This chapter traces the publication history and animating ideas of Luciani Opuscula, a set of translations of Lucian begun as a collaboration between Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. I examine the volume’s contents, which grew over time as Erasmus kept adding to them, and the letters with which both translators prefaced their own selections, explaining to fellow humanists how the works are to be read. These interpretive letters tell us much about how the two great northern humanists understood Lucian and what role he played in their own evolution as the foremost ‘Lucianists’ of their age.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

Chapter 5 explores the distinct dynamics of Plutarch reception in England prior to the famous 1579–1603 translations of Thomas North (1535–1604). In England at this time, Plutarch’s work was read largely through a Ciceronian lens. I reflect on the vernacular translations of Plutarch’s moral essays by Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), Thomas Blundeville (1522–1606), Richard Taverner and Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) as well as explore the place of Plutarch in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). I argue that prior to the translations of Thomas North, Plutarch was read predominantly in England as a thinker whose political insights were secondary to his moral ones. While the increasing precariousness of the English realm into the latter sixteenth century changed the tone of political thought, the English never read their Plutarch in the vernacular with the same attention to the nature of public office and the public realm in the way prevalent in France earlier in the century.

Chapter 1 examines demographic ideas in early Tudor England, centering on connections between the mobility and mutability of particular groups of people. It first delineates sources for demographic ideas, in particular the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics, and emphasizes the centrality of qualitative concerns about multitudes of people as a factor in the health of the polis. It then turns to a major context for English demographic thought, the enclosure of land from the late fifteenth century. It delineates a key theme in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of agrarian complaint, detailed in More’s Utopia: causal links between enclosure and depopulation (the removal of a functional multitude from a specific locale) and between mobility and degeneration (here, of ploughmen displaced by enclosure into criminals). The final section looks at the development – in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal, and an anonymous set of “Polices” – of an idea of policy centered on restricting mobility to prevent degeneration and maintain proportions and relations between functional multitudes as components of the body politic.

The emergence of the English state in the 16th and 17th centuries was underwritten by two rival legal vocabularies: royal prerogative and the common law. These opened the two avenues through which successive Tudor and Stuart rulers tried to integrate the landowning nobility and the merchant elites in support of the crown’s policies. Each vocabulary had its biases. Prerogative powers were articulated by civilians whose Roman law training made them almost automatic supporters of absolutism. Common lawyers, by contrast, stressed the inviolability of the rights of property against the extractions of the king. Both idioms had their view also on the law of nations. Civilians focused on diplomacy and the rules of war and peace while common lawyers understood property as a natural right to wage commerce across the world. Sometimes the vocabularies came together as a specific lex mercatoria. A series of legal cases in the 17th century juxtaposed sovereignty and property rights in a way that inspired Thomas Hobbes to produce his powerful theory of the commonwealth as a protection/obedience pact in which all property rights were dependent on the decision of the sovereign.

This chapter explores the competing memories about the transmission of Sir Thomas More’s hair-shirt – the penitential garment he wore beneath his clothing for most of his adult life – the object’s significance to More’s descendants, and its devotional and memorial function within the religious communities they founded or patronised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the hair-shirt story are two Margarets: his blood daughter, Margaret Roper (1505–44), and his adopted ward, Margaret Giggs (1508–70). Different historical accounts claim each Margaret as uniquely aware of More’s asceticism, and that they each received the hair-shirt from him when he died. These claims suggest each woman had a superlative connection to More’s spirituality and beliefs. The hair-shirt symbolises More’s deep commitment to God throughout his political career and service to Henry VIII, a commitment that would cost him his life. More’s state execution both literally and figuratively exposed the hair-shirt and his largely private devotional practices. The hair-shirt became a new surface on which memories of the Reformation, and the construction of English Catholic identity have been formed from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Sixteenth-century jurist, Thomas More, developed the distinction between a Christian utopia and the political autonomy of the state. Chapter 4 recognises religion’s role in contributing to cosmopolitan ethical principles to guide political power, without becoming a justification for a political theology of the state. Section 4.1 proceeds with More’s emphasis of a common humanism that brought accommodation between temporal and spiritual sovereignty. Section 4.2 ascertains in what manner the Second Vatican Council recognised that not alone freedom but the search for the truth is central to political democracy and an open public sphere. Catholic theorists recognise a prisca theologia or a semblance of the natural law, and thereby advance in what way the expression of the political form the state takes as a basis for a common cosmopolitan humanism. Section 4.3 details Maritain’s proposed model of Church and state, and delineates Maritain’s theory of secular democratic faith, as a bridging of Catholicism with liberal democracy and human rights. This chapter concludes by enquiring if a secular democratic faith in democracy and human rights is possible today.

It was consistent with both humanism and the growth of political bureaucracy that humanisticallyeducated ‘new men’ took roles as counsellors in the courts of both early Tudor kings. This chapter explores the role of the counsellor in the work of three leading Renaissance humanists: Erasmus, More and Castiglione. Each accepted that good counsel should, to varying degrees, rule the prince. At the heart of their writings remains, however, a question about the efficacy of counsel in a hereditary monarchy. Often overlooked in this debate is importance of Seneca, who provides the basis for the discussion of the effectiveness of counsel in all three writers’ works, contrasting principles learned through instruction from precepts gathered through counsel.