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Saint Thomas More, The Four Last Things, The Supplication of Souls, A Dialogue on Conscience; Rendered in Modern English by Mary Gottschalk. New York and Princeton, NJ: Scepter Publishers, 2002, 218 pp., ISBN 1-889334-65-0, $9.95.
The publication of any of More's works in contemporary English is a welcome event, but the appearance of these three works is particularly welcome, since none has recently been made so accessible to the nonspecialist reader. This attractively designed volume joins Gottschalk's previous modernization of A Dialogue of Comfort (published, also by Scepter, in 1998). This latest book brings together some of More's least-known works: the unfinished devotional treatise, The Last Things (1522), the polemical defense of purgatory, styled as Supplication of Souls (1529), and the letter in which More resists a last plea from his daughter Margaret Roper to sign the oath of allegiance to Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England (1534).
In so doing, Gottschalk gives the reader valuable insight into the many facets of More's faith and intellect at all stages of his career at the court of Henry VIII. The Last Things was written just after More's appointment as privy councillor, Supplication was written just before his appointment as Lord Chancellor, and the letter (here given the title A Dialogue on Conscience) was written during his final imprisonment in the Tower. For nonacademic readers whose only acquaintance with More may be a translation of Utopia, this version of later works is an important resource.
The fact that these works are so little known, except among More scholars, can be partly attributed to certain anomalous features of their composition. The Four Last Things, titled simply The Last Things in the 1557 edition of More's English works (the only extant early source for the text), is not a finished work; only one of the four last things (death, judgement, hell, and heaven) is actually discussed, and even that one defied More's completion. The Supplication is a completely...