The Question of Thomas More

Anew biography of a great man, especially one whose life is already rich with lore, is a delicate task. There is the temptation to attempt something new, or worse, to try to make the story “relevant”—even “urgent,” heaven forbid—by inserting into the great one’s life some zippy contemporary narrative (usually sexual). Contemporary biography imagines that people of the past only matter if they are to some degree secretly, transgressively, or subversively working to promote one of today’s controlling ideas. It’s a fundamentally gnostic approach to people’s personal histories, which insists that individuals only matter insofar as, in their own remote eras, they participated in the secret knowledge of the cultural mores of the late 2010s.