Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

**Tyler Cowen** (0:04)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Joanne Paul. She's a historian, popular writer and broadcaster prominent on YouTube, and she's affiliated with the University of Sussex.
She's an expert in the Renaissance and early modern periods, and I very much enjoyed her latest book called More, A Life, which is on sale now. Joanne, welcome.

**Joanne Paul** (0:53)
Thank you.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:54)
I have many questions. Now, as you know, Erasmus wrote quite a bit about More, including a dedicatory letter in In Praise of Folly.
If More was so dogmatic, what about him did Erasmus admire so much?

**Joanne Paul** (1:08)
More and Erasmus have a really interesting friendship. It doesn't start well. Erasmus is actually very put off by More at first. They meet in 1499, actually at the same time that they meet the young Prince Henry, who would become Henry VIII.
They don't hit it off immediately, but soon after, they're exchanging letters, and it's clear that Erasmus has a deep admiration for More. It's not always so clear that More feels the same about Erasmus. Actually, you can sometimes get a sense of a bit of annoyance from More about Erasmus. Erasmus is a full-time occupation as a friend. He's a bit of work.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:47)
But what's he annoyed about?

**Joanne Paul** (1:49)
He writes a lot of letters and demands a lot of letters in return. He's a bit of a hypochondriac. He's always chasing promotion, but then doesn't always follow up. So he's very high maintenance, I think, is what More feels about him. They do fall out for a number of years, not to do with anything regarding religion or the Reformation, but actually to do with the fact that More becomes Lord Chancellor, that he essentially gives up his career as a scholar, his reputation as a scholar, to devote himself almost entirely to the service of Henry VIII.
And no letters are exchanged that we have anyway, between More and Erasmus for those years that he's Lord Chancellor. So it has nothing to do really with dogmatism. Both are defenders of the Catholic Church. Neither is that interested in aligning with Luther particularly. It has more to do with the choices that More makes in his public career.

**Tyler Cowen** (2:43)
And how did More influence in Praise of Folly, Erasmus' greatest work?

**Joanne Paul** (2:48)
Erasmus dedicates Praise of Folly to More, as you say. He may have written some of it, parts of it, while staying at More's home.
And the title itself, Praise of Folly, can actually in Latin mean Praise of More. And so More stands in some ways as that figure of wise folly that Erasmus is trying to articulate in Praise of Folly. I think the pair too were just very interested in satire, in using satire as almost a stick to prod the prideful and powerful with as a way of bringing them down a bit more and really trying to point out to them how silly their pride was. Both Erasmus and More liked poking fun, liked making fun of those who they considered to be stuffed up with pride.

**Tyler Cowen** (3:42)
And do you read More's Utopia as satire or book two? Do you think he meant it? This is the actual Utopia.

**Joanne Paul** (3:48)
I think Utopia is intentionally enigmatic. I think it's a riddle. It's a lot of different things. Certainly satire is one of those things. He is trying to poke fun. If we take, for example, the passage about gold and precious jewels in the island of Utopia, they use gold as chamber pots. They use gold as chains to imprison their prisoners and their slaves.
Those who therefore arrive on the island of Utopia, covered in jewels and gems, are laughed at. Gems are given to children to play with.
Those who deck themselves out in all this wealth are laughing stocks. More is definitely doing something satirical with that, suggesting that in European courts, those who adorn themselves in such ways ought to be mocked. Why do they think that this medal gives them some sort of power or authority or status above anyone else? And the idea that gold chains in particular signify servitude, I think, is something he's specifically suggesting in the text, that those who wear, for instance, chains of office, as he does in his famous Holbein portrait, that they are in some way enslaved by their service to the king. So satire is certainly a part, a big part, of utopia. But there are other elements of it as well, as we know. I think he's trying to say something very pointed about the nature of the island of utopia as both obviously completely fantastic, unreal, impossible, while at the same time there's something about utopia that I think he's suggesting is more real than the world he lives in.