NRO: "Getting to Know Thomas More"

(Hat tip: Amy Welborn)

Matthew Mehan reviews a new book on St. Thomas More at National Review Online:

Getting to Know Thomas More
A more seasoned Man for All Seasons.

By Matthew Mehan

Dead nearly five hundred years, Sir Thomas More pops up all over the place. He is in the Frick Collection in Manhattan as painted by Hans Holbein. More's bust sits in the Tower of London where he was imprisoned and executed, and his statue is at the Inns of Court, the center and source of Anglo-Saxon law, where he was recently named in a British lawyers' poll the "Lawyer of the [last] Millennium." You can find him in Rome where he was canonized a saint in 1935 and named the patron of statesmen in 2000. You can find him on stage and on film in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. You can find him in bookstores the world over, still posthumously pedaling his hotly debated and famous philosophic dialogue Utopia. So hotly debated was that book that you can even find More's name engraved on a Leninist monument near the Kremlin, erected in 1918, celebrating him as one of that handful "who promoted the liberation of humankind from oppression, arbitrariness, and exploitation." Less but still surprising, you can find him in the Anglican Church calendar celebrated yearly as a martyr. When Lenin, the pope, and the Church of England all lay claim to the same man's legacy, you have to assume the following: This man is worth knowing, and no one knows this man.

***
Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith, from the University of Dallas and Hillsdale College respectively, have edited together into a manageable and highly readable volume, a collection of documents that form an impressive mosaic of the life — political, intellectual, personal, spiritual, and historical — of Sir Thomas More. The book — A Thomas More Sourcebook is not, as you might think, simply famous selections from his voluminous tracts, letters, poems, speeches, and philosophic dialogues. Rather, it is something more clever and nimble, which turns out to give a far clearer picture of More than has been heretofore drawn — excepting Holbein's portrait of course.

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