Abstract: This essay seeks to overcome the dichotomy still perceived in much modern scholarship between More's humanist writings and his reformation controversies by grounding both groups of texts in humanist reflections on language as the key instrument of academic method and social intercourse. Reading More's defence of Erasmian philology in the 'Letter to Dorp' together with Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica (first printed in Louvain in 1515) and the language theory of Juan Luis Vives, the essay argues that More not only promotes the humanist principles of communicability, usage orientation and appreciation of linguistic form as cornerstones of a renewed theology but is also implicitly aware of the epistemological uncertainties they might generate. As the essay goes on to demonstrate, More's controversies with Luther and Tyndale (1523–33) were still governed by linguistic and semiotic concerns on all levels, while the rupture within the common interpretive framework of ecclesiastical consensus made the ambiguities lurking beneath the humanist principles of common usage and credibility all the more urgently obvious.
Gabriela Schmidt (Mon,) studied this question.
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