After first considering Thomas More’s reputation for friendship, this article will trace references to friendship across More’s writings from his earliest letters and poems until the year of his imprisonment, 1534. In sum, the article suggests that a clearer understanding of More’s own “virtue politics,” to invoke James Hankins’s magisterial study of Renaissance humanism in Italy, must account better for the centrality of friendship in More’s thinking, writing, and life. Thomas More, a leading humanist and citizen of England, sees and understands himself consistently as a friend—of himself, of others, and of his own country.
Stephen W. Smith (Mon,) studied this question.