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A DIALOGUE CONCERNING HERESIES. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 6, Parts I and II, Edited by Thomas M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc'hadour, and Richard C. Marius. New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 1981. Pp. xiv, 1-435 ; viii, 439-888.
With the appearance of A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, the Yale editors have moved one stage closer to the completion of their monumental task of assembling the definitive edition of More's Complete Works. The same high quality of scholarship which has characterized the undertaking until now has again been applied to this, the most significant and literary of the author's polemical writings. By reason of the meticulous editorial concern for the most authoritative reading of the text and the illuminating commentary on it, CW 6 attains the distinguished level of performance found in Yale's earlier volumes.
The Dialogue itself justifies the care and attention which its editors have lavished upon it. The work was composed at a crucial period in the early years of the English Reformation and addresses the most urgent questions of that moment. Not only is it an important historical document by reason of its publication less than a decade before Thomas Cromwell begins to despoil the monasteries and strip bare the shrines of England, but it also announces a theme in English literature that will be taken up again and again through the succeeding ages. More's defense of images in Catholic devotional practice implies a fundamental attitude toward the position which art and the artifact should occupy in the church, and his argument extends to the religious edifice as a whole. This will, at first, prove a major bone of contention between Catholic and Protestant. In reply to More's apologia on behalf of Catholic usage, Tyndale raises his majestic voice against the maumets and dumb ceremonies of the fleshly, popish congregation. His outrage gives rise to destruction, but, in the wake of the iconoclastic fury, comes a change in the Protestant consciousness. Think of Dr. Johnson amidst the ruins of St. Andrews thundering against Knox and his Reformation, or the boy Chatterton awakening to the glories of the Middle Ages in the shadows of St. Mary Redcliff. Recall Scott at Melrose Abbey, Carlyle at Bury St. Edmunds, Ruskin at...