Sir Thomas More Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Sir Thomas More

Sir Thomas More's place in the history of rhetoric and logic is secure for two reasons. First, he enacted the "new learning" of the studia humanitatis, translating and transforming ancient literature to produce a new literature keyed to his age; second, he opposed late-medieval versions of both logic and rhetoric as academically inbred and therefore impractical. As a humanist concerned with civic action and civic virtue, he held as a tenet of faith that the open hand of rhetoric should prevail over the closed fist of logic. This preference for the affective and imagistic medium of rhetoric as opposed to the technical rigors of logic places More within the intellectual cause of humanism.

The signature of this movement was an intense interest in Greek and Roman literary sophistication. More's fascination with the Greek rhetorician and satirist Lucian (second century A.D.) is characteristic of the early humanist phase of the Renaissance. Like the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, More was excited by the ancient fusion of literary modes and civic purposes: a city, a nation, a civilization could be moved toward the good and useful by the inducements of fiction or any literary form that, through its color, movement, and verisimilitude, seized the reader's imagination and intellect.

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