Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Joanne Paul. She's a historian, popular writer, and broadcaster prominent on YouTube, and she's affiliated with the University of Sussex. She's an expert in the Renaissance and early modern periods, and I very much enjoyed her latest book called Thomas More: A Life, which is on sale now. Joanne, welcome.

Oh, thank you.

I have many questions. Now, as you know, Erasmus wrote quite a bit about Thomas More, including a dedicatory letter in In Praise of Folly. If More was so dogmatic, what about him did Erasmus admire so much?

More and Erasmus have a really interesting friendship. It doesn't start well. Erasmus is actually very put off by Thomas More at first. They meet in 1499, actually at the same time that they meet young Prince Henry, who would become Henry Henry VIII, and they don't hit it off immediately, but soon after, they're exchanging letters, and it's clear that Erasmus has a deep admiration for Thomas More. It's not always so clear that Thomas More feels the same about Erasmus, and actually, you can sometimes get a sense of a bit of annoyance from More about Erasmus. Erasmus is a full-time occupation as a friend. He's a bit of work.

But what's he annoyed about?

He writes a lot of letters and demands a lot of letters in return. He's a bit of a hypochondriac. He's always chasing promotion. But then doesn't always follow up. So he's just, he's very high maintenance, I think, is what Thomas More feels about him. And they do fall out for a number of years, not to do with anything regarding religion or the Reformation, but actually to do with the fact that Thomas More becomes Lord Chancellor, that he essentially gives up his career as a scholar, his reputation as a scholar, to devote himself almost entirely to the service of Henry VIII. And no letters are exchanged, that we have anyway, between More and Erasmus for those years. That he's Lord Chancellor. So it has nothing to do really with dogmatism. Both are defenders of the Catholic Church. Neither is that interested in aligning with Luther particularly. It has more to do with the choices that More makes in his public career.

And how did More influence in Praise of Folly, Erasmus's greatest work?

Erasmus dedicates Praise of Folly to More, as you say. He may have written some of it, parts of it, while staying at Thomas More's home. And the title itself, Praise of Folly, can actually in Latin mean Praise of More. And so More stands in some ways as that figure of wise folly that Erasmus is trying to articulate in Praise of Folly. I think the pair too were just very interested in satire, in using satire as almost a stick to prod the prideful and powerful with as a way of bringing them down a bit more and really trying to point out to them how silly their pride was. Both Erasmus and More liked poking fun, liked making fun of those who they considered to be stuffed up with pride.

And do you read Thomas More's Utopia as satire or Book Two? Do you think he meant it? This is the actual utopia.

I think Utopia is intentionally enigmatic. I think it's, it's a riddle. It's a lot of different things. Certainly satire is one of those things. He is trying to poke fun. If we take, for example, the passage about gold and precious jewels in the island of Utopia, they use gold as chamber pots. They use gold as chains to imprison their prisoners and their slaves, and those who therefore who arrive on the island of Utopia covered in jewels and gems are laughed at. Gems are given to children to play with. And so those who deck themselves out in all this wealth are laughingstocks. And More is definitely doing something satirical with that, suggesting that in European courts, those who adorn themselves in such ways ought to be mocked. Why do they think that this metal gives them some sort of power or authority or status above anyone else. And the idea that gold chains in particular signify servitude, I think, is something he's specifically suggesting in the text, that those who wear, for instance, chains of office, as he does in his famous Holbein portrait, that they are in some way enslaved by their service to the king. So satire is certainly a part, a big part of Utopia, but there are other elements of it as well. We know, I think he's trying to say something very pointed about the nature of the island of Utopia as both obviously completely fantastic, unreal, impossible, while at the same time, there's something about Utopia that I think he's suggesting is more real than the world that he lives in. You think about his world, 16th century Europe, you think the world we live in today, it's based a lot on artificial elements. Money, totally made up. Property, totally made up. Social hierarchy, totally made up. These are falsities. There's nothing real or true about these things. And these are the things that the utopians have rejected in favor of things that are real, that are true, that actually have value. The investment in gold, the value of gold is false, is untrue, whereas the utopians value things that actually matter: virtue, food, water, clothing that is useful. And I think he's trying to make a point about that difference between falsity and reality, that utopia is in some sense more real than the real world itself.

And the high degree of surveillance in this utopia, is that intended as a good thing or a cautionary note, or we're supposed to be ambivalent about it?

Utopia is really interesting because of course it's the first book to use that word. Utopia. It's not necessarily the first utopia—we can point to some others—but it's, it's the first in that genre to use that name. We're so used now to dystopias undermining the very concept of utopia, and we live in a post-Enlightenment liberal world where individual rights, individuality, is so important to us that we can't look at a utopia like More's without seeing the darker elements of it. I don't think most of those dark elements that we see today were intended by More. I think that there are some that we can point to. I think the utopians' attitude to war, their attitude to slavery, we could definitely question. But in terms of surveillance and in terms of individuality, those were not things that More was that concerned with. I think that comes out of a much more post-Enlightenment and indeed post-20th century perspective that we really hone in on those. If anything, More was really troubled by the concept of individuality. He saw pride in that, the sin of pride, and, and Utopia in many ways is about forgetting, letting go of what is private, what is ours, what can be demarcated as ours, and instead emphasizing the public and what can be shared. That's why there is no private property in Utopia.

And why is the story told through the third-party narration of Raphael? And there's even multiple layers of narrative between More and Raphael, right?

Yeah. And here we dig into the riddle and the enigma that is Utopia, because Book Two of Utopia, which describes the island, is, as you say, narrated by Raphael Hythloday, whose name can mean all sorts of things. It could mean peddler of nonsense. It could mean someone who's actually pointing out nonsense and letting us know where we need to be aware of nonsense happening, and that way we take him a little bit more seriously. Raphael, of course, an archangel, so maybe we should be taking what he's saying at face value. And so that's Book 2, and that's that long description of the island. And then around that, there's Book 1 and a sort of another framing at the end, which puts the book within a discussion between Raphael and the character of Thomas More. And this is set up to really get us, I think, to question who the authority in the text really is. And Raphael only comes to the description of Utopia because of a debate that he's having with this character of Thomas More about whether one, as an educated, experienced person, ought to give their advice, their service, to a king, to a prince. And there's all sorts of other satires and criticisms and things that happen in that conversation, but they really turn to description of the island of Utopia as an example of a place where one could give counsel because there is no pride, because there is no greed, because there is no social hierarchy, and so on. So it's framed within this larger discussion. Thomas More comes back at the end, after the description of Utopia, to say, "Well, this could never ever happen, right? The institutions upon which Utopia is based, I would never—I might wish, but would never expect to see in the world around me." And it really leaves the reader with a question about what they ought to be taking from Utopia. And I think that's part of why the text is still being discussed 500 years later, is because it is a puzzle. And I think, you know, there are elements of it we can solve. I've done my best to, but really it's, it's left very much to the reader to decide what the lessons of Utopia really are.

Now, as you point out in the book, and you're well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. I mean, was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? Like he took a stand on principle and he died. But what was the principle really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?

As a historian, I take one of my sort of principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil. Right. I'm not a historian.

Right. Like, should I just dislike him?

No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear, and I think that's something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case. I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that's an important lesson. And if we just sort of reject, oh, he was bad, then I don't think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality. He imprisoned heretics, he interrogated them. We don't know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn't. I don't know that we'll ever find evidence either way on that. And there were 3 cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I find— I see on social media and the like of people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. And I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.

Have you ever been to the Frick Museum and seen the Holbein portrait of More? Yes. What makes it so compelling?

I think it's partly so compelling because Holbein was a friend of Thomas More's. He knew him, he knew him intimately. He was living at Chelsea, when he did that portrait. And you can see the level of detail that he gives Thomas More. You can see the individual little hairs on his chin. You can see the twinkle in his eye. This is someone who knew More very, very well and respected him. I think it is useful to contrast, as the Frick does, More's Holbein, More's portrait by Holbein, with the one he does of Cromwell, which lacks, I think, that intimacy. And that connection with the man himself. There's something sort of pallid about his presentation of Cromwell as opposed to More. I think the other thing that makes it so compelling is that we have not only that portrait of More by Holbein, but we have the family portrait as well. Now, we don't have Holbein's original of that. We have his original sketch and then a later copy, but we are able to see More in the context of his larger family, and especially the women of his family are given a very strong role in that family portrait. It's a very unique portrait for the time. We don't get many presentations of Tudor figures in that sort of setting.

A Man for All Seasons. It's a famous movie. It's a portrait of More. What's the main bias in that film?

Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons, the play and then the film, needed a figure who would stand for certain principles that were important to Bolt and his time. They included freedom of conscience, in particular a willingness to stand against an oppressive state. Bolt personally was very interested in those things, and he found More's refusal to swear to the Act of Succession and the Act of Supremacy— he found those principles in More. More himself would not have advocated for those. As I said, he's someone who actually is very worried about this idea of individual authority and individual conscience. That is his complaints, his criticism, his worry about Lutheranism. And so the More that is presented in Man for All Seasons is very detached from the historical More. We can see it in that famous line, you know, "It's not because I believe it, it's because I believe it." That's something entirely contrary to anything More himself stood for.

Let's say you're recasting that movie today. Who is it you pick to play Sir Thomas More?

You know, I get asked this all the time and I don't have a good answer. I really don't know. It requires, I mean, it's hard to recast Paul Schofield. I don't have an answer for that. I'd just go watch the film again, frankly.

How about Benedict Cumberbatch? Yeah, I could see him.

He's been suggested before. People have suggested to me James McAvoy. I think they have played figures like More in many ways before. So, so sure, I'd probably watch that.

In general, when history is portrayed in movies, what's the biggest general bias that you feel? People are too heroic, or characters are too simple, or what goes wrong?

I think there is a temptation always to paint figures as, as heroes and/or villains, as has been done with Thomas More. He's a hero in Man for All Seasons. He's basically a villain in Wolf Hall. And we lose some of that complexity of a contradictory, complex human individual. Of course, there's a desire to sex things up and to make things more both sexy and violent than they necessarily were. But yeah, I think this desire to sort of smooth over complexity— again, we look at someone like Thomas More as opposed to Cromwell. It seems always the case that one has to be good and the other has to be conniving, cunning, and a little bit mean. Man for All Seasons, it's More as the hero, Cromwell as the villain. That's swapped in Wolf Hall, whereas actually they had no known each other for decades before the conflicts of the 1530s. They had more in common than I think those productions show us, and I think there's more of a mix of what we would admire and what we would condemn in each of them.

How did it matter that the Tudors were Welsh?

Well, in a couple of different ways, it matters that the Tudors were Welsh. Partly, it's to do with the sort of precarity of the Tudor dynasty. They didn't have a very strong claim to the throne, and their roots were used against them. Certainly when Henry VII is— before he's Henry VII, when he's sort of making waves in Europe and threatening invasion and stuff, Richard III calls him Henry Tydder, T-Y-D-D-E-R, as I think a way of undermining him as a leader to whom people might flock, making fun of this very Welsh name that he has. And it's certainly the case, and some very good work has been done on this, that they They didn't use the name Tudor in the Tudor period. That's us. That's us doing that. That was something of which they were ashamed and didn't make reference to. Henry was known as Henry of Richmond before he became Henry VII, and there wasn't this sense of a sort of Tudor dynasty, this name, until much, much, much later. That's something we impose on them.

And as the Reformation is approaching, In England with the common people, is Catholicism declining in popularity or it's just the same? Is there any great outcry for getting rid of, you know, the church?

That's a really interesting question because you framed it as something that is popular or not popular, that's something they can accept or reject. And it's not sort of framed in that sense. You are a Catholic.

But they could hate the church courts or not hate the church courts, right? Even if they know that.

Absolutely. You can, you can, and they did often criticize Thomas More as someone who criticized elements of the church. There were certainly heretics known as Lollards. You know, they didn't think of themselves as heretics, of course, but they were treated as heretics. In a funny way, they're Catholics still. Well, they're still Catholics, absolutely. And most, you know, any attempt to change, reform, criticize the church is very much from within. Thomas More was a huge critic of the church, huge critic of the church, as was Erasmus, to the point where when Luther starts publishing his criticisms of the church, people think they think they're actually coming from Erasmus. They think Erasmus and Luther are the same person, because Erasmus had articulated such harsh criticisms of the church. But there was no question in the minds of most of these reformers, the change had to happen inside the church. There was sort of no other option than that. And that's part of what More was so concerned about in the Reformation, was this idea of a sort of fragmenting. He was interested in the unity of the church, the community of the church, and the idea that that might fragment was terrifying. To him and indeed for many in the period. So it wasn't something that you sort of decided to pick up or not. You were a Catholic.

But say when he's executed, are people upset or they're just like, "Eh, whatever.

Next." There's a lot of upset when Thomas More is executed, and Henry VIII knows that that's going to be the case. They're very aware when they're trying to pressure Thomas More into accepting the supremacy of Henry VIII as head of the church that people are watching within England and beyond. It's sort of, in many ways, it's a bit of a PR disaster that they're not able to get him to submit, and there are attempts from some, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to say, "Well, what if we just agree, get him to agree to part of it? Then other people might get in line, and people will see that, and see that he's acquiescing." But then the concern is that they'll see that they're compromising, and so there's this awareness of people watching. And certainly when he's executed, even the scheduling of that, they want to make sure it doesn't happen on a feast marking the birth of Thomas Becket because of those parallels between Thomas More and a king named Henry and Thomas Becket and a king named Henry. And so they're very conscious of the fact that it is a controversial thing to do. Most people are upset by the idea that Henry VIII that Cromwell, that this regime would sort of hound Thomas More to his death.

Now Shakespeare obviously is coming much later in the 16th century and spanning early into the 17th. How is it that Shakespeare became so smart and insightful? Like what precursors are there in the era you specialize in? Do you see it coming at all?

Well, I'm certainly not going to say that Shakespeare was too smart to have existed. I'm certainly not going to— We know he existed. Yeah, I'm not going to sit here and say it was the Earl of Essex or or something like that, or the Earl of Oxford. It's the Earl of Oxford, isn't it?

But it's still the same puzzle.

Someone became that smart, right? Exactly. Yeah. So throughout the 16th century, there's a real growth, an explosion really, in education, certainly in literacy at the, at a most basic level. But that's partly coming out of two movements, the humanist movement, of which Thomas More was a part, that argued for wider accessibility of education. Thomas More even advocated for the education of girls, women, but also the Reformation, which which in many ways came out of that movement, arguing that people needed to be literate in order to read scripture. So we see a growth in grammar schools, particularly free grammar schools. Thomas More, when he was a child, went to the only free grammar school in London. That's not the case decades later, there are others. And really these, these schools were nominally designed to help children largely boys, exclusively boys in the schools themselves, to learn Latin, Latin grammar. That's why they're grammar schools. But they did so by reading Latin texts. And so boys would be introduced to writers such as Cicero, Ovid, and so on, and introduced to these stories and these structures for telling stories. They were introduced to rhetoric, and we can see Shakespeare using these tools in telling his stories, in writing his soliloquies, in writing his poetry. It's very neoclassical in what he's doing, and it's because of this growth in education through the 16th century.

And what precursors of the Scientific Revolution do you see, other than education? So that's coming in the 17th century, but is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting, or what, what are the roots in the Tudor period?

A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There's this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts and advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts, and learning Greek, and so a lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. But the other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I'm teaching the Scientific Revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the Scientific Revolution isn't this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you. These two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century. The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which is a sort of, we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the Philosopher's Stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist. Francis Bacon has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. And so the growth and interest in what we might think of as sort of mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, sort of comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the Scientific Revolution.

There's so many wonderful things going on, or at least starting in England at the time, but the visual arts seem quite backward. Holbein is wonderful, but he's from the continent. Why aren't the visual arts more advanced?

I'm not an expert in this. There's a fantastic book that's just come out on Tudor art, so I'd recommend people go and have a look at that. I mean, yes, Holbein's naturalism realism is unmatched at the time. I think they do look to Italy, to the continent, to Germany, to the Netherlands for Renaissance art for the developments that are happening at the time. And we don't see the same support for sort of homegrown art in England at the time. But there are artists who are trying it. I think there's just this idea that, well, it's no good unless it's from the continent.

That book just convinced me how poorly England was doing.

I did buy that book. Yeah. Okay.

Well, there you go. Handcrafted items might be good, but something like painting, just seems low quality. And I don't understand why. Yeah, I'm not sure why either.

She is the expert on these things. So if the book doesn't have an answer, I'm not sure I do.

If you accept the premise, why did antisemitism rise so much in the 16th century in England? And in general, it seems that happened during the Renaissance, right? Maybe something about larger state structures. More discourse, greater need for victims, higher volatility. Do you have an intuition?

I mean, I have some sense of this. This is not something I've spent much time on. I know in terms of a more European-wide trend, a lot of it has to do with the Inquisition, with the Reformation, with a desire to isolate and eliminate any heterodoxy, anything that isn't in conformity with the Catholic Church, especially of course, we can look at the Iberian Peninsula and the desire to reconquer the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula for Catholicism, to reject anything that looks like a questioning of the church. But it's not something I've spent extensive time on.

And how much Islam is there in England then? Is it a few visitors? Is it anyone? Can you show up? Does someone whack you in the face? How does that work? The distances are not that great, right?

Yeah, there's— I don't think you're going to find that many people in England at the time who are openly professing to be Muslim. Of course, there's a number of people who have Moorish ancestry, and we know that, again, there's been some very good work on that in recent years. There is an interest, a sort of academic interest, again, in Hebrew, in Hebrew scholarship, as well as in Islamic texts, and we see, of course, a lot of sort of ancient knowledge, of which they're very interested in the period, is translated, is transported in some sense through through Islamic scholarship in the early Middle Ages. It's not until you get into the late 16th century that you're having, for instance, visitors from Persia or ambassadors who are going over in that sense. We're not seeing that in the early 16th century.

Say I'm in Morocco and I take a boat to England and I step off the boat. Am I noticed? Is the treatment hostile? Does anyone care? Am I a huge novelty?

It probably depends on who you are. Certainly, it would be something novel, but it depends on who you are. You know, racism in the 16th century was different to our modern scientific racism. And that's not to say that there wasn't racism. Thomas More is often held accountable for the racist sentiments that he expresses in some of his works and letters, for instance, but it functions slightly differently. To our racism today. There was a sense in which one's social status could in some sense transcend one's race, that, you know, there were famously in Italy, of course, there's a duke who was Black. There were other examples in England. One of the trumpeters in Henry VII's court was Black. And that didn't automatically mean that you were part of some sort of subclass or that you were excluded on the basis of the color of your skin, but it would've been noted and people would have considered it potentially to have expressed something about one's character, for instance. And it was associated often with a sort of moral darkness that was reflected in your skin.

There's a lot of upward mobility back then, isn't there? So Cranmer, Cromwell, they're not from wealthy families. Like, other than being a woman, what was it that ruled you out of advancing?

Yeah, there is a lot of social mobility in the Tudor periods that comes thanks to Henry VII, who had this this strategy, essentially, of employing people, capable administrators, smart, smart men from lower backgrounds in these roles in government, largely as a way of keeping the nobility down and also having this class of bureaucrat that was essentially disposable, that he didn't have to worry about people getting upset if he tore them down. And of course, Henry VIII does the same thing. You know, very few of the people that we might mention survive very long in the Tudor court. There are people he can lift up and eliminate as he needs. So you still needed, though, to have an education. Without that education, you couldn't be useful in the way that More, Cromwell, Cranmer were, Wolsey was. So that was essential. You know, you needed Latin, some understanding of the law. Yes, not being a woman certainly helps. Women did have positions of great power and authority, and some indeed were scholars and artists and everything else, but that was rare, the exception rather than the rule. Women were not considered able to reason, to have prudence, to control themselves emotionally, and were excluded from formal governance. I say formal there because it's worth noting that what we see in the 16th century is an increasing formalization of positions moving from late medieval into what we can properly call early modern. We see the exclusion of women as things become more formalized, more institutionalized. They're there more strongly, more powerfully as a presence before things become very institutionalized.

Now, you've written a lot about the monarchy, but just the City of London, how is that governed? Is the monarch also in charge, or there's a council, there's a mayor? What happens there?

That is a point of contention throughout the 16th century. The City of London has a mayor then, as it does now.

There's a court of aldermen, Not elected or elected by a council?

Yes. Oh, that's a good question. I think he's elected by the council at that stage. Don't quote me on that. I'd have to check. It is largely democratic or nominally democratic. And of course, there are all sorts of requirements in terms of who can vote. You have to be a citizen, which usually means you're a freeman of London. You're part of the guild system in London. That's very important. You have to be nominated and approved of by by a guild, a trading guild in London, and so on. So there's all sorts of restrictions on the franchise, but it is designed to be a fairly democratic system. And in theory, the City does govern itself within the larger realm that is England, but there are all sorts of conflicts that happen between the City and the Crown in the 16th century. Thomas More, in fact, ends up in the middle of a few of them. He's undersheriff of London for a time, and then he becomes a representative of the Crown. And in fact, even draws attention to the way in which he won't be trusted in the city anymore if he takes any sort of annuity or payment or reward from the crown, that there is this sense of conflict between the two of them.

Now, am I correct in thinking you're from Western Canada?

I'm, I'm from Ontario. Ontario. Okay. Yes. Um, but I did my master's in British Columbia.

How do you think your Canadian background gives you a different understanding of Tudor history than most historians who tend to be British, right?

I would love to think that it does. I don't know for sure that it does. I think my religious background maybe might be interesting in that I was raised Roman Catholic but now profess to be an Anglican. So on the question of Thomas More, I have some awareness of sort of both sides of the Reformation. I think Canada has a deep appreciation of the monarchy from afar. Today is a very very— I don't know if this is something you want to talk about, but today is a very interesting day for the British monarchy, as just a few hours ago Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested. And so I think being in England as opposed to being in Canada, you're aware of sort of the darker side of monarchy in a way that we just sort of see the flash and the sort of ornamentation of it all. But I mean, it's such a joy and a real privilege privilege to be able to walk into an archive here in the UK and just be handed boxes and boxes of material related to the period that I study that we just don't have access to in Canada. And hopefully, I'd like to think that my appreciation for the gift that is that history means that maybe I'm a bit more passionate or dedicated to those archives than I might otherwise be.

What is it about Canadian history that interests you most, even if you don't work on it or write on it?

Mm, I, part of me would like to. I loved Canadian history when I was doing it, you know, in high school and then at university and even a little bit during my master's. I'm by training an intellectual historian, so I'm interested in the history of ideas, and I'm interested in the way in which Canada has produced a really interesting intellectual history, one that really draws, I think, on Republican thought, obviously on federal thought, on the idea of creating a federation, but one that has also really contributed to discourses around multiculturalism. Some of the leading theorists on multiculturalism have come from Canada. And so I'm interested in, in that story of what really makes Canadian political thought and the way that that has impacted other schools of thought around the world.

And what for you is the biggest puzzle in Canadian intellectual history? The thing you'd like to understand, but you don't, and it gnaws at you and people argue about it.

Ah, that's a great question. I mean, I really do want to go back at some point. I don't know if I'll ever have the opportunity to do this and look at some of the earliest expressions, written expressions of Canadian political thought. So we're going back to Confederation and a little bit before, and understand the different influences on that and what they were trying to do with that. I think I'd really like to think a bit too about how they're influenced, and they are influenced by Native confederations and Native thoughts, and how that that sort of flows into what is Canadian political thought. In recent decades, that's been even more apparent. My MA supervisor was James Tully, who really draws on a lot of those strains of thought in constructing his political theory. So those are things that I'm interested in, and I really appreciate the question because I've not gotten to think about these things in recent years, and I'd love to come back to them one day.

And biographically, what is it that led you to English history, because it does mean you're going to have to move to England, right, to actually do it? And you did move to England. I did.

Well, partly it's because I don't have very many other languages. But that will work in Canada too. That's, that's part of it. I think I was interested in the time period specifically. You know, I sort of, I had the benefits of an education at a Canadian university, which differs slightly from a university in the UK in that you have a broader range of courses that you can take. And so you can really just take surveys and figure out what really appeals to you. And as I went through my degree, which is a 4-year degree, I realized essentially that everything I was picking was vaguely sort of 16th century, whether it was in history or politics. And it took reflection to work out why. And I think a large part of that is to do with the way that the 16th century sits in this sort of liminal and very transitional space between what we can recognize as medieval, and therefore in some sense is sort of foreign and almost fantastical, and those things that we can identify as very modern and that we do indeed recognize that are familiar to us. And so over the course of the 16th century, you see both, you see a movement from one to the other, but also you see things, and this really intrigues me, you see things that could have been, you see not the path that we took necessarily, but the paths that we could have. I find that as something that really appeals to me to think about, not only as a sort of counterfactual history, but indeed often those contain lessons for for us. Paths not taken are options we might have now, or ways that we can sit at a distance and think about the world that we did create and question that and maybe even start to dismantle it a bit. My PhD supervisor, Quentin Skinner, often talks about history and the contingency in history as providing a sense of agency. We are not necessarily bound by the world as we find it. History inspires scares us, to question it, to think about rebuilding it. And that's something that I find in the 16th century. What was it like working with Quentin Skinner?

I love his books.

Brilliant. He is the most supportive mentor, the most brilliant man, of course. And one of the best things about working with him is the space that he gives to you. As you know, I was a very young scholar. I had barely stepped foot in an English archive before. I really didn't know what I was about. You know, I'd only studied in Canada. I'd never been to Cambridge or Oxford or anything else. And yet he really empowered me to have the space to try things out, to say things, to question things. And that, as a young scholar, as a woman in a male-dominated field as well, makes all the difference in the world. And he's really committed himself for the last several decades to ensuring that he's sort of empowering those voices and giving space to them.

He's brilliant. Not counting London, Cambridge, or Oxford, but where is your favorite place in England?

My favorite place in England. I adore Warwick. I've spent a lot of time in Warwick. There's Warwick Castle, nearby is Kenilworth, Lord Leicester Hospital. There's a lot of fantastic history in Warwick. I'm going, the minute we sign off, I'm going to think, oh, I should have said that place.

There's so much choice, right?

Yeah, there's so, so much choice. I love Edinburgh because you said the UK, didn't you? Not just England. Well, you can pick it.

I love Liverpool, actually.

Oh, is that? Yeah, I haven't been to Liverpool in, oh, I'm going to date myself, probably about 20 years. So, I think I need to revisit it. I love Manchester, Manchester, Bristol, beautiful. Yes, I mean, I could go on forever, but I'll say Warwick and surrounds for at the moment.

What's the hardest thing about living there for you? You're still Canadian in a bunch of ways. Is it the hot and cold water from the separate faucets or something more fundamental than that?

That is, yeah, when we had our bathroom redone, we made sure that that was not the case. I can't stand that. The hardest thing, it took a while for me to learn how to drive here, if I'm being honest. It's not just sort of the roundabouts and the other side of the road. That's not that hard. It's just a different style of driving and the roads are so narrow that always feel like you're in someone's way. I miss the space, the openness of Canada. Everything here does feel a bit confined and constrained. And I have to say, despite the fact that it doesn't get as cold as in Canada, for several months of the year I feel I'm just always cold because the houses just aren't as insulated as we manage in Canada.

How is the Anglican Church doing these days? You mentioned you're an Anglican. Do you despair?

Do you think it's I am encouraged by the appointment of the latest Archbishop of Canterbury. I'm hoping that's a very positive appointment. I'm hoping that it can pull itself out of the controversy and the difficulties and some ways the tragedies of previous decades and can think about moving forward in a positive way. I have Several members of my husband's family are members of the clergy in the Church of England, and so I'm very aware of the challenges that it's faced, but I'm hopeful. I'm certainly someone who thinks that part of the answer needs to be embracing, fully embracing women in the clergy. That churches are closing down who won't even consider a female vicar, and they're closing down because they're not finding clergy to look after them. They're not allowing for not even 50%, probably more than that, of who's coming into the clergy right now to come in and look after their parish. So I think that has to be part of the answer.

What percent of the English population do you think believes, say, in the Trinity and the resurrection? Ah, that's a great question. Is it like 5% or 1%? 30%? I'd guess 5%, but I don't live there.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there's surveys on this. I have, I have no idea. And I think too, there's, it would be interesting to to frame that question precisely, because I think that there are a lot of people in England and probably elsewhere as well who participate in Anglican communion, who go to church from time to time, and certainly at Christmas and Easter and celebrate Anglican, Christian widely holidays, but wouldn't necessarily believe in that sense, or might even say that they believe but haven't interrogated that belief in a very long time, for instance. So I don't know. I'd be very interested in the numbers.

But if you don't know, that suggests it's quite low. So I'm in the US and Virginia. People will talk about devils and hell and angels, and you hear the chatter all the time. You could question how much they believe or how far, but those are common topics.

Yeah, see, I mean, the Anglican Church and the English in general are all quite a bit more restrained about talking about those sorts of things. So yeah, I agree. I think the fact that it doesn't come up much. I mean, the other thing to say is that I'm an academic and it became very unfashionable many years ago for academics to be religious in any way. You know, I've been in situations in academic contexts where I've been mocked for, you know, believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, as some will put it. So it's not something that encounter that much and not something that I talk about that much because there is still such a criticism of those who have a faith beyond reason.

Why do you think the UK seems so stuck now, both politically and economically? There's a lot of talent in the country, right? An incredible history, great location, English language, world's best time zone.

I think there's a lot of things that have gone on in the UK in recent years that have led a sense of stagnation, a sense of frustration, certainly a huge economic downturn. I'll say explicitly that I think that Brexit posed a huge problem for the UK, both in terms of its identity and its economic position in the globe. We saw a huge standard of living crisis following Brexit, which we're still not fully recovered from. I think there's a lot of very short-termist thinking when it comes to investments. I'll take the example of higher education. Of course, that's an example which I'm very, you know, I find myself in, and it's one of the UK's greatest commodities and products is its education. You know, when you think of great universities of the world, of course, Oxford comes up, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as you could think about the LSE, Imperial, so on and so forth. And yet there has been a real disinclination to invest in higher education. There's been real significant cuts to funding. There's been attacks on the concept of expertise. There's been particular attacks on the humanities, on history, indeed on languages. And so there's a sense in which they're sort of shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to one of the UK's great commodities, and one of the things that upholds its reputation around the world. Unfortunately, there's also been a lot of racism and xenophobia in this country, which of course sits beneath Brexit as well and has continued past that point, which has, I think, held us back from bigger conversations. We've gotten stuck on these topics which are designed to divide and therefore conquer. Very last question.

Your book, Thomas More: A Life, was what led to this podcast. But please tell us if you can, what will you do next? What do you want to do next?

So I have recently signed, I've got two more books under contract. I think I'm allowed to talk about one of them, and in fact it hasn't been announced yet. I think there's a press release forthcoming, but I checked with my editor today and I am allowed to talk about it. It will be called Tyrant, and it will be be a portrait of tyranny in the reign of Henry VIII, not only an understanding, a greater understanding of his tyranny, of the character, the personality of a tyrant through Henry VIII, but I'm also very interested in the responses to tyranny, the work done by those who seek to prevent, to mitigate, to oppose tyranny, what their strategies were, successes, the failures, and really just to think about the concept, the nature, the expression of tyranny in the 16th century.

Joanne Paul, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.