Featured Review Featured Reviews are especially provocative discussions of highly significant works. They appear on a recurring basis. (Review Editor). Jasper Ridley, Statesman and Saint: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, and the Politics of Henry VIII. New York: The Viking Press, 1983. [xiv] + 338 pp. $20.75; J. A. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More. Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. xii + 220 pp. £20 and $22.50. Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. xii + 271 pp. $19.95. There was a natural affinity between the biographical mode and the Christian humanists of the sixteenth century. Asking about the nature of the individual human personality, they were fascinated by the many different roles that one person might perform, and they were attracted to those areas where the personal and the social, the individual and the historic moment, and life and art met. The young Thomas More translated Giovanni Francesco Pico's life of his uncle, Pico della Mirándola; and a later work, The History of King Richard III, is also, in some sense, a biography. Later still, More commissioned a family portrait, by Holbein, that could be thought of as a group biography, so brilliantly are the figures and their interaction represented. But, then as now, More's own life, character, and personality—which he shaped and reshaped in both his writings and his life—have proven more fascinating still. As early as 1517, a friend, Richard Pace, included an 84 biography Vol. 8, No. 1 informal sketch of the clever young humanist in his De Fructu. The definitive portrait of More as humanist, however, proved to be Erasmus ', written as a letter to a friend, Ulrich von Hütten, in 1519. By focusing on More's personality and the telling detail and combining classical models with classical and Christian ideals filtered through a humanistic consciousness, Erasmus gave the world a new kind of hero. The More he portrayed was a good friend, a loving son, husband, and father, and a valued administrator, well-rounded, witty, steeped in good letters (not pseudo-learning), devoted to the humane and godly, able to find pleasure in all human relations, and willing to serve his society without self-aggrandisement, on the one hand, or retreat to the monastery on the other. Erasmus took particular pains to evoke a characteristically humanist stance: "None is less guided by the opinion of the herd, but again none is less remote from the common feelings of humanity." Erasmus wrote a decade before More became Lord Chancellor and before the religious and political turmoil of the late 1520's and early 1530's that led to More's trial for treason and his death on Tower Hill on July 6, 1535. A second biographical tradition, reacting to these events, emerged in the course of the sixteenth century, initiated by Roper's life of More (written in the 1550's but not printed until 1626). Roper was More's son-in-law and had lived with him for over sixteen years; like Erasmus, then, Roper spoke from personal knowledge and was interested in the personality and character of More. His More was "a man of singular virtue and of a clear unspotted conscience," and a hagiographie tone colors all that he wrote, although, if we read between the lines, we can detect some of the ways that More controlled passions and emotions Roper never discussed directly. These two traditions did not go wholly unchallenged, either in the sixteenth century or later; More's opponents were quick to challenge his own self-charactertization, for example. But the images that were created—of humanist and saint or martyr—have continued to dominate our view of More until very reently. The three works under review, all published between 1980 and 1983 (a fourth biography, by Richard Marius, is announced for Fall 1984 publication by Knopf) are, in this respect, signs of what promises to be a new era in More studies. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, the psychological aspect of both Erasmus' portrait and Roper's is inadequate from a...