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With the novelistic vividness that made his National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Queen of Scots "a pure pleasure to read" (Washington Post BookWorld), John Guy brings to life Thomas More and his daughter Margaret-- his confidante and collaborator who played a critical role in safeguarding his legacy. Sir Thomas More's life is well known: his opposition to Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn, his arrest for treason, his execution and martyrdom. Yet Margaret has been largely airbrushed out of the story in which she played so important a role. John Guy restores her to her rightful place in this captivating account of their relationship. Always her father's favorite child, Margaret was such an accomplished scholar by age eighteen that her work earned praise from Erasmus. She remained devoted to her father after her marriage--and paid the price in estrangement from her husband.When More was thrown into the Tower of London, Margaret collaborated with him on his most famous letters from prison, smuggled them out at great personal risk, even rescued his head after his execution. John Guy returns to original sources that have been ignored by generations of historians to create a dramatic new portrait of both Thomas More and the daughter whose devotion secured his place in history.

This volume is an important contribution to the field of Margaret More Roper studies, early modern women's writing, as well as Erasmian piety, Renaissance humanism, and historical and cultural studies more generally. Margaret More Roper is the learned daughter of St. Thomas More, the Catholic martyr; their lives are closely linked to each other and to early sixteenth-century changes in politics and religion and the social upheaval and crises of conscience that they brought. Specifically, Roper's major works - her translation of Erasmus's commentary on the Lord's Prayer and the long dialogue letter between More and Roper on conscience - highlight two major preoccupations of the period: Erasmian humanism and More's last years, which led to his death and martyrdom. Roper was one of the most learned women of her time and a prototype of the woman writer in England, and this edited volume is a tribute to her life, writings, and place among early women authors. It combines comprehensive and convenient joining of biographical, textual, historical, and critical components within a single volume for the modern reader. There is no comparable study in print, and it fills a significant gap in studies of early modern women writers.