Thomas More: A Life

The definitive biography of the man who dominated political and intellectual circles in England during the sixteenth century: Thomas More.

Born into the era of the Wars of the Roses, educated during the European Renaissance, rising to become Chancellor of England, and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More was one of the most famous--and notorious--figures in English history.

Was he a saintly scholar, the visionary author of Utopia, and an inspiration for statesmen and intellectuals even today? Or was he the cruel zealot famously portrayed in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? Thomas More: A Life is a monumental biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning prior interpretations of this titan of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows Thomas More to have been intellectually and politically central to the making of modern Europe.

Based on new archival discoveries and drawing on more than a decade of research into More’s life and work, this is a richly told story of faith and politics that illuminates a man who, more than four hundred years after his execution, remains one of the most brilliant minds of the Renaissance.

Joanne Paul, author of The House of Dudley, is a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Sussex. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance and early modern periods. She has written for the Cambridge University Press ’Ideas in Context’ series and has been widely praised for her work on Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes. She lives in Sussex.