Who Went to Thomas More's Lectures on St Augustine's De Civitate Dei?

Abstract

AbstractIn 1501 omas More, newly qualified as a barrister, delivered a series of lectures on St Augustine's De Civitate Dei to a select audience in the London church of St Lawrence Jewry. To Erasmus, looking back some years later, what was striking was the contrast between the youthful speaker and the established clergy, lawyers, and higher civil servants who came to hear him. In fact the lectures can be seen as the fulfilment of a native tradition of lay piety, that of the "medled" or mixed life which combined spiritual culture with civic responsibility. In More's case it provided a fertile ground for the reception of humanist ideals.