvious example of that, which is by no means simple, can be seen when Fortune states her opposition to elected poverty — Boccaccio’s struggle between Fortune and Poverty

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being reworked by More out of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.23 More has Fortune initiate her statement of opposition by having her take up the issue of wisdom, whereas Lydgate continuously pays greater attention to the issue of freedom (freedom from Fortune, gained by the choice to be poor).24 More’s Fortune introduces her statement this way: With owt good happe ther may no wit suffise. Better is to be ffortunate than wise. And therefore hath som men bene or this My dedly ffooys and wrytyn many a bok, To my disprayse.

(65–69)

Fortune’s opposition to those who have rejected her and chosen poverty is first an attack on wisdom. So it continues to be. What she wants to make “the people” believe can be epitomized as follows: the only salvation and perfection that matter are at her disposal (55–64); wisdom cannot confer them because she overrules “wyse provisioun” as she sees fit (64–65). Therefore, “Better is to be ffortunate than wise” (66). Moreover, the wise who write against her and her gifts (whom Fortune aptly refuses to name), act out of anger at her not having favored them — out of frustrated desire for the very goods they denounce, choosing in fact to be self-divided nonentities (67–80). When Fortune unfolds a reworked version of the conflict between Poverty and herself, she tries to reveal wisdom as folly. It is clear that Fortune thereby reveals herself as a type of Folly. At the same time, she parodies the Pauline topos of God’s wisdom overthrowing the wisdom of those accounted wise and making wise the simple.25 But it seems clear, too, that in deprecating wisdom directed against her she obliquely alludes to Stoicism and seeks implicitly to discredit it. Particularly relevant here is one of the main things at stake in her assault on wisdom — the attribution of power to confer identity. Fortune claims that identity is hers to bestow; in doing so she counters the notion, a notion asserted especially by the Stoics and at length by Boethius, that wisdom produces a selfhood at once

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authentic and independent from her. Among her unnamed targets are precisely writers such as Boethius and the authority of texts such as The Consolation. Further Stoic elements are added to the characterization of Fortune in “To them that tristith in ffortune” and “To them that seketh ffortune.” As two examples from the latter indicate, those elements likewise replicate or accord with the Stoic concepts evoked by Boethius. The poem begins with the warning (admonitio) quoted a little earlier: Who so deliteth to prove and assay, Of waueryng fortune the full vncertayn lot, Yf that the answere plese the not alway, Blame not me: for I comande you not, Fortune to trust, and eke full well ye wot, I haue of her no brydyll in my ffiste, She renneth lose, and torneth wher she lyste.

(265–71)

More’s “brydyll” image may allude ironically to 2.met.2.15–16 in The Consolation or, perhaps, to Chaucer’s translation of those lines.26 In any event, his argument echoes that of Philosophy when she says, “These [changes] are always her [Fortune’s] ways; such is her nature” (“Hi semper eius mores sunt ista natura” [2.pros.1.29–30]). Then, If, when you have voluntarily chosen [Fortune] as your mistress, you wish to draw up a law about her staying and departure, won’t you be acting unjustly and by your impatience make worse a lot which you cannot change? If you commit your sails to the winds, you go not where your will desires but where the blasts push you; if you entrust your seedlings to the fields, you balance fruitful years against sterile ones. (Ibid., 51–58)27

Subsequently in More’s poem, his speaker offers this counsel about Fortune: she kepeth euer in store From euery man som parcell of his will, That he may pray therefore and serue her still.

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Som man hath good, but children hath he non. Som man hath both, but he can get non helthe. Som hath all thre, but vp to honowrs trone Can he not crepe, by no maner stelthe. ........ it is fortunes gyse To graunt no man all thyng that he will axe, But as her self liste ordre and devise. (290–96, 300–02)

As Philosophy asks, “For who is so thoroughly happy that something does not to some degree conflict with the quality of his situation?” (“Quis est enim tam conpositae felicitatis ut non aliqua ex parte cum status sui qualitate rixetur?” [2.pros.4.41–43]). She continues: The nature of human prosperity is unsettled; either it never wholly flourishes or it never remains constant. This man abounds in wealth but his ignoble birth shames him; noble birth makes this man stand out but, hedged about by the poverty of his family possessions, he would prefer to be unknown. That man, rich in money and birth, bewails not being married; that man, happily married but childless, breeds riches for an heir not of his blood. Another man, blessed with children, cries, dejected, at the faults of son and daughter. So no one agrees unhesitatingly with the condition of his fortune.28

In More’s characterization of Fortune, as in The Consolation, the Stoic and the Augustinian do not just coexist but are made to work in harmony. The Fortune that he presents is the Stoics’ personification of chance given new life and meaning as a parodically Augustinian deity. On the other hand, when More’s poems examine human responses to Fortune rather than her nature, the Stoic and the Augustinian come to be used differently. In such contexts their interaction is affected not only by the characterization of Fortune that More uses them to develop but also by the kind of audience More’s speaker addresses in “To them that tristith in ffortune” and “To them that seketh ffortune.” A striking difference in their

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use can be seen when More’s speaker focuses on personal agency. He seems then to follow primarily the Stoics, appearing almost to ignore Augustinian thinking on personal agency in favor of a Stoic perspective. Thus he accords with some elements of Boethius’s thought on the topic in The Consolation but not with those that distinctly resemble or iterate the thought of Augustine. Difference of a related kind can be seen when, in “To them that tristith in ffortune,” More’s speaker ends his address with advice (adhortatio) and implicitly ignores Augustinian wisdom in favor of Stoic. The latter again strategically displaces the former. More has Fortune herself establish the basis for his speaker’s consideration of personal agency. Mock-Augustinian as well as mock-Stoic figure that she is, she can readily announce: “Eche man hathe of hym self the gouernaunce” (89). She makes that announcement near the end of “The wordes of Fortune to the people” and adds nothing to it. But More’s speaker, in the two subsequent poems, develops the Stoic rather than the Augustinian implications of her assertion. He does not contradict what Fortune says. He does modify it, emphasizing how miserably limited and impaired human nature is in its frailty, impercipience, instinctive greed, and unreason (despite its possessing reason). For example, he complains in “To them that tristith in ffortune,” with reference to the obviousness of Fortune’s instability: Yet ffor all that we brytill men ar ffayn, (So wrechid is owr nature and so blynde) As sone as fortune list to lawgh agayn, With fayre countenaunce and deceytffull mynde, To crowche and knele and gape after the wynde, Not on or twayn but thowsandes on a rowt, Lyke suarmyng bees cum flateryng her abowt. Than as a bayte she bryngith forth her ware, Syluer, gold, rich perle, and precyous stone: On which the mased peple gase and stare, And gape therfore, as dogges for the bone.

(110–20)

The speaker’s complaint harmonizes with Augustine’s portrayal of humanity in terms of concupiscentia, cupiditas, libido; it

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agrees, too, with Boethius’s imaging people in terms of saeva rapacitas and cupido. However, what he proceeds to say agrees with Boethius, insofar as Boethius follows Stoic convention, rather than with Boethius when following Augustine or with Augustine himself. Neither in “To them that tristith in ffortune” nor in “To them that seketh ffortune” does More’s speaker urge or mention liberation from weakness, from the force of desire, from consequent impairment of the will (and therefore from Fortune’s blandishments) through grace won by prayer. Augustine both advocates and celebrates such liberation, though not in the context of opposing Fortune; Boethius concurs with Augustine but, of course, he does so when reflecting on resistance to Fortune and escape from her.29 Instead, More’s speaker presents exemplary “old filosophers,” who variously committed themselves to poverty, as models of how to overcome human frailties and gain freedom from Fortune (“To them that tristith in ffortune” [192; see 187–221]). He focuses chiefly on “Byas.” A whole stanza is devoted to commemoration of the philosopher used by Cicero in Paradoxa Stoicorum as a version of the Stoic sage: as an example of someone who, transcending human acquisitiveness, wisely preferred the possession of virtue to the possession of worldly goods.30 More’s speaker offers, in other words, a Stoic perspective on personal agency congruent with Boethius’s ideal of the truly wise man who rises above desire, not with Boethius’s Augustinian view of free will as possessed by those other than Stoic sages. (This perspective is likewise in agreement with Boethius’s praise of frugality and his argument that to be human is to possess mental riches but never, in fact, material and transient wealth or resources.31) The model of the Stoic wise man is, the speaker seems to suggest, there for all to see and to imitate (“To them that tristith in ffortune” [222–56]). This privileging of the Stoic over the Augustinian makes sense when viewed in light of the two factors mentioned earlier: the speaker’s characterization of Fortune as a hybrid mingling the parodically Augustinian with the mock-Stoic, the nature of his supposed audience. He addresses those who trust (“tristith”) in

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Fortune. Therefore, as “The wordes of Fortune to the people” indicates, he addresses those who have already chosen, not necessarily understanding in full what they have done, to establish chance as the ruling principle of their lives: as a virtually divine principle to which they attribute those qualities assigned by Augustine to God. Consequently, they have chosen to live, as it were, outside grace and under the “ffauour” of Fortune. Living under that “ffauour” which is her grace, they cannot seek help against her or freedom from her by that grace’s aid, so the course available to them is secular — liberty gained by emulation of the Stoic ideal manifested in Byas. Then, by implication at least, wisdom opens the way for them back to the domain of divine grace (for which they now have no desire). Having abandoned their parodically Augustinian god, they may return indirectly to the original. More’s strategy is, when his speaker considers personal agency in specific circumstances, to put the Stoic before the Augustinian but not to set them in opposition. He uses the same strategy when his speaker ends “To them that tristith in ffortune,” though he does not use it in exactly the same way. At the end of that poem, More’s speaker counsels moderation to his notional audience should its members be unwilling to abandon trust in Fortune and to espouse poverty: But and thou wilt nedes medill with her tresur, Trust not therin, and spend it lyberally. Bere the not prowde, nor tak not owt of mesur. Byld not thyn hows high vp in the skye. Non ffallith ferre, but he that clymeth hye, Remembre nature sent the hether bare, The gifts of fortune cownt them borrowed ware.

(257–63)

His Stoic advice is spoken in terms familiar from Horace and Boethius. Lines 259–61, for example, have an affinity with Odes 2.10.1–12 and with The Consolation, 2.met.4; line 262 seems clearly to echo Boethius’s work at 2.pros.2.9–10.32 Again, those who have chosen to live outside the domain of divine grace — and choose so to remain — are offered secular aid. More’s speaker

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seems to direct his audience toward aequus animus insofar as that may be available to them. In other words, he accommodates Stoicism to them: if they cannot aim at the Stoic ideal, then a Stoic way of dealing with experience is nevertheless still possible. Those living in effect by trust in a parodically Augustinian deity are counseled to observe the mean; it is implicit that, were they living by trust in her original, the comparable advice would be uti non frui (as can be seen in A Dialogue of Comfort, 3.7 and 3.12). That phrase suggests what the most substantial and ambitious of More’s Fortune verses are preeminently concerned with, namely, the unrelenting acquisitiveness that prompts or impels people to commit their lives to chance as if indeed to a god. In order to cope with Fortune, More indicates (as did Boethius before him), one must initially try to understand and to control desire.33 The representations of chance and of desire by More’s speaker — also, his accounts of how to deal with those phenomena — have been identified above as predominantly Stoic and Augustinian. Now the question to be considered is, given Bouwsma’s documentation of those discourses as polarities in humanist thought throughout the Renaissance, what are the relations between them as used in More’s poems? The short answer is: complementary rather than merely oppositional. Their complementarity is possible in part because More can allow Stoicism and Augustinianism to coexist separately in “To them that tristith in ffortune” and in “To them that seketh ffortune” — and so without direct confrontation. He has Fortune define herself, in “The wordes of Fortune to the people,” with reference to either discourse. Stoic elements of characterization are added in the two subsequent poems. In those poems, however, people who are imagined as virtually having made chance their god are offered the therapy of Stoic counsel; Augustinianism expresses a worldview alien to them—thus, it is obliquely evoked in the first of the poems but is merely penumbral to the second. Contradictions between Stoicism and Augustinianism are therefore not so much suppressed as made to appear irrelevant. More would write elsewhere

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on Fortune in terms neither predominantly Stoic nor Augustinian. As has been mentioned above, he would later write on personal agency in thoroughly Augustinian terms. Yet in the longest of his Fortune verses, when focusing on a concern common to both, he brought the discourses together for a moment of productive interplay or juxtaposition. His doing so affirms Bouwsma’s emphasis on the importance of Stoicism and Augustinianism to humanist thought while suggesting that they need not conflict in humanist texts.

Fortune and Utopia To have read the Fortune verses is more thoroughly to understand Fortune’s absence from Utopia: to understand more thoroughly why, in the Utopians’ homeland, there are fortuna, sors, and occasio for example, but not Fortuna, Sors, and Occasio.34 One can appreciate More’s thinking on Fortune as presented in his most famous analysis of the common weal. Fortune’s absence from Utopia is interesting both in itself and because of Utopia’s alleged preeminence among states. When the citizens attend church, they thank God “for the divine favour which [has] placed [them] in the happiest of commonwealths” (“quod deo propitio in eam rempublicam inciderit quae sit felicissima”).35 They thank God that they live in what their “poet laureate” Anemolius, added anonymously in the parerga to the population of the island, identifies as the exceptionally “good place” (19). Hythloday agrees, of course, asserting that “there is not a more excellent people or a happier commonwealth (“feliciorem . . . rempublicam”) anywhere in the whole world” (179/178). And at one point a marginal comment also expresses enthusiastic agreement, declaring, “O sacred society [O sanctam rempublicam], worthy of imitation, even by Christians!” (145/144). In what is variously claimed to be the best of places, Fortune has no place. There is almost literally no room for her in any of her guises or for her subordinate divinities — and it does not

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follow that the notionally best of places, simply because of its supposedly being so, should lack adequate space. The prime reason for Fortune’s absence is simply that Utopus banned belief “that the universe is ruled by blind chance, not divine providence” (“mundum temere ferri, sublata providentia, putet” [225/224]).36 So, when in church, the Utopians do thank God for his “divine favour” — and not Fortune for hers — “which [has] placed [them] in the happiest of commonwealths.” The second and no less substantial reason is that, given the religious principles and ethics and the social structures and practices of Utopia, little motivation or opportunity (occasio, one might say) exists for a citizen to commit his or her life to the goddess, whether she were to be illicitly recognized as one or to be accepted de facto. A visitor to Utopia would look in vain for signs of a cult of Fortune or for someone who would praise her if not worship her. A visitor would likewise seek in vain, I think, for evidence of anxiety lest citizens should be tempted to make chance, one way or another, into a divinity ruling their lives. As is self-evident, even the highly structured yet strategically flexible Utopian state could not hope to exclude unintended consequences or accidents — fortuna, sors, and so on. In fact, confronting their inevitability, it tries to minimize or manage their effects on the community as a whole and on individual citizens. Its social-welfare policies attest to and facilitate the attempt, for instance, its policy on health care (139–41); the attempt is facilitated, at a deeper level, by the “religious principles” (161) underpinning such policies and guiding personal behavior. Derived from those principles are conventional beliefs of this kind: “So long as [‘those public laws which control the distribution of vital goods, such as are the very substance of pleasure’] are observed, to pursue your own interests is prudent; to pursue the public interest as well is pious; but to pursue your own pleasure by depriving others of theirs is unjust” (165).37 Utopians, as a community and as individuals, can no more be inoculated against mishap than can anyone else, but they are better prepared for dealing with it than most. While they are forbidden to believe

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in a chance-ruled universe, at the same time they have little cause to perceive chance as a divinity — to see it as a principle that rules their lives with what is effectively a divine authority. A glance at the parerga helps to clarify how the Fortune verses illuminate the Utopians’ lack of motivation to deify chance. Guillaume Budé, in his going-along-with-the-game letter to Thomas Lupset, linked Utopia with chance when he wrote, “The island of Utopia, however, which I hear is also called Udepotia, is said (if the story is to be believed) to have imbibed, by marvellous good fortune [“mirifica . . . sorte”], both in its public and its private life, truly Christian customs and authentic wisdom, and to have kept them inviolate even to this day” (13/12). His remark evokes the punning name of More’s island, in which eutopia means the “‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ place.”38 Yet if Utopia is a Fortunate Isle its good fortune is self-made rather than the result of luck. Fortune has not plotted its history, irrespective of the Utopians’ official incapacity to think that she has; chance has had little to do with its happiness. In part Budé acknowledged as much when he continued, with reference to his last-quoted observation: It has done so by holding tenaciously to three divine institutions: equality of all good and evil things among the citizens (or, if you prefer, full and complete citizenship for all); a fixed and unwavering dedication to peace and tranquillity; and utter contempt for gold and silver. These three principles are the dragnets (so to speak) which sweep up all swindles, impostures, tricks, wiles and underhanded deceptions. Would that the gods, by their divine power, could cause these three pillars of Utopian policy to be fixed by the bolts of strong and settled conviction in the minds of all mortals. You would promptly witness the withering away of pride, greed, idiot competition and almost all the other deadly weapons of our hellish adversary. (13–15)39

From a reader’s point of view, Raphael’s narrative then adds to what Budé makes explicit in part, for Raphael’s story elaborates on what Budé emphasizes chiefly through his reference to the Utopians’ nullifying of greed. Raphael relates that Utopus has

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outlawed the belief that chance and not divine providence governs the universe. One immediate result of the general’s having done so was that he thereby sanctified his role as culture hero: not chance but providence had made him at once a conqueror and founding father. A less direct result is no less important. His outlawing belief in chance as ruler of the universe complemented his initiating the Utopian state’s concerted attempt to erase greed and to stifle pride in the individual citizen.40 The most substantial of the Fortune verses are ultimately concerned with greed, with the unrelenting acquisitiveness — itself linked to the impulse to pleasure — that prompts or impels people to commit their lives to chance as if indeed to a god. In those poems, I argued above, More implies that greed effects what is virtually the deification of chance. An obvious corollary to More’s suggestion is that greed’s erasure or at least its being severely constrained would deprive Fortune of her godhead. Utopus formally disestablished her divinity. To read the Fortune verses is to recognize that, when he initiated the state’s attempt to eradicate greed, he complemented his interdiction by also minimizing his people’s motivation to deify chance. The scope and priorities of Utopus’s intent when he began Utopia’s long campaign against greed cannot be perfectly identified. One consequence was that his subjects, from More’s perspective, had little cause to attribute a godlike authority to chance. Fortune was banished from Utopia by decree; Utopia’s social policies and practices subsequently ensured that she would be very unlikely to return. However, although there is an illuminating connection between More’s Fortune verses and his Utopia, in the latter work More takes his analysis of why folk deify chance a step beyond what is presented in the former. Where does greed itself come from? The marginal comment “Rapacitas unde” (136) highlights this observation by Raphael in book 2: “Fear of want, no doubt, makes every living creature greedy and rapacious, and man, besides, develops these qualities out of sheer pride [‘sola . . . superbia’], which glories in getting ahead of others by a superfluous display of possessions”

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[137–39]).41 What was glancingly indicated in the Fortune verses has there been spelled out. Further, just as greed is linked with pleasure in the Fortune verses, so in Utopia are pride and false pleasure (167–69), but the link between the last two is more explicitly and heavily emphasized than the link between the first two. Now, years beyond his writing of the Fortune verses, More identifies human vanity and the impulse to pleasure as turning chance into a divinity. The Utopian campaigns against greed — a manifestation of pride — and directly against pride are therefore both also campaigns against Fortune. To have examined how the Utopians are portrayed as dealing with greed, pride, and therefore with Fortune invites some consideration of how Europeans are represented as dealing or failing to deal with them. Education forms no small part of the Utopian strategy for opposing greed and pride. Raphael says, of Utopians’ wonderment at and disdain for acquisitiveness and vanity, “These and the like attitudes the Utopians have picked up partly from their upbringing, since the institutions of their commonwealth are completely opposed to such folly, partly from instruction and good books” (155). Raphael often comments on Europeans’ ingrained rapacity or on their habitual love of ostentation, that is (directly or otherwise), on their “upbringing.” All the same, he never denies that European education — “instruction and good books” — to an extent sets itself against those vices. He has no need to do so. According to him, Europeans are rather less educable than the Utopians: “This [Utopian] readiness to learn is, I think, the really important reason for their being better governed and living more happily than we do, though we are not inferior to them in brains or resources” (107). More had already indicated in his “Pageant Verses” that humankind resists education. The Utopians, since conveniently they are New Worlders, can be imagined as differing in that regard from their European fellows. On the other hand, just after Raphael has delivered his observation on the comparative ineducability of Europeans, the

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fictional More says, “Then let me implore you, my dear Raphael, [to] describe that island [Utopia] to us. Don’t try to be brief, but explain in order their fields, rivers, towns, people, manners, institutions, laws — everything, in short, that you think we would like to know. And you can assume we want to know everything we don’t know yet” (Utopia, 107). As in the “Pageant Verses,” so again in Utopia. Not all (European) people are unwilling to learn and resistant to gaining useful knowledge. Given nonetheless that Europeans are reluctantly educable, how in Utopia are they pictured as dealing with Fortune? Soon after Raphael’s first-quoted words above, he alludes to the rich as potential victims of Fortune — there he offers his European perspective on experience, not that of the Utopians — and in the process suggests metonymically that often Europeans cannot or will not deal successfully with her. By and large, he indicates, they cannot or will not cope with Fortune.42 When, however, in book 1 Raphael talks about Cardinal Morton, he describes Morton in this way: He was a man, my dear Peter (for More already knows what I’m going to say), as much respected for his wisdom and virtue (prudentia ac virtute) as for his authority. ........ He had been taken straight from school to court when scarcely more than a boy, had devoted all his life to important business, and had been whirled about by violent changes of fortune (ac variis fortunae aestibus assidue iactatus) so that in the midst of great dangers he had learned practical wisdom (prudentiam rerum), which is not soon lost when so purchased. (55/54)

As Raphael tells it, extremes of chance have taught Morton wisdom; further, he has united wisdom with virtue and, by implication, with piety. He seems to be presented as someone whom prudentia and virtus (and pietas) have equipped to handle chance. He stands out among Europeans as known to and described by Raphael. But of course he would be a less unusual figure among the Utopians, for among them, as Raphael thereafter relates, the

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mingling of practical wisdom with virtue and piety is a more familiar phenomenon (Utopia, 163–67). The reader comes to perceive that, in important respects, Morton resembles the Utopians rather than the great majority of his fellow Europeans.

THREE

Being a Woman, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Whose Common Weal? When considering pleasure and chance as aspects of human experience, More sometimes gendered them female; that is to say, at times he represented them by drawing from the mythographies of Venus and Fortune. But what did he suggest that actual women, as distinct from goddesses, were or should be or might become? How did he associate women who were not goddesses with issues of pleasure? Further, what did he suggest that women might contribute to the common weal? A useful way to start answering such questions is to look at what More seems to have thought (at least, in his literary texts) about educating women: in particular, women who were entering adult life — entering into what was agreed to be the major female role — by marrying for the first time and newly taking upon themselves the management of a household. In one of his most ambitious Latin poems, as nowhere else, More wrote elaborately, concisely, and problematically on the education of women who were in just those circumstances. My discussion will therefore begin To Candidus: How to Choose a Wife, a Poem in Iambic Dimeter Brachycatalectic (Versvs iambici dimetri brachycatalectici ad Candidvm, qvalis vxor deligenda). To discuss it necessarily involves examining More’s other Latin 63

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poems on women. I am mainly concerned here, however, with affinities between To Candidus and notions about female education that were or were to become part of the already long, and mostly male, debate about the nature of womankind.1 A study of women as figured in Utopia and in Historia Richardi Tertii will follow, thus bringing together representations of femaleness that are shaped within texts as different in genre as they are in setting.

To Candidus Because the primary concern in this part of my discussion is to clarify the relationship between More’s To Candidus and humanist notions on female education, especially those put forward about young brides by two of More’s humanist friends, I want to revisit the early modern debate on educating women, an important element of the wider debate about femaleness itself. One medieval and thence early modern idea on female education was that, in addition to what their mothers taught them, most women needed merely to receive religious and ethical instruction from their husbands, who would likewise instruct them in how to govern a household.2 After all, it was often pointed out, the household was women’s natural domain. Therefore, since they would not normally engage with the world at large as men would — since they would not normally be educators or writers or politicians, for example — women did not usually need the broad education appropriate to men.3 Assertion to the contrary was variously argued, and differences between or among those contrary assertions did not always depend on whether an author was male or female. In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a response to Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, Christine de Pizan attempted to construct at once a refuge and a resource for women, whom she recognized as having been misrepresented to themselves no less than to men throughout generations of misogynic male fictions, ranging from satire

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to epic, from fable to history.4 Her City of Ladies, insofar as it is a revisionist history of women, forms a textual space that offers a refuge as well as a resource. She advocates that women aim at “cultivat[ing] virtue” and thereby gaining inclusion in the true, illustrious record of female achievement: membership of a textual community within which they will see themselves reflected and which is at one with the City of God.5 Inseparable from their seeking to do so, she emphasizes, will be their receiving education (City of Ladies, 1.37.1–1.43.1, 2.36).6 Despite that emphasis — and despite her emphasizing that women are men’s intellectual equals or, not infrequently, superiors — Christine nevertheless defends the concept that the domestic sphere and not the public is in general “appropriate” to women (1.11.1; cf. 1.43.2). Crucial to her case is her explanation for the absence of women lawyers or judges. Carefully and with some reluctance opposing the intellectual talents possessed by women to the physical limitations imposed by their biology, she proposes that the latter naturally constrains the former and so justifies women’s conventionally accepted set of roles in society (1.11.1). Another notable female proponent of women’s education, Anna Maria van Schurman, not only affirms the household to be women’s proper domain but also tempers her praise of women’s intellectual capacities with denigration of them. Writing two centuries after Christine de Pizan, van Schurman asserts that women have the same intellectual capacities as men, and “The whole circle of liberal arts, as it is called, is entirely fitting to a Christian woman.”7 Yet she asserts, too, that women rather than men possess “weakness or inconstancy of intellect or temperament” and that the “more excellent” men exceed women in intellectual ability. In identifying the household as women’s proper domain, van Schurman relies on the authority of (Pauline) Scripture, not on biology as did de Pizan.8 My point here is not that two learned, vigorous, female advocates of women’s education seem to have been driven, for whatever reason, to affirm women’s confinement to the domestic sphere. Nor do I wish to dwell on the fact that

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whereas Gisbertus Voetius agrees with van Schurman’s arguments about women’s education, shortcomings, and domestic role, the more distinguished Cornelius Agrippa had earlier written otherwise.9 I should like to focus instead on how Erasmus, Vives, and More relate female education to female domestic confinement, because interaction between the two is intriguingly rendered in terms of myth: whether unwittingly or deliberately, turned into a tale of moralized transformation. Humanist advocates of women’s education engaged with, rather than ignored, the conventional idea that to be a woman was all but invariably to become mulier economica — confined to the domestic as household manager. Although the results of their doing so were divergent, Desiderius Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and More tended to affirm the idea. Yet what seems of greater interest than mere affirmation is when they give mythic expression to their accounts of female education and, implicitly, to their affirmations of female domestic confinement: when, with whatever degrees of knowingness and emphasis, they voice both in terms of a particular myth and thereby impose mythic identities on at once the provider and the receiver of education. When Erasmus wrote on the education of young women newly taking on the role of mulier economica — and it is clear that he viewed female education as confirming their commitment to that role — he evoked the myth of Pygmalion. Indirectly he identified the husband as a type of Pygmalion, the bride with the marble about to be given pleasing form. Erasmus notably made those identifications in his colloquy, Marriage (Coniugium), published in 1523. Then he iterated them in his formal treatise on the subject of marriage, The Institution of Christian Matrimony (Institutio Christiani matrimonii), published in 1526 but begun around 1524.10 The latter work, since it deals with women’s major social role, can reasonably be seen as at once a discourse on marriage and a contribution to the current debate about the nature of femaleness. The two Erasmian texts refigure the process of female transformation as moral education, yet of course not

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solely as that. Further, they allude to the process in very similar words — in fact, through language akin not to that of Ovid in his Metamorphoses but rather to that of Boccaccio in his Genealogie deorum gentilium libri. In addition, when Marriage alludes to the Pygmalion myth, it simultaneously gestures toward the attempts by More to educate his first wife, Joan Colt. Vives, when writing of female education and confinement, accorded with Erasmus, from whom he nevertheless differed as well. In his The Education of a Christian Woman (De institutione feminae Christianae, completed in 1523 and published in 1524), he, like Erasmus, linked female education with private, male happiness. And he started from an assumption that, as he voiced it, implies that the education of a prospective bride is a Pygmalion-like transformation.11 At one specific and important point, his language is identical to Erasmus’s and to Boccaccio’s. If, however, like Erasmus, he strongly connected women’s education with their domestic confinement, his account of their containment significantly differs from that of Erasmus. It seems to incorporate Augustine’s concept of quies into a vision of the multifaceted, almost unrelenting imprisonment of the married woman. More’s To Candidus, where he presented what is effectively his version of the Pygmalion myth, was written between 1500 and 1518 (maybe between 1515 and 1518) — before the letter, but much in the spirit of his friends (CW 3.2:10). Certainly Erasmus and almost certainly Vives would have read the poem; similarity of thought — affinity of mind — is however at issue here rather than any question of indebtedness, as one would want to suggest when relating the texts by Erasmus to Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman. In any event, More’s poem on choosing a wife seems to present, although clearly not by design, a recreation of the Pygmalion myth specific beyond the evocations of it by Erasmus. Connections between the myths of Pygmalion and of Narcissus consequently become apparent in To Candidus, whereas they remain latent in the writings by More’s friend.12

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Another consequence is that the association between female education and women’s domestic confinement was confirmed by More with an emphasis distinct from that by either Erasmus or Vives. This emphasis suggests that the allegedly ideal woman’s contribution to the common weal will in most cases be of very private significance — the female humanist as perfect mulier economica. His poem therefore harmonizes with and differs from those of his Latin poems that are openly misogynic. Discussing the texts in the authorial sequence above allows the writings by More’s colleagues to be viewed initially in relation to the evolving humanist debate about femaleness — and especially about female education — as well as in relation to one another. More’s poem (and some of his other poems) can thus be viewed in relation to that humanist debate and in connection with Erasmus’s colloquy, his treatise, and with the treatise by Vives. The evocation of the Pygmalion myth in Erasmus’s Marriage is, for my purpose here, paradigmatic. In the exchange between Eulalia and Xantippe, the former counsels her companion that managing a household may well involve transforming one’s husband. Yet his metamorphosis, she says, will be achieved by one’s self-transformation. Speaking from personal experience, she tells of having adapted herself to her husband and having “tak[en] care to avoid any unpleasantness,” notably in her “management of household affairs, the special province of wives.”13 Thus, Eulalia explains, in changing herself she strategically exercised a wifely submissiveness concordant with natural and divine law. “A woman’s highest praise,” she observes to Xantippe, “is to be obedient to her husband. It’s the order of nature, the will of God, that woman be entirely dependent on man” (319). To transform a husband in such a way is for a wife to be transformed simultaneously into a mirror of her husband, into the type of a benevolent Venus Mechanitis (one of chaste, married love) and into a sanctified type of Circe.14 However, while elaborating on the process of unevenly mutual, marital change, Eulalia cites an example of wifely transformation

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that evokes another myth and further issues. Recounting a story illustrative of “husbands who improved their wives by courtesy,” she says, I’m well acquainted with a certain nobleman, a learned and remarkably clever man. He married a girl of seventeen who had been reared wholly in her parents’ country home (since nobles generally like to live in the country, for the sake of hunting and hawking). Her lack of sophistication recommended her, because he would fashion her to his tastes the more readily. He undertook to teach her literature and music and gradually to accustom her to repeating what she had heard in a sermon, and by other devices to train her in what would be of later use. (314)15

Eulalia’s mention of training is possibly an allusion to Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, where the education of a wife by her husband is compared to the training of a horse. Eulalia elsewhere likens the transforming of a husband by a wife to the training of various animals including “horses,” so Erasmus applied the analogy to both marital partners (Marriage, 312).16 Yet before that, and of greater importance, is what seems an allusion simultaneously to Thomas More and to the myth of Pygmalion. Because of the circumstances described, an apparent pun on More’s name (as will be seen presently), and for other reasons, the exemplum is usually accepted as referring to More and to his first wife, Joan Colt.17 In the most pertinent moment of the anecdote, Erasmus’s Latin is, “Rudem volebat ille [the “certain nobleman”], quo facilius illam ad suos mores fingeret” (Opera, vol. 1, col. 704). As far as putative linking of the nobleman and his bride with More and Colt is concerned, there does seem a likelihood that, given its context, mores puns on “More,” as Craig R. Thompson has suggested. Both Erasmus and More himself, after all, liked to pun on More’s surname, as the former’s prefatory letter to his Praise of Folly and the latter’s Tower correspondence attest. The apparent pun is part of a trope: an audacia of life transformed, of an impressionable life’s sculptural reshaping through education — education with a moral

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inflection. The metamorphosis is, too, a process whereby the female is shaped according not merely to the husband’s “tastes” but, in fact, according to his way of viewing the world, his principles, his way of behaving, all of which mores suggests. Eulalia’s exemplum seems to be, then, the story of More as a type of Pygmalion. Certainly, it is by implication the story — the approvingly told story — of a man’s choice to become another Pygmalion: the man in question selects as his wife a girl who is, from his perspective, virtually unformed (rudem) material and therefore able to be shaped by him into a form expressing his desire, which is to say, educated by him into the likeness of his ideal mulier economica. What I take to be Erasmus’s deliberate allusion to the Pygmalion myth is interesting not simply in its own right, because it weaves the problematic classical narrative (along, inescapably, with its mythographic associations) into the early modern debate about female education, but also because it raises interesting issues.18 It is clear in Eulalia’s narrative that the purpose of the young bride’s reshaping by education is her intellectual and moral development for the sake, first, of her husband’s happiness and thence of her own. In other words, when he becomes happy, so ultimately does she. But it is not subsequently indicated that her transformation has made her happier than she originally was. She is indicated to be happy because, beyond all else, she has been fortunate to have found so kindly, forbearing, and generous a husband (Marriage, 315). He is happy, Eulalia’s anecdote implies, since he comes to possess a wife embodying his intellectual preferences and priorities: Erasmus’s version of the Pygmalion myth thus draws attention to links between it and the myth of Narcissus. Finally here, the bride’s education has everything to do with her role as mulier economica and so with her life at home. It is designed to make her husband’s and thereafter her domestic experience enjoyable — it has nothing to do with life outside the walls of their house. Virtually an identical account of the education and confinement of young brides occurs in Erasmus’s The Institution of Christian Matrimony. There he writes,

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It is up to the individual to decide whether it is more advisable to marry an untutored virgin or a widow with experience. I know that some people concur with what appears to be the opinion of Xenophon’s Ischomachus that it is better to marry an inexperienced girl who brings the bridegroom nothing from her parents’ home except chastity, modesty, and a willingness to be guided in all things. Differences of temperament mean that there can be no single educational method and that the same education will not suit everyone; it is not uncommon to see two entirely virtuous individuals who would be completely unsuited to lifelong companionship. Thus a man who chooses a well-favoured but untutored bride will try, if he is a good craftsman, to fashion himself a wife to suit his own temper, and will succeed, with God’s aid, so long as his own character reflects the moral code. Conversely, a man who wants to escape the drudgery of educating her, which is a long and not always successful job, may prefer a widow who is already broken in and formed. (Institution, 312–13)

Affinities between what might be called the Morean episode in Marriage and the passage quoted above are not hard to see. In the episode from the colloquy, Erasmus alluded to (or, at the least, wrote in accordance with) Xenophon’s metaphor of horse taming; in the passage quoted from the treatise, he cites Xenophon early and, at its end, seems distinctly to echo his horse-taming trope.19 Further, he again presents a version of the Pygmalion myth, perhaps more directly than he did in his colloquy, as his Latin suggests: “Proinde qui felicem quidem naturam, sed rudem elegit, si bonus artifex est, fingit ad suos mores conjugem” (Opera, vol. 5, col. 659).20 Degrees of directness aside, resemblances between the evocation of Pygmalion in Marriage and its counterpart in the treatise are obvious. It would not be difficult to look for similarities between Erasmus’s implicitly mythical writing and someone else’s direct dealings with the Pygmalion narrative. As I have already suggested, the search would take one beyond Ovid to Boccaccio. In Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, 2.49, where the Pygmalion narrative is recounted, then interpreted, Boccaccio’s

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concern was evidently female innocence rather than female education. Describing Pygmalion himself as “strongly talented” and as a sculptor with “ingenious hands,” he then interprets the making of the statue using these words, which are virtually those used subsequently by Erasmus: “Quam cum suis aptam fecisset moribus.21 The affinity between Boccaccio’s language and that of Erasmus, the writers’ shared idea that the male marital partner shapes his female companion according to his “tastes” and the like, leave little doubt that Erasmus did indeed image as a type of Pygmalion the husband who educates his bride. Since Erasmus’s evocation of the Pygmalion myth in his treatise closely recalls its predecessor in Marriage both versions are therefore connected to the version of the myth in Boccacio’s text. Yet Erasmus’s two versions are linked to each other and to Boccaccio’s moralized narrative by more than linguistic affinity and the commonality of an emphasized idea. As in the colloquy, so in the treatise and in Genealogie: transformation of the female is seen from the perspective of — is associated primarily with — male self-gratification. Boccaccio’s text does not, in that respect, matter much to my argument; more important is the fact that, through evocation of the Pygmalion myth in the Erasmian texts, female education, male self-gratification, and female confinement are brought together. The young bride is to be educated by her husband for chiefly his own benefit: she is to be shaped as far as possible into an embodiment of his preferences and priorities for his domestic pleasure. She may find her transformation personally advantageous (in one way or another), but his benefit will precede, will take precedence over, hers. It is worth recalling, should there be any hesitancy about the extent to which Erasmus seems to have believed in a wife’s domestic confinement, how he chose to interpret the statue that “the famous sculptor Phidias made for the people of Elis . . . of Venus standing on a tortoise” (Institution, 382). According to Erasmus, the statue’s symbolic meaning was: “A wife should move slowly through the house, carrying the house with her, as it were. If she looks out, it should

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be no farther than the yard, the playground, or the garden next to the house; these are the boundaries of the housewife’s realm” (382). Erasmus’s mythopoeic dealings in Marriage and in The Institution with the topic of female education — more specifically, with the topic of educating a woman about to manage a household — at times agree but at others strongly disagree with how the writers discussed before him seem to have considered the education of women, whether married or in general. For example, de Pizan, van Schurman, and Voetius in their respective texts accept the idea that domestic confinement is appropriate to women, though the idea is not equally accepted. Yet they also suggest that education benefits women because they, no less than men, are able to receive and to benefit from education. Erasmus associates both the education of a young bride and her domestic confinement primarily with the husband’s gratification — with his rather than his wife’s advantage. Erasmus was writing about female education in the context of marriage; nevertheless, in his colloquy and in his treatise he did not identify the education of women as good for them apart from its capacity to keep them virtuously and pleasantly occupied within the domestic sphere.22 Agrippa’s declamation indicates, by way of contrast with the Erasmian texts as well as with those by the other writers discussed above, that female education should be independent of matrimonial bonds or constraint within the household. Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman presents, however, a claustrophobic counterpart to Erasmus’s thoughts on the education and confinement of women. There, by way of initially justifying female education, Vives in effect proposes that women should be educated because it is essential to a husband’s well-being that his wife has received education (within certain limits and in morality above all else), an idea concordant with Erasmus’s views on female education in Marriage and The Institution. “For what is so necessary as the spiritual formation of those who are our inseparable companions in every condition of life?” Vives asks at

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almost the very start of the preface to his treatise, in fact directly after his opening address to Catherine of Aragon (Education, 45). His emphasis on a potential or actual wife’s being fashioned in accordance with a husband’s priorities resonates, moreover, with Erasmus’s evocation of the Pygmalion myth. Vives’s Latin text uses the same word for sculptural shaping (fingere, but in its passive form) that Erasmus and Boccaccio use. When revealing what is effectively his initial assumption, Vives uses a mythically resonant word that implies the molding, the sculpting of women by men and for male benefit. Women cannot be allowed, as Vives soon stresses, to shape themselves. They must be transformed, subjected to a generic change — a moral transformation — that is subsequently indicated as having individuating nuances. Moving adroitly if fairly predictably from the domestic to the civic, Vives then asserts, “With good reason Aristotle says that those states that do not provide for the proper education of women deprive themselves of a great part of their prosperity” (Education, 45). Nonetheless, his concern actually resides with the domestic and not the civic since, as he makes plain, a woman’s domain is usually the household (126). To be exact, it lies with a husband’s possession of a wife whom education has made not merely more agreeable but irreproachably chaste. As Vives writes, “A woman’s only care is chastity; therefore when this has been thoroughly elucidated, she may be considered to have received sufficient instruction” (46). Thus, “We do not wish the young girl to be as learned as she is chaste and virtuous” (54). Finally, “A woman has no need of [eloquence]; she needs rectitude and wisdom. . . . In the education of a woman the principal and, I might almost say, the only concern should be the preservation of chastity” (71). The problem is, according to Vives, that women are mentally inconstant and prone to vice, “more inclined to pleasure [than are men] by . . . natural disposition” (113, 55) — and girls are restrained from wrongdoing primarily through fear (58). Vives’s solution to the problem is to propose female education as a component of domestic surveillance and incarceration. “A

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woman should live in seclusion and not be known to many,” he writes, adding that “it is a sign of imperfect chastity and of uncertain reputation [for a woman] to be known by a great number of people” (Education, 126). Pursuing the topic by question and reply, he proceeds, Should [a good woman] never set foot outside her own house? Evidently that would be a great crime. Must she always hide herself at home, which certain vain women, anxious to see or be seen, interpret to mean in prison for a life sentence? She should go out at times, if circumstances demand it or a parent orders it. But before she steps over the threshold, let her prepare her mind as if she were entering a combat. (126)

Vives implies clearly that a woman’s confinement to the home is not imprisonment — only a wrong-minded woman could think so. A diverse domestic surveillance and virtual incarceration are, however, what he proposes. Writing of pubescent girls and then of young women more generally, Vives asserts not just that they be kept mostly at home but that they also be kept under watch, in particular by their mothers. Under direction by their husbands, married women will make their homes their worlds (see Education, 87, 110, 126). The bodies of young women and (or) wives can thus be watched and restrained — but what of their minds? Vives’s way of dealing with the mental lives of women was to suggest that a woman’s mind be formed by reading assigned to her, not chosen by her, and that therefore the appropriate education of women effect their interior surveillance. In short, a female mind morally shaped by allocated reading of Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and the church fathers (as well as Scripture), will be a directed and restrained female mind. Vives claims, “The woman who has learned to make [morally sound judgments] either through instinctive virtue, innate intelligence, or through her reading will never bring herself to commit any vile act, for her mind will have been strengthened and imbued with holy counsels.” Moreover, “If we wished to review past ages, we would not find any learned woman who was unchaste” (71, 77–78, 84–85, 65). Therefore,

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although woman “is a weak creature and of uncertain judgment and is easily deceived” (72), she can be watched, educated, and restrained — overseen and almost literally imprisoned — into a life of chastity. Vives posits, along with confinement, what is more or less a hierarchy of individuated surveillance enacted chiefly by God, the educated conscience, a husband, and a mother (or other responsible woman). The ultimate result will be, Vives imagines, that from such enclosure a woman will gain a harmonious and serene life. In his words, her life will be one of “Christian tranquillity,” specifically, a “quietem Christianam”: quies within self and home in anticipation of quies throughout eternity.23 Vives’s rigorously restrained, ideal mulier economica notionally becomes the embodiment of an Augustinian happiness. Vives’s affinity with Erasmus on the subject of female education and confinement indicates how close on that topic he is in some respects to his friend. It also indicates how far both differ — again, in some respects — from those writers on female education who were considered above. It also shows how Vives and Erasmus resemble the Thomas More who authored To Candidus and a number of associated Latin poems. Among the latter, the speaker in “In amicam foedifragam iocosvm, versvm e cantione Anglica” (“A Jesting Poem to a Faithless Mistress, Translated from an English Song”), ironically recounts a supposed dream of the Apocalypse in order to stress that the inconstancy of women is part of the natural order. That More’s poem restates the topos of women’s innate inconstancy puts his speaker in agreement with a multitude of writers from Aristotle through Vives and van Schurman, but in disagreement with de Pizan as likewise with Agrippa. More’s “In virginem moribvs havd virgineis” (“On a Maid with Unmaidenly Habits”), images an “unmaidenly” woman with such iterative contempt — yet evident fascination — that one is reminded of how Vives wrote in The Education of a Christian Woman about transgressive female sexuality.24 More’s other Latin poems mocking women (to whatever degree

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they do so) are in general no less simply misogynic, except for the poem To Candidus. There More’s speaker counsels his supposed addressee — whose name connotes uprightness and openness — with something of a deliberative formality. His address begins by putting forward a proposition amid admonition, exhortation, and brief narrative. Then follow a division, a confutation made part of an elaborate confirmation, and a paradoxical conclusion. That stylized advice urges Candidus to marry by imaging the woman most likely to become an ideal wife, in other words, the woman who can become a perfect mulier economica. She who can fulfill that ideal is defined against the woman who cannot. She who cannot, as is hardly a surprise, closely resembles the “maid with unmaidenly habits” portrayed in the epigram discussed a little earlier: “But let her modesty bring blushes to her cheeks; let her glance not be provocative. Let her be mild-mannered, not throwing her slender arms wantonly around men’s necks. Let her glances be restrained; let her have no roving eye.”25 Analogues to those lines in Erasmus or in Vives would be easy to find; of greater interest, however, are the affinities between their writings and More’s poem when his speaker moves on to the topic of the prospectively ideal bride’s education and life in the household. “Let her be either just finishing her education or ready to begin it immediately,” says More’s speaker (“Sit illa uel modo / Instructa literis, / Vel talis ut modo / Sit apta literis” [102–05]). His words faintly anticipate Erasmus’s remark, in The Institution, about one advantage in marrying a widow — namely, that she is already trained whereas a young woman about to marry will have to be put through a process of education by her husband. Stronger affinities between More and Erasmus can nevertheless be discerned here, for this question necessarily arises: if the prospective bride is on the verge of education, who will provide it and what will be made available? The answer to the initial part of the question would seem to be that, of course, the man deciding

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to marry such a woman would see thereafter to her education, conferring it himself by way of others or in conjunction with others. The first and third of those possibilities concur with More’s own practice in educating Joan Colt, as Erasmus attests, using the words “illam ad suos mores fingere.”26 Answering the subsequent part of the question, suggests further likenesses between More and Erasmus as well as between More and Vives. What will be made available to the chosen partner may be fairly described as a humanist education. More’s speaker says, Happy is the woman whose education permits her to derive from the best of ancient works the principles which confer a blessing on life. Armed with this learning, she would not yield to pride in prosperity, nor to grief in distress — even though misfortune strike her down. For this reason your lifetime companion will be ever agreeable, never a trouble or a burden. If she is well instructed herself, then some day she will teach your little grandsons, at an early age, to read. You will be glad to leave the company of men and to seek repose in the bosom of your accomplished wife, the while she attends to your comfort, and while under her dexterous touch the plucked strings resound. . . . Then you will be glad to spend days and nights in pleasant and intelligent conversation. . . . By her comments she would restrain you if ever vain success should exalt you and would comfort you if grievous sorrow should cast you down. When she speaks, it will be difficult to choose between her perfect power of expression and her thoughtful understanding of all kinds of affairs. (To Candidus, 106–56)27

More’s image of the female humanist as perfect mulier economica is not simple and neither are its relations with those images of the ideal household manager fashioned by Erasmus and by Vives. The words introducing that image, “Happy is the woman,” sound a counterpart to the beatus ille motif. Unlike Erasmus or Vives (akin to de Pizan, Agrippa, van Schurman, and Voetius), More emphasizes that the woman herself will primarily benefit from education. Yet the difference is deceptive. For a start,

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More’s speaker in To Candidus portrays a woman transformed by a humanist education into an embodiment of evidently his and certainly More’s own priorities and preferences (the mores of each, as it were). She becomes, as female humanist, a mirror to the poem’s male humanist speaker and his maker. Erasmus’s Eulalia counsels that a wife should transform herself into a mirror of her spouse; here, no self-transformation is envisaged. In terms of the poem’s argument, either the prospective female partner has already been fashioned into desirable form by some more or less kindred spirit to the prospective (humanist) husband or he, perhaps with assistance, will so fashion her. Thus the poem’s image of the female humanist as ideal household manager clearly accords with the subsequent Erasmian evocations of Pygmalion in Marriage and The Institution. Further, in its mirrorlike specificity, that image suggests the narcissism of the Morean speaker. He unwittingly reveals himself as a type of Pygmalion. That the image of the ideal prospective bride is a tale of moralized transformation, echoing after its fashion the tales of Pygmalion and of Narcissus, can be perceived yet more clearly when one considers the notional consequences of the transformation: what it will allegedly bring about. Some of those things are quite simple. For example, such a wife will not be annoying; she will be qualified to teach the grandchildren that she will have helped to provide. She will make Candidus glad to stay at home, away from other men and the public sphere, because she looks after and entertains him so well (To Candidus 117–46). The last alleged consequence is not quite as simple as it might seem, for it indicates that, through the knowledge and skills born of her transformation, Candidus’s prospective bride will in turn transform his home into a microcosmic eutopia, a private “good place” distinct from the outer social world. Further consequences are in keeping with and no less sophisticated than that eutopian vision — and not least among them is this. Early in his image of the woman who will become the ideal mulier economica, More’s speaker implies that from her

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transformation she will gain a philosophic calm (“To Candidus” 106–16). He proceeds to suggest that she will communicate that calm to Candidus through counsel or consolation, depending on his circumstances (147–52). She will therefore act as her husband’s personal humanist adviser, her education advancing not the common weal but the domestic, not the public but the private good. Uniting, as female humanist, “Summa eloquentia” with “omnium graui / Rerum scientia” (154–56), she will bring to her husband that quies, to borrow Vives’s word, which she herself possesses.28 It could be proposed, with regard once again to Venus and to Fortune, that More’s speaker implies such a woman will be a source of lasting pleasure to Candidus and will enable him to increase his power over life’s uncertainties (compare 227–34). The benefits of her transformation — the pleasure consequent upon that transformation — will ultimately be his.

Utopia Whether or not To Candidus was written at the same time as Utopia, or even close in time, the poem’s domestic eutopia and the Utopia of More’s dialogue present notions of femaleness that are alike in some ways but strikingly different in others. Women in Utopia are portrayed as contributing to both the private and the public good — nevertheless, in their society they have been subjected to transformation neither more nor less than their male companions. Like them, Utopian women may receive what resembles a humanist education; as a result they may, like them, become counterpart-humanists. They will not be confined to the domestic sphere if they do so. Yet the fact that women educated in Utopia may become public scholars — that, having been initially educated in public, they may perhaps thereafter proceed to further study and to public use of their education for the common weal — has to be understood in light of another. The public sphere in Utopia differs so markedly from its equivalents in the Europe known to Raphael and his audience that the public education

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of women and their (potential) roles as public intellectuals are implicitly positioned in More’s text as things peculiar to an alien, unique, and imaginary society. Women’s educational equality with men in Utopia is indicated to be practicable only because Utopia is not Europe. In Utopia, More suggests, the concept of equality between men and women is in the domain of the interesting, the possibly desirable, the actually impossible. As Raphael reports, the Utopian woman may become a new world mulier economica: she may plan, prepare, and cook meals; nurse children; and do much else besides.29 She may also become a government official. That such differing roles are available — especially the latter role — points to the paradoxical status of women generally as represented by More throughout his text. In order to explore that paradoxicality I should like first to consider Raphael’s account of the hierarchic relations between Utopian men and women. Raphael says that when Utopian women marry, they join their husbands’ households: “Each city, then, consists of households, the households consisting generally of blood-relations. When the women grow up and are married, they move into their husbands’ households. On the other hand, male children and grandchildren remain in the family, and are subject to the oldest member, unless his mind has started to fail from old age, in which case the next oldest takes his place” (Utopia, 135). In unknowing alignment with European expectations, women move when they marry and men do not. Further, households are ruled by the oldest male of unfailing mind. Raphael identifies the dominant family member as “Antiquissimus” (136), and, in any case, he reports that “wives act as servants to their husbands” (136), that the Utopians believe wifely “virtue and compliance” hold a man’s love (195), that on the day of “Last-feast,” wives kneel before their husbands to confess and beg pardon for their sins (237). Ultimately, in Utopia, men rule.30 But they do not rule by themselves. Because women may become scholars, they may become ambassadors and, albeit rarely,

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priests. They may become tranibors and perhaps even governors (Utopia, 131). The paradox is that Utopian women are born into a society where they customarily live in radical subordination to their menfolk. Some women may rule, then; on the other hand, it remains uncertain as to whether even those few escape subjection to male authority — an authority reported by Raphael as pervading their society. That vision of female political equality is, therefore, problematic as well as remote insofar as it depends upon the educational practices of an imaginary, distinctly un-European culture. And its remoteness has an additional cause. In Plato’s Republic the argument is put forward that, since women have the same intellectual faculties as men, those women who have the same mental capabilities as the appropriate men should — in an ideal state — be educated to rule with them. In short, in an ideal society it is desirable for women to share the burdens of rule.31 Plato makes that argument seem questionable, however, by repeatedly presenting disparagement of women. His text disparages them for their supposed love of and (or) dependence on cosmetics, implying their vanity and superficiality (373c). They are indicated also to be unduly emotional and thus unreasonable as well as unheroic (388a). They are suggested to be, in fact, contemptibly inferior to men (398e).32 The vision of women’s political equality with men in Utopia is thus made to seem remote from European experience because, in addition to anything else, behind it lies an ambiguous, European textual precedent. It is an unavoidable truth that, whereas some women in Utopia may rule, men ultimately do so in general; however, it is nevertheless true that Utopian women share physical labor with men, face the dangers of war alongside them, and have what is arguably sexual equality with them. In several disparate respects they are treated as men’s equals while being, for the most part (at the least), radically subordinated to them. Women are occasionally but still significantly placed above men. Perhaps, therefore, the representations of femaleness in More’s text do not form a harmony of

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contrasts but a collection of paradoxes and contradictions. More exploits the inclusiveness and inconclusiveness of his chosen genre, Menippean satire. He explores and plays with various notions of femaleness that, according to Menippean decorum, need neither be brought into concord nor harmonized with European notions to which he himself apparently adhered.33

Historia Richardi Tertii In Historia Richardi Tertii, written at much the same time as Utopia, there is neither the truly eutopian nor the Utopian, but rather, the dystopian.34 More tells of an England made dystopian by Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III, and the women who feature most prominently in his narrative — the queen and Jane Shore — are portrayed sympathetically yet also misogynically, as being in their very different ways heroic, flawed, vulnerable.35 They are heroically resistant and they are victims; what they resist is tyranny, but that does not solely victimize them. They are public figures who cannot retreat into a safely private, domestic world — even if doing so were what they wanted. They do not act in a public sphere made safe by social training and political structures that minimize the possibility of political power’s illegitimate acquisition or exercise. Although to some extent idealized, they are by no means represented as ideal. Nor are they identified merely as the products of their society. Instead, they are memorably individuated re-creations of women who encountered and resisted, as More’s version of the past would persuade its readers, a singular threat to the common weal in and of England. According to More, at the heart of the queen’s resistance lay eloquence, whereas love (desire and charity) lay at the heart of the resistance by Shore’s wife. To perceive how the queen and Jane Shore are represented as women, and as having exercised their respective forms of resistance, is to understand More’s detailed focus on them in the Historia as major opponents of tyranny. It

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is thus also to understand with greater clarity his representations of Richard, the man whom he portrayed as the recently notable, English instance of tyranny, and of Edward IV. At the start of Historia Richardi Tertii it is primarily through women that More’s narrator suggests the nature of the England — but also of the world — in which his history — and, by implication, all history — unfolds. When listing the children of “King Edward, the fourth of that name,” he describes them as follows: Edward, the heir-apparent, about thirteen years old; Richard, Duke of York, two years his junior; Elizabeth, who later by the guidance of fate became the consort of Henry VII and the mother of Henry VIII, a queen of remarkable beauty and character; Cecily, not as fortunate as she was fair; [Bridget, who imitated the virtue of her namesake, took vows, and led the life of a religious in a convent of cloistered nuns at Dartford; Anne, later honorably married to Thomas, at that time Lord Howard and afterwards Earl of Surrey;] Catherine, who experienced many changes of fortune, occasionally benign but more often unfavorable, and who at last, if this change be the last (for she is still alive), gained the generous favor of fortune she eminently deserved through the pious goodwill of her nephew, King Henry VIII. (CW 15:315)36

Not much is said there of the king’s sons — their stories will come later, interwoven with Richard of Gloucester’s story. But the narrator makes a point of observing that Elizabeth’s life was guided providentially, that Cecily’s was not fortunate in proportion to her beauty, that Catherine was tossed about by extremes of chance. He emphasizes that Bridget chose a life of virtue. Her having done so seems to have placed her beyond chance’s power, for her life is summarized as one set devoutly apart from the world. Anne, on the other hand, seems to have married well and to have been left otherwise untouched by chance — insofar as that can be associated with her marriage. So the England, the world, in which More’s Historia Richardi Tertii unfolds has much in

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common with the world portrayed in his Fortune verses. In particular, both insist on the power of chance over individual lives and that virtue enables escape from chance. Through his description of Edward’s daughters, then, More’s narrator implies that the world of his and of all history is in basic respects the world as presented throughout The Consolation of Philosophy.37 In that world he portrays the queen and Shore’s wife, respectively the wife and mistress of Edward IV, resisting in their different ways the incarnation of unnaturalness and of tyranny that is his Richard. His characterization of the queen begins negatively, and its misogynic elements, though to be cunningly transcended, are never denied. She is introduced as a woman vigorously and perhaps violently pursuing power. Amid an account of ruthless, male political ambition the narrator says this: “For whether the queen’s faction laid a trap for him [the Duke of Clarence] (for the queen’s partisans and the king’s kinsmen were bitterest enemies, as women by nature and not out of malice almost always hate those who are dearest to their husbands) . . . he was condemned by a full parliament to the most grievous punishment” (CW 15:323).38 Despite her rank, the narrator parenthetically remarks, the queen was still as naturally contrary as any other woman, so she possessed a contrariness that went beyond mere passion. His emphasis on her pursuit of power evokes the conventional charge against women of their being ambitious; on the other hand, the queen’s pursuit of political power is recounted immediately after the identification of Richard, Duke of York’s three sons as “insatiably ambitious, hungry for power,” and iteration of specifically George’s “greed for power” (CW 15:323).39 Her ambition does not differentiate her from her husband or from his brothers. What More’s narrator subsequently suggests, however, is the extent to which her perhaps murderous ambition is overwhelmed by Richard of Gloucester’s definitely and extensively murderous will to power. Yet the moment when the reader sees her ambition succumb to Richard’s is also the moment when her

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characterization is shown as transcending the misogynic — when More stages her disputation with Cardinal Bourchier. In her long exchange with the cardinal a number of important things are simultaneously at stake. Certainly two are the life of her son and hence, indirectly, legitimate succession in England. But there are others—for example, the interpretation and maintenance of church tradition, the acknowledgment of and obedience or deference to natural law, the power of prudence and, as well, the power of eloquence. A major reason for that simultaneity is the fact of the queen’s being in sanctuary with her son; another is the no less obvious fact of her being a woman and mother. When, in effect, she loses a disputation she appears to have won, her defense of church tradition and of natural law, her attempts to exercise power through prudence and eloquence, elevate her beyond her actual failure and the flaws attributed misogynically to her. In order to understand the queen’s sad moment of transcendence, one first has to consider More’s preludes to it: a speech by Richard; a principled although acquiescent response to Richard by the cardinal, who speaks very briefly; a lengthy speech by the Duke of Buckingham. The terms for the queen’s dispute with the cardinal originate with Richard, whose speech denounces the queen’s taking refuge in sanctuary. Much of what Buckingham will thereafter argue derives directly or obliquely from the Protector’s condemnation of the queen. Richard starts by condemning the queen as an unnatural mother. She is, he claims, Medea-like in her readiness to “sacrifice her own children” — through an abuse of sanctuary — and thereby exact “vengeance on those whom she hate[s]” (CW 15:361). In addition, Richard casts the queen as a type of female recalcitrance, weak judgment, and ambition for political control: ultimately, in consequence, as an offender against natural law and prudence, as a distinctly female enemy to the common weal (CW 15:365). Buckingham’s speech ingeniously elaborates on the themes prominent in that of his master. There, furthering the Protector’s desire to separate royal son and mother, he attacks the queen

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for being a woman, for being the kind of woman and mother that he alleges she is, for having ill-advisedly taken sanctuary (a church tradition, according to him, in need of reform), and for being directed neither by prudence nor by natural law. To get what the Protector and he want (separation of son from mother), Buckingham has to overcome multiple obstacles (motherhood, royalty, the church). The problem is that the different obstacles and single objective coalesce in the one ambitious, desperate, and hostile female existence. Since what Buckingham has to contend with when he speaks in support of Richard is perfectly clear, it comes as no surprise to the reader that Buckingham develops Richard’s multiple arguments and that More assigns Buckingham a cunningly deliberative, smoothly ruthless speech — credibly deceptive in its portrayed context and evidence of its speaker’s and of More’s rhetorical virtuosity. Some of the detail in Buckingham’s speech is important for other reasons as well. Because the cardinal transmits or translates to the queen much of what Richard and, subsequently, Buckingham argue, her dispute with him forms an implicit response to the duke and, therefore, the Protector. By way of beginning, Buckingham picks up a phrase used by the cardinal, who has been speaking immediately before him. When Bourchier announces his willingness to address the queen on the Protector’s behalf — but not to “impair the immunity of . . . sanctuary” — he closes with the words “maternal indulgence and womanly fear” (CW 15:365, 367).40 “‘Womanly fear?’ said the Duke of Buckingham. ‘No; the woman’s invincible stubbornness’” (365, 367).41 Buckingham starts his speech by picking up Bourchier’s allusion to female weakness (which echoes an allusion to that by Richard) and replacing it with condemnation of the queen as a striking incarnation of female recalcitrance (a charge the Protector has made directly). In order to elaborate on, rather than merely to iterate, Richard’s depreciation of her, he relocates her in terms of Richard’s misogynic clichés. The queen is to be recognized as primarily recalcitrant, not weakly fearful. Just so, he knows

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when to deviate from Richard in order to strengthen and advance the Protector’s case. He suggests that, even if the queen’s judgment may be relatively weak and unsound, it is nevertheless sufficiently strong for her to choose a better course of action: women lack sense, but the queen actually “has quite a bit, for a woman” and therefore may have wit enough to acknowledge that her son does not need confinement in sanctuary (CW 15:365, 367).42 He goes on to assert that, nonetheless, she may reject prudent counsel’s correction of her imprudence; in that case, according to Buckingham, she will reveal her governance of the young duke to be driven by female obstinacy instigated by malice. On the other hand, he suggests, if she really is a mother driven by “irrational fears [that] even extend to imagining that her son is in danger” (367–69), then she is in fact so unreasonable — though rather, “no doubt,” self-interestedly calculating — as to be placing her son in harm’s way. Now he “languish[es]” in sanctuary; soon, of a certainty, he will be lost to his brother because his own mother will spirit him abroad (369). Accused of female weaknesses, accused of departing from them in viciously female ways, the queen is portrayed as an unnatural mother. Thereupon Buckingham deals astutely with the church. Sanctuary, he argues, although “based on a venerable tradition” has become much abused — often by women. It is a tradition needing to be reformed. The queen has misused it; an immediate and appropriate correction of that specific abuse would be for the Protector’s agents to liberate her son into the Protector’s care (369–77). When the cardinal transmits or translates Buckingham’s and Richard’s arguments to the queen, More presents her as being variously victimized: by Richard’s cunning ambition; by that ambition’s knowing facilitators; and by the (male) naiveté or witlessness unknowingly complicit with it. Comprehensively duped by both Richard and Buckingham, the cardinal initially puts forward some of their main arguments. He indicates to the queen that her virtual imprisonment of her son in sanctuary, dividing royal brothers, marks her as at once an unnatural and politically

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imprudent mother. The interests of the realm, of her friends, of herself and of her sons would benefit were she to accept his “sound and useful advice as her trustworthy and loving friend” — advice “to set the duke free” (379). He begins, then, by representing the queen to herself as a specifically female enemy to the common weal. The cardinal appeals to her through what he naïvely takes to be argumentation innocently urging the common good but what she understands to be (as of course does the reader) Richard’s disguised argument in support of his will to tyrannic power. The queen’s response is a deliberately nuanced counterrepresentation in which she portrays herself to Bourchier as the necessarily female preserver of natural law and prudence. Doing so, contesting identification of the natural and the prudent in her circumstances, she covertly defends her son’s life from the Protector’s desire to end it. Not by accident does she raise the issue of her younger son’s health. Sanctuary, her parental presence, and her son’s health are indivisible, she replies. According to her, in the “shelter[ing]” isolation made possible by the church, her son can fully benefit from her maternal care (CW 15:379).43 Her argument implicitly unites ecclesiastical tradition with natural law. (The latter is doubly evoked by her pervasive appeal to motherhood and by her passing appeal to “medical authorities.”) Through their union it suggests that true prudence lies, first, in her continued exercise of a mother’s unique ability to protect her son’s life and, second, in her concomitant protection of the royal succession (379–81). Bourchier, in rehearsing or recreating the arguments of Richard and of Buckingham, brings the power of eloquence to bear upon the queen. He has, after all, earlier said to Richard, “I will attempt the task [of winning over the queen] so energetically that it will be quite evident to everyone that the real stumbling block was not my lack of diligence” (CW 15:367). Contesting that power she matches the cardinal in ability to argue by ethos, pathos, and logos. More portrays her as formidably eloquent. He does that, in part, for an obvious reason: she is a mother and queen

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arguing desperately in defense of her child’s life against the agent of a political rival. Yet there is a less obvious though no less important reason, namely, she is simultaneously arguing on two fronts and addressing two audiences. She disputes with the cardinal but is therefore dealing both with what he says and with what Richard — and (or) Buckingham — has put in his head; she addresses the cardinal but knows that what she says will be recounted to the Protector and his court. As eloquent in argument as she is astute, she appears even from the start of her exchange with Bourchier to be heroic: desperate, undeniably still flawed and nevertheless heroic in her defense of the otherwise undefended against the finally insuperable. It is illuminating, that being so, briefly to contrast More’s representation of the queen with the figure of the ideal wife as described in his poem To Candidus. There More’s narrator asserts that the ideal wife will possess “Summa eloquentia / Iam cum omnium graui / Rerum scientia”: “the highest eloquence with deep [or, thoughtful] knowledge of all things [or, matters].”44 He continues, “Such a woman, I suspect, was Tullia — never was daughter more beloved by a father, himself in learning second to none.”45 In To Candidus, then, the ideal wife is portrayed as being among other things a perfect orator. Her uniting “the highest eloquence” with “deep knowledge” implies as much; that suggestion is affirmed by the subsequent allusion to Tullia and to her father, Cicero. As has been observed above, however, this perfect orator — this perfect female humanist — is also wholly domestic: she voices her eloquence in private for the well-being of her husband and not in public for the good of the community. Now it is self-evident that the queen is a public figure and that, in her dispute with the cardinal, she argues eloquently for what is at once a personal and a public good. On the other hand, she is disputing in confinement. The notionally ideal wife in More’s poem exercises her eloquence in the imposed confinement of home; the queen disputes eloquently in a chosen refuge from the public world. In To Candidus the ideal mulier economica has safety in her imposed containment.

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The queen has a precarious safety — one ultimately and obviously doomed — in the retreat she has chosen yet to which she also has been driven by her well-grounded fears. That the safety of the queen and of her son is ultimately doomed seems obvious to the reader, not simply because he or she may already know what will happen next or because the queen is a woman and therefore supposedly weak, being especially vulnerable in a male and ruthless political domain. After all, as regards the latter reason, Richard has destroyed powerful men; no opponent has so far been able to withstand him. Further, the queen has been a powerful, perhaps ruthless politician in her own right, and she has not become personally weak — although weakness has been a generic accusation conveniently directed against her by Richard, Buckingham, and the cardinal. It is instead because she, as sole defender of the otherwise undefended, faces opposition that she cannot overcome. True, the cardinal has earlier defended sanctuary: he has told Richard that sanctuary must not be profaned and that motherhood must be respected. Yet even Bourchier demeans sanctuary — and motherhood — when urging the queen to surrender her son. Therein he follows Richard. More’s narrator reports that, having “gain[ed] the title of Protector,” Richard soon accused the queen of “cruelty” to her children, emphasizing the ill treatment supposedly directed against her younger son, “since she had deprived him of his freedom, dragged him away from the brightness and splendor of his fortune, and hidden him away in a wretched sanctuary, in darkness and filth as it were” (361). Bourchier’s initial address to the queen refers to the perceived disreputableness of her younger son’s “lurking in sanctuary” (CW 15:379).46 When the queen responds he then repeats the phrase — applying it to the queen herself — and adds to it with words like those of Richard. He says, “But if you are determined to lurk in this sanctuary, a general consensus has determined that it is much more in the duke’s interest to live at large with the king to their mutual benefit and advantage in conditions of dignity and splendor than for him to lead a wretched existence in a squalid

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lair with you, to the deprivation of the one, to the disgrace of the other, and certainly to the sorrow of both” (381).47 The man who has claimed that he will not “impair the immunity of . . . sanctuary” has been so gullible in his political dealings, and is therefore so incapable of prudence, that he cannot recognize the queen’s as a genuine case of sanctuary.48 Deprecating her retreat into protection by the church, he unwittingly attacks sanctuary itself. There can be little wonder, then, that when the queen subsequently dismantles Bourchier’s Richard-derived counsel, in effect unmasking the Protector to his agent, the cardinal understands what she says as revealing only her “groundless womanly fear” (CW 15:385).49 Soon after using those words he even raises the idea that the queen’s son cannot claim sanctuary at all — a thought he carefully although vaguely attributes to others — and that removal of the boy, against the queen’s will, would thus be legitimate (385–87). In her long and impassioned reply the queen goes so far as to ask Bourchier, “Is there any place in the world holier than this one, the immunity of which no tyrant has ever before now been impious enough to violate?” (387).50 Having none too obliquely identified Richard as a prototyrant already more “impious” than his tyrannic predecessors, she is thereupon cast in the role of unknowing prophet. Immediately she adds, “And I for one have no doubt that the spirit of St. Peter, holy guardian of this sanctuary, has no less power to take vengeance upon violators of his sanctuary today than he had in the past.”51 That is indeed the apex of the queen’s moment of transcendence — and More’s irony is clear: Bourchier, like many other notionally prudent men of state, failed to see Richard as a tyrant in the making and so became his puppet (unfortunately, given the issue of sanctuary, his clerical puppet); only a notionally weak woman saw the Protector for what he was and spoke against him, more truly than she knew at the time. The queen’s arguing with the cardinal is, therefore, both necessary and an exercise in futility. His naïve faith in Richard places him beyond persuasion by even her eloquence. She can find no

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help in ecclesiastical authority, despite the fact that she has precariously found it in church tradition. Secular power lies in the Protector’s hands and is, of course, directed against her. The opposition to her is insuperable and hence her eloquence can reveal the truth, express her heroic resistance to a prototyrant, but do nothing else. More portrays the queen as winning the dispute, insofar as she wins her argument with the cardinal, yet inevitably losing it because there has never been a possibility of her controlling its outcomes. Forced to confront that fact when the cardinal announces he will abandon discussion, she intensifies her inevitable loss by actually handing over her son and thereby giving the cardinal what he wants. His refusal to continue arguing achieves what his eloquence could not. Further, the very ingenuousness of Bourchier when he withdraws from dispute, and not any cleverness on his part, prompts the queen into her disastrous decision. When ceasing discussion he accuses the queen of seeming “to doubt” the “prudence” or the “good faith” of him and of his associates (CW 15:393). More stages his conclusion to the scene so that the queen, face to face with imprudence and misplaced faith acting on behalf of irresistible bad faith, has to decide on the spot what is the prudent course of action available to her. The only way she can see is that suggested to her by a forlorn yet not unintelligent hope of submission’s being met with various mildness or dutifulness. She hands over her son, emphasizing that responsibility for acting with prudence and in good faith does indeed lie with the cardinal, his companions, and those they represent (395). Almost directly after the queen’s long, desperate speech of farewell to her son, More’s narrator quotes the Protector’s brief, wittily sinister greeting to the boy: “My dearest nephew and liege, you are a welcome arrival to everyone, and especially welcome to me” (397).52 Just as the terms of the queen’s dispute with Bourchier originated with Richard, so he has the last word. The words through which he seeks to exercise the power of misogynic categorization over Shore’s wife, formerly the “favorite” mistress of Edward IV (CW 15:411), have some affinity with

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but also differ from those he has deployed against the queen. The reason for that seems straightforward enough: like the queen she is an influential woman perceived by Richard as a threat, but she is neither a directly political opponent nor the mother of claimants impeding his way to the throne. Therefore, in order to facilitate both her use in his acquisition of complete tyrannic power and his diminution of her residual power, Richard categorizes Shore’s wife as being, like the queen, an unnatural woman. In fact, with an arrogant indifference to implausibility, he identifies her and the queen as “enchantresses” in league with each other and with other women of the same kind (409). Through that ploy he can attack the queen, begin to attack Hastings, and diminish the power of Shore herself. It is ironic that, condemning both women as unnatural because they supposedly possess magical power, he makes Shore’s wife resemble the queen. Certainly, by denouncing her as a harlot, he also makes her the queen’s antithesis (425). Yet it is pertinent to recall here that the Protector had earlier compared the queen with Medea, thereby suggesting that she is an unnatural mother. Having now labeled her an enchantress, he has unknowingly extended his Medea analogy; having categorized Shore’s wife as an enchantress, he has likewise unknowingly and incongruously drawn her into it. Richard is not alone in portraying Jane Shore misogynically. The misogyny of More’s narrator appears amid his exculpation of Shore for having become Edward’s mistress. Even if, he observes, her marriage had been neither ineptly arranged by her parents nor (on her part) loveless, she was, after all, just a young girl, and therefore ready to be seduced by ambition, by the opportunity to possess extravagant adornment and to gain pleasure. She was, he indicates, a young woman who no doubt possessed a woman’s typical weaknesses.53 However, sympathy and admiration coexist with misogyny in the portrayal of Shore by More’s narrator. In fact, the narrator portrays her as having transcended her implied weaknesses and as having been tacitly resistant to Richard. She

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achieved the former, More’s narrator suggests, through her urbane charitableness at court before the passing of her royal lover. Through that charitableness, he suggests as well, she transcended — at least to some extent — her sexual transgression. Since Shore’s resistance to Richard is portrayed in the Historia as tacit, not voiced, and as expressing endurance rather than defiance in the face of persecution, More’s narrator presents her resistance not as resembling that of the queen when in sanctuary but, rather, as complementing it. Her demeanor and behavior throughout her elaborately staged, public humiliation — which is her particular moment of resistance in the tale, just as the queen’s is her dispute with the cardinal — are described as if they had possessed an eloquence of their own. Certainly the narrator creates an eloquent image of Shore’s wife in representing her as at once having withstood and almost triumphed over the public degradation that Richard inflicted on her. Thus although her implied flaws, her rising above them, and her passive resistance are less spectacularly presented in the Historia than are those attributed to the queen, and appropriately so, she is nevertheless characterized as having been and as still being a woman of no slight significance. Edward’s mistress may not figure as prominently in More’s narrative as does the queen; nonetheless, Shore’s wife is useful to More in his account of Richard as an embodiment of the unnatural and the tyrannic. In order to clarify that usefulness I want to return to the exculpation of Shore for having become Edward’s mistress. There the most interesting thing seems to be that the misogyny of More’s narrator is sympathetically intended: designed in fact to evoke the reader’s sympathy for Shore by associating her with generic female flaws. As a result, the portrait of Shore harmonizes with the narrator’s earlier portrait of Shore’s royal lover. The public body of King Edward is described in terms of the just, Christian prince. He has courage and discretion, showing justice and mercy in peace and prudence as well as boldness in war (CW 15:317). In

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the very last stage of his reign he attempts to engender Christian charity among those who will survive him (333–35). The private person of the king is, however, described by More’s narrator as “particularly given to dissipation and wantonness, like virtually everyone else; for you will hardly persuade anyone in good health to restrain himself when his fortune permits great extravagance” (319).54 Just as More’s narrator partly excuses Shore’s sexual transgression by an appeal to generic female flaws, so he likewise excuses Edward’s concupiscence by an appeal to generic human weakness. In both cases, the narrator seeks not so much to condemn as to excuse, to evoke sympathetic understanding while not altogether denying culpability. Further, the narrator links Shore with Edward not only in terms of sexuality and weakness; he also connects both through charity and through compassion displayed in a fissuring courtly society. Thus he associates Shore with one of the main qualities by means of which he can make Edward resemble a just Christian prince (despite the king’s very obvious personal imperfections). In fact, by focusing on her charitableness — albeit perhaps caritas humana rather than caritas — he does not merely link her positively with Edward.55 He makes her, like the late king, in effect an exemplum of what Richard could not be; he indicates that, as a woman, she was more than the sum of her (implied) weaknesses and her sexual transgression. As Edward lies dying he makes a speech that seems to signal the transition from an almost golden age of government to one that is definitely iron. More has the king appeal to his factionriven entourage in an attempt to bring a Christian harmony out of growing discord (CW 15:333). Edward reminds the faction members that since they are “related by ties either of blood or of marital affinity” (335), “God forbid, then, that the very thing which ought to make you most desirous of harmony should give rise to discord” (335).56 The king’s attempt in that speech to evoke Christian concord will radically distinguish him from Richard, his tyrannic successor. It may be that More’s emphasis on concupiscence and charity in Edward indicates an intention to characterize the king

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by way of chiefly the concupiscible appetite — with its possibilities for ill and good — but to portray Richard by way of chiefly the irascible appetite’s negative aspects. The mix of concupiscence and charity delineated in the king occurs likewise in the portrayal of Shore. Praising her benevolent social skills, her adroitness in bringing people happily together, More’s narrator talks of Shore’s “gracious manner and a winning air of convivial urbanity” (CW 15:429). Therein, he says, and not in her famous beauty, lay “her greatest charm” (429).57 The celebration of Shore as a harmonious presence at court becomes more serious when the narrator remarks soon after, “She frequently soothed the king’s temper, won indulgence for enemies and pardon for offenders, and finally assisted many people in their great transactions, usually for no reward or a token one” (429).58 According to the narrator, Shore mediated charity — and drew love to herself — in a society then losing that quality and now not much concerned with bestowing it on her (431). He indicates that in her case as in the king’s, love was more than merely concupiscence and benefited not merely the self. Shore’s capacity to draw love to herself, be it lust or charity, is nowhere better illustrated in the Historia than in the account of her public humiliation. Precisely that capacity enabled her, More’s narrator suggests, unintentionally to turn Richard’s piece of tyrannic theater against its author, enabling her not simply to endure Richard’s assault but virtually to transform it into personal triumph. Shore’s humiliation in St. Paul’s is presented as a violation of the sacred. It was so, More’s narrator implies, because Richard’s making Shore publicly repent evidently expressed his “hypocrisy and malice” rather than “any real interest in decency” (CW 15:425; subsequent references to this episode are from the same page). In addition, the narrator suggests, it was so because Richard compelled Shore to act as — to play at being — a penitent. Working her way through her assigned role, she may have blushed, but that seems to have been occasioned by her subjection to a “great dishonor” and not by a sense of religious guilt.

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Further, her blushing with shame heightened her already considerable beauty — as did the decorousness of “her expression and gait.” Hers was, then, a command and directed performance, yet one perhaps not altogether uncalculated by her; and to whatever extent her performance may have been calculated, it was certainly one ordered by the Protector yet beyond his control. As a result, Shore attracted “no little measure of praise and goodwill from all those more desirous of her body than concerned for her soul.” She had the erotic allure of a Mary Magdalene, seemingly without the latter’s contrition. Thus, staging her condemnation for sexual transgression, Richard presented, rather, her sexual power and his hypocritical malice. Moreover, if the spectacle of her humiliation excited (as is ironically remarked) the carnality for which she was in part being notionally punished, it also aroused compassion (“even good people who hated her faults pitied her disgrace”). One could say that whereas Richard successfully violated sanctuary in his assault on the queen and on her son, his violation of St. Paul’s in order to assault Jane Shore proved a dramatic failure. Not long after recounting Shore’s moment of endurance and virtual triumph, More’s narrator deftly juxtaposes a description of the woman as she was with a portrayal of her as she is. In the latter case he focuses on her capacity now to draw love to herself, to arouse lust or compassion (CW 15:427–31). That portrayal of Shore as she is — not quite decrepit, not quite destitute, victimized through deliberate and ungrateful neglect — variously suggests how her status has changed. The change can be simply described, of course, in broad terms. Once a celebrity whose body and character were thought attractive, today Shore is a beggar, seeming all but unable to evoke physical interest or even compassion. Yet, as can be seen distinctly, More’s narrator does not portray Shore in just that way. The history of “Jane Shore” is not merely the tale of a woman who, once an emblem of beauty and urbane charitableness, now emblematizes vanitas vanitatum, contempt for the fleeting goods of this worldly life. The narrator does indeed suggest that those things are part of her history

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but he indicates that others are as well. They are, surely, these: that even amid the decay of her beauty some of its former and extraordinary allure may still be discerned (for Shore still has the power to rouse the imagination’s mildly erotic play); that even after a fall from high — if not altogether honorable — estate into wretchedness she still has a dignity, a worth, earned by her past kindnesses and acts of compassion. Just as one can see comparisons and contrasts between the image of the queen in More’s Historia and that of the ideal wife in his To Candidus, so one can see affinities and differences between the image of Shore’s wife and that of the sexually transgressive woman in “On a Maid with Unmaidenly Habits” (see CW 3.2:147). Not least among those affinities, in the latter case, is the apparent though not identical fascination with which each woman is described; not least among the differences is Shore’s larger practice of love. Further, as far as differences are concerned, in their Boethian, dystopian, English environment, the queen and Shore are necessarily far removed in basic ways from the mode of femaleness that More inconsistently sketched in the nonEuropean — but nevertheless deeply problematic — culture of his Utopia. However, the queen and Jane Shore are not entirely different from the women in Utopia after all. Utopian women are at times described misogynically and are shown to be radically subject to men; it is said, too, that they may be variously heroic.59 Three concluding points should be made here. First, the queen and Shore’s wife seem designed in More’s Historia to individuate complementary forms of female resistance to tyranny and thus to help in the defining of a historical tyrant (as More apparently saw Richard to have been). The representations of the two women therefore help in the characterization of Edward IV, and thereby heighten the antithesis between Edward as an (almost) just, Christian prince and Richard as neither just nor Christian nor legitimately a ruler. Second, the queen and Shore’s wife seem undesignedly to reveal the intricately mingled sympathy with and antipathy to women that can be seen in so many of

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More’s writings. The final point concerns More’s representing the impulse to pleasure in relation to the common weal. In To Candidus female education is linked ultimately to narcissistic male pleasure and to the domestic rather than to the public good. Conversely, in Historia Richardi Tertii the will to pleasure in King Edward and in Shore’s wife is elaborately and genially portrayed as mingling charity with desire for self-gratification, as ultimately benefiting rather than injuring the common weal. It is as if More were portraying a precarious accord between the Venus and Age of his “Pageant Verses,” one in which Edward figures as a benevolently Saturnian ruler and Jane Shore as a kindly Venus Mechanitis.

FOUR

Masculinity, Friendship, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Which Common Weal? As the preceding chapter suggests, the portrayals of women in More’s writings are many sided and often ambiguous — for example, the desperate, flawed yet heroic motherhood of Queen Elizabeth in Historia Richardi Tertii and the rationally controlled but not passionless motherhood at which Hythloday glances now and then in his account of Utopian society. Further, women are misogynically shown as exercising political power, or neutrally though problematically represented as having the opportunity to wield it, or portrayed approvingly as exercising sexual power in order to achieve benign consequences. What is alleged to be a naturally female contrariness marks the wifely power-play of Queen Elizabeth in opposition to her husband’s kinsmen; an equality coexistent with inequality places the best and brightest of women alongside their male counterparts in the political leadership of Utopia; Shore’s wife frequently manages to coax her royal lover, when his anger with others gets the better of him, into affability and mercy. Women are variously identified, too, as actual or potential counselors: actual in the very different cases of Jane Shore and of some women in Utopia; potential in the strange case of Candidus’s notionally ideal wife-to-be.1 More’s representations 101

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of women are diverse, sometimes deliberately simple, but tend to be elusive. So it is as well with his representations of men, of being male. For instance, although in the “ages of man” stanzas of his “Pageant Verses” More gestures toward humankind as a whole, those segments of the poem nonetheless portray males and offer a view on masculinity.2 They do so diversely, at times with confrontational simplicity, and yet ambiguously. Emphasis is given to male impatience with education — an impatience generated by education’s interrupting the pursuit of physical pleasure. Emphasis is given also to male violence — again, in the pursuit of pleasure — as an aspect of the (male) will to power. It is given to male arrogance and vanity, to the childishness of male sexuality, to male vanity’s subtle contamination of altruism. Emphasis is given, by way of the poem’s implied author, to a male regard for humanist learning and a male capacity for ironic self-awareness. That multifarious presentation of masculinity in More’s “Pageant Verses,” especially through the icons of Manhod and Old Age, has obvious and important affinities with his characterization of Edward IV in Historia Richardi Tertii. It necessarily has points of significant contact likewise with his representation of Richard, though divergences between the two are no less clear. More evidently wanted to image Richard as at once a proto-tyrant and an incarnation of the monstrous. Evoking their characterizations, however, More in turn evokes two roles that seem to have particularly interested him when identifying himself and others as men, namely, fatherhood and friendship.

Historia Richardi Tertii Edward’s great speech of farewell in the Historia — the climactic moment of his characterization — is prompted by his fears for his children: it is the speech of a father anxiously seeking, too late, to protect them.3 Much of the king’s portrayal in More’s Historia makes him seem almost a mix of Saturn (the benevolent

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Saturn who ruled in the golden age), Silenus and Priapus; but in his great moment he plays out the role of failing father and king. Richard is, in effect, presented as a child-killer; that is to say, Richard’s portrayal seems to make him akin to the malign Saturn in his (proto-)tyrannic cunning, his callous destructiveness, and his murder of children related to him.4 Further, Richard is shown as having no true friends — it might better be said, no capacity for forming true friendships — but Edward as having the ability to draw people to him and to make friends of them. In the blazon of Richard (CW 15:323–25), More’s narrator remarks, “Lavish beyond his means, to maintain his resources he was forced to squeeze money from one group only to squander it on another; by such tactics he made fickle friends and firm enemies” (325).5 Then the narrator adds soon after, “He had equal regard for a friend and for an enemy in comparison with his own advantage, and never hesitated to kill anyone whose life seemed to stand in the way of his plans” (325).6 As Cicero observed, and Dio Chrysostom after him, a tyrant cannot really have friends.7 Yet as Dio and other ancient writers agreed, kings can and should. So it is with More’s Edward. When formally describing the king, More’s narrator observes that Edward had a talent for friendship (317–19). The king’s reign was undisturbed, he says, in part because he could draw some opponents “to partake of his favor and friendship, in the fostering of which he was reputed to be open and accommodating” (317).8 Whether it was a matter of personality or of policy (or of both — but the first seems most likely), Edward consolidated his rule through friendship, a practice advocated by Dio Chrysostom, Isocrates, and Xenophon.9 In fact, Xenophon has Cyrus say to Cambyses, his son, “This golden sceptre is not what preserves the kingship; rather, trustworthy friends are the truest and safest sceptre for kings.” Cyrus points out as well that it is by way of “benefaction” that a king engenders fidelity.10 Nor is that the sole emphasis in the Historia on Edward’s capacity for friendship. In the final summer of Edward’s life, according to the narrator, the

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king’s talent for friendship harmonized court and city for one prolonged, golden moment: his talent for friendship and his delight in its pleasures helped sustain the precarious calm of the common weal (319). That elegiacally rendered anecdote at once celebrates the king and obliquely draws attention to the friendlessness and dissonance of Richard, the lurking proto-tyrant; but a couple of other remarks could also be made. First, the anecdote suggests a Ciceronian dimension to Edward’s portrayal. Second, More’s contrast between the king and his successor expresses something like an Augustinian antithesis between caritas and cupiditas. I shall consider the significance of those things presently. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that fatherhood and friendship are used by More in the Historia as major ways to characterize the masculinities of Edward and of Richard.

More, Utopia, Cicero, Augustine It is no surprise that fatherhood and friendship are major ways through which More represented his own male selfhood. Near the very beginning of A Dialogue Vincent says to his uncle, who is More’s surrogate in the text, “But vs here shall you leve of your kyndred a sort of very comfortles orphanes / to all whom your good help and counsaile and comfort hath longe bene a great staye / not as an vncle vnto some, and to some as one ferther of kyn / but as though vnto vs all, you had bene a naturall father.”11 Through Antony, More would present himself in other roles; but at almost the start of his text he chose to present himself in the role of father.12 So, of course, he had directly and famously presented himself near the start of his letter to Peter Giles that prefaces Utopia: “For when I get home, I have to talk with my wife, chatter with my children, and consult with the servants. All these matters I consider part of my business, since they have to be done unless a man wants to be a stranger in his own house. Besides, you are bound to bear yourself as agreeably as you can towards those whom nature or chance or your own choice has made the companions of your life.”13

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Yet context is everything. Just prior to More’s portrayal of himself there as a charitable paterfamilias, he has been explaining to Giles why Utopia has taken a while to appear. He says, first, that his many-sided role as a man of public affairs consumes most of his daylight hours. Then, he continues, on his return home he takes up his business as father of his household.14 Throughout his explanation he plays on the word negotium: “business,” “want of leisure.” More tells Giles that he has not been able to get on with the business of writing because legal and other business have taken up his time, as has the business of his household. Public and domestic business deprive More of the leisure needed for the business of writing. The two relevant paragraphs of the letter show More using negotium, in one form or another (adnominatio), five times.15 More’s elision of the public and domestic spheres, of the public world with his household, is quite deliberate, and through it he indicates among other things that in microcosm as in macrocosm he busily pursues the common weal. Only after he has done so, he suggests, can he turn to his studies — and those, Utopia itself implies, tend in any case to contribute toward that very end. Thus More presents himself to Giles and hence to his wider readership as a truly civil scholar (truly, a vir civilis).16 Amid his brief but elaborate self-presentation, however, More reveals something further. Friendship frames fatherhood: in the letter, that is to say, his male identity as a friend frames his identity as a father. Now he is not proposing that friendship supplants fatherhood, as did some Roman writers, for example; rather, he is presenting his image of his public role(s) and of his fatherhood within the framework of his role as a friend. In the international arena, beyond his engagement with the English public and the domestic spheres, his role as a friend inside — and thus citizen of — the republic of letters contextualizes his civic-cum-domestic selfhood.17 A question inevitably arises: what was More’s notion of friendship — insofar as he might be said to have formulated one — and how did he use it? Although answering that question involves a

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brief return to the Historia, leads to an examination of the Life of Pico, then brings one through the Letter to Dorp to Utopia, initially it means looking at Cicero’s De amicitia and at writings by Saint Augustine. I am not about to argue that More merely extracted his understanding of friendship from what Cicero and Saint Augustine had written on the topic. But I am going to suggest that in some of their writings one finds views on friendship that seem, in many respects, to have affinities with those expressed directly or indirectly by More. In De amicitia, one of his dialogues, Cicero proposes through the character Laelius that human friendship is a manifestation of the “bond of goodwill” holding together not merely households and cities but all civilized life and ultimately the universe itself. Laelius asserts, in a declaration that resonates with Edward’s harmonizing of court with city in Historia Richardi Tertii, If you should take the bond of goodwill out of the universe no house or city could stand, nor would even the tillage of the fields abide. If that statement is not clear, then you may understand how great is the power of friendship and of concord from a consideration of the results of enmity and disagreement. For what house is so strong, or what state so enduring that it cannot be utterly overthrown by animosities and division? From this it may be judged how great good there is in friendship. It is said, at any rate, that a certain learned man of Agrigentum sang in inspired strain in Greek verse that in nature and the entire universe whatever things are at rest and whatever are in motion are united by friendship and scattered by discord. And indeed this is a statement which all men not only understand but also approve.18

Thus friendship grows out of nature, specifically from a natural affection for virtue (De amicitia, 9.32).19 Cicero has Laelius begin his account of friendship by saying, “This, however, I do feel first of all — that friendship cannot exist except among good men” (4.18). It is an Aristotelian premise diversely emphasized throughout Laelius’s discourse. For example, he observes that friendship

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“springs rather from nature than from need,” that is, from a natural love for virtue (“For there is nothing more lovable than virtue, nothing that more allures us to affection, since on account of their virtue and uprightness we feel a sort of affection even for those whom we have never seen” [8.27–28]). Again, “And it is far from being true that friendship is cultivated because of need; rather, [it is] cultivated by those who are most abundantly blessed with wealth and power and especially with virtue” (14.51). He adds, “And so, the truth of what I said in the beginning is established: ‘Friendship cannot exist except among good men’” (18.65). Similarly, “Friendship was given to us by nature as the handmaid of virtue” (22.83); “Virtue, . . . Virtue, I say, both creates the bond of friendship and preserves it” (27.100). Finally, at the dialogue’s close, “This is all that I had to say about friendship; but I exhort you both [Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius] so to esteem virtue (without which friendship cannot exist), that, excepting virtue, you will think nothing more excellent than friendship” (27.104). Cicero seems to propose that friendship, as described by Laelius, is the primary expression of a truly civil life. So in effect it seems to be for More — as regards the public sphere, particularly the republic of letters, and always allowing for some Augustinian distinctions. By way of evidence one could cite, for instance, the letters to Dorp, to Lee, and to a monk. Further, from the letter to Lee one could instance a moment such as this in order to suggest the likeness between what Laelius says of friendship and how More appears to have viewed it. Defending Erasmus against his detractors, More praises his friend as “the man whom no material expense and no physical illness or danger could tear from the virtuous labors which he was performing for the good of the entire world” (CW 15:167).Nor is that the only likeness, even though it is arguably the most important. Laelius describes what might be called a style, or perhaps a mode, of friendship that accords closely with how More represents and conducts it in his writings. Laelius says,

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For it is characteristic of the good man, whom I may also call the wise man, to maintain these two rules in friendship: first, let there be no feigning or hypocrisy; for it is more befitting a candid man to hate openly than to mask his real thoughts with a lying face; secondly, let him not only reject charges preferred by another, but also let him avoid even being suspicious and ever believing that his friend has done something wrong. To this should be added a certain affability of speech and manner, which gives no mean flavour to friendship. While unvarying seriousness and gravity are indeed impressive, yet friendship ought to be more unrestrained, genial, and agreeable, and more inclined to be wholly courteous and urbane. (De amicitia, 18.65–66)20

No one would suggest that More necessarily followed Laelius’s advice when, say, he portrayed friendship in his Historia or wrote his letters to Erasmus and to Giles, to Dorp, and to Lee; but it is hard to imagine that he was unaware of that counsel, and it is certain that Laelius’s words capture what proves often to be the temper of his writings on friendship. Nevertheless, as I have indicated earlier, those Ciceronian affinities are complemented and subsumed by Augustinian values and attitudes. These in particular seem to have engaged More’s attention: the idea that friendship originates from and is sustained by God; the opposition between caritas and cupiditas; and the idea that friendship implies the wish to bring one’s friend closer to God. The suggestion could therefore be made that More’s notion of friendship is ultimately Augustinian — that ultimately it accords with Augustine’s. As I shall argue when discussing the Life of Pico, that does appear to be the case; nonetheless, at various points (as I have already remarked), More’s written views on friendship have a distinctly Ciceronian outlook and tone. Not the least interesting aspect of Augustine’s thinking on friendship is his familiarity with Cicero’s views on the subject.21 His divergence from Cicero has a greater immediate interest, however, for where Augustine diverges significantly from his predecessor, so likewise does More. In De amicitia Laelius usually

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describes friendship as deriving from nature but he also identifies it as a gift from the gods (13.47). Augustine asserts that friendship derives from and is sustained by God. For example, in The Confessions he wrote of true friendship: “For true it cannot be, unless thou solderest it betwixt such parties as cleave together, by that love which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us.”22 Further, in De amicitia Cicero uses the word caritas when alluding to the affection between friends. Augustine sometimes uses it in that way, yet he also uses the word to identify a theological concept that marks a major difference between his thinking on friendship and Cicero’s — and which ties in with his belief that true friendship derives from God. For Augustine caritas is God-centered love as distinct from selfcentered love, cupiditas. Therefore, to love another human being rightly is to love that person because she or he has been made in God’s image, belongs to God.23 An example of the concept’s relation to Augustine’s thinking on friendship can be seen in his letter to Felicia (letter 208): “Wherefore, as I myself share your pain, and am solicitous for your welfare in Christ, I have thought it my duty to address this letter, partly consolatory, partly hortatory, to your Holiness, because in the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, in which all His members are one, you are very closely related to us, being loved as an honourable member in that body, and partaking with us of life in His Holy Spirit.”24 The important phrase, as regards the concept of caritas, is “being loved as an honourable member in that body.” Carolinne White pertinently comments on the letter: “As Augustine explained to Felicia in Ep. 208, it is common membership in the body of Christ which brings Christian friends so close together. By being members of the true Church and by loving one another in Christ (my emphasis), Christians are able to create that unity which is so hard to achieve in this life but which will attain perfection in heaven.”25 Finally, that quotation from the letter to Felicia expresses Augustine’s concern for his friend’s spiritual welfare: her “welfare in Christ.” Those Augustinian divergences from Cicero are likewise More’s.

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Life of Pico Even to have glanced at Augustine’s opposition of caritas to cupiditas and how it influenced his thinking on friendship is to recognize that, in More’s Historia, the antithesis between Edward and Richard has an Augustinian affinity. The genial and generous Edward, who in his last speech appeals to his courtiers that they become reconciled to one another in Christian charity, is contrasted with the ruthlessly and immoderately self-loving, the truly friendless Richard. But the similarities between More’s views on friendship and Augustine’s can be seen with greater exactness and clarity when one considers the Life of Pico, especially More’s prefatory letter to Joyeuce Leigh. It seems reasonable to suggest that there one sees More’s views on friendship in microcosm — and it is interesting that his views are expressed in a letter to a woman. Classical discussions of friendship often assumed or declared that it can be shared by men — or, in the cases of some writings, by men and boys — but not by men and women. Early Christian writers such as Augustine changed that in their radical revisioning of friendship as a whole.26 In accord with Augustinian and other precedent, Jerome’s for example, More evidently accepted the idea that friendship can be shared between the sexes.27 If perhaps not a great many of his friendships were with women, not all were with men. I have suggested above that, in the letter to Joyeuce Leigh that prefaces his Life of Pico, More presents on a small scale his views on friendship. There, in fact, he presents what is an essentially Augustinian notion of friendship, one that subsumes but does not erase those aspects of his thinking on the topic that recall Cicero’s. More’s letter to Leigh begins by considering friendship itself: “Hit is and of longe time hath bene my well beloued sister a custome in the begynnyng of the new yere frendes to sende betwene presentis or yeftis / as the witnesses of their loue and frendsship and also signifyenge that they desyre eche to other that yere a gode

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contynuance and prosperous ende of that lukky bigynnyng.”28 More thereupon proceeds by way of contrarium to identify the limitations of friendship so conceived and practiced: But communely all those presentes that are vsed customably all in thys maner betwene frendis to be sent: be such thyngis as pertayne only vnto the body eithir to be fed or to be cledd or some othir wyse delyted: by which hit semyth that their frendshyp is but flesshly and stretchith in maner to the body only. But for asmoch as the loue and amyte of christen folke shuld be rather gostly frendsshyp then bodili: sith that all feithful peple are rather spirituall then carnall (for as thapostle seith we be not now in flessh but in spiret if crist abide in vs) I therfore myne hartely beloued sister in good lukk of this new yere haue sent you such a present as may bere witnes of my tendre loue and zele to the happy continuannce and graciouse encreace of vertue in your soule: and where as the giftis of other folk declare that thei wissh their frendes to be worldeli fortunate myne testifieth that I desire to haue you godly prosperous. (CW 1:51, lines 9–23)

Having begun his letter by identifying Leigh as a friend, More initially considers friendship in terms of utility, that is to say, in terms of material exchange symbolic both of the friends’ mutual affection and of their desire for each other’s material prosperity. Aristotle and thence Cicero had categorized friendship as being based on utility, or on pleasure, or on a love of virtue — the last of which they regarded as the basis of true friendship. In effect, More begins where they did. Then, as the quotation indicates, from consideration of utility as a basis for friendship More goes on to consider pleasure. Material gifts, he writes, are in general useful and physically pleasing (“eithir to be fed or to be cledd or some othir wyse delyted” [CW 1:51, lines 11–12]). He suggests that friendship based on material pleasure is therefore merely corporeal; he implies, in short, that it is friendship tied merely to the world (compare “worldeli fortunate” [line 21]). However, when More writes that

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the “amyte of christen folke shuld be rather gostly frendsshyp then bodili” (lines 14–15), describing it as “spirituall” (line 16) since “as thapostle seith we be not now in flesh but in spiret if crist abide in vs” (lines 16–17), he is clearly identifying true friendship with virtue but subordinating Aristotle’s and Cicero’s secular category of virtue to a theological one that is, at the very least, akin to Augustine’s caritas. And that it is subordination, not replacement, can be readily seen. More writes to Leigh that he has sent her “such a present as may bere witnes of my tendre loue and zele to the happy continuannce and graciouse encreace of vertue in [her] soule,” thus wishing her to be “godly prosperous” (lines 19–21, 23). Writing out of concern for Leigh’s spiritual welfare, he wishes his “entirely beloued sister in crist” to have a “graciouse” increase in virtue (lines 1–2, 20; my emphasis). Yet just as More repositions the notion of virtue in relation to friendship, so he repositions that of pleasure. His subsequent punning on Leigh’s first name (CW 1:52, line 14) seems to indicate that he wants Joyeuce to be strengthened in her knowledge and pursuit of what equates with true joy — of what equates with true pleasure — which brings us back to More’s thinking on pleasure in his “Pageant Verses.” He writes, Which warkis I wolde require you glady to receiue: ne were hit that they be such that for the goodly mater (how so euir they be translated) may delite and please any person that hath any meane desire and loue to god: and that your self is such one as for your vertue and feruent zele to god can not but ioyously receive any thing that meanely sownith either to the reproch of vyce commendation of vertue or honoure and laude of god who preserue you. (lines 9–16)

The affinities between More’s notion of friendship, as expressed in his letter to Leigh, and that of Augustine seem clear. It is no less clear that More’s representations of friendship in the Life of Pico itself are distinctly Augustinian. The prefatory letter to Leigh is of greater importance for an understanding of More’s views on friendship than is the hybrid

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biography-cum-selected-writings that it precedes. Friendship is not a primary concern of More’s in the Life; nevertheless, one needs to consider how in the Life More uses it as a means to represent Pico. Friendship is indicated to be an ambiguous element of Pico’s existence, since worldly friendship is set against its devout counterpart and shown to cause Pico spiritual anxiety. Early in the Life, enmity (“the enuie of his [Pico’s] malitiouse enemyes” [CW 1:57, lines 12–13]) is marked out as an underminer of learning and virtue. No simple and antithetic celebration of amity follows. On the contrary, because of his regard for “hercules Estensis duke of ferrare” — indeed, “at the instant request of the duke which very singulerly loued him” (CW 1:61, lines 7, 11–12) — Pico is described as being caught up in a public disputation even though his view of disputations as such has come to be as follows: but he saide that those dispitions did gret hurt: that wer holden openly to thostentation of lerning and to winne the fauoure of the commune peple and the commendation of folys. He thought that vttirly hit coude vnneth be but that with the desyre of worshippe (which these gasing disputers gape aftir) there is with an inseparable bonde annexed the appetite of his confusione and rebuke whom they argue with. Which appetite ys a dedeli wounde to the sowle and a mortall poyson to charite. (CW 1:61, lines 19–27)

In that particular instance, worldly friendship makes Pico act in a context that now he sees (although once he did not) as hostile to “charite.”29 It makes him act in a context hostile to what More’s prefatory letter has implied to be the essential principle of Christian friendship: caritas (or a theological category indistinguishable from that). The subsequent portrayal of a devout counterpart to that worldly friendship implies a tacit correction to the latter’s staging of vanity: To pore men alway if eni cam he [Pico] plentuosly gaue out his money: and not content only to giue that he had him self redy:

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he wrote ouer that / to one Hierom Beniuenius a florentin a wel letred man (whom for his gret loue toward him and the integrite of his conditions he singulerly fauored) that he shold with his owen money euer helpe pore folk: and giue maidens money to their mariage: and alway send him worde what he had laide out that he might paye hit him a geyn. (CW 1:64, lines 11–18)

There friendship is depicted with an emphasis on learning and freedom from sin — but, above all, on charity. The amity between Pico and Girolamo is presented as the centerpiece to their combining in charitable works.30 That specific significance of the episode would seem to form part of a larger thematic design. More’s Life of Pico sets before Leigh the exemplum of an extraordinarily gifted yet also flawed young man, who moves toward perfection not because of his protean genius but because he learns to redirect love from himself — from his own self-centered pleasures — to God. (And so he seeks to direct his friends).31 The opposition between cupiditas and caritas acts as an elemental motif in More’s text.32 The two anecdotes illustrative of Pico’s friendships thus also illustrate his discovering what the true object of love is and who he truly is.

Letter to Dorp and Utopia Considering the maneuvers that, in the name of friendship, open the Letter to Dorp helps to illuminate the portrayals of friendship in the parerga to Utopia.33 That is to say, it helps to clarify the representation of masculinity in the republic of letters. The start of the Letter to Dorp reveals More trying to quash discord in the republic — namely, criticism of Erasmus — by a coercive appeal to friendship, one that seems to have affinities with both Augustinian and Ciceronian thinking. What makes that appeal especially of interest is More’s play with the idea of charity. Through a rhetoric of hyperbole, More celebrates the charitableness of Erasmian friendship as central to the republic of letters, which thereby enables him subsequently to imply that Dorp, foolishly

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violating charity, runs the risk of exiling himself (of invoking his own banishment) from the republic. In his commentary on the letter, Daniel F. Kinney discusses More’s image of Erasmus as a friend and a disseminator of charity: “More represents Erasmian amicitia as an exemplary expression Christian caritas” (CW 15:496). That accords with my identifying More’s notion of friendship as essentially Augustinian. More says, I would also have liked nothing better than to get to know you [Dorp] face to face, since Erasmus, who feels great affection for both of us, and who is, I hope, equally dear to us both, has instilled in my heart a remarkable longing to see you, to make your acquaintance, and to show you my love. In fact nothing gives him more pleasure than to praise absent friends to friends present, and since his learning and his delightful disposition have endeared him to so many people in various parts of the world, he is constantly trying to make all of them share with each other the same special attachment which binds them to him. Thus he never stops mentioning each of his friends one by one to the rest or describing the gifts for which each merits love, so that each gains a share in the friendship of all. Though he regularly commends all his friends in this way, he commends none more often, more lavishly, or more heartily than he commends you, my dear Dorp. (CW 15:3)34

The opening of More’s letter distinctly emphasizes decorum, affection, friendship. For example, in the Latin original and as the translation above indicates, there are these repetitions (by way of adnominatio): commode, commodius; charus, charissimus, charissime; amicos, amicorum, along with complectendique, amantissimus, and so on. The phrase, “mirum pectori meo desyderium inseuit Erasmus, utriusque nostrum amantissimus” (lines 11–12), is of particular interest, with its obvious pun on Erasmus’s first name. Through More’s rhetorical cunning, the very name of Erasmus seems to link More and Dorp in affection, indirectly suggesting the indecorum — indeed, the uncharitableness — of Dorp’s

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anti-Erasmian polemic. And it does so almost at the letter’s start. Of perhaps greater importance, however, is a phrase that elaborates on that preceding one: “Conatur sedulo ut quo in unum se, omnes animo sunt, eodem etiam inter se omnes conglutinet” (lines 16–18). Amid his emphasis on decorum, affection, and friendship, More implicitly identifies Erasmus as the source and center of both charity and learning in the republic of letters (compare lines 15–16) — almost, as it were, the fons et origo. Now the fact of Erasmus’s being presented in that way does not of course automatically equate charity with Augustinian caritas in what is the letter’s foundational image of More’s friend. But given the meaning that More attaches to his phrase “the amyte of christen folke” in his letter to Leigh, the identification seems to make such a harmony between the two, perhaps even their elision, reasonable at the least. Further, the portrayal of Erasmus concurs with Ficino’s assertion that “love is the author and preserver of all things, and the lord and master of all the arts.”35 To be specific, it agrees with Ficino’s observation that “love can properly be called the eternal bond and coupler of the world — the immovable pillar of its parts and the firm foundation of the whole fabric.”36 Erasmian charity (caritas), in More’s image of his friend, binds together the international community, the social cosmos, of the republic of letters (“eodem etiam inter se omnes conglutinet”) — which, More subsequently implies, Dorp’s foolish uncharitableness toward Erasmus seeks to fracture. In the opening of his letter More thus lays the basis for warning Dorp that to attack Erasmus is at once to attack the republic of letters, More himself, friendship, and charity (caritas). He implicitly defines the true citizen of the republic of letters as the true friend who is a man both of good learning and of Christian charity. Such a man is Erasmus (a man akin to the spiritually matured Pico); he who would attack Erasmus is not. Ultimately More indicates, through his foregrounding of friendship in his portrait of Erasmus, that the man who is a citizen of the republic works for the common weal of the republic, for the common weal of the state(s) environing it,

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and for the common weal of the Church Militant.37 At the start of his Letter to Dorp More makes it possible for Dorp subsequently to recognize what (More believes) he is not being and what he is on the edge of losing. The continuity between More’s letter to Leigh and the start of his Letter to Dorp is Augustinian rather than anything else. But his opening remarks to Dorp seem as well to have an affinity with Laelius’s comments in De amicitia about the style or mode of male friendship. There, as was seen above, Laelius remarks, “Secondly, let him not only reject charges preferred by another, but also let him avoid even being suspicious and ever believing that his friend has done something wrong” (De amicitia 18.65–66). That is clearly pertinent to More’s initial portrayal of Erasmus, which thereafter he develops into the picture of a charitable and otherwise virtuous man of learning uncharitably wronged. No less relevant to More’s way of engaging with Dorp is what Laelius then goes on to say: “To this should be added a certain affability of speech and manner, which gives no mean flavour to friendship” (18.66). Laelius’s words are relevant and interesting, however, because More’s affability could be described in this context only as dangerous, not to say potentially lethal — which brings me back to what Laelius identifies as the first rule of friendship. He says, “First, let there be no feigning or hypocrisy; for it is more befitting a candid man to hate openly than to mask his real thoughts with a lying face” (18.65). Now I am not suggesting that, at the start of his letter, More writes hypocritically to Dorp or is lying; but I am suggesting that not very soon after reading the start of the letter one perceives the scope of More’s irony in confronting Dorp with the iconic presentation of Erasmus. One perceives, too, the menace chilling his affability. The “affability of speech and manner, which gives no mean flavour to friendship” appears rather differently in the letters framing the 1518 edition of Utopia. In discussing those letters I shall consider how they present More in terms of friendship — how they present More in terms of that charitable good learning which, as

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he implies in his letter to Dorp, characterizes the man who is truly a citizen of the republic of letters — and also how, in those terms, More presents himself. It is no accident and entirely appropriate, when one recalls the portrayal of Erasmus at the start of the Letter to Dorp, that the first of the letters in the parerga is by Erasmus himself.38 At the start of his letter to the printer Johann Froben, Erasmus emphasizes that More and he are friends. He seems in particular to be emphasizing that Utopia has been produced by a geographically challenged member of the republic of letters but one who is nonetheless a citizen of importance. The letter begins: While heretofore I have always thought extremely well of all of my friend More’s writings, yet I rather mistrusted my own judgement because of the very close friendship between us. But when I see all the learned unanimously subscribe to my opinion, and esteem even more highly than I the divine wit of this man, not because they love him better but because they see more deeply into his merits, I am wholly confirmed in my opinion and no longer shrink from saying openly what I feel. How admirably would his fortunate disposition have stood forth if his genius had been nurtured in Italy! (Utopia, 5)39

There Erasmus describes More to Froben as a “very close” (artissimam) friend of whose works he has “always thought extremely well,” as do “all the learned.” Actually, the latter esteem More’s “divine wit” (“divinum . . . ingenium”) even more highly than he does — “not because they love him better but because they see more deeply into his merits.” More is identified with universally lauded true learning and with the circulation, the bonds of friendship. He is represented to Froben in terms of amity and good learning: in terms all but identical to those through which More portrays Erasmus to Dorp. The absent term in Erasmus’s account of More is Christian charity. That comes as no surprise since Erasmus’s promotion of Utopia to Froben did not require mention of it, whereas More made it central to his admonition of Dorp. However, it is not

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merely supplied by but implicitly made the heart of Budé’s letter to Lupset. Framing the letter and its ethical centering on caritas (at the expense of cupiditas), are chains of praise: the naming of friends and the linking of their names in celebration. The letter begins and ends by celebrating particular citizens of the republic of letters and thereby the republic itself. The immediate implication of the linked praise is that Budé portrays a circle of friends within the republic of letters who are expanding one another’s circles of knowledge and so creating a circle of intellectual and ethical debt. Indeed, Budé’s epideictic rhetoric at the beginning of his letter approximates an act of Senecan reciprocity. There is praise of Lupset for having given Budé a copy of Utopia; there is praise of More’s book for uniting the useful and the delightful, as well as of More himself for his prudence. Finally, there is an emphasis on the uniqueness of the gift because of the singularity of the Utopian culture it describes — and thus, by implication, on the impossibility of Lupset’s gift actually being reciprocated (see Utopia, 7, 9, 17). What precisely makes Lupset’s gift of Utopia a valuable one, from Budé’s perspective, soon becomes clear. Budé proceeds to offer a brief portrayal of himself as an exemplum of worldly success and amiable folly corrected by the wisdom of a friend and fellow citizen in the republic of letters. The book written by the amiable and prudent More, he implies, confers wisdom by bringing — from Budé’s personally recounted experience — its reader the prudence that enables one to turn from cupiditas to consideration and appreciation of caritas. Describing More himself, Budé writes, “You send me the Utopia of More, a man of the keenest wit, the most agreeable temper and the most profound experience in judging human affairs.”40 Then he tells Lupset, I took [More’s] book with me to the country and kept it in my hands as I bustled about, in constant activity, supervising the various workmen (for you no doubt know, or have at least heard, that for two years now I have been absorbed in business connected with my country house); but when I read it I was so

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fascinated with learning about and reflecting on the customs of the Utopians that I almost forgot and even dismissed entirely the management of my household affairs. What nonsense, I thought, is all this bustle over maintaining a household, this whole business of constantly accumulating more and more! (Utopia, 9)41

He continues: And yet this appetite, like a hidden parasite rooted in our flesh from birth, preys on the whole human race — there is no one who does not see and understand that fact. I might almost say we are bound to admit that this is the real end of legal training and the profession of the civil law: to make each man act with ingrained and calculated malice towards the neighbour to whom he is linked by ties of citizenship and sometimes of blood. He is always grabbing something, taking it away, extorting it, suing for it, squeezing it out, breaking it loose, gouging it away, twisting it off, snatching it, snitching it, filching it, pinching it, pilfering it, pouncing on it — partly with the tacit complicity of the laws, partly with their direct sanction, he carries off what he wants and makes it his own. (Utopia, 9)42

In the first passage cited above, one sees Budé’s self-portrayal as a man who has been successful in worldly affairs, as his recent engagement in the business concerning his country house by no means disagreeably implies (“villaticis . . . negotiis”). Yet there he also portrays himself as a man who has been freshly convinced of the ridiculousness of chasing worldly success: that is to say, convinced by Lupset’s gift of More’s Utopia.43 What he has been specifically made to acknowledge is the daftness of his own impulse to accumulate and the horrible pervasiveness of cupiditas to which it attests. He then considers cupiditas not merely as a pervasive and intrinsic human characteristic but as one that societies institutionalize, building it into the very administration of the law. Moreover there can be little doubt that cupiditas is the phenomenon he has in mind. Later in his letter, reflecting on the Utopians, he asks, “By all the gods above, I wonder what special

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holiness protected the Utopians, so that their island alone was shielded for so many centuries from the assaults, either stealthy or violent, of avarice and cupidity?” (Utopia, 15). In the Latin original, “avarice and cupidity” appear as “avaritia et cupiditas” (Utopia, 14, line 7). No less clear is Budé’s emphasis on caritas in opposition to cupiditas. After dwelling on the evils of individual and institutionalized cupiditas but before turning to consideration of Utopian society, Budé remarks, “But the founder and controller of all property, Christ, left his followers a Pythagorean rule of mutual charity and community property” (Utopia, 13). That remark, anticipating Budé’s subsequent celebration of the Utopians’ veto on private property, distinctly sets the private ownership of things and cupiditas in opposition to the divinely ordained mutuality of charity and of goods.44 The Latin rendered by “charity” is charitatem (Utopia, 12, line 15). Now to observe that Budé opposes charitas to cupiditas is not to suggest that he is, therefore, thinking in strictly Augustinian terms. It is, however, to suggest that, by way of Lupset’s friendship and his consequent gift to Budé of More’s book, Budé is led to a celebration and advocacy of Christian charity at the expense of individual and institutionalized cupiditas. The opposition between c(h)aritas and cupiditas at the heart of Budé’s letter brings together friendship, good letters, and Christian charity with reference to Utopia. In doing so, it implicitly characterizes More as a truly amiable man of good learning and charitable mind — as an ideal citizen of the republic of letters. More is portrayed, in fact, as a man pursuing the common weal of the republic of letters, that of the larger European community, and that of the Church Militant. Budé’s last words to Lupset are, Give my best regards also to More, either by letter, as I said before, or in person. He is a man whose name, in my opinion, and as I have often said, stands high in the ledgers of Minerva; I particularly love and revere him for what he has written about

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this island of the New World, Utopia. Our own age and ages to come will discover in his narrative a seedbed, so to speak, of elegant and useful concepts from which they will be able to borrow practices to be introduced into their own several nations and adapted for use there. Farewell. (Utopia, 19)45

Budé’s presentation of More and his Utopia in the context of friendship thus affirms what More, picturing Erasmus in the Letter to Dorp, obliquely identifies as the attributes of masculinity in the republic of letters. That image of More is elaborated upon in Peter Giles’s following letter to Busleyden, then in More’s initial letter to Giles, and thereafter comprehensively in Busleyden’s to More. The first of those heightens the image of More as a man of good letters and prudence, in fact, as a member of the republic of letters who pursues the common weal of the community beyond the republic itself.46 In doing so, Giles praises Utopia for revealing the enargia, energia, and facunditas of More’s writing — and for revealing an ingenium that allows More to go beyond Plato’s achievement in creating The Republic or Homer’s in creating Ulysses.47 Busleyden’s letter all but fashions More into a counterpart to the Erasmus whom More had portrayed in his Letter to Dorp (Utopia, 251).48

D Various of More’s writings suggest that, for him, friendship was a key way of expressing and characterizing masculinity in the public sphere — and, especially, in the republic of letters. His Historia Richardi Tertii attests to the importance of friendship in defining masculinity. Edward’s capacity for friendship and Richard’s incapacity tell the reader much about the two men as individual males and as men exercising or seeking to exercise political power. In More’s Life of Pico, the account of Pico’s friendships reveals less on the subject of masculinity, although it does point to the transition from cupiditas to caritas that forms an elemental motif in More’s shaping of Pico’s life as an exemplary tale. On the other hand, the entire Life of Pico is itself an

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act of friendship: an enactment of that primarily Augustinian but also Ciceronian view on friendship implicit in More’s prefatory letter to Leigh (with its interesting sidelight on pleasure). Further, the view suggested there is crucial if one is to understand the representations of friendship — and thus the staging of masculinity within the republic of letters — in the Letter to Dorp and the letters framing Utopia. In both cases the man who is an ideal citizen of the republic of letters is indirectly identified as the true friend possessing good letters and guided by Christian charity. Friendship, caritas, and pleasure mingle harmoniously. More, writing in admonition of Dorp, fashions Erasmus into the ideal man of the republic, into the defining male figure in that international community. Budé and Busleyden, in the parerga of Utopia, similarly fashion More. Particularly the Letter to Dorp and the letters by Budé and by Busleyden allow one to see that friendship is, insofar as More represents it or is represented in connection with it, revelatory of being male and thus in turn concerned with many things. Not least among those is pursuit of the common weal throughout different though connected domains of experience: the republic of letters, the state, and the Church Militant.

FIVE

Role-Play, Masculinity, Pleasure — In and Beyond Pursuit of the Common Weal From the “Pageant Verses” to De tristitia Christi, that is, from probably his earliest extant work to certainly his last, More revealed his fascination with what he and so many of his contemporaries saw as the theatricality of human experience. In what follows I shall consider how selection, interplay, and performance of role dominate self-presentation in his A Dialogue of Comfort.1 More does not there describe the world as a theater; on the contrary, he writes of it as a maze and a prison (see, e.g., CW 12, 2.17, 3.19–20). Yet his protagonist, who demonstrably seems his alter ego in A Dialogue, presents himself again and again in terms of roles that he indicates should be prized and enacted (and sometimes he indicates roles that are to be avoided). His doing so accords with More’s remarks, in the letter to Peter Giles prefacing Utopia, about obligatory social or familial roles. It agrees too with More’s remarks in De tristitia Christi about role-play’s linking the individual with Christ and about playing the Good Shepherd.2 Thus the roles adopted by More’s speaker, in keeping with what has been proposed throughout the previous chapter, sometimes imply what it is to be specifically a man; at others, they intimate what one should seek to become as a human being. That strategy 125

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of self-presentation allowed More to show how he was confronting imminent death and, simultaneously, to attempt a composite, immutable, final image of himself for his family and for posterity. He seems with typical cunning to have designed a self-portrayal that would both memorialize him and turn him into an exemplum of adherence to the old religion. Through his self-portrait, in effect, he sought to evade constraint by gaoler and executioner, to continue his resistance to Henrician religious policy, to pursue the common weal of the Church Militant. His self-portrayal has further significance, however. For a start, the roles that More’s surrogate performs or seeks to fulfill include some of those adopted by or imposed on More in his days of less troubled celebrity, long before he entered the Tower. He brings them together and recontextualizes them, he himself having been now recontextualized.3 In addition, the roles sought or enacted by the surrogate More often indicate his concern with the instability of the imagination or of the will to pleasure. The latter, as has been argued above, is a preoccupation in More’s writings from the “Pageant Verses” onwards.4 Given, too, that More’s A Dialogue of Comfort suggests a broadly identifiable sequence to role-selection as a human phenomenon, there are illuminating likenesses and dissimilarities between that work and Vives’s A Fable about Man.5 There appear as well to be telling similarities and differences between A Dialogue and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.6 The second of those textual relationships is at least in part self-conscious, whereas the first seems to be uncalculated. Nevertheless, recognizing and examining them, even if briefly, emphasizes the extent to which More’s last major work implicitly engages with preoccupations that recur throughout the various culture of humanism, namely, self-transformation and exile.7 There is a moment in A Dialogue when More unmistakably unveils his text’s artificiality. He has his protagonist, Antony, say to Nephew Vincent in the preface to book 2:

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And therfor wished I the last tyme after you were gone / when I felt my selfe (to sey the trowth) evyn a litell wery / that I had not so told you styll a long tale alone / but that we had more often enterchaungid wordes / and partid the talke betwene vs, with [ofter] enterparlyng vppon your part / in such maner as lernid men vse betwene the persons / whom they devise disputyng in their faynid diologes. (CW 12:79, lines 20–26)

All More’s gestures toward realism in his text — the topical, political details, the details of prison experience, the individuating habits of speech assigned to Antony and to Vincent — are suddenly countermanded by one gesture notionally affirming verisimilitude but of course negating it.8 Moreover, through the remark about “faynid diologes” that lays bare his status as a persona, Antony draws attention to his maker, famously the “lernid” author of and a refigured participant in a dialogue about No Place. Indeed, those aspects of Antony which readers of A Dialogue since Harpsfield, at least, have plausibly connected with More himself can be seen as authorially projected onto Antony in order that he might become a quite recognizable mask (persona) for his maker — More’s stylized surrogate.9 Thus the roles that Antony chooses, enacts, or rejects would seem to form elements of a none too remotely fictionalized attempt by More, sitting in the shadow of death, at a conclusive self-presentation. The dying and misunderstood Hamlet tries to have his posthumous identity fixed accurately by Horatio. More tries to have his likewise fixed by way of Antony. The first of Antony’s roles clearly associates him with More, for it is that of paterfamilias. The opening speech in A Dialogue, given by Vincent, ends with this portrayal of More’s alter ego — a speech to an imprisoned and death-expecting man: “But vs here shall you leve of your kyndred a sort of very comfortles orphanes / to all whom your good help and counsaile and comfort hath longe bene a great staye / not as an vncle vnto some, and to some as one ferther of kyn / but as though vnto vs all, you had bene a naturall father” (CW 12:4, lines 1–5). Almost at the very start of More’s

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text, Vincent establishes Antony as having performed a male role that More himself certainly prized; and Vincent’s idealizing Antony as paterfamilias harmonizes with some of Margaret Roper’s words about her father.10 But that familiarly Morean role is thereafter affirmed, subsumed, and potentially unsettled by what might be called the master role-play not merely of A Dialogue in particular but of the Tower works in general, that is, imitatio Christi. Given the circumstances and environment in which the Tower works were written — and given, too, one’s being De tristitia Christi, another Treatise on the Passion — it is scarcely a shock to find that imitation of Christ means primarily for Antony (and, thence, More) enacting roles centered on Christ’s Passion. It needs to be emphasized, however, that imitation of the suffering Christ involves More’s surrogate in performing or seeking to enact roles that form a subtly extensive repertoire, a cluster of self-presentations that may connect directly with the Passion or may not. Some connect with it quite indirectly, yet nonetheless serve to confirm the imprisoned More’s (rather than the imprisoned Antony’s) attempt to portray himself as committed to imitation of Christ. Antony’s role as paterfamilias is affirmed by what I have called the master role-play of imitatio Christi because the values of the former — implicit in Vincent’s quoted words — can, of course, be seen as ultimately authorized by those inherent to the latter. The superior status of the latter, on the other hand, displaces and subsumes the authority of the former, an authority that may be destabilized by the uncertainties accompanying any efforts to achieve imitation of Christ. More suggests several times in A Dialogue, for instance, that one may intend to act in imitation of Christ yet finally enact an imitation of Peter: suddenly turn to playing out imitatio Petri and so to betrayal. To “play saynt Peter” would be to parody one’s goal of identification with Christ through sacred role-play — and Antony’s concern, as one of the letters written from the Tower strongly indicates, was More’s as well (CW 12:246, line 16).11

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More implies the preeminence of imitatio Christi as a performative mode in Antony’s long meditation on the Passion (CW 12:3.27), which all but literally concludes A Dialogue. Antony begins: Surely Cosyn as I said before in beryng the losse of worldly goodes, in suffryng of captyuytie thraldome and Imprisonment, and in the glad susteyning of worldly shame, that yf we wold in all those poyntes, dyepely pondre the sample of our saviour hym selfe / It were of yt selfe alone sufficyent, to encorage euery kynd christen man and woman, to refuse none of all those calamytees for his sake / So say I now / for paynefull deth also, that yf we could and wold with dew compassion, conceyve in our myndes a right Imagynacion and remembraunce of Christes byttre paynefull passion, of the many sore blody strokes [that] the cruell tourmentours with roddes and whyppes gaue hym vppon euery part of his holy tendre body / the scornefull crowne of sharp thornes beten down vppon his holy hed, so strayght and so diepe. (CW 12:312, lines 5–17)

He ends, after detailed elaboration on the sufferings of Christ: yf we wold I say remembre these thinges in such wise, as wold god we wold / I verely suppose that the consideracion of his incomparable kyndnes, could not fayle in such wise to inflame our kay cold hartes, and set them on fire in his love / that we shuld fynd our selfe not onely content, but also glad and desierouse to suffre deth for his sake / that so mervelously lovyngly lettid not to sustayne so farre passyng paynfull deth for [ours]. (CW 12:313, lines 1–7)12

Antony’s description of the Passion is an elaborate pragmatographia and its devout virtuosity emphasizes several things. First, it stresses that anyone in the immediate circumstances of Antony and thus of More is obliged — should feel compelled — to act in imitation of Christ: to reenact the Passion. The passage clearly communicates the notion that, in the circumstances of an Antony/More, a ritualized and dramatic consciousness of Christ’s suffering should, beyond any other consideration, be borne in

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mind so that the Passion may be performed anew as one’s last rite. The connection between religious meditation (in fact, meditation on the Passion) and acting made in De tristitia Christi is also made here, albeit less overtly.13 Yet the passage highlights further things as well, for it also points to the various roles generated by reenactment of Christ’s suffering. Most directly it points to roles that are at once Augustinian and scriptural. The beginning of the meditation suggests how memory and imagination can, and should, impel the will to fervent love of God. There Antony suggests in effect that, if memory of the Passion were heightened — were made affectively specific — by use of the imagination, if the understanding were to consider well what the mind would then be viewing, thereupon the will would enthusiastically turn to God in love.14 The triad memory, understanding, and will/love clearly implies that an Augustinian psychology shapes the design of the meditation; moreover, the meditation accords with Augustine’s interest in the notion of attempting sanctification and thereby stabilization of the phantasia.15 (Repeatedly in A Dialogue Antony’s predicament forces him to examine how fear goads the imagination and the imagination heightens fear, threatening to induce faithlessness, Petrine betrayal.)16 Other Augustinian concepts and concerns can also be seen in A Dialogue. There are the allusions to uti non frui as the way to deal with the world, the various portrayals of God as a physician, the allusions, in what seem Augustinian terms, to grace and to free will.17 When the Augustinian design to the meditation is recognized, and therefore seen as one among other Augustinian elements in More’s text, recognition follows of his decorum in having the meditation align with Augustine’s concept of accommodatio. To Vincent and to the implied reader — as to himself — Antony/ More’s meditation advocates imitation of Christ; yet, already in imitation of Christ, Antony/More plainly teaches divine truths, accommodating them to that reader. He enacts in the meditation, that is to say, the role of Augustinian teacher.18

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To perceive his enacting that role in the meditation is to reevaluate his earlier instruction of Vincent throughout A Dialogue. His homely anecdotes, fables, everyday analogues, and exempla then appear not as miscellaneous forms of instruction but as diverse tactics of accommodation. Their being viewed in that way adds, as a consequence, to appreciation of how they characterize Antony. True, they still help make him seem a well-meaning, meandering plain-talker, wandering yet by no means lost in his mostly self-conscious long-windedness. However, when More portrays Antony as the accommodator of divine truth (and perhaps martyr-to-be) who is very worthy and likewise physically unimpressive, at times seemingly foolish, and lacking worldly resources and high status, More also associates his surrogate and therefore himself with Erasmus’s Sileni. In Sileni Alcibiadis, from the 1515 edition of his Adages, Erasmus proposes that history has been radically altered for the better by those he calls Sileni. A “Silenus,” he writes, is a figurine in the form of a flute player that can be opened to reveal the image of a god. According to Erasmus, human life down the centuries has been ameliorated by men who were — or are — like the Silenus figurine. They appear poor, of no social significance, of little physical attractiveness, sometimes (in one way or another) foolish; yet their words and actions reveal them to be transcendently wise and noble within.19 Antisthenes, Diogenes, Epictetus — each was a Silenus, as were the prophets of the Old Testament, the Apostles, and Bishop Martin. Erasmus’s main point is that Sileni prefigure or subsequently reflect Christ: “And what of Christ? Was not He too a marvellous Silenus, (if one may be allowed to use such language of Him)?”20 Thus Antony/More’s performance as Augustinian teacher doubly enacts an imitation of Christ. His accommodation of sacred truth to Vincent and to the reader is Christ-like. His mode of accommodation makes him akin to the Erasmian Sileni and, in that way as well, Christ-like. Yet there is a further and interesting consequence to his affinity with the Sileni. His likeness to them highlights the fact that

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More’s portrayal of Antony links his surrogate with Socrates, for Socrates is the first of the Sileni described by Erasmus.21 It has been variously speculated that More may have so fashioned Antony as to align himself with the Socrates of the Crito and of the Apology (the “Saint Socrates” of Nephalius) — and with the Socrates married to Xantippe.22 After all, in A Dialogue the reader encounters Antony/More the wise teacher who has been imprisoned for truth’s sake (as one infers) and awaits death, who muses on the imperfections of this world and talks of departing it for the life to come. Then, too, the text’s thinly veiled evocations of Dame Alice imply a deliberate though oblique comparison between her and Xantippe.23 Another consequence to More’s having Antony play the Augustinian teacher and the Erasmian Silenus is that his surrogate comes, in some major respects, to resemble Philosophy in Boethius’s The Consolation. More knew well the writings of Augustine and of Erasmus; certainly, by the time he wrote A Dialogue, he was also well acquainted with Boethius’s text.24 Some affinities between the texts are obvious and have necessarily received attention. For example, it has been noted that, like Boethius, More wrote his consolatory text while in prison and anticipating execution, having fallen from high estate for all his proclaimed innocence of any offense against his (tyrannic) king (see CW 12:cxvii). Two affinities between Antony/More and Boethius’s Philosophy are arguably of greater interest than those similarities between the texts, however, and seem to have been ignored or little examined: first, Antony/More teaches in A Dialogue just as Philosophy does in The Consolation; second, in broadly similar ways both understand that human life is exile. The exilic nature of human life forms no small part of what Antony/More teaches. In The Consolation, Boethius’s persona has to be taught early and anew that, while on earth, he is physically yet not therefore spiritually an exile from his true, heavenly home. Philosophy says to him:

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When I saw you weeping in your grief I knew at once that you were wretchedly banished; but how remote was that banishment I should not have known if your speech had not told me. But how far from your homeland have you strayed! Strayed, not been driven, I say; or if you prefer to be thought of as driven, then how far have you driven yourself! For in your case it could never have rightly been possible for anyone else to do this. You must remember what your native country is: not one like that of the old Athenians, governed by the rule of the many, but “there is one ruler, one king” who delights in associating with his subjects, not in driving them out; to be guided by his hand and obey his justice is true freedom. (The Consolation, 1. pros.5.3–15)25

Philosophy portrays life in the world as physical exile from the “native country,” the patria of heaven. It is spiritual exile as well, she says, only if one makes it so. Beyond her speech can be heard Augustine’s and, more distantly still, Plotinus’s voicing nostalgia for the soul’s divine homeland, though of course their concepts of that homeland are quite different from each other. Philosophy’s concept of the patria and of how it is to be reached may not exactly match that of Augustine or of Plotinus; nevertheless, when she talks of spiritual exile and homesickness, her words recall theirs.26 Antony/More’s view on life in the world as exile resembles Philosophy’s and, as is unsurprising, has an affinity with Augustine’s. Nevertheless his view has a domestic emphasis of its own, appropriate to the immediately familial readership and domestic tone of More’s text. Early in A Dialogue, for example, Antony/More says, “Some are in the begynnyng of tribulacion very stoubourn and styff agaynst god / and yet at length tribulacion bryngeth them home” (1.4.27–28). Later, he images exile and expresses nostalgia in terms at first civic then once again domestic. He alludes to Saint Paul: “Nor haue [we] not as saynt paule sayth our dwellyng citie here / but we be sekyng for that citie that is to come” (1.13.6–7).27 Then,

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Now because this world is as I tell you, not our eternall dewellyng but our litell while wandryng / god wold that we shuld in such wise vse it, as folke that were wery of yt / and that we shuld in this vale of labour, toyle / teares, and miserye / not loke for rest and ease / game, pleasure / welth, and felicitie / for they that so do / fare like a fond felow that goyng toward his own house where he shuld be welthye / wold for a tapsters pleasure become an hosteler by the way / and die in a stable and neuer come at home. (1.13.17–24)28

There is no space here for consideration of further examples, nor is that perhaps needed. It can be seen that exile is a concern in A Dialogue and that More presents a traditional, Christian form of that many-sided humanist concern.29 However, the example quoted just now usefully brings us back to Antony/More in his role as teacher. Three things seem most significant. To begin with, the example is an instance of accommodatio — one that shows More’s gift for transfiguring the commonplace. Second, it instances More’s preoccupation in A Dialogue with the instructive scrutiny of pleasure. Repeatedly throughout his text he has Antony focus on people’s insatiable desire for pleasure, their failure to distinguish true pleasure from false, their eagerness to set their own pleasures before the pleasure of God, their carelessness of his displeasure. Repeatedly he has Antony indicate, in effect, how relevant to A Dialogue is the neo-Epicureanism of the “Pageant Verses.”30 Finally, the example instances More’s concern in A Dialogue to make ordered and sanctified use of the imagination, which, so often in his text, he portrays as deceitful and subversive.31 Much that he focuses on and achieves in A Dialogue can there be seen on a small scale. As it happens, Antony/More’s focus on pleasure in the example obliquely indicates the main scriptural role played throughout A Dialogue by More’s surrogate. The “fond fellow” of the example, who “for a tapsters pleasure become[s] an hosteller by the way,” acts the fool for worldly pleasure’s sake. He is a fool because he does not understand the exilic nature of life on earth

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and therefore has false, or no, priorities among his pleasures. Throughout A Dialogue, the reader sees Antony/More playing the fool for Christ’s sake: beginning to reenact the Folly of the Cross. And he emphasizes that he does so. One of the accusations confronted by More in his last letters and in A Dialogue is that his refusal to take the oath is mere folly — that an overly scrupulous conscience and willful unwisdom drive him to a fool’s self-ruin. In a letter from Margaret Roper to Alice Alington, More is reported as acknowledging that “men call [the reason for his refusal to take the oath] as it pleaseth them . . . no conscience but a foolish scruple.”32 Later, with reference to a fable about fools and wisdom directed against him by the now–lord chancellor, who had told it to Alice Alington, he reportedly says, Howbeit daughter Roper, whom my Lord taketh here for the wise men and whom he meaneth to be fools, I cannot very well geast, I cannot well read such riddles. For as Davus saith in Terence, Non sum Oedipus, I may say you wot well, Non sum Oedipus, sed Morus, which name of mine what it signifieth in Greek, I need not tell you. But I trust my Lord reckoneth me among the fools, and so reckon I myself, as my name is in Greek. And I find, I thank God, causes no a few wherefore I so should in very deed. (Last Letters, 77)

More alludes to a role assigned him by Erasmus in the prefatory letter to the Praise of Folly: that of being the man whose name brands him fool but who is actually wise in a foolish world.33 In the letter to Alington, however, More seems to give the role a wider Pauline — and Erasmian — meaning. There More appears to imply that, although from a worldly perspective he may appear to be playing the fool, he is, rather, playing the fool for Christ’s sake. That Pauline notion of sacred folly, iterated by Folly in Erasmus’s text, is variously evoked by Antony/More in A Dialogue. For instance, “To suffre the thing for Christes fayth / that we worldly wrechid folys wene were vilany and shame, the blessid apostles rekenid for greate glory / for they when they were with despite and shame scourgid, and there apon

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commaundid to speke no more of the name of christ / went ther way fro the councell ioyfull and glad, that god had vouchsafed to do them the worship, to suffer shamfull despite for the name of Ihesu” (290–91).34 The “blessid apostles” rejoiced to imitate the folly of their master; and so should we all, as Antony/More goes on to observe.35 Further, he asserts at the same time, to imitate that apparent folly is in fact to achieve the highest wisdom: “And where as he [Christ] thorow shame assendid into glory / we wold be so madd that we rather will fall into euerlastyng shame both before hevyn and hell, than for feare of a short worldly shame, to follow hym into euerlastyng glory” (292, lines 6–9). Suggesting that to act out the Folly of the Cross is to take on a role placing one above guidance or judgment by the wisdom of the world, Antony/More brings A Dialogue into accord and disagreement with Vives’s A Fable about Man. Vives’s narrator tells of “man’s” transforming and (or) perfecting himself through prudentia then sapientia.36 Whether he is proposing that humankind can effect those things by means of the will alone remains unclear.37 But it is clear that he emphasizes the transforming and (or) perfecting power of wisdom in its two guises, just as it is evident that — concerned pervasively with the scope of individual human achievement — he contributes by means of his fable as a whole to the long humanist debate about “the nature and dignity of man.” In A Dialogue Antony/More also participates in that debate, although much less directly. His argument is, unlike Vives’s, that neither prudence nor sapience has the power to transform or to perfect in terms that finally matter, whereas the Folly of the Cross does. To be “man-the-actor” is not to move from prudence through sapience to apotheosis. Instead it is to act the wise exile, the wise prisoner in the world, ever prepared to reenact the folly of Christ and, thereby, transform oneself into a perfected image of God.

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More’s portrayal of himself, through Antony, as Christ’s fool suggests that he was and would be no one else’s.38 Among his juxtaposed or layered roles in A Dialogue, the affectionately and the not so affectionately familial coexist with the Augustinian and the scriptural, the Erasmian and the Boethian — all linked to the master role-play of imitatio Christi. His various roles seem chosen with a devout and politic cunning that unintentionally reveals the positive side of Raphael’s negative remark in Utopia, “Est mortalium natura mutabilis.”39 Antony/More becomes a holy Proteus who, variously embodying the wise and the sacred, appropriates much and therefore denies much to his persecutors. To them remain the tyrannic, the heretical, the infidel, the alien. They become unwitting prisoners, wanderers in a maze, ignorant victims of pleasure, fools.40 And to see that More represents himself as being, in effect, a holy Proteus resolves in part what is otherwise a relevant and unsolvable problem raised by Goffman in his reflections on role-play: “It is a basic assumption of role analysis that each individual will be involved in more than one system or pattern and, therefore, perform more than one role. Each individual will, therefore, have several selves, providing us with the interesting problem of how these selves are related.”41 For More, of course, the problem of how one’s roles — rather than one’s selves — relate to each other had immediate relevance since, as he was always aware and perhaps never so sharply as in A Dialogue, “The soule . . . is the substaunce of the man” (2.12.15–16).

CONCLUSION Throughout his nonpolemical writings More returns again and again to consideration of the will to pleasure. He evidently thought that not to recognize the will to pleasure’s preeminent and insistent power in one’s life is certainly to become its victim. One might well become its victim anyway, as he variously acknowledges, but understanding it at least means being able to contextualize it and creates the possibility of constraining or redirecting it, if necessary: of making life more than an indistinct obedience to the primary impulse. Perceiving a hierarchy of pleasures, a teleology to pleasure itself, was from More’s perspective no small part of living the examined life. It is interesting, however, that, with respect to pleasure as to other things, More saw love complementing or supplanting knowledge. His “Pageant Verses,” Fortune verses, and Utopia, for example, set prudentia before the reader. They offer an insight into pleasure shaped by More’s awareness of rival philosophical traditions and of Augustinian theology. They also offer an insight that is nuanced, especially as far as the two sets of poems are concerned, by his views on gender. Yet his Historia Richardi Tertii emphasizes caritas rather than prudentia, through the strongly gendered characterizations of Edward IV and of Shore’s wife.1 The portrait of Edward suggests that the king does not understand what motivates him. It is not unfair to say that More presents him as too lazy to be bothered with self-knowledge (after all, everyone knows he is king). He is imaged, nevertheless, as a man in whom the will to pleasure seemed at once selfish and benevolent — a man in whom concupiscentia (which is to say, cupiditas) mingled with caritas. In him, failed father and king, pleasure caused and love all but 139

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covered a multitude of sins. The more elaborate and intriguing portrait of Shore’s wife shows, in accord with misogynic cliché, a young woman seduced by luxury and hence by love for material and sensual pleasures. It shows, too, a woman who was tirelessly charitable: a woman who may never have reflected analytically on pleasure but whose caritas humana, or perhaps caritas, gave her life a substance and value that only the uncharitable could or would not perceive.2 Further, although she was connected with the state’s decline under Edward IV, she nonetheless contributed to the common good. There is always, according to More then, tyranny of one kind or another to be confronted in the pursuit of the common weal. Through a diversely manifested prudentia and caritas, he suggests, the potential or actual tyranny of pleasure can perhaps be evaded, or ameliorated, or overcome — within personal life and within that of the community. He implies that the same strategies can be directed against the tyrannic drive of libido dominandi, though of course their success cannot be predicted. In the “Pageant Verses” Manhod’s crude will to power is indicated as being, at least in some instances, refined or sublimated by Age into caritas humana. More claims it was her caritas humana (if not caritas itself, as observed above) that indirectly allowed Shore’s wife to triumph over the tyrannic Richard when he sought to humiliate her. Whatever the case with respect to Shore’s wife, in A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation it is emphatically by means of caritas that Antony/More seeks to overcome what he presents as tyrannic oppression of the old religion. There More implicitly depicts confrontation between the state’s tyrannic power and tradition — between perverse innovation adopted by the state and inherited truth, an encounter that recurs in different guises throughout the polemical writings. Throughout other of his works More expresses desire for society’s liberation from the tyrannic power of false custom.3 In his Fortune verses, to cite one example, More advocates ways of dealing with chance that are

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prudent and customary as distinct from those that are customary and misleading. In Utopia Raphael describes ways in which a new-world society has broken with tyrannic, old-world social conventions and thereby reinvented the state. The nonpolemical works variously imply that pursuing the common weal involves forestalling, or lessening, or defeating tyranny. It also involves role-play. More seems to have been fascinated from almost his earliest writings with the commonplace of life’s journey as a sequence of performances, a taking up and laying aside of masks. He always knew that only one role finally mattered, and he indicated as much in his Life of Pico and A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. He always knew that role should inform those civic roles focused on pursuit of the common weal: prince, counsellor, and lawyer, for instance. Yet he knew other things as well about role-play, and they tell us that early modern notions of life as traveling theater need not be quite as we might sometimes prefer. He knew, for a start, that each role has its decorum, derived from the genre to which it belongs or with which it has affiliations — a point that Morus makes to Raphael when explaining the difference between philosophia civilior and philosophia scholastica. Roles are ultimately contained: they may allow for improvisation, but for all that they are situated within one or more mundane contexts and also sub specie aeternitatis. Moreover, just as roles are not arbitrarily located, nor are they always chosen. We cannot invariably choose, but we do not necessarily lack choice. Most important, the roles we play, chosen or not, ultimately have something behind them. The fact that we are role-playing creatures does not mean, for More, that any given life is merely a collection of roles. An innermost self lies behind or informs them, and it is accountable for how they are performed. That is, surely, why More’s references to life as theater are serious rather than ludic, why fear and performance are at the last so closely entwined in A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. More knew, no less than did Shakespeare and Jonson, that after performance comes judgment.

NOTES

Notes to Introduction 1. More’s role as parent is of particular interest. See John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 2. The first major study was by Edward Surtz, S.J., The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy, Education, Communism in More’s “Utopia” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). Among subsequent studies, see esp. George G. M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s “Utopia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. 145–49, 154–56, 161–63, 166–76; Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s “Utopia” (1991; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 172–75, 177–78. 3. That is to say, gender rather than (for example) legal or political mechanisms. 4. See More: “Utopia” Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. Logan, R. M. Adams, and C. H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95–97 (“Hoc est, inquit ille . . . Hac utendum est tibi”); subsequent reference to Utopia is from this edition, hereafter cited in the text by page number. For an account of philosophia civilior in book 1, see Baker-Smith, More’s “Utopia,” 125–28. See also Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (1978; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213–62, and his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66–110. 5. See, from early among More’s nonpolemical writings, his translation of Lucian’s Menippus, in Thomas More, Translations of Lucian, ed. C. R. Thompson, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, pt. 1 (1974; repr., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 179 (“Tum ego statim . . . vitae genus putaret.” . . . “Optima est, . . . ridensque traducas”). Striking illustrations from later among those writings can of course be found in Utopia. See Utopia, 157 (“Nam ne ullam . . . ediscunt pueri” and “At sunt in . . . item astrorum). Also see 163 (“Nempe virtutem definiunt . . . societate praebeamus”). More’s preference is one he shares with Seneca and with Erasmus. 143

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6. For discussions of medieval and Renaissance thought — and its antecedents — on the common good, see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:44–46, 57–65, 175–80; J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–1450 (1988; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 24, 311, 596; J. H. Burns, ed., with M. Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 18–29, 142–46, 258–73; A. Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24–28; A. P. Monahan, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300–1600 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 18, 30, 41–42, 88, 139, 203, 267, 291; M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 24–26, 46–56, 163–69, 379–83. 7. See De re publica, 1.25.39, in Cicero, De re publica, De legibus, ed. and trans. C. W. Keyes, Loeb Classical Library (1928; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 8. Cf. More’s The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, ed. L. A. Schuster et al., in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8, pt. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 590, lines 28–36. In the parerga of Utopia, Anemolius’s unknown creator implies by way of the poet-laureate’s verses that More’s text is comparable to or maybe surpasses Plato’s Republic because it is a practical exemplum of an ideal commonwealth — a working textual model up for scrutiny, so to speak — rather than an abstraction. For a discussion of medieval and Renaissance thinking on the state, see, among many others, J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1928; repr., London: Methuen, 1941), 134–56; D. W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: The Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1–264; Black, Political Thought in Europe, 108–16, 186–91; N. Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on the State and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); M. Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35–125; Skinner, Visions of Politics, esp. 2:368–413; C. Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 218–27. 9. See “ex religione deprompta . . . rationem putant” (Utopia). 10. See “Servanda igitur . . . iniuria est” (ibid., 165).

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Notes to Chapter One 1. See English Poems, Life of Pico, and The Last Things, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), xviii, where Edwards suggests that the “Pageant Verses” were written either between 1492 and 1494 or between 1496 and 1501. References to the English verse, cited by line number, and to the texts edited with it, cited by page number, are from this edition, hereafter cited as CW 1. 2. S. C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life: An Exploration into the Renaissance Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 157–59; D. D. Carnicelli, ed., Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke, by Lord Morley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 49, suggests that More was influenced by the illustrative tradition inspired by the Trionfi rather than by the text itself. Subsequent reference to Morley is from that edition. See also R. Coogan, “Petrarch and Thomas More,” Moreana 6 (1969): 19–30. On ages of man literature and art, see M. Dove, The Perfect Age of Man’s Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); E. Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 3. Respectively, R. A. Duffy, “Thomas More’s ‘Nine Pageants,’ ” Moreana 50 (1976): 15–32; E. McCutcheon, “Number Symbolism in St. Thomas More’s ‘Pageant Verses,’” Moreana 70 (1981): 29–32; M. E. Willow, An Analysis of the English Poems of St. Thomas More (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1974), 73–138. A. D. Cousins, “St. Thomas More as English Poet,” in Thomas More: Essays on the Icon, ed. D. Grace and B. Byron (Melbourne: Dove Communications, 1978), 43–52, esp. 48–51. See also A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 10–13; L. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34. 4. See Willow, An Analysis, 78–80, and Edwards, CW 1:191. 5. St. Thomas More: “The History of King Richard III” and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, ed. R. S. Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), in R. S. Sylvester, ed., The Yale Edition of the Works of St. Thomas More, Selected Works, 3:114. 6. The first scholar, as far as I am aware, to have considered the affiliations of the “Pageant Verses” with epigram and emblem was H. H. Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (1947; repr., New York: Octagon, 1966), 23–79,esp. 31–35. 7. Cf. More’s “Lewes the Loste Lover” and “Davy the Diser,” written in the Tower.

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8. See CW 1:156, lines 19–22. Willow, An Analysis, also recognizes the theatrical connotations of the term, but she cites the OED and E. K. Chambers, not More (78–79). 9. See De tristitia Christi, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 14, ed. C. H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 1.253, lines 6–10 (esp. “ipsius personam gerere” [lines 7–8]) and 1.271, lines 3–4 (“bonum pastorem agit”). This volume is hereafter cited as CW 14. See also More’s letter to Margaret Roper, written in the Tower ca. April 17, 1534, in The Last Letters of Thomas More, ed. A. De Silva (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 59: “When they had played their pageant and were gone out of the palace, then I was called in again.” 10. The most influential discussion of More’s sensitivity to the theatricality of human life remains S. Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning from More to Shakespeare (1980; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 11–73. On More’s interest in plays, see H. B. Norland, Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485–1558 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 111–27. 11. See Six Anonymous Plays: First Series (c. 1510–1537), ed. J. S. Farmer (1905; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 165; subsequent reference to Mundus et infans is from this edition. 12. See, for example, the accounts from Quintilian to Hoskins brought together by L. A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 1968), 68–69. She does not cite the account of the trope (there called “superlatio”) in Ad herennium, 4.33.44, which accords with the accounts cited by her. See the edition and translation of that work by H. Caplan (1954; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 13. That he uses optatio is apparent; however, that he also uses dementiens in his final words seems clear when his preceding line of speech is borne in mind. 14. The second enthymeme can be described as: books deny me my pleasure; if “these hateful bookes all” were burnt, therefore I would have no hindrance to perpetual enjoyment. The second enthymeme partly incorporates the combinations of dementiens and optatio occurring at the speech’s middle and end. The enthymeme is valid but not true — a point that will be repeated in discussion of Manhod’s speech. 15. Contrast the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 980a (“All men by nature desire to know”) with his Nichomachean Ethics, 3.12.1119b. More’s Chyldhod seems to contradict the first but affirm the second. The Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. W. D. Ross (Chicago: Benton, 1952), 1:499, 2:366. Subsequent reference to Aristotle, unless otherwise noted, is from this edition.

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16. R. Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (1984; repr., London: Dent, 1985), remarks, “the idea that pleasure was the goal of human life was neither radical nor uncommon in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” (174). His point, made with specific reference to Utopia, is that Epicurus need not be seen as influencing More’s thought on the human impulse to pleasure. On the history of Epicurean philosophy in the Renaissance, see The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 374–86; H. Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1989), 142–213. 17. See Latin Poems, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, pt. 2, ed. C. H. Miller et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 142–43, 353, where the editors observe, “More’s immediate source is probably Cicero (De finibus 2.7.22).” Reference to the Latin poems is from this edition, hereafter cited as CW 3.2. See also E. Surtz, S.J., The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy, Education, and Communism in More’s “Utopia” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 26. Surtz, like the editors of the Latin poems, points to Diogenes Laertius as another likely source of More’s knowledge of Epicurus’s philosophy. 18. See De finibus bonorum et malorum, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, (New York: MacMillan, 1914), 1.9.29–30. Cf. A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 12, ed. L. L. Martz and F. Manley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 3.21; hereafter cited as CW 12. 19. On More’s engaging with Valla in Utopia, see G. M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s “Utopia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 157–63, esp. 163. See also Surtz, The Praise of Pleasure, 25–26. 20. A notable example can be seen in C. Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1970), 1:105–50. 21. Reference to De voluptate is from L. Valla, On Pleasure: De Voluptate, ed. M. Lorch, trans. A. K. Hieatt and M. Lorch (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 3.5.4 (“Corporis bonum quod intelligent . . . . Ceterum si recte . . . puerilem affectum.’’). 22. My understanding of the term “right reason” and of its history has been chiefly guided by R. Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). 23. Albeit here in translation. See Cicero, De officiis, ed. and trans. W. Miller, (1913; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1.43.153 (“quae est rerum expetendarum fugiendarumque scientia”). Subsequent reference to De officiis is from this edition and translation. Discussions of wisdom literature in the Renaissance include E. F. Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

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University Press, 1958); V. Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). 24. And in the case of Manhod as in that of Chyldhod, the final enthymeme is valid but not true. One might add that the icon of Manhod implies that education has failed to humanize (in Ciceronian terms) Chyldhod. See De oratore 3.15.57–58, in De oratore, De fato, Paradoxa stoicorum, De partitione oratoria, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols., ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (1942; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965–67). Cf. More’s letter to William Gonell, May 22, 1518?, in St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, in The Yale Edition of the Works of St. Thomas More, Modernized Series, ed. E. F. Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 103–07, esp. 104–05. See also “Utopia”: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, C. H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 231 (subsequent reference to Utopia is from this edition); Letter to Dorp, in In Defense of Humanism, “Letter to Martin Dorp,” “Letter to The University of Oxford,” “Letter to Edward Lee,” “Letter to a Monk,” with a New Text and Translation of “Historia Richardi Tertii,” in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15, ed. D. Kinney (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 15, 49, and esp. 77 (hereafter cited as CW 15). On education and the gaining of prudence, see Letter to the University of Oxford, 139. 25. Male childhood, specifically, and male adulthood: becoming and living as a man in the world are More’s immediate though by no means exclusive preoccupations in the “Pageant Verses.” 26. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, 50–151, was the first to discuss, to my knowledge, the iconography of Iuventus in conjunction with the “Pageant Verses.” 27. Cruelty is indeed an issue here, though it is not a main issue, and one can infer this in the icon of Manhod in light of Latin epigram 37 and of the Utopians’ views on blood sports. See Utopia, 170–73. 28. Duffy, “Thomas More’s ‘Nine Pageants,’ ” 17n2, reads Manhod as focused on “dominance,” “mastery,” “power,” and “control.” I agree, but our readings differ widely. I do not wish to suggest, although I use the terms “will to pleasure” and “will to power,” that More evaluates human life in proto-Nietzschean terms. For More, of course, the deep truth is neither Dionysian nor Apollonian. Socrates is, for More, a guide to the ultimately true: the Socrates of Nephalius and one of the Sileni Alcibiadis — not Nietzsche’s Socrates(es). 29. “And many a lady,” he says (my emphasis). 30. That is partly the point, of course, in the characterization of Manhood: subtlety is beneath him, even if he were capable of it. 31. To be sure, his pleasures are all part of a complex cultural formation, to use an old-fashioned phrase; nonetheless, the culture of the hunt

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(in its various forms) involves dominating some animals in order to kill others. 32. The most thorough demonstration seems to be by Dove, The Perfect Age of Man’s Life. A pertinent example of picturing Iuventus as the high point of human life can be seen in Ralegh’s The History of the World, at 1.2.5. Reference is to the edition by C. A. Patrides (London: MacMillan, 1971). Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. R. Roberts, 2:2.12.1388b. 33. De officiis, 1.4.11 (“[Sed] inter hominem et beluam . . . praeparat res necessarias”). The lines 1.4.13–14 are also relevant here, if less directly so than the earlier paragraph. 34. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, ed. and trans. J. E. King, (1927; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 4.15.34: “quando igitur virtus est . . . ipsa virtus brevissime recta ratio dici potest.” 35. One could pertinently glance at Criseyde’s calling Troylus “Cupides sone.” See Troylus and Criseyde, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. J. H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), 5.1590. Subsequent reference to Chaucer is from this edition. Reference to Petrarch’s Trionfi is from The Triumphs, trans. E. H. Wilkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 24. Morley’s rendition is: “Even so was I unto all other pleasure / Deaf and blynde out of all measure.” See The Tryumphe of Love, 3.159–60. Petrarch’s original reads: “Ad ogni altro piacer cieco era e sordo.” Reference to the original, here and subsequently, is to F. Petrarca, Rime, Trionfi, e poesie Latina, ed. F. Neri et al. (Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1951), 498, line 109. 36. “Prudence and Moderation were near by,” in Wilkins’s version (42); Petrarch’s original words are: “Senno e Modestia a l’altre due confine” (511, line 82). 37. E. F. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 141–50, has a deft commentary on Ficino and Pico as mythographers of Venus, and a celebrated discussion of “Blind Cupid” (95–128). The standard discussion of Venus as Venus Victrix is E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (1958; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 91–96. 38. See Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, lines 260–80 (cf. 218–24) and his Knight’s Tale, lines 1931–35. Cf. Latin epigrams 123 and 143. 39. See, in this regard, Seneca’s De constantia, in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. J. W. Basore (1928; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1:12.1–2. 40. Reference to Epicurus is from The Epicurean Philosophers, ed. J. Gaskin, trans. C. Bailey, R. D. Hicks, and J. C. A. Gaskin (London: Dent, 1995), 45, quoting from the “Letter to Menoeceus.” 41. The fifth of “The Principal Doctrines,” quoted in ibid., 5.

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42. “Letter to Menoeceus,” ibid., 45–46. 43. See Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. and trans. F. E. Robbins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 4.10, reprinted in Burrow, The Ages of Man, 197–98. 44. See G. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, 2 vols., ed. V. Romano (Bari: Lateza & Figli, 1951), 2:9.94c. Subsequent reference is to this edition. 45. See Genealogie, 1:8.85a–85b. See also Macrobius, Saturnalia, trans. P. V. Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 1.7.32. Cf. Knight’s Tale, lines 2443–48. Modern commentary on the mythography of Saturn includes Panofsky, “Father Time,” Studies in Iconology, 69–93, and L. Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), esp. 21–23. 46. Cicero, De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, ed. and trans. W. A. Falconer (1923; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 6.17 and 12.39, respectively (“Nihil igitur . . . senectus solet”; “Sequitur tertia . . . adulescentia vitiosissimum”). Cf. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 2:1, 5–6, 1095b–96b and 10:6–7, 1176a–77b. 47. De officiis, 1.34.123 (“Senibus autem . . . plurimum adiuvent”); cf. Latin epigram 73. 48. 1.21.70 (“facilior et tutior . . . res gerendas accommodaverunt”). 49. That not all men can do it, or that — of those who can — not all do, is beside the point here. Old age is when that happens, if it is going to, among those who can make it happen. And they may or may not, of course, be emergent from the group identifiable in terms of the icon of Iuventus. 50. Quintilian writes, “The public man [as distinct from the philosopher living away from public affairs] is truly wise and devotes himself not to idle disputations, but to the administration of the state.” See Institutio Oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (1920; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 11.1.35 (“At vir civilis vereque sapiens, qui . . . rei publicae dederit”). 51. How far More’s portrayal of Age differs from medieval English representations of old age can be inferred from P. Tristram, “Age and Its Perspectives,” Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Elek, 1976), 62–94. 52. Epicurus, “Vatican Sayings,” no. 58, in Gaskin, Epicurean Philosophers, 52. 53. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in ibid., 44–45. 54. See, for example, in ibid., Epicurus, “Principal Doctrines” 7, 8, 14; “Letter to Menoeceus”; “Vatican Sayings,” 17, 23, 27–28, 41, 52, 54, 58; “Fragments in Greek Literature” 86, cf. 87; “Sayings Quoted by Seneca”: “The wise man will not be involved in public affairs unless something prevents him.”

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55. Cf. Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 78. 56. See esp. Surtz, The Praise of Pleasure, 23–77, and Logan, The Meaning of More’s “Utopia,” 145–49, 166–81. 57. Thus, More’s icon does not set before the reader simply the vanity of things and mindfulness of dying. 58. Reference to Virgil is from The “Aeneid” of Virgil, Books 1–6, ed. R. D. Williams (1972; repr., London: MacMillan, 1975). I have translated phrases from 4.174 and 190, respectively; see also lines 180–81, which mention the monstrousness and destructiveness of Fama. For discussion of her, see L. Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford, 1986), 123–27. The Fame of Petrarch’s Trionfi is also Virgilian in origin. Cf. A Dialogue of Comfort, 3.9, 3.27. 59. Cf. Aeneid, 4.188–97. More’s Fame mentions the “people” twice, emphasizing the dependence of fame upon popular acclaim and memory. Latin epigram 132 stresses confusion as an element of fame generated by popular opinion. Cf. Rogers, Yale Edition, where More, addressing William Gonell on the subject of fame, writes, “A mind must be uneasy which ever wavers between joy and sadness because of other men’s opinions” (104). 60. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols., ed. and trans. F. J. Miller (1916; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 2:15.234–35: “tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas, / omnia destruitis.” 61. The translation of More’s Latin is from CW 3:2 of Epigram 272, which is a reprint of this poem. 62. Cf. Marsilio Ficino: The “Philebus” Commentary, ed. and trans. M. J. B. Allen (1975; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 484–86. 63 See, respectively, the first of “The Principal Doctrines” and the “Letter to Menoeceus,” in Gaskin, Epicurean Philosophers, 5, 43. Cf. “Principal Doctrines,” nos. 18–22 (Gaskin, 7–8). 64. From De finibus, 1, 63, in ibid., 65. 65. CW 1: 177, lines 22–31. 66. Cf. Francis Quarles, Emblemes, 3.14 (“O that men were wise, and that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end”) for an interesting counterpart to the idea of a myopic secularity. 67. Boethius’s Consolation seems to offer an indirectly Christian correction of Epicurus. See The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (1973; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1.4.104–06, 3.2.48–51, 3.9–10, 4.3.24–31. 68. Cicero, De re publica, De legibus, ed. and trans. C. W. Keyes (1928; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), De re publica,

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1.25.39 (“coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus”). On the Ciceronian subtext to Utopia, see G. B. Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 109–27. 69. See The City of God against the Pagans, 7 vols., ed. and trans. G. E. McCracken et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957–72), 19, 21.

Notes to Chapter Two 1. See Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. G. E. McCracken et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957–72), 6:19.4 (“in hoc bello intestino sumus” and “‘spiritus concupiscit adversus carnem’”). Subsequent reference to The City of God is from this edition. Augustine alludes to Galatians 5:17, as also noted by the editor and translator of volume 6, W. C. Greene. 2. Ibid., 6:19.4 (“Quae mala Stoici philosophi . . . mortis quaerit auxilium”). 3. See, for example, The Free Choice of the Will, 2.20.54, and Grace and Free Will, 15.31, in Saint Augustine, The Teacher: The Free Choice of the Will, Grace and Free Will, trans. R. P. Russell, in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 59 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968). Reference hereafter to The Free Choice of the Will and Grace and Free Will is from this edition. Cf. The City of God, 5.9–11, and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, ed. and trans. J. E. King (1927; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 4.17.37–39. As is well documented and discussed, Augustine’s thinking on freedom of the will changed over the years. Here I emphasize Augustine’s mature thought on the issue and the aspect with which More seems to have had most sympathy. See, for example, his The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, ed. L. A. Schuster et al., 3 parts, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 503–05, 510–11, 799. Subsequent reference to The Confutation is to this edition, cited as CW 8. See also Thomas More, Treatise on the Passion, Treatise on the Blessed Body, and Instructions and Prayers, ed. G. E. Haupt, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 13 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), A Treatise upon the Passion, 36–38. Subsequent references to the treatises, instructions, and prayers are from this volume, cited as CW 13. 4. William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” A Usable Past Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 20. M. L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985),

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has significantly added to knowledge of Augustine’s complex relations to Stoicism. See in particular her account of Augustine, Stoicism, and the issue of the will’s freedom (2:225–32). 5. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism,” 58. 6. Boethius, Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (1973; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Unless otherwise stated, the translations from The Consolation are mine. On the interplay between Stoic and other concepts in The Consolation, see H. Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (1981; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 223–53. Reference to More is from English Poems, Life of Pico, and The Last Things, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 1, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), hereafter cited as CW 1. Nothing seems to be known about The Boke of Fortune apart from its title. See CW 1:xxix–xxx. 7. See “De Trinitate,” 31–34, in Boethius, Theological Tractates. Chadwick, Boethius, remarks that Boethius’s Theological Tractates “manifest a deep knowledge of St Augustine”(xiii). Affinities between Augustine’s writings and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy have been discussed before, as one would expect, and the literature on the topic is not small. See, for example, P. Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition litteraire antecedents et posterite de Boece (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1967). 8. In addition to the sections of The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer mentioned above in note 3, see A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. L. L. Martz and F. Manley, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 3.21 and 24. 9. See Boethius, The Consolation, 270–71, note b, which highlights Courcelle’s La Consolation de Philosophie, 161ff; see also 10 and 230. 10. Confessions, 2 vols., ed. W. H. D. Rouse and trans. W. Watts (1912; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 1:1.1; my translation. 11. Confessions, 13.36 and 38; my translation. Cf. The City of God, 11.8 and 22.30. 12. See Expositions on the Book of Psalms, trans. A. C. Coxe (1888; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 86.1 and 8, 148.6 and 8 (according to the numbers assigned to the Psalms in the Vulgate); The Six Enneads, trans. S. MacKenna and B. S. Page (Chicago: Benton, 1952). 13. Philosophy alludes to the Stoic sage in her opening words: “Quisquis composito serenus aevo.” Cf. Boethius, The Consolation, 1.met.7.20–31.

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14. The celebration of aurea mediocritas looks back from the Stoics to Aristotle. 15. On freedom of the will, see also Boethius, The Consolation, 5.pros.6.163–66. 16. See J. M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (1994; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 97–112; R. Teske, “Augustine’s Theory of Soul,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. E. Stump and N. Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 116–23. 17. Germain Marc’hadour (personal communication) has drawn my attention to Wisdom 9:15 and to its citation by both Erasmus and More. 18. Respectively, Cicero, De Inventione, 1.2.2, in De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, and Topica, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell (1949; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum 6, in De Oratore Book III, De Fato, Paradoxa Stoicorum, and De Partitione Oratoria, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (1942; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); De Partitione is hereafter cited in the text. 19. CW 1:xxviii; “Possibly” the poems were written “much earlier” than “the ‘Rufull Lamentation,’” Edwards suggests. That would mean the poem was written prior to 1504 (xxiv). 20. More refers to Boethius in The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, part 2, book 8, p. 939, citing his defense of the will’s freedom. 21. See, for example, The City of God, 19.11, and Boethius, The Consolation, 4.met.1.19–30. 22. See, for example, The City of God, 11.28; Confessions, 4.10–13; and Boethius, The Consolation, 3.pros.7–pros.11. More concurs, too, in the final epigram of his “Pageant Verses,” which has been discussed in chapter 1. 23. See John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, Early English Text Society, 4 vols. (1924; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). M. E. Willow, An Analysis of the English Poems of St. Thomas More (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1974), points out similarities between some images in the Fall and some in More’s Fortune verses (200–01). 24. See, for example, the Fall of Princes, 1.6126, 6182 in relation to 3.212, 315, 332, 343, 350, 449–50, 587. 25. Willow, An Analysis, 192, suggests an affinity here between Fortune and Erasmus’s Folly. 26. See Chaucer, Boece, Metre II. Si quantas rapidis, lines 17–18, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. J. H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977). 27. “Quod si manendi . . . sterilesque pensares.” 28. “Anxia enim res est . . . cum fortunae suae condicione concordat” (ibid., 2.pros.1.43–53).

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29. Augustine’s ridicule of deifying “fortune” can be seen in The City of God, 4.18–19. 30. See Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, 8–9. Cato is Cicero’s prime and direct example of the Stoic wise man. In CW 1: 205, the editor notes that W. E. Campbell and A. W. Reed first linked More’s Byas with Cicero’s Bias (they edited the English Works in 1931) and that R. M. Coogan thereafter linked More’s exemplum with Petrarch’s account of Bias in his rerum memorandarum libri. Cf. E. F. Rogers, ed., Thomas More: Selected Letters, in The Yale Edition of the Works of St. Thomas More, Modernized Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 104, where More wrote to Gonell of “those shadows of good things which almost all mortals, through ignorance of truth, greedily snatch at as if they were true goods” (104). However, see also Cicero, De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, ed. and trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library (1923; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), De amicitia, 16.59. 31. See Boethius, The Consolation, 2.pros.5.40–100, esp.: “Paucis enim minimisque natura contenta est” (44). 32. CW 1:207 indicates that some of what More’s speaker says in the lines quoted may have — or could be seen as having — associations with proverbs; however, the analogues to and (or) sources of the lines that may be seen as associated with proverbs were themselves widely familiar in More’s time. Reference to Horace is from The Odes, ed. and trans. J. Michie, (1964; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). The Wife of Bath cites Seneca when she defends “glad poverty.” (I owe that reference to Germain Marc’hadour [personal communication]). 33. There is in the poems a glancing association between greed and pride. Reference to the Fortune verses is from CW 1, cited previously in my discussion of the “Pageant Verses.” In “The wordes of Fortune to the people,” Fortune offers rule of a “common wele” as an enticement to worship of her: her point is, in fact, that to rule is to gain for oneself a godlike power, though one apparently both like and not so obviously unlike hers (81–87, esp. “ioy, reste & pease” in the stanza’s final line, and cf. “Age” in the “Pageant Verses”). Greed for power is implicitly associated with pride. In “To them that tristith in ffortune,” pride and greed are linked at the start (96–97) and obliquely aligned with pleasure (100). Pride is indirectly associated with greed again in lines 145–46 and 152 (compare the ironic allusion to pride in 177; 175–76 have a relevance to More himself). Poverty, as opposed to “Stately fortune,” is called “humble” (223), and Fortune is called “prowde” (251). The association between greed and pride is undeveloped; in particular, the causal relation between them is not considered, as will not be the case in Utopia.

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34. I have consulted A Concordance to the Utopia of St. Thomas More and A Frequency Word List, ed. L. J. Bolchazy, with G. Gichan and F. Theobald (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1978). 35. “Utopia”: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, C. H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239, 238; hereafter cited by page number in the text, referring first to the page of the translation and then to that of the Latin (if quoted). 36. On the banning of belief in “blind chance,” see 222: “sancte ac severe vetuit ne quis.” Augustine likewise rejected the notion of Fortune. As Colish, The Stoic Tradition, neatly puts it, Augustine “eliminates completely the catetgory of fortune or fate, whether as a synonym for God’s ordering of the world or as an agency through which God operates.” She adds, “He redefines providence as God’s foreknowledge and argues for its compatibility with free will through an analysis of the divine psychology” (2:228). 37. See, respectively, “ex religione deprompta . . . rationem putant” and “Servanda igitur . . . iniuria est.” 38. Utopia, 31n2. 39. Moving further away still from the idea of chance, he wrote almost straight after those lines quoted: “I wonder what special holiness protected the Utopians,” and, “Would that almighty God, in his infinite goodness, had dealt as kindly with those regions which embrace and take their title from his most holy name!” (Utopia, 15). 40. Utopus is alleged to have designed “the whole city” of Amaurot: the paradigmatically uniform and unostentatious Utopian city (Utopia, 119). Along with vetoing belief that chance rules the universe, he forbade belief that the soul is mortal. Thus he made possible the Utopian orthodoxy that fear of punishment in the hereafter restrains a person from antisocial behavior, in particular, from flouting the law in order “to gratify his own personal greed” (“Cui enim dubium esse potest quin is publicas patriae leges aut arte clam eludere aut vi nitatur infringere dum suae privatim cupiditati serviat, cui nullus ultra leges metus, nihil ultra corpus spei superest amplius?”); see 225/224. On greed and pride, see also Utopia, 137–39. 41. Raphael immediately adds: “But this sort of vice has no place whatever in the Utopian scheme of things” (139). 42. See Utopia, 155, paragraph 1. The rich are used as the focus for discussion of Europeans’ greed, the false scale of values engendered by it, and how it makes them vulnerable to chance. As has been indicated in the text, Raphael projects the figure of Fortune into his narrative at this point (the Surtz translation renders “chance” and not “Fortune.”) See Utopia, ed. E. Surtz, SJ, and J. Hexter, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

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Notes to Chapter Three 1. Reference to the Latin verse is from Latin Poems, ed. C. H. Miller et al., The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3.2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); hereafter cited as CW 3.2. In connection with the early modern debate about women, and their education, see (among many commentaries, others of which are cited in the notes below) I. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); L. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), esp. 18–48; A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), 29–57; T. Fenster and C. A. Lees, eds., Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2002). The best reading known to me of More’s To Candidus is P. J. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 158–66. In this disscussion I have especially taken into account M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 174–220, and Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:57–89. 2. See S. Vecchio, “The Good Wife,” trans. C. Botsford, in A History of Women, gen. eds. G. Duby and M. Perrot, II Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. C. Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 118–21. The idea had a classical lineage; for example, in [Aristotle’s] Economics and in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus it is proposed that a husband educate his wife as household manager. 3. For example, see Giovanni Michele Bruto, quoted at some length from La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente (1555), in Thomas Salter’s translation (1579), by R. Kelso in her Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 59–60. 4. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982); hereafter cited in the text. For an instance of explicit correction of Boccaccio, see 1.39.2–1.39.3. There is a thoughtful discussion of the work’s relation to Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris in Richards’s introduction, at xxxiv–xxxviii. On the City as refuge and resource, see 3.19.1. On the subject of misogynic male fictions, see 1.1.1–1.2.2, 1.8.3–1.8.10, and 1.9.1–1.9.2. See also M. Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Cite des Dames” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); C. Dinshaw

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and D. Wallace, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 184–94. 5. Christine acknowledges, in effect, her City to be a textual space when she has Reason command that the City be built in “the Field of Letters” (1.8.1). On women’s fulfilling their capabilities as women, see, for example, 3.19 — and on the feminist significance of Christine’s advocating that, see Richards’s introduction (ibid., xxx). On women’s “cultivat[ing] virtue” and gaining inclusion in the City, see 3.19.6; cf. 3.19.1 on the City as a mirror to virtuous women. Christine implicitly links her City with Augustine’s at 3.18.9. 6. See also Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, trans. K. L. Forhan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. 7. Reference is from A. M. van Schurman, Whether a Christian Woman Should be Educated and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle, ed. and trans. J. L. Irwin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 27, 26. 8. Ibid., 28, 33, 30. 9. See Gisbertus Voetius, Concerning Women, in van Schurman, Whether a Christian Woman, 126–28, 117–18. Agrippa, writing more or less chronologically between de Pizan and van Schurman, proposes that “Women . . . invented all the liberal arts,” that they are preeminently pious and learned, that they are the first and best educators, that their learning is exercised not only in the domestic domain and, further, that women are improperly educated insofar as they are prepared for a life of unjust domestic confinement. See Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Pre-eminence of the Female Sex, ed. and trans. A. Rabil Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 76, 79–82, 83, 84–85, 95. See M. Fonte, The Worth of Women wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. V. Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 100–01. Cf. also G. B. Gelli, Circe, trans. T. Brown and R. Adams (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), dialogue 5, pp. 85–88, where the domestic confinement of women is mocked. Like de Pizan but unlike van Schurman, Agrippa denied the inconstancy of women. See Agrippa, Declamation, 77; de Pizan, City of Ladies, 2.47. 10. Erasmus, Colloquies, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 39, trans. and annot. C. R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 306–27; The Institution of Christian Matrimony (Institutio christiani matrimonii), trans. and annot. M. J. Heath, in Spiritualia and Pastoralia, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 69, ed. J. W. O’Malley and L. A. Perraud (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 203–438. Reference to the English translations is from those editions. Reference to the Latin originals is from Desiderii Erasmi, Opera omnia, 10 vols. (Lugduni, 1704), vols. 1 and 5. On the dating of Erasmus’s two works,

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see Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus, 306, and Heath, Spiritualia and Pastoralia, 204. As regards the treatise on matrimony, see also Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. C. A. Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15. Erasmus’s works are from these editions and hereafter cited in the text. 11. On the dating of the work, see Vives, Education, 1, 12–13. Just as Erasmus alludes to the education of More’s first wife, Vives alludes to the education of More’s daughters. 12. In The Romance of the Rose Pygmalion compares and contrasts himself with Narcissus. See Gillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. C. Dahlberg (1971; repr., Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 20817–21195. J. H. Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4–5, alludes to a link between Pygmalion and Narcissus. 13. Erasmus, Marriage, in Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus, 313; hereafter cited in the text by page number. 14. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus, 318. On the wife as a reflection of her husband, see Eulalia’s advice: “As a mirror, if it’s a good one, always gives back the image of the person looking at it, so should a wife reflect her husband’s mood” (Marriage, 313). 15. After mentioning improvement of wives through courtesy, Eulalia says, “How much more fitting for us to do the same for our husbands!” (ibid., 314). The mutuality of marital transformation is not at issue; the point is, of course, that the wife’s bringing about change in her husband depends on her willing submission to him. 16. As regards Xenophon, see Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, trans. S. B. Pomeroy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3.11. Xenophon’s text envisages an equality between marital partners that is not to be found in Erasmus’s colloquy or, for that matter, his treatise on matrimony. Assuming that Erasmus was associating Xenophon’s horsetraining trope with More’s education of his first wife, then her surname may have had something to do with the association. 17. A useful summary of major reasons for the identification can be seen in Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus, 324nn31, 32, 35. 18. J. M. Miller, “Some Versions of Pygmalion,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. C. Martindale, 205–14 (1988; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 208, mentions education as part of the mythography of Pygmalion (with reference to Besuire). E. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 8, does as well, likewise with reference to Besuire. He also mentions the Pygmalion/education link with reference to Caxton (10).

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19. He uses the trope later in relation to both husband and wife, the idea being that “the wife should obey her husband rather than the opposite” (Institution, 340). Soon after, he uses the trope of the wife as a mirror to her husband (341). Continuities between Marriage and The Institution are quite clear. 20. There, Erasmus uses the words “domitam ac formatam” when adopting Xenophon’s metaphor of horse training. 21. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, 2 vols., ed. V. Romano (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1951), 1:100. The relevant Latin is: “Attamen quia valebat ingenio, et artificiosas haberet manus, finxere poete eum sibi ex candidissimo ebore femineam sculpsisse ymaginem. . . . Arbitror enim, cum Pigmaleoni suspecta provectarum etate virginum pudicitia esset, eum sibi virgunculam elegisse etate suspicione carentem, candore atque mollitie ebori similem, quam cum suis aptam fecisset moribus.” 22. See Institution, 319–20. Note the domestic emphasis introducing and running through the assertion that education is good for girls. In The Abbot and the Learned Lady Erasmus argues that reading confers wisdom and so (among other related things) supports women in fulfilling the role of household manager. 23. Vives’s Latin is quoted from his Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Valentiae, 1782–83), 4: 90 (1783). The relevant phrase runs: “Quae pectus in quietem Christianam componant.” 24. See, for example, Education, 80–84, 87, 91–93 (which include castigation of several things), 104–06, but esp. 111–13. 25. “To Candidus,” lines 87–96, in CW 3.2. “At rursus ut tamen . . . Vagis ocellulis” Hereafter cited in the text by line number. 26. Letter to Ulrich Hutten, Antwerp, July 23, 1519, in Opvs Epistolarvm, ed. P. S. Allen, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 18, lines 169–70: “Rudem adhuc, vtpote ruri inter parentes ac sorores semper habitam, quo magis illi liceret illam ad suos mores fingere. Hanc et literis instituendam curauit et omni musices genere doctam reddidit.” 27. “Felix, quibus bene . . . Rerum scientia.” Cf. More’s letter to William Gonell, May 22, 1518?, in Selected Letters, ed. E. F. Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 103–06. More proposes that education consolidates female virtue, especially if the right reading has been allocated. His underlying view of why women should be educated seems to accord with Plato’s in The Republic. On More’s domestic practice of education, see John Guy, A Daughter’s Love, 60–65. 28. The translation of “omnium graui / Rerum scientia” as given in CW 3.2 could be otherwise, namely, “deep (or, thoughtful) knowledge of all things [or, matters].” Scientia had various meanings, especially in relation to prudentia and sapientia. The term forms part of a hyperbole since it is implicitly clear that the ideal household manager does not have

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an active life in the public sphere — nor do the poem’s exempla imply the opposite. Vives wrote that women did not need eloquence because of their domesticity. With reference to De amicitia, More’s portrait of the counselor-wife has an affinity with Cicero’s notion of the true friend as another self and as an honest, benevolent adviser (see De amicitia 7.23, 25.91, in Cicero, De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, ed. and trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library [1923; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971]). But there is not the Ciceronian notion of equality in friendship, not least because the notionally ideal wife has implicitly been made in her husband’s image. 29. “Utopia”: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, C. H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 141; hereafter cited in the text by page number. 30. For an interesting examination of male power in Utopia, see J. Mueller, “‘The Whole Island Like a Single Family’: Positioning Women in Utopian Patriarchy,” in Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, ed. P. C. Herman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 93–122. 31. Plato, The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. T. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 450c–58c; hereafter cited in the text. 32. See also 549e and 557c, which emphasize the alleged unreasonableness and superficiality of women. 33. See, for example, More’s letter to William Gonell, in Rogers, Selected Letters; several of More’s remarks agree with observations by Erasmus and by Vives on female education. 34. Reference is to In Defense of Humanism: Letters to Dorp, Oxford, Lee, and a Monk; Historia Richardi Tertii, ed. D. F. Kinney, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); hereafter cited as CW 15. As Kinney points out, the text edited by him forms the most accurate version of what More intended in his Latin account of Richard III and one in major respects superior to its English counterpart (CW 15:cxxxiii–cliii). I have consulted The History of King Richard III, ed. R. S. Sylvester, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); hereafter cited as CW 2. In relation to the versions of More’s history contained in that volume, see esp. J. H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 75–154. See also A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 75–101, and A. Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 108–27.

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35. By “misogyny” in the accounts of the two women, I mean that although the queen and Jane Shore are in general portrayed sympathetically, their portrayals identify them, insofar as they are women, as therefore possessing certain gender-pervasive flaws and weaknesses that men (as men) usually do not possess. Thus the sympathetic portrayals of the queen and Shore reflect the misogyny, that is to say, the suspicion of femaleness throughout early Tudor culture, in which More’s text participates. “Jane Shore” is a misnomer, but I use the name for convenience in identifying her characterization. On More’s identifying of Shore’s wife, see CW 2:219–20, 314–15. 36. “Eduardo videlicet . . . consecuta est” (CW 15:314). 37. The allusion to Providence likewise associates the world of More’s history with that of The Consolation. 38. “Nam siue . . . acerbissimo supplicio adiudicauit” (CW 15:322). 39. “Auidi potentiae”; “regnandi cupiditas” (ibid., 322). 40. “Maternam indulgentiam ac muliebrem . . . metum” (ibid., 366). Cf. CW 2:194–95. 41. “Muliebrem [metum] inquit Dux Bukyngamiae” (CW 15:366). 42. He adds, “She surely does not suppose she has more foresight than any of us, in particular those whose good faith she has no cause to question” (ibid., 367). 43. Not merely her younger son but both her sons would benefit from that, she in fact tells Bourchier — who is presumably deaf to what she implies about the health of her son currently in the Protector’s care. 44. CW 3.2, lines 154–56, my translation, with incorporation of C. H. Miller’s “thoughtful” for “graui.” 45. “Talemque suspicor . . . Fuisse Tulliam” (CW 3.2, lines 169–73; C. H. Miller’s translation). 46. “In asylo delitescere” (CW 15:378). 47. “Sin tibi ipsa . . . et squalore ducere” (ibid., 380). The important phrase here is, “in hoc asylo delitescendum.” 48. Thus Bourchier becomes an outstanding instance of what More’s narrator calls, with direct reference to Hastings, “The dense blindness of mortal existence!” (ibid., 419). The Latin is, “O densam mortalitatis caliginem” (418). Emphasis on human impercipience, also expressed through a trope of blindness, occurs in More’s Fortune verses. 49. “Ne muliebris iste frustra conceptus timor in mentem tibi subigat” (CW 15:384). 50. “Estne vllus vsquam locus . . . veritus violare?” (ibid., 386). 51. “Atque ego . . . quam fuit olim” (ibid., 386). 52. “‘Aduenisti / charissime . . . profecto gratissimus’” (ibid., 396). 53. “Even had it been otherwise, the glamor of such a great suitor and the heady spectacle of a man feared by others deferring to her and imploring her favor, as well as the prospect of finery, a lavish feminine ward-

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robe, and furthermore leisure, extravagance, and pleasure, could easily make an impression in the girl’s tender heart” (CW 15:427) (“Et alioqui tanti . . . puellae animum vellicare” [426]). 54. “Ceterum genio . . . fortunae licentia” (ibid., 316–318). 55. Compassion and charity are virtues conventionally ascribed to women, just as lechery, ambition, and love of luxury are vices conventionally attributed to them. Thus More can play conventional, “female” virtues and vices against each other in characterizing Shore. The association of Edward with compassion does not feminize him, for mercy is an attribute of the just, Christian prince. 56. “Tantum prohibeant superi . . . concordiam deberet incitare” (ibid., 334). 57. “Nec tamen pulchritudine . . . conuiuendi capiebat” (ibid., 428). 58. “Quin hec muliercula . . . vel perexigua” (ibid., 428); “Certum est adeo . . . posteris inclarescunt” (430). The first part of the quotation suggests that, as one would have anticipated, Edward’s irascible appetite was in working order — even if subordinate to its counterpart. 59. See, for example, Utopia, 137, 195, 201, 211–13, 233–35, 237.

Notes to Chapter 4 1. Jane Shore is indicated to have been a counselor insofar as she is described as someone who facilitated important negotiations between or among those connected with the court. 2. The maleness of, primarily, the middle or upper-class male. 3. Thomas More, Historia Richardi Tertii, ed. D. F. Kinney, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 331–33; hereafter cited as CW 15, followed by page number. 4. Thus the two faces of Saturn can be glimpsed in the Historia as well as in the “Pageant Verses.” The difference is that, in the former text, the two Saturns are linked with opposite ways to govern the common weal. 5. “Supra facultates . . . odium pareret” (CW 15:324). 6. “Quippe amici . . . suis obstare ” (ibid., 324). 7. For Cicero, see De amicitia, 15.52–53, in De Senectute, De amicitia, De Divinatione, ed. and trans W. A. Falconer (1923; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); for Dio Chrysostom, see Discourses 1–11, ed. and trans. J. W. Cohoon (1932; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 3, 116–18. See also D. Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 107. In my thinking on classical notions of friendship I have greatly benefited from Konstan’s guidance.

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8. “In gratiam atque . . . pronus ferebatur” (CW 15:316). 9. Chrysostom, Discourses, 3.128–33. Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, 93–95, discusses Isocrates’s view on this. 10. Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, trans. and annot. W. Ambler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 8.7.13. For discussion of this, see Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, 96. 11. See A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. L. L. Martz and F. Manley, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 4, lines 1–5. 12. As I shall note in the final chapter, when again considering Vincent’s words, the idealized presentation of Antony as a virtual paterfamilias accords with some of Margaret Roper’s remarks about her father. 13. Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, and C. H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33 (“Nempe reverso . . . iucundissimum compares” [32]); hereafter cited in the text by page number. 14. “Most of my day is given to the law — pleading some cases, hearing others, arbitrating others, and deciding still others. I pay a courtesy call to one man and visit another on business; and so almost all day I’m out dealing with other people, and the rest of the day I give over to my family and household; and then for myself — that is, my studies — there’s nothing left” (Utopia, 33) (“Dum causas . . . literis, nihil” [32]). 15. “Fateor, mi Petre, . . . mensis, annus” (Utopia, 30–32). More plays negotii against negotia. He does not use the word otium, since he claims that for him there is no “leisure”: the time for writing has to be filched (as he puts it, “At mihi hoc solum temporis acquiro quod somno ciboque suffuror” [32]). 16. On the humanist notion of the vir civilis, see Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66–99. 17. For general accounts of “the republic of letters,” see J. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 283–95, and L. Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: MacMillan, 1996), 135–80. See also the latter’s Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 147–74. 18. Cicero, De amicitia, 7.23–24: “Si exemeris . . . re probant”; hereafter cited in the text. 19. Laelius later says that friendship is a gift of the gods (ibid., 13.47). 20. “Est enim . . . facilitatemque proclivior.” 21. Carolinne White has illuminatingly demonstrated Augustine’s knowledge and use of Cicero in her Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 185–217, esp.

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190–93, 198, 207. I am indebted to her book in much of what follows with reference to Augustine on friendship. 22. Augustine, Confessions, 2 vols., ed. W. H. D. Rouse, trans. W. Watts (1912; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 4.4 (“Qia non est . . . datus est nobis”). White, Christian Friendship, connects that passage with Augustine’s “particular emphasis . . . on the need for grace in human affairs in general” (196). 23. As Bonnie Kent, “Augustine’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. E. Stump and N. Kretzman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 205–33, puts it — and I borrow the word “belongs” from her: “We must love people because they belong to God, not because they belong to us. Augustine goes so far as to declare it more inhuman [her emphasis] to love somebody because he is your son than because he is a human being, made in the image of and belonging to God” (214). 24. Reference to the letters is from The Confessions and Letters of St. Augustin, ed. P. Schaff (1886; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 558. The letters were translated by J. G. Cunningham. 25. White, Christian Friendship, 208. 26. See ibid., 10–12, 45–60, 88–90, 134–38. See also Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, 149–73. 27. See, as regards Jerome, Letters and Selected Works, trans. W. H. Fremantle (1892; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 58–60, letter 45. 28. Thomas More, English Poems, Life of Pico, and The Last Things, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 1, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 51, lines 4–9; hereafter cited as CW 1. For commentary on the Life, see A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 28–38. 29. The word used in the Latin original is charitatis (CW 1:318). 30. The Latin original for the “loue” of Girolamo for Pico is charitate (CW 1:320). 31. On Pico’s directing of his friends toward God, see CW 1:68–69, esp. 68, lines 21–23. On Pico and the protean nature of humankind, see W. G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Symbol of His Age: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 1–88; and M. Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 147–49. 32. The phrase “elemental motif” is an adaptation of Anders Nygren’s contested “fundamental motif,” deployed in his Agape and Eros. See the translation of that work by P. S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 41–48.

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Notes to Pages 114–22

33. Daniel F. Kinney states that “More’s Letter to Dorp, like book 2 of Utopia, was composed during the last half of More’s ‘Utopian embassy’ (May 12–October 24, 1515)” (CW 15:xxiii). 34. “Tum quo nihil” . . . Dorpi libentius” (CW 15:2, lines 8–23). 35. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. S. Jayne (1985; repr., Woodstock: Spring Publications, 1994), 3.3, p. 67. 36. My translation, from Commentary on the Symposium of Plato, ed. and trans. [into French by] R. Marcel (Paris: L’ Association Guillaume Budé, 1956), 3.3.27.S. Jayne’s rendering is, “Love may rightly be called the eternal knot and link of the world, and the immovable support of its parts, and the firm foundation of the whole machine” (68). 37. On ideas of citizenship in the early modern period, see P. Riesenburg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 187–99. 38. The editors of the Cambridge edition note, of Erasmus’s letter, “It is interesting that Erasmus’ own tribute — which implies some reservations — did not appear until this third edition of the book “ (Utopia, 5). 39. “Cum antehac . . . instituisset Italia?” (ibid., 4, lines 1–10). 40. “UTOPIAM illam . . . aestimatione veteratoris” (ibid., 8). 41. “Eum librum cum . . . census ampliatricem” (ibid., 8). 42. “Qua tamen . . . et intervertat” (ibid., 8). 43. Budé suggests he set aside for a while, but did not of course completely abandon, management of his household. That would have been a dereliction of duty, so his argument seems to be that More’s book fascinated him, took him away from excessive preoccupation with his personal business, made good letters hold first place in his thoughts, and convinced him (anew, presumably) of the folly of cupiditas. 44. Cf. More’s Responsio ad Lutherum, ed. J. M. Headley, trans. Sister S. Mandeville, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 5, part 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 18, esp. 275, line 23 through 279, line 39. 45. “Velim etiam . . . adcommodent. Vale” (Utopia, 18). 46. Giles alludes to More’s prudence and to his “public business and private concerns” (27; see also 26, line 5, “an prudentiam,” and line 9, “tot publica simul et domestica negotia”). 47. As regards Giles’s praise of More’s style and his remarks implying More’s transcendence of Plato and Homer, see Utopia, 25 (cf. 24, lines 5–23) and — with reference to his style alone — 27 (cf. 26, lines 5–9). 48. “Non sat fuit, . . . adfirmandum destinaveris.” . . . “qui quod non . . . republica edidisti” (Utopia, 250, lines 2–11).

Notes to Pages 125–26

167

Notes to Chapter Five 1. A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. L. L. Martz and F. Manley, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); hereafter cited as CW 12. My thinking about role-play has been influenced chiefly by Goffman’s theorizing of it — and by responses to his theories. See, in particular, E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 85–152; S. H. Riggins, ed., Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), esp. 141–61, 163–86; T. Burns, Erving Goffman (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 106–25. 2. See De tristitia Christi, ed. C. H. Miller, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 14 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), part 1, p. 253, lines 6–10, and p. 271, lines 3–4; hereafter cited as CW 14. The first of those remarks alludes to Christ as the Good Shepherd, but the two references are not specifically connected. 3. More has his protagonist in A Dialogue remark, by way of using the prison analogy, that incarceration has not dramatically relocated him since all the world is in fact a prison. See his last speech in CW 12:3.19. 4. Discussion above has focused chiefly on the “Pageant Verses,” Utopia, To Candidus, Historia Richardi Tertii, and the Life of Pico. See also, for example, The Last Things, in English Poems, Life of Pico, The Last Things, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers, and C. H. Miller, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 177, lines 22–31; hereafter cited as CW 1. Also see More’s letter to Henry VIII (Chelsea, 5 March 1534), in A. De Silva, ed., The Last Letters of Thomas More (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 46. See also Treatise on the Passion, Treatise on the Blessed Body, Instructions and Prayers, ed. G. E. Haupt, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 13 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 22, line 4–24, line 12, and 81, line 3–82, line 9; hereafter cited as CW 13. 5. Juan Luis Vives, Fabula de Homine, in G. Majansius, ed., Opera Omnia, 4 vols. (Valentiae, 1782–83), vol. 4. Also, A Fable about Man, trans. N. Lenkeith, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. E. Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, and J. H. Randall Jr. (1948; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 387–93. 6. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, in Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy, new ed. (1973; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); hereafter cited in the text.

168

Notes to Pages 126–28

7. On self-transformation as a concern in the culture of humanism, see, among very many studies, J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 15th ed., trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Harrap, 1929), 143–74; H. Baker, The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (1947; repr., New York: Harper, 1961), 203–333; C. Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1970); P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1972); S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (1980; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1984); J. J. Martin, Myths of Renaissance: Individualism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); C. Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 105–46. On exile, see R. Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); A. B. Giamatti, Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), esp. 12–32, 115–50. See also J.-M. Claassen, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (London: Duckworth, 1999). 8. In keeping with his established characterization, Antony’s transitional speech is an apology for his long-windedness, an apology that leads to yet another of his shrewd digressions. Thus, in addition to the fact that Antony is making the point “this isn’t like one of those literary dialogues,” his speech is decorously in character and hence his illusionbreaking words are doubly and simultaneously a notional affirmation of verisimilitude. With respect to the characterization of Antony, see S. B. House, “‘the field is won’: An Introduction to the Tower Works,” in A. D. Cousins and D. Grace, eds., A Companion to Thomas More (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 225–42, esp. 230–36. 9. For a substantial account of likenesses between More and Antony, see CW 12:cxxxv–cxlvii. On cxxxv the point is made that “More deliberately dissolves at times [for the benefit of his family and friends] the literary artifice of the dialogue and speaks to them directly from behind the mask of his fiction.” My concordant line of argument is that More unveils “the literary artifice of the dialogue” unmistakably at one moment so that the diverse affinities between himself and Antony can be seen as less than coincidental — and so that his protagonist can be seen not merely as persona dramatis, so to speak, but specifically as a persona, or mask, for More himself. 10. See Margaret Roper’s letter to More (May? 1534) in Last Letters, 66–67. Vincent’s words also bring us back to the letter to Giles prefacing Utopia.

Notes to Pages 128–32

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11. See Margaret Roper’s letter to Alice Alington (August 1534), Last Letters, 72–89, at 88. The fact that, in A Dialogue, Antony revisits Peter’s betrayal is itself suggestive of More’s concern (compare CW 12:cv–cvi). 12. On the “key-cold” image, see “A Devout Prayer”: “Take from me good lorde, this luke warme facion, or rather key colde maner of meditacion” (CW 13:230, lines 23–24). 13. Compare CW 12:253, lines 3–12, and Life of Pico, CW 1:90. 14. The phrase “dyepely ponder the sample of our saviour hym selfe” (CW 12:312, line 8) foreshadows exercise of the understanding, which is also implicit in Antony’s later reference to the true theological significance of the “holy sacraments” (line 31). Subsequently, the understanding is overtly and often exercised throughout the meditation, as for example at 313, lines 19–26. 15. Augustine famously expounds the natures and functions of those faculties in his De Trinitate (cf. A Treatise upon the Passion, CW 13:12, lines 4–11). On his interest in instability of the phantasia, see De Trinitate 11.10.17 and 12.8.13–9.14 in On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, ed. and trans. P. Schaff et al. (1887; repr., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1978). For pertinent discussion of the Augustinian elements of the meditation, see CW 12:cxv–cxvii, and A. D. Cousins, The Catholic Religious Poets from Southwell to Crashaw: A Critical History (London: Sheed and Ward, 1991), 33 (cf. 12–14). 16. See, for example, CW 12:297, line 23, through 298, line 8, and 299, line 27, through 300, line 15. Cf. 107, line 23, through 108, line 6; 198, lines 5–32. 17. On uti non frui, see A Dialogue, CW 12, 3.7 and 3.12. Cf. CW 12:cviii–cix. On God or, in particular, Christ as a physician, see, for example, CW 12:10, line 8, through 12, line 4; 17, line 22, through 18, line 9; 1.8 and throughout. For discussion of God as physician in A Dialogue, see CW 12:341. On grace and free will, see 1.2 and throughout; CW 12:92, lines 16–20; and esp. 250, line 1, through 254, line 28. 18. See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (1958; repr., Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), for the concept of the teacher’s using accommodatio. See esp. 4.8–15. 19. My discussion of Erasmus’s Sileni draws on Cousins, Catholic Religious Poets, 6–8. 20. Reference is to Adages ll vii 1 to lll iii 100, trans. and annot. R. B. Mynors, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 34 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3.3.1, pp. 262–82. Subsequent reference to Sileni Alcibiadis is from that edition, by page number. 21. On Socrates as a Silenus, see Sileni Alcibiadis, 262–63. The other Sileni, apart from Christ, are mentioned immediately thereafter. Harpsfield saw, of course, a direct and immediate affinity between the imprisoned More and the condemned Athenian philosopher. It cannot be determined whether More’s self-portrayal in A Dialogue influenced

170

Notes to Pages 132–34

Harpsfield’s perception of him. See Harpsfield’s The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore, Knight, Sometymes Lord High Chancellor of England, ed. E. V. Hitchcock (1932; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 199: “O noble and woorthy voyce of our noble, newe, christen Socrates!” 22. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (Westminster: Newman Press, n.d.), 16–19, 398–400, compared More with Socrates. 23. See C. Condren, “Dame Alice More as Xantippe,” Moreana 64 (1980): 59–64. See, however, poem 258 in Latin Poems, ed. C. H. Miller et al., The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3.2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 24. He would seem to have been well acquainted with Boethius’s The Consolation long before that; nevertheless, see The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, ed. L. A. Schuster et al., The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8, pt. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 939. In The Consolation, 1.pros.3.19–21, Philosophy identifies Socrates as a martyr for wisdom’s sake. 25. “Maestum lacrimantemque vidissem, . . . summa libertas est.” 26. See Expositions on the Book of Psalms, trans. A. C. Coxe (1888; repr., Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 1974), 86.1, 8; 148.6, 8 (according to the numbers assigned the Psalms in the Vulgate); The Six Enneads, trans. S. MacKenna and B. S. Page (Chicago: Benton, 1952), 1.7–8. 27. That Pauline text is also quoted at the start of A Treatise upon the Passion. See CW 13:3, lines 16–18, 19–29. Cf. Life of Pico, CW 1:97–98. 28. Cf. A Treatise upon The Passion, CW 13:100, lines 4–17. 29. Petrarch’s words, “I, begotten in exile, was born in exile,” could be seen as emblematic of the humanists’ concern not merely with political exile but with exile as a historical and cultural phenomenon. See Rerum familiarium libri, trans. A. S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975–85), 1.1, p. 8. See also Giamatti, Exile and Change, 12–32, esp. 12. For other allusions to exile — and evocations of nostalgia — in A Dialogue, see 4, 42, 60, 241, 242, and the major discussion of the concern on 251. 30. A list of page references will indicate how pervasively More has Antony consider the human will to pleasure: 48, 51, 59, 68, 70–72, 76, 100–101, 114, 154, 168–69, 175, 184–86, 200, 203, 210–11, 223–24, 226–27, 231–32, 237, 244, 261, 273, 281–82 (harmonizing with the Epicurean notion of the impulse or will to pleasure as innate to humankind), 286, 298, 300, 303, 305–06 (particularly in accord with the notion of prioritizing pleasures — as implicit in the “Pageant Verses” and explicit in Utopia), 308, 313, 317 (cf. 319–20). On some pages there may be more than one reference to or focus on pleasure. Sometimes pleasure is discussed in terms of that which pleases or displeases God. Sometimes pleasure is discussed in relation to fear, to the imagination, and so on.

Notes to Pages 134–37

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31. On the imagination as a preoccupation in A Dialogue, see 6–9 (an important, early discussion of the imagination that emphasizes the need for its control and sanctification), 61, 64, 107, 122, 149, 154, 198, 210–11, 224–25, 256, 262, 266, 276–77, 286–87, 297. 32. See Alvaro de Silva, ed., The Last Letters of Thomas More (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 74; hereafter cited in the text. 33. Praise of Folly, trans. and annot. B. Radice, in Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 5, Panegyricus Moria / Julius Exclusus Institutio Principis Christiani Querela Pacis, ed. A. H. T. Levi, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 83, prefatory letter. The Oedipus/Davus opposition occurs also in Pico’s letter to Andrea Corneo, in a passage not translated by More from the letter as given in Giovanni Francesco Pico’s biography of his uncle. See CW 1:353. 34. Cf. 148, line 25, through 149, line 7; 310, line 17, through 311, line 28. 35. See also A Treatise upon the Passion, CW 13:49, lines 12–15, and 52, lines 27–30; “A Devout Prayer,” ibid., 229, lines 2–3; “A Godly Meditation,” ibid., 226, line 29, through 227, line 8. 36. “Semotus parumper a conspectu, velo diducto redibat mox prudens, justus, socius, humanus, benignus, comes, homo, frequentabat cum aliis civitates, vicissim imperabat et parebat imperio, quae ad publicos attinebant usus atque utilitates ipse cum aliis curabat, denique nullus non erat civilis sociusque. Non expectabant dii eum pluribus visum iri formis, cum ecce adest repente in eorum speciem reformatus, supra hominis ingenium, totus innixus sapientissimae menti ” (Vives, Opera Omnia, 4:5). 37. Vives’s final account of human self-transformation may imply that Christ is “man” perfected: that human transformation and perfection are realized in — and made possible through — Christ. If that is so, it would harmonize with, for example, his Introduction to Wisdom, 289–96. See also 281: “All human wisdom compared with the Christian religion is but squalor and unmixed folly.” Reference is to Vives’s Introduction to Wisdom: A Renaissance Textbook, ed. M. L. Tobriner S.N.J.M. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968). In addition, see C. G. Norena, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 228–49. In that case, More’s text and Vives’s would differ but not as markedly as they otherwise do. 38. More’s sly remark, “Howbeit daughter Roper, whom my Lord taketh here for the wise men and whom he meaneth to be fools, I cannot very well geast” (Last Letters, 77), seems pertinent here. 39. See Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, and C. H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 232.

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Notes to Pages 137–40

40. In 2.17.4 Antony/More calls the world “this bisy plesaunt mase,” an image he plays with in the ensuing paragraphs. By implication his persecutors, turning from the old religion, either forget the nature of life in the world, how to view it, how to interact with it, or have never truly known. 41. Goffman, Encounters, 90.

Notes to Conclusion 1. A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation also, albeit differently, emphasizes caritas rather than prudentia in dealing with pleasure. There, in fact, prudence lies in understanding and affirming the centrality of love to human experience. 2. That the notion of “Jane Shore” reflecting analytically on pleasure seems wholly alien to Historia Richardi Tertii may indicate a link between her characterization and the misogynic commonplace of women as intellectually weak. On the other hand, it could be argued that Bouchier is certainly portrayed as intellectually weak — and, further, that in being so he forms an antithesis to More’s image of Morton in the English version of the Historia. See, for instance, The History of King Richard III, ed. R. S. Sylvester, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 92–93. 3. Cf. Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s “Utopia” (1991; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 142, 168, 222.

INDEX 132–33, 151n67, 153n7, 170n24; Theological Tractates, 40, 153n7 Boke of Fortune, The, 40, 45–46, 153n6 Book of the City of Ladies, The (de Pizan), 64–65, 158n5 books, 15, 18, 146n14 Boucheir, Cardinal Thomas, 86, 89, 91–93, 95, 162n48 Bouwsma, William J., 39–40, 55, 56 Buckingham, Duke of, 86–88 Budé, Guillaume, 58, 119–22, 123, 156n39, 166n43 Busleyden, Jerome de, 122, 123

accommodatio, 130, 134, 169n18 Aeneid (Virgil), 31–32 afterlife, 30, 31–32 age, 150n49; depiction in “Pageant Verses,” 24–27, 30 agency and will: Augustinian view of, 39, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 52, 53, 54, 130, 152n3, 169n19; Boethius on, 41, 42, 43–44, 53; in Fortune verses, 40–41, 45; Stoic view of, 38, 39, 41, 52, 53, 54 Agrippa, Cornelius, 66, 158n9 Alington, Alice, 135 animals, 16, 20, 21, 148–49n31 Aristotle, 74, 111, 146n15, 157n2 Art of Poetry (Horace), 11 Augustine, 35, 52–53, 133; on caritas, 109, 112; on fortune, 38–39, 41, 156n36; on free choice and agency, 38–39, 43–44, 152n3; on friendship, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 123, 164n21; on praising God, 42, 48; on quies, 42, 48, 67; on role-play, 130, 169n15; and Stoicism, 39–40, 55, 152–53n4; uti non frui concept of, 130, 169n17; works: The City of God, 38–39, 44, 45; The Confessions, 42, 109 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 48–49; De mulieribus claris, 64; Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, 67, 71–72 Boethius, 34, 53; on fortune, 41, 48, 50; on personal agency, 42, 43–44, 54; on wisdom, 49–50; works: The Consolation of Philosophy, 40, 41, 42–45, 48, 50, 52, 54, 85, 126,

caritas: and charity, 116, 123; Cicero and Augustine on, 109; and cupiditas, 109, 110, 114, 121; Edward IV and, 139–40; and friendship, 109, 113, 114, 115; humana, 6, 35, 96, 140; and prudentia, 139, 172n1. See also charity chance: Augustine on, 38–39, 41, 55, 156n36; Boethius on, 41, 48, 50; and consciousness, 48; in Fortune verses, 4, 37, 46–48, 55, 140–41; gender and, 2, 63; as ruling principle, 46, 54; and Utopia, 4–5, 37–38, 56–62; and vanity, 60 charity: and caritas, 116, 123; Christian, 118–19, 121, 123; Edward IV and, 95–96, 139–40; and friendship, 114; Jane Shore and, 96, 97, 100, 139–40, 163n55; in Letter to Dorp, 114–15; and self-gratification, 100; women and, 96, 163n55. See also caritas

173

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Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 45, 50, 149n35 Chew, Samuel C., 11, 145n2 childhood, 14–18, 24, 146n15 Christ: as Good Shepherd, 125, 128–30, 167n2; imitatio Christi, 8, 125, 128–30, 131, 137, 167n2; and sacred folly, 135–36, 137; and self-transformation, 171n37 Cicero, 4, 75, 164n21; on age, 25–26; on friendship, 106–07, 108–09, 111, 117, 123, 161n28; on pleasure, 16, 33, 147n17; on right reason, 3, 11, 18, 21; on state and common weal, 34–35; on tyrants, 7, 103; works: De amicitia, 106–07, 108–09, 117, 161n28; De finibus, 16, 147n17; De officiis, 21, 26; De senectute, 25–26; Pradoxa Stoicorum, 53, 155n30; Tusculan Disputations, 21 citizenship, 116–17, 166n37 City of God, The (Augustine), 38–39, 44, 45 Colt, Jane, 67, 69, 78 common weal, 1, 7; Cicero on, 34–35; citizenship and, 116–17; and community, 4, 11, 57, 122; good governance and, 4–5, 25, 26; More’s practical emphasis on, 9; and pleasure, 3–4, 26–27, 34–35, 100; of republic of letters, 121–22; and tyranny, 140, 141; in Utopia, 4–5, 28, 57, 80, 141; women and, 6, 68, 89 Confessions, The (Augustine), 42, 109 Consolation of Philosophy, The (Boethius), 40, 41, 42–45, 54, 85, 126, 132–33, 151n67, 153n7, 170n24; on fortune, 48, 50; on personal agency, 43–44, 52 cruelty, 18, 19, 29, 148n27 cupiditas, 120–21, 139, 166n43; and caritas, 109, 110, 114, 121 death, 38; depicted in “Pageant Verses,” 30–32, 33 De mulieribus claris (Boccaccio), 64

de Pizan, Christine, 73, 76; The Book of the City of Ladies, 64–65, 158n5 De tristitia Christi (More), 8, 125 De voluptate (Valla), 16, 17, 22–23 Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, A (More), 8, 37, 55, 104, 126–31, 167n3; on caritas, 140, 172n1; on exile, 133–34; More’s self-portrayal in, 125–26, 127–30, 131–32, 168n9; role-play in, 125, 126, 127–28, 137, 141; on sacred folly, 135–36 Dilemma Epicuri (Epicurus), 16 Dio Chrysostom, 103 education: humanist, 5, 78, 79, 80; philosophic, 43; remedial power of, 43, 60; resistance to, 12, 15–16, 60–61, 102; Valla on, 22–23. See also women’s education Education of a Christian Woman, The (Vives), 5, 67, 73–76 Edward IV, 84; ambiguities in, 6, 100, 139–40; benevolent characterization of, 95–96, 100, 102, 103–04, 139–40, 163n55; selfishness and dissipation, 96, 100, 139–40; talent for friendship, 7, 103–04, 122 Elizabeth Woodville, Queen, 83, 85, 95, 99, 101; as defiant, 6, 89–90, 91–93; eloquence of, 6, 83, 86, 89, 90, 93; misogynic image of, 6, 85–89 Enneads (Plotinus), 42 enthymemes, 18, 148n24 Epicurus: More’s revision of, 3, 11, 16–17, 27, 33–34; on true pleasure, 15, 16, 23–24, 26–27 Erasmus, Desiderius, 116, 154n25, 159n16; More as friend of, 107, 115–18, 123; on women’s education, 77–78, 160n22; on women’s role, 66–67, 70–71, 72–73, 160n19; works: The Abbot and the Learned Lady, 160n22; The Institution of Christian

Index Matrimony, 66–67, 70–71, 77; Marriage, 5, 66–67, 68–69, 70, 71, 159nn14–15; Sileni Alcibiadis, 131–32 exile: Boethius on, 132–34; as humanist theme, 126, 134, 168n7; More on, 133–35; Petrarch on, 170n29 experience: Augustine and Boethius on, 44–45; and fortune, 4, 44–45, 61; knowledge from, 3; Stoic view of, 55; theatricality of, 12–13, 125, 141, 146n10 Fable about Man, A (Vives), 126, 136 Fall of Princes (Lydgate), 48–49, 154n23 fatherhood, 104–05, 164n14; and friendship, 7, 105 folly: sacred, 135–36, 137, 171n38, 172n40; wisdom and, 49, 135 fortune. See chance Fortune verses (More), 45–56, 139, 154n23; on chance, 4, 37, 46–48, 55, 140–41; dating of, 45, 154n19; on greed, 59, 155n33; on personal agency, 52; on pleasure, 47–48; Stoic and Augustinian concepts in, 40–41, 45, 51, 52–54; on wealth and poverty, 48–49, 51; on wisdom and folly, 49–50 freedom, 133; from fortune, 49, 53, 54; of will, 42–43, 44, 152n3 friendship: Augustine on, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 123, 164n21; and caritas, 109, 113, 114, 115; Cicero on, 106–07, 108–09, 111, 117, 123, 161n28; Edward IV’s talent for, 7, 103–04, 122; and fatherhood, 7, 105; gender and, 2, 110, 122; and God, 109; in Letter to Dorp, 114–17, 118, 123; in Life of Pico, 7–8, 110–14, 122–23; and pleasure, 111, 112; and utility, 111; and vanity, 113–14; and virtue, 112 Genealogie deorum gentilium libri (Boccaccio), 67, 71–72

175

Giles, Peter, 122, 166nn46–47 God: Augustine on, 42, 48; childhood’s concern with, 17; and friendship, 109; as physician, 130, 169n17; and pleasure, 17, 33, 48; and self-transformation, 136 Goffman, Erving, 137 greed: and cupiditas, 120, 121; human nature, 52; and pleasure, 48, 60; and pride, 155n33; Utopians’ nullifying of, 58–60, 156n42 Historia Richardi Tertii (More), 83–100, 139, 161n34, 163n4; depiction of masculinity in, 6–7, 102–04; portrayal of friendship in, 108; women’s defiance in, 6, 83, 89–90, 91–93, 95, 99; women’s misogynic image in, 6, 83, 85–89, 93, 94, 95, 101, 140, 162n35, 172n2 Horace: Art of Poetry, 11; Odes, 54 humanism, 39; self-transformation and exile as themes in, 126, 134, 168n7; Stoic and Augustinian, 39, 40, 56 human nature, 2, 3, 52 hyperbole, 14, 114, 146n12, 160n28 imagination, 134, 171n31 immortality, 33–34 Institution of Christian Matrimony, The (Erasmus), 66–67, 70–71, 77 Kinney, Daniel F., 115, 166n33 Last Things, The (More), 12, 28, 34 Leigh, Joyeuce, 8, 110–12, 116, 117 Letter to Dorp (More), 8, 166n33; and friendship, 114–17, 118, 123 Life of Pico (More), 28, 141; and friendship, 7–8, 110–14, 122–23 Lydgate, John: Fall of Princes, 48–49, 154n23 Marriage (Erasmus), 5, 66–67, 68–69, 70, 71, 159nn14–15

176

Index

masculinity: childishness of, 23, 102; depicted in “Pageant Verses,” 18–24; depiction in Historia Richardi Tertii, 6–7, 102–04; depiction in “Pageant Verses,” 6, 102; in republic of letters, 122; and self-awareness, 102; and vanity, 102 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 32, 67 More, Dame Alice, 132 More, Thomas: Augustinian and Stoic influences on, 35, 47, 48, 51–56, 112, 115, 123, 133; as civil scholar, 2–3, 7, 9, 105, 141; educates first wife, 67, 69, 78; imprisonment of, 126, 132, 167n3; as paterfamilias, 7, 104–05, 127–28, 164n14; polemical writings, 1, 140; self-portrayal of, 125–26, 127–30, 131–32, 168n9 More, Thomas, literary devices of: hybridity, 27–28; hyperbole, 14, 114, 146n12, 160n28; parody, 46–47; satire, 20, 22, 27, 30–31 More, Thomas, works of: To Candidus: How to Choose a Wife, 5, 63–64, 67–68, 77–80, 90, 99, 100, 101; De tristitia Christi, 8, 125; A Dialogue of Comfort, 37, 55, 125, 126–37, 132, 140, 141, 167n3, 168n9, 172n1; Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, A, 8, 104; Fortune verses, 45–56, 140–41, 154n19, 154n23, 155n33; Historia Richardi Tertii, 6–7, 83–100, 101, 102–04, 108, 139, 161n34, 163n4; Last Things, The, 12, 28, 34; Latin poems, 76–77; lectures on The City of God, 45; letter to Alice Alington, 135; Letter to Dorp, 8, 114–17, 118, 123, 166n33; letter to Edward Lee, 107; letter to Joyeuce Leigh, 8, 110–12, 116, 117; letter to Margaret Roper, 146n9; letter to Peter Giles, 7, 104–05, 125; letter to William Gonell, 155n30, 160n27; Life of Pico, 7–8, 28,

110–14, 122–23, 141; Mundus et infans, 13–14, 19; “On a Maid with Unmaidenly Habits,” 99; “Pageant Verses,” 3–4, 6, 11–35, 37, 47–48, 60, 100, 102, 112, 125, 139, 145n1, 145n6, 163n4; Praise of Folly, 69–70, 135; Utopia, 1, 2–3, 4–6, 28–30, 37–38, 48, 56–62, 80–83, 99, 118, 119–22, 123, 139, 141 Mundus et infans (More), 13–14, 19 Narcissus myth, 67, 70, 79 Odes (Horace), 54 Oeconomicus (Xenophon), 69, 71, 157n2, 159n16 Ovid: Metamorphoses, 32, 67 “Pageant Verses” (More), 11–35, 37, 60, 125, 139; dating of, 145n1; depiction of age, 24–27, 30, 31, 32, 35; depiction of childhood, 14–18; depiction of death, 30–31; depiction of eternity, 32–33; depiction of fame, 31–32; depiction of manhood, 18–24, 35, 102; depiction of time, 25, 32; as epigrammatic and emblematic, 6, 145n6; hybridity of, 27–28; image of Saturn in, 25, 32, 163n4; portrayals of masculinity in, 6, 18–24, 102; satire in, 27, 30–31; Venus and Cupid icons in, 22, 100; on will to pleasure, 3–4, 23, 28–29, 47, 48, 112 Petrarch, 155n30, 170n29; Trionfi, 11, 22, 28, 37, 145n2, 149n35 phantasia, 130, 169n15 philosophia civilior, 2, 3, 9, 141 philosophia scholastica, 2, 3, 141 Plato, 41–42, 44, 75; Republic, 82, 122, 144n8, 160n27; on women, 75, 82, 160n27 pleasure: in animals, 16; Cicero on, 16, 33, 147n17; and common weal, 3–4, 26–27, 34–35, 100; and cruelty, 18, 19; depiction in

Index

177

Utopia, 1, 28–30; distinguishing true and false, 4–5, 8, 134; Epicurus on, 15, 16, 23–24, 26–27; and friendship, 111, 112; as gendered, 5, 63; and God, 17, 33, 48; and greed, 48, 60; hierarchy of, 139; innate will to, 15, 16, 28, 147n16; as More preoccupation, 1–2, 126, 134, 139, 170n30; in “Pageant Verses,” 3–4, 23, 28–29, 47, 48, 112; and power, 3, 20, 22, 24, 34, 148–49n31; and prudence, 23–24; sexual, 20, 47; and vanity, 60 Plotinus, 40, 44; Enneads, 42 poverty, 48, 49–50, 155n33 power: and common weal, 25; male will to, 3, 12, 102, 140, 148n28; and will to pleasure, 3, 20, 22, 24, 34, 148–49n31 Praise of Folly (More), 69–70, 135 prayer and meditation, 53; Augustine on, 130, 131; Boethius on, 43, 44 pride. See vanity and pride Proclus, 41–42, 44 prosperity and wealth, 51, 61 prudence: and age, 25; and caritas, 139, 172n1; Cicero on, 18; and pleasure, 23–24; and right reason, 21, 23 Pygmalion myth, 71–72, 159n18; Erasmus evocation of, 66, 68–69, 70, 71, 72, 159n14; More and, 5, 67, 79

role-play, 167n1; Augustine on, 130, 169n15; and Christ imitation, 125, 128–30, 137, 167n2; in A Dialogue of Comfort, 125, 126, 127–28, 137, 141; as More concern, 2, 8, 141 Roper, Margaret, 128, 135

Republic (Plato), 82, 122, 144n8, 160n27 Richard III (Richard of Gloucester), 6, 83, 122; as embodiment of tyranny, 84, 92, 95, 96, 102, 103; and Jane Shore, 94, 97–98; and Queen Elizabeth, 86, 87, 91 right reason, 3, 11, 21; and age, 25; Cicero on, 3, 11, 18, 21, 25–26; and prudence, 21, 23; and unreasonableness, 3, 11–12, 17–18, 23, 34, 52

theatricality, 12–13, 125, 141, 146n10 Theological Tractates (Boethius), 40, 153n7 To Candidus: How to Choose a Wife (More), 77–80, 90, 100; on ideal wife, 77, 90, 99, 101; on women’s education, 5, 63–64, 67–68, 77–79, 100 Trionfi (Petrarch), 11, 22, 28, 37, 145n2, 149n35

sanctuary, 86–87, 88–89, 91–91 satire and parody, 20, 22, 27, 30–31, 46–47 Saturn, 25, 32, 102–03, 163n4 secularity, 17, 32, 34 self-transformation: and God’s image, 136; as humanist theme, 126, 134, 168n7; Vives on, 136, 171n37; of women, 6, 68–69, 72, 79 Seneca, 75 Shore, Jane, 93–98; and charity, 96, 97, 100, 139–40, 163n55; as counselor, 101, 163n1; as defiant, 6, 83, 95; misogynic image of, 6, 83, 93, 94, 95, 140, 162n35, 172n2; public humiliation of, 97–98 Sileni Alcibiadis (Erasmus), 131–32 Socrates, 132, 148n28 Stoics and Stoicism: on agency and will, 38, 39, 41, 52, 53, 54; Augustine and, 38–39, 40; Boethius and, 42–43, 53; More and, 40–41, 45, 48, 55; on wisdom, 49–50 Sylvester, Richard S., 12

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Utopia (More), 2–3, 28, 48, 118, 122, 139; and chance, 4–5, 37–38, 56–62; and cupiditas, 119–22, 123; depiction of pleasure in, 1, 28–30; fortune in, 56–62; preface to, 7, 104–05, 125; pursuit of common weal in, 4–5, 28, 57, 80, 141; women and, 5–6, 80–83, 99 Valla, Lorenzo, 3, 11, 39; De voluptate, 16, 17, 22–23 vanity and pride: and chance, 60; and false pleasure, 60; female, 82; and friendship, 113–14; and greed, 155n33; male, 102; in Utopia, 5 van Schurman, Anna Maria, 65, 73, 76 Venus image, 22, 24, 47, 63, 100, 149n37 verisimilitude, 127, 168n8 Virgil: Aeneid, 31–32 virtue: female, 160n27, 163n55; and friendship, 112; and wisdom, 61–62 Vives, Juan Luis, 66, 67, 78, 80, 161n28; on self-transformation, 136, 171n37; works: The Education of a Christian Woman, 5, 67, 73–76; A Fable about Man, 126, 136 Voetius, Gisbertus, 65–66, 73 White, Carolinne, 109, 164n21 wisdom: and age, 26; and divine grace, 54; and folly, 49, 135; and poverty, 49–50; recognition of mortality as, 35; and virtue, 61–62 women: and charity, 96, 163n55; and chastity, 71, 74, 75, 76; and common weal, 6, 68, 89; concept of equality of, 81, 82; defiance by, 6, 83, 85, 89–90, 91–93, 95, 99;

domestic confinement of, 5, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72–73, 77, 78, 79–80, 90, 160–61n28; and eloquence, 6, 74, 83, 86, 89, 90, 93, 161n28; Erasmus on, 66–67, 70–71, 72–73, 160n19; as ideal wife, 77, 90, 99, 101; misogynic image of, 6, 83, 85–89, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101, 140, 162n35, 172n2; as obedient and submissive, 68, 74, 159n15, 160n19; as obstinate, 6, 87–88, 101; Plato on, 75, 82, 160n27; and pleasure, 5, 63; public role of, 65, 80–82, 158n9; as reflection of husbands, 68, 79, 159n14; and self-transformation, 6, 68–69, 72, 79; as sexually transgressive, 76–77, 94–95, 96; surveillance and incarceration of, 74–75, 76; in Utopia, 5–6, 80–83, 99; vanity of, 82; weakness image of, 87, 88, 91, 94, 162–63n53 women’s education: Aristotle on, 74, 157n2; Boccaccio on, 71–72; in To Candidus, 5, 63–64, 67–68, 77–79, 100; de Pizan and van Schurman on, 64–66; Erasmus on, 77–78, 160n22; and female transformation, 66–67, 68–69, 70, 79; and female virtue, 160n27; as “horse taming,” 69, 71, 160n20; during medieval times, 64, 157n2; in Praise of Folly, 69–70; and Pygmalion myth, 5, 66, 67, 68–69, 70, 72; in Utopia, 80–81; Vives on, 73–76; and women’s domestic confinement, 68, 70; Xenophon on, 69, 71, 157n2, 159n16. See also education Xenophon, 7, 103; Oeconomicus, 69, 71, 157n2, 159n16