The Life of Thomas More Book

I thought on first reading this biography some years ago that it was less gripping that it could have been, given the stature of the man that it is about, but I find on re-reading the book that my first assessment was wrong. What I had called tedious then is what I would now call atmospheric and impressively detailed. Peter Ackroyd knows sixteenth-century London inside and out. One of the virtues of this biography is that it places Thomas More in his proper context, as a man who all his adult life upheld the prerogatives of the law and the Church as he understood them.

That Thomas More's life intersects those of such larger-than-life figures as Martin Luther, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and (of course) King Henry VIII is a boon to skillful biographers, and Ackroyd also has insights to share about More's peers, not to mention the impetus for and course of the Protestant Reformation in England.

While some of the excerpts from More's writing slowed down my own reading because spelling at the time had not been standardized, it was great fun to learn how much More actually bequeathed even to language, by crafting or documenting expressions like "dead as a doornail." More even followed the medieval practice of employing a household Fool who was himself clever enough to use lines like "Chancellor More is chancellor no more."

It is no easy thing to make virtue accessible without belittling it, which is why saints are tricky to write about. Fortunately, Ackroyd has a firm grasp of what it means to be "in the world but not of it," and his work here does justice to England's most famous lawyer.