MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0161
Chunpeng Hao
{"title":"A brief discussion of the differences in the four inscriptions of More’s Utopia","authors":"Chunpeng Hao","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0161","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0162
Seymour Baker House
{"title":"G. W. Bernard, Who Ruled Tudor England: An Essay in the Paradoxes of PowerLucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History","authors":"Seymour Baker House","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0162","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0156
Jolanta Rzegocka
{"title":"The Polish-Lithuanian legacy of Sir Thomas More in the rediscovered plays and playbills of the eighteenth century","authors":"Jolanta Rzegocka","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0156","url":null,"abstract":"The life and execution of Sir Thomas More, humanist writer and Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII Tudor, has captured the imagination of both Elizabethan and Continental playwrights. The article discusses the cultural context as well as the form and structure of a 1736 playbill, Messis immortalium trophaeorum ex triumphalibus palmis, Thomae Mori cancellarii Angliae (Wrocław Ossolineum Library, XVIII – 15241. IV), originally from Zamoyski Academy; and a newly discovered 1765 manuscript play, Morus Angliae Cancellarius tragedia (Vilnius University Library, MS F3-1118), from the Jesuit College in Lwów, both from the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The article argues that specific representations of More’s life and martyrdom in the Jesuit theatre of Poland-Lithuania can be explained and analyzed in the light of the political traditions and multi-denominational religious life of the Commonwealth up to its partitions in the second half of the eighteenth century. They raise interesting questions regarding the balance of spiritual and secular concerns, and creatively link Thomas More’s story with the Commonwealth’s political culture to offer moral and ethical exemplars for the young.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141233022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0159
Joanne Paul
{"title":"The Milk Street mystery: Thomas More’s birthplace","authors":"Joanne Paul","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0159","url":null,"abstract":"Cresacre More’s assertion that Thomas More was born at Milk Street has frequently been taken at face value, and there is no existing scholarly discussion of its veracity. This article begins by laying out the material which supports the case for Milk Street, namely that More’s father, John More, lived there. However, this evidence only places John More at Milk Street in the 1520s or, at the earliest, in 1499. On the other hand, there is significant archival evidence to suggest that John More raised his family near where he and More’s mother married, at St Giles without Cripplegate. The suggestion that the Mores lived in the extramural area around Cripplegate fits with recent research into these areas and lifecycle mobility around London. This article contends that the balance of evidence weighs more heavily against a location on Milk Street as the birthplace for Thomas More, and toward one in Cripplegate without.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0157
Kevin Slack
{"title":"The politics of Thomas More's A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation","authors":"Kevin Slack","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0157","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas More's early writings provide both a defense of his vocation in politics and a political theory for a Christian polity, attempting to harmonize Christendom with the best practicable political order. But More's A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation reflects upon this vocation in light of the anti-Christian political order. He uses the specter of Turkish tyranny sweeping into Hungary to reflect on the open persecution of Christians. Where other scholars have focused on the pedagogy, history, and theology of More's Dialogue, this paper focuses on its political teachings. More shows his readers the essence of political tribulation, the necessity of supplementing pagan philosophy and virtue with a distinctly Christian courage, and how the Christian citizen should behave in the face of death. The Christian's virtue is the source of his comfort and the bulwark for Christendom's final victory.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141232614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0158
Andreea Norica Bălan
{"title":"Lyric, lovers, and limitlessness: Shakespeare’s quarrel with time in Sonnet 55","authors":"Andreea Norica Bălan","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0158","url":null,"abstract":"As a genre, lyric remains difficult to define. Paul Celan perhaps best summarizes its meaning by referring to an encounter that lyric effects. In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare tests the limits of lyric against the most powerful of forces—time—showing that it can withstand its assaults better than stone monuments can preserve the king’s image. Shakespeare takes it one step further, however, hinting at the resurrective power of lyric and at the possibility of lyric’s lasting into eternity. Ultimately, Shakespeare succeeds in giving us an image of lyric as fostering human culture, birthing lovers and civilizations and outlasting both.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141232612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2024.0160
Patrick Spence
{"title":"Interpretive ironies in More’s translations of two Lucianic dialogues","authors":"Patrick Spence","doi":"10.3366/more.2024.0160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2024.0160","url":null,"abstract":"The Lucianic dialogue Cynicus has often been criticized as an unconvincing (and therefore spurious) defense of the philosophy of its title character. I argue that the dialogue deliberately undercuts its characters in humorous ways that guide us to spot their errors, without letting us dismiss anyone's claims entirely. We are meant to learn to separate the good and true from the false and misleading, which is not the same as picking a character to agree with. Thomas More translates Cynicus along with two other Lucianic dialogues, and, in his dedicatory Letter to Thomas Ruthall, describes Cynicus as a straightforward and successful defense of Christian asceticism. More goes so far as to claim that John Chrysostom based a homily on it. More's letter has been criticized as an accidental or deliberate misrepresentation of Cynicus motivated by a desire to make it palatable to censorious readers. I argue that More's treatment of Cynicus, while sincerely appreciative, does not miss its ironies, and even imitates them in its description of the work. More follows Cynicus with his translation of Lucian's Menippus, whose title character's costume recalls the Cynic and whose penchant for telling ironic lies should make us reconsider the Cynic's credibility, if we had trusted him before. More's own translation of Menippus makes subtle changes that invert his dubious claims about Chrysostom and humorously insert Christian advice into the mouth of Lucian's Tiresias in Hades, ironically baptizing the dialogue in a way that is somehow both Christian and Lucianic after all.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2023.0150
Bradley Ritter
{"title":"“Our very prison this earth is”: the world as prison and other images common to More's Epigrams and later works","authors":"Bradley Ritter","doi":"10.3366/more.2023.0150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2023.0150","url":null,"abstract":"More's Epigrams of 1518, usually associated with More's humanist phase, contain a number of poems designed as meditations on proper attitudes towards the goods of fortune. Special attention is given to how phrasing and argumentation used in the Epigrams reappears within a number of More's later works, including Last Things, Treatise on the Passion, and A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Both briefer and longer examples are discussed, the latter including More's more elaborate description of the world as prison (Epigram 119) and fame as an insubstantial wind (Epigram 132). Numerous parallels between the arguments of these epigrams and his later works, written for “spirituall profytt” ( The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947], 531), are examined, giving us insights into the writings of the humanist More. As much of his earlier English poetry, some of the More's Latin poems were written with an eye towards “the happy continuannce and graciouse encreace of vertue” ( CW 1:51/20–21)","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138611276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2023.0151
Joshua Avery
{"title":"The prison analogy in Thomas More's A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation","authors":"Joshua Avery","doi":"10.3366/more.2023.0151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2023.0151","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues for a particular purpose in the section of the Dialogue during which Anthony argues to Vincent that the world is, properly understood, a prison. Anthony, in the vein of Socrates, challenges Vincent by presenting questions and arguments—sometimes even deliberately simplified arguments—that force Vincent into a deeper engagement with the relevant issues, and hence to an improved clarity. Specifically, Anthony Socratically pushes Vincent better to appreciate the enormous gulfs between human and divine perspectives on the relevant issues. By realizing the limits of his own human-centered assumptions, Vincent is able to deepen and elevate his understanding of the points at hand. It is by means of this new orientation that Vincent is able to find peace, a victory over his passions, as is implied by the Latin word for “conquer” embedded in his name.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138618202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MOREANAPub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.3366/more.2023.0152
Benjamin V. Beier
{"title":"Epistolary precepts and the expressions of friendship in More’s 1535 letter to Bonvisi","authors":"Benjamin V. Beier","doi":"10.3366/more.2023.0152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/more.2023.0152","url":null,"abstract":"The essay examines More’s 1535 letter to Antonio Bonvisi. It compares the epistle, as a whole and in its salutation and valediction, with the humanist epistolary conventions expressed by Erasmus and discovers that More often, but not always, ignores Erasmian precepts. The essay argues that More’s rhetorical choices deepen our understanding of his enactment of friendship in the letter and of More’s self-understanding near the end of his life.","PeriodicalId":41939,"journal":{"name":"MOREANA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138608345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}