The Essential Works of Thomas More

The Essential Works of Thomas More
Edited by Gerard B. Wegemer & Stephen W. Smith
Yale University Press, 2020

The new decade starts off with a great thumping $100 doorstop from Yale University Press, The Essential Works of Thomas More, edited by Gerard Wegemer and Stephen Smith, a 1500-page assemblage of all the major writings of Saint Thomas More: the poetry, the translations, the miscellaneous muckraking prose, the intellectual dialogues, the parodies, the prayers and meditations, and of course the entirety of Utopia, a wide, sweeping collection of everything even remotely noteworthy or representative of the man over an entire career of writing. 

“The Essential Works of Thomas More gathers together - for the first time in a one-volume standardized edition - More’s writings in poetry and prose from his Latin and English works,” proclaims the Center for Thomas More Studies in the book’s Preface. “The only other one-volume editions of More date from earlier centuries, and focus either on his English or Latin compositions.” Such a claim leans heavily on that word “standardized” and seems to exclude volumes like John Thornton and Susan Varenne’s 2003 Saint Thomas More: Selected Writings or 1967’s The Essential Thomas More, edited by James Greene and John Dolan. The Greene and Dolan volume, for instance, likewise includes everything major that More wrote - in a $2 paperback. “Standardized” comes with a hefty price tag. 

There’s no denying this enormous volume is worth that price tag, even though it can be neither bought nor read casually. It’s beautifully designed, with the frontispiece showing Pablo Eduardo’s gorgeous sculpture portrait of More from the Boston College Law School (and a close-up of Holbein’s famous portrait of an unshaven, worried-looking man), a barrage of textual footnotes on every page, and a binding strong enough for thing’s immense weight. 

And the selections here are prodigious and varied - there’s More wading into the theological arguments of the day, his brief life of Richard III (so merrily kicked around in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time), and, for morbid fascination, a reconstruction of More’s trial. The Preface offers all this with a minimum of filler or fuss:

More’s writings are presented chronologically, with brief introductions, content outlines, relevant images, and glosses, all of which seek to assist the reader and facilitate careful study; in preparing the edition, we have had particularly in mind those for whom More’s works are less familiar, but who nevertheless wish to make a solid beginning of studying his writings. This edition endeavors to present a comprehensive More to the contemporary reader, as fully as limitations of space and wit allow.

That parting note of subtle insult directed at the hoi-polloi among the book’s readers (the Center’s docents would no doubt say the mention of possibly deficient wit was aimed at their own humble selves) would have brought a wintry smile of sympathy to More’s own face, since it very much aligns with the underlying done of so much of the prose in these pages. This might come as a surprise to readers expecting to encounter here exclusively the pasteboard saint of A Man For All Seasons, and that’s the strongest recommendation of an opera omnia as impressive as this one: it continually surprises. More was an agile, inventive, and endlessly responsive writer in all his authorly guises; having this much of him in one volume will be happily instructive even to readers who know some of those guises well.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post , and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.