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.
The humanist revolution viewed the medieval academy as an obstacle to its interests. In pursuing the trivium--grammar, logic, and rhetoric--medieval scholars gave disproportionate attention to logic, more specifically to determinations of meaning, a field that would today be described as linguistics. For humanists such as More, these scholars' abstruse delvings into the conditions of intelligibility meant a neglect of the ancient virtue of rhetoric. The orator or writer trained in rhetoric could juxtapose alternatives in debate and then, after full consideration of the alternatives, proceed to their resolution. Further, the orator-writer could narrate or dramatize moral, social, or political truths and thus delight the reader's senses and understanding. In short, rhetoric as persuasion could address a learned audience as opposed to a strictly academic one. More's advocacy of the liberalizing of knowledge on behalf of a wider audience gave rise to the wide range of his own writing--from theological argument, educational advocacy, and translations of Greek and Latin authors to the imaginative projections of literary art, the most famous of which, Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip.
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