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The Debate Between Thomas More and William Tyndale, 1528–33: Ideas on Literature and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
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Extract

The disagreement between Thomas More and William Tyndale has often been deplored. It has been felt that the controversy failed to bring out the best in More as a writer – that he became bitter, bullying and, worst of all, tedious. Alistair Fox, in his recent book on More, while rightly assigning an important place to the controversial works, writes of them, on the whole, with distaste, finding ‘a pattern of progressive deterioration; dialogue gives way to debellation, self-control yields to loss of proportion and perspective, candour is replaced by dishonesty, and charity is displaced by violence’. More's latest biographer, Richard Marius, finds ‘ferocity and deadly dullness’ in More's polemic, ‘monumental self-righteousness and viciousness’ in Tyndale's. Other modern readers have agreed; C. S. Lewis, in particular, pointed to the tragic irony of such a lengthy quarrel between two men who shared many intellectual assumptions and were to have strangely similar fates. It is true that the opponents have much in common, true also that the scolding of scholars is no longer regarded as first-class intellectual entertainment. And the reader, while admitting the importance of the long-distance debate in the Renaissance as a means of clarifying and disseminating ideas, misses, in More's writings against Tyndale, the pleasing courtesy of his Letter to Martin Dorp in defence of Erasmus and, more acutely perhaps, the ability to compress and control his subject which gives his earlier polemical letters their attractive blend of lightness and earnestness.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , July 1988 , pp. 382 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

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69 Ibid. 422

70 Ibid. 394, cf. 307.

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72 Tyndale, Treatises, 160.

73 Ibid. 104.

74 Tyndale, Answer, 55, 135, 62.

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113 Ibid. 616, 644.