The Life of Thomas More Read Free Page B

Aristotle; he had constructed a Greek typeface in 1498, and Linacre himself had already participated in the ‘Aldine Academy’, which was devoted to the study of the language and literature of that civilisation. Clearly Aldus was not a printer, or publisher, in any contemporary sense of those terms. He was, rather, one of a group of innovative technicians and intellectual pioneers who had found in the invention of printing access to a whole new conception of learning. Johann Amerbach, and later Froben, were responsible for the first publication of the works of St Ambrose and St Augustine in Basle; there was Plantin-Moretus of Antwerp, Badius of Paris and Theodoricus Martens of Louvain. These were the actual sources of that learning which the reformers and humanists of London were in the process of expounding. Their workshops were also libraries, with the press and the foundry as the indispensable furniture in what were literally the newest academies of learning. They hired scholars to improve the editing of texts; their premises were used for lectures and public readings.
    But they were only the intellectual vanguard of a rapidly growing trade; by the end of the 1470s there were printers in all the major cities of the Low Countries, and it has been estimated that by 1500 there were altogether seventeen hundred presses in operation throughout Europe. 15 It was a world in which commerce and learning, scholarship and merchandise, came together for the first time. That is why it has been suggested that the proliferation of books and pamphlets is directly relatedto the success of the Reformation in parts of Europe; this, at least, was the theory of the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, who believed that God’s cause was ‘advanced, not with sword or target … but with printing, reading and writing’. 16 In fact there is every reason to believe that the expansion of the printing press led to a revival of Catholic piety in the publication of saints’ lives, arts of dying and various works of a liturgical or homilectic nature. More himself encouraged his close relations, the Rastells, to publish an extensive variety of books both in Latin and in English.
    There were certain colleagues of More—in particular Colet and Grocyn—who made no determined effort to launch their own work into print, however; they still relied upon the resources of the manuscript culture of their youth. This may in turn be related to Colet’s continuing interest in cabbalistic learning, in the ‘secrets’ of such ancient writers as the pseudo-Dionysius, not to be divulged to the vulgar throng. It is certainly true that the enclosed and hierarchical nature of the medieval Church could not easily have withstood the climate of learning and opinion generated by the printing press, but this was something which the London reformers understood perfectly well. That is why their concern was with a purified faith, together with the persuasive eloquence of the classically trained grammarian or orator, as a means of renovating that Church. That is also why Thomas More used the new printing technology with an assiduity and determination worthy of any Lutheran reformer. It is at this moment, too, that another figure should enter the narrative of More’s life—a Catholic scholar and rhetorician who used the art of printing to disseminate his work across all Europe. It is Desiderius Erasmus to whom we must now turn, when he visited England for the first time in 1499.
    Since there is a tradition of anecdotes concerning the meeting of great personages, it is not surprising that the first encounter of More and Erasmus has been embellished with coincidence and with Latin witticisms; in one version Erasmus admits to coming
‘ex inferis’
, which might mean from the cellar, hell, or the Low Countries. In this particular account the two men are supposed to have met at the table of the Lord Mayor of London; this is probably the reflection of some garbled report