The Life of Thomas More.

Peter Ackroyd Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $30, 447 pp.

Marcia L. Colish

Given the available biographies of Thomas More (1478-1535), why another one? Peter Ackroyd has two good reasons, one acknowledged and the other unstated. It was only in 1990 that the last volume in the critical edition of More's works was published. Thus, only biographers in the 1990s can exploit these materials exhaustively. Ackroyd does so, with telling effect. Also, More has always been controversial. From the sixteenth century onward, relatives and later coreligionists have drawn a hagiographical picture of More, countered by the view of him as a bloodthirsty heresy-hunter inspired by Protestant martyrologists, with or without retroactive head-shrinking. Students of Renaissance literature and humanism see him as an erudite, eloquent, elegant wit and scholar, an engaged and engaging family man and man of letters, while political historians typically treat him as a conscientious but bland facilitator, less an idea man or mover and shaker than Cardinal Wolsey or Thomas Cromwell, his predecessor and successor as lord chancellor. While Ackroyd does not identify interpretations he opposes, he does take a personal stand, and offers a generally persuasive reading of More.

Ackroyd's bibliography shows that he has done his homework well; but his scholarship has flaws. He thinks Saint Augustine was a lawyer before his conversion, not a professional rhetorician, and describes Justinian's corpus as a compendium of canon, not civil, law. He assumes, incorrectly, that the thirteenth-century logician Petrus Hispalensis was taught at Oxford in More's student days; actually, Oxford masters used the Logica Oxoniensis. More than a dozen misspelled authors' names and garbled titles mar his notes and bibliography.

These glitches, however, are decisively offset by the evocative and richly textured picture Ackroyd paints of English life in More's day. The sights, sounds, and even smells of More's London emerge vividly. Recently, scholarship has revised our understanding of English religious life on the eve of the Reformation and Ackroyd accepts its findings, depicting a religious culture whose ritual and color were pervasive and deeply satisfying. He argues that More feared that this familiar and sustaining environment would be annihilated by the break with Rome. The legal culture that formed More was even more central in shaping his conviction that order and hierarchy were essential and that any attack on these principles would destroy the social fabric. Another key element in More's intellectual makeup, for Ackroyd, was rhetoric and role-playing. Thus, More's anti-Lutheran tracts are less an index of his personal devotional agenda or manifestations of neurotic fixations than literary exercises in which More invoked the generic conventions and vocabulary of contemporary polemic, with an eye to the sensibilities of the audiences he addressed. In contrast with the themes stressed in such works, More's own spirituality centered on devotion to and imitation of the Man of Sorrows.

In recounting the crisis leading to More's execution, Ackroyd agrees that Henry VIII's resolution of the "king's great matter" was triggered by his desire that his child by Anne Boleyn be born legitimate. Ackroyd soft-pedals Henry's late-blooming religious scruples and Queen Catherine's age, which foreclosed the possibility of a male heir by her. Other biographers have exposed Henry's double game in seeking a papal dispensation in order to marry Anne, whose sister had been his mistress, while simultaneously claiming that the papal dispensation that permitted him to marry his brother's widow could not override the church's consanguinity rule.

If Henry's deviousness is unacknowledged by Ackroyd, it was certainly known to More, who made it clear to Henry in private that he could not countenance the annulment of the king's marriage to Catherine. A major unresolved question is why, knowing More's position, Henry appointed him lord chancellor, and why More accepted, knowing that the exercise of that office was likely to destroy him. No consensus exists on this question. Ackroyd thinks that Henry believed More could be won over, and that More accepted because his whole career was a preparation for the chancellorship and because commitment to public service, come what may, was so ingrained in his character that he could not refuse. Ackroyd's Henry is more sanguine and less disingenuous than that of other biographers; his More is more naive about his ability to defend his queen and church.

Ackroyd also revises the political historians' estimate of More. His More emerges as an activist, an effective leader, efficient and just in discharging his duties. More receives highest marks as a diplomat and as a judge in the Court of Chancery. Prosecution of heresy was part of this job, as it was before and after More. In Ackroyd's view, More was not motivated by a fanatic enjoyment of the heretics' sufferings; his concern was to investigate and uproot the networks through which heterodox literature was imported and distributed. As to the charge that More succumbed to double-think in denying the heretics' right of conscience while demanding the same right for himself, Ackroyd is surely correct in observing that More held himself just as accountable to the law as anyone else. He resigned the chancellorship to avoid opposing king and Parliament openly. And, when the government decided that More's noncompliance as a private citizen was a public-relations problem, he did not claim exemption from the Court of Star Chamber or from the verdict it handed down. As for More the Christian, Ackroyd depicts him with admiration. His More is a Christian humanist, committed to evangelical piety and private asceticism, an active life of charity to the unfortunate, and to public service as his worldly calling.

This is not to say that Ackroyd has resolved all the ambiguities surrounding the actions and convictions of this complex and subtle personality. To his very considerable credit, he avoids reductionistic theorizing of any kind. Ackroyd succeeds in bringing to life, without canonizing, demonizing, or psychopathologizing, a man for whom paradox was not just a Renaissance taste but a condition of his inner universe, no less than of the external universe - theological and political - that he inhabited. In his last chapter, Ackroyd quotes More's words at the scaffold: "I die the king's good servant, but God's first." He might equally have quoted, as the book's subtext, More's motto: "Be ye wise as serpents; be ye innocent as doves."

Marcia L. Colish is the Frederik B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College. Her most recent book is Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400-1400 (Yale University Press).