Thomas More is often called a “humanist,” and rightly so if the word has its usual meaning in scholarship on the Renaissance. “Humanist” has by now acquired so many different and contradictory meanings, however, that it needs to be applied carefully to the likes of More. Many postmodernists tend to use the word, pejoratively, to mean someone who believes in an autonomous self, the stability of words, reason, and the possibility of determinable meanings. Without quite arguing that More was a postmodernist avant la lettre, this essay suggests that he was not a “humanist” who stalks the pages of much recent postmodernist theory and that in fact even while remaining a devout Catholic and sensible lawyer he was quite as aware as any recent critic of the slipperiness of human selves and human language. It is time that literary critics tightened up their definition of “humanist,” especially when writing about the Renaissance.
