Notes — Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Notes on Joanne Paul in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/joanne-paul/), 24 June 2026.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A biographer’s portrait of Thomas More set against the wider Tudor world he inhabited. Paul, author of Thomas More: A Life, resists collapsing More into either the martyr of A Man for All Seasons or the persecutor of Wolf Hall, insisting on holding both the humanist wit behind Utopia and the Lord Chancellor who imprisoned heretics in view at once. The conversation radiates outward from More to Erasmus, the Reformation, Tudor social mobility, the roots of Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, and closes on Paul’s own vantage as a Canadian historian of England.

Q2 — How is it argued? Through close biographical and textual reading rather than abstract theory: Paul reasons from specific documentary evidence (More and Erasmus’s surviving correspondence, the Holbein portraits, the three recorded burnings under More’s chancellorship, the etymology of ‘Raphael Hythloday’) to general claims about the period. Her method is explicitly anti-reductive — she states a principle of refusing to sort historical actors into good or evil, and repeatedly reframes Cowen’s binary questions (‘am I supposed to admire him?’) as invitations to sit with contradiction instead.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Well-evidenced on the documentary specifics she is trained in — the More-Erasmus relationship, the Utopia text, the Holbein portraits — and appropriately hedged where she is candid about the limits of her expertise (Tudor visual art, the extent of More’s use of torture, English religious-belief statistics). Her broader interpretive claims (More’s fear-driven turn against heresy, the ‘falsity vs reality’ reading of Utopia’s economy) are argued rather than proven, as is appropriate to intellectual history, and she flags this herself by contrasting her reading against Robert Bolt’s very different one. [?] Her claim that only three people were burned at the stake under More’s chancellorship is stated as a corrective to inflated social-media claims, not independently sourced here.

Q4 — What of it? A model of biographical nuance transferable well beyond Tudor history: refusing to resolve a complicated figure into hero or villain, and treating a text like Utopia as a deliberate riddle rather than a position paper. It also supplies the wiki’s first dedicated treatment of Renaissance humanism and English Reformation politics, and — via the counsel-to-princes theme — a possible future link to the wiki’s cluster on power and its constraints (Iron Law of Oligarchy, Seven Rules of Power).

Glossary

Renaissance humanism — the early-modern intellectual movement, of which More and Erasmus were leading figures, that revived classical Greek and Latin texts and used them to argue for broader education, rhetorical training, and reasoned criticism of institutions (including the Church) from within. [§ On More’s Utopia]

Utopia — More’s 1516 book, the first to use the word; a fictional island society narrated at second hand by the traveller Raphael Hythloday, built on no private property and no gold-based wealth. Paul reads it as a deliberate riddle, part satire and part serious counter-proposal, not a simple blueprint. [§ On More’s Utopia]

Counsel — the early-modern practice and duty of an educated adviser offering (unwelcome) truth to a ruler; the framing debate inside Utopia itself is whether a wise person should serve a prince at all. [§ On More’s Utopia]

Lord Chancellor — the English Crown’s most senior legal and political officer; More held the post under Henry VIII (1529–1532), a role that pulled him away from his life as a scholar and eventually cost him his life. [§ On whether More should be admired]

Act of Supremacy — the 1534 Tudor statute making the English monarch head of the Church of England in place of the Pope; More’s refusal to swear to it led to his execution. [§ On whether More should be admired]

Lollards — an English heterodox religious movement pre-dating the Reformation, treated as heretical by the Catholic establishment even though its adherents did not consider themselves outside the Church. [§ On English Catholicism as the Reformation approaches]

Key claims by section

On More’s Utopia [§ On More’s Utopia]

More and Erasmus’s friendship began awkwardly in 1499 (the same year they met the young Prince Henry) and grew into deep, if uneven, mutual regard; correspondence stopped entirely during More’s years as Lord Chancellor, for reasons of career choice rather than religious disagreement.
Utopia is intentionally enigmatic: satire (gold used for chamber pots and prisoners’ chains, mocking continental status-display) sits alongside a serious claim that Utopia’s rejection of money, property, and social hierarchy is in some sense more real than the falsities — money, property, hierarchy — that structure More’s own world and ours.
The narrator Raphael Hythloday’s name is itself a riddle (readable as either ‘peddler of nonsense’ or an archangel’s messenger), and the frame narrative — a debate between Hythloday and a character named ‘Thomas More’ over whether one should give counsel to princes — deliberately unsettles who holds authority in the text.
Paul resists reading Utopia’s surveillance and lack of individuality as an intended dystopian warning; those readings are, in her view, projections of a post-Enlightenment, rights-individualist lens back onto a text more troubled by the sin of pride than by lost privacy.

On whether More should be admired [§ On whether More should be admired]

Paul declines to sort More into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, arguing instead that his turn toward persecuting heresy came from fear — specifically, fear that Lutheran heresy would fracture the unity of Christian society — a mechanism she thinks is worth understanding rather than simply condemning.
As Lord Chancellor, More oversaw the imprisonment and interrogation of heretics and three recorded burnings; whether he personally tortured suspects is disputed and, in her account, unresolved by surviving evidence. [?]
She pushes back on inflated popular claims (hundreds burned ‘personally’ by More) as historically unsupported.

On play and movie adaptations of More [§ On play and movie adaptations of More]

Holbein’s portrait of More (at the Frick) is compelling because Holbein knew More intimately, in contrast with his comparatively ‘pallid’ portrait of Cromwell — a contrast the Frick itself draws.
Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons recruits More as a champion of freedom of conscience and individual authority against the state — values Paul says More would not have recognised as his own, since More was in fact deeply suspicious of individual conscience as a source of heresy.
Popular and dramatic treatments tend to flatten complexity into hero/villain pairs (More the hero and Cromwell the villain in A Man for All Seasons; the reverse in Wolf Hall), even though the two men had known each other for decades and shared more common ground than either production shows.

On English Catholicism as the Reformation approaches [§ On English Catholicism as the Reformation approaches]

Religious identity in early Tudor England was not a matter of preference or popularity — ‘you are a Catholic’ — even as internal criticism of the Church (from More, from Erasmus) was extensive; reform was assumed to happen from within, not by fragmenting into a new church.
More’s horror at the Reformation centred on the prospect of the Church’s unity fragmenting, which he and many contemporaries found genuinely terrifying.
More’s execution provoked real public unease; Henry VIII’s regime was conscious of being watched, scheduled the execution to avoid symbolic parallels with Thomas Becket, and needed but failed to secure More’s public acquiescence.

On Shakespeare and the growth of education [§ On Shakespeare and the growth of education]

A 16th-century expansion in literacy and grammar-school education (partly humanist, partly Reformation-driven, since Protestants needed literate scripture-readers) supplied the rhetorical and classical training — Cicero, Ovid, rhetoric — visible later in Shakespeare’s soliloquies and poetry.
Precursors to the scientific revolution include renewed engagement with Greek mathematics and science and, notably, alchemy: Paul stresses that the scientific method itself emerged entangled with occult and mystical pursuits (John Dee, Francis Bacon), not in opposition to them.

On the quality of Tudor art [§ On the quality of Tudor art]

Paul, outside her specialism here, notes that Tudor England looked to the Continent (Holbein among them) for Renaissance-calibre visual art, without matching homegrown investment or achievement. [?source — she defers to another named forthcoming book she has not written]

Rising antisemitism in 16th-century England is tied, in Paul’s tentative account, to a European-wide Inquisition-and-Reformation-driven push against heterodoxy, though she flags this as outside her close expertise. [?]
Racial attitudes functioned differently from modern ‘scientific’ racism: social status could partly transcend race (a Black trumpeter at Henry VII’s court, a Black duke in Italy), even as skin colour carried moral connotations and More himself is on record with racist sentiments.
Tudor social mobility was substantial and deliberately engineered by Henry VII, who promoted capable low-born administrators (a strategy Henry VIII continued) partly to check noble power and partly because such men were politically disposable; a classical/Latin education was the effective gatekeeper, and being male was close to a precondition.

On London’s governance [§ On London’s governance]

The City of London had its own mayor and court of aldermen and a nominally democratic franchise restricted to guild-approved freemen, creating recurring 16th-century friction between civic self-government and the Crown; More himself sat on both sides of that line as undersheriff of London and then a Crown representative.

On Canada [§ On Canada]

Paul is from Ontario; her graduate training under Quentin Skinner shaped her interest in contingency in history — that past outcomes were not inevitable, which she reads as a source of present agency.
She situates Canadian intellectual history within republican and federal thought and multiculturalism theory, an area she would like to return to.

On choosing English history to study [§ On choosing English history to study]

She was drawn to the 16th century’s liminal position between the recognisably medieval and the recognisably modern, and to its visible ‘paths not taken’ — a source, in her account, of both counterfactual interest and present-day lessons.

On touring and living in England [§ On touring and living in England]

(Personal/biographical; no load-bearing claim beyond colour.)

On religion, politics, and economics in the UK [§ On religion, politics, and economics in the UK]

Paul, an Anglican convert from Catholicism, favours full inclusion of women in the clergy as part of the Church of England’s recovery from recent difficulty.
She attributes UK stagnation substantially to Brexit’s economic and identity costs, short-termist underinvestment in higher education (including attacks on humanities expertise), and persistent racism and xenophobia that crowd out other debate.
Paul’s next book, provisionally titled Tyrant, will examine Henry VIII as a portrait of tyranny and the period’s strategies of resisting it.