A DIALOGUE OF COMFORT AGAINST TRIBULATION

St. Thomas More wrote his Dialogue while facing an unknown future in the Tower of London in 1534, an imprisonment that terminated with his death. Editor Leland Miles speculates on his frame of mind and deduces from More's brave march to his execution that the Dialogue indeed gave him the comfort he required for complete reconciliation with his destiny. He writes as well of the literary merits of the work (""one of the most remarkable documents of the English Renaissance...far more representative of the complex totality of More's thought and literary techniques than Utopia"") the sources, themes and traditions behind it, the text and textual problems. The present edition is an abridged one based on the 1557 Rastell edition.