More's Utopia and The City of God

Abstract

Homas More ‘read for a good space a public lecture of St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, in the Church of St. Lawrence in the Old Jewry’ shortly after his appointment about 1501 as Utter Barrister in Lincoln's Inn. Stapleton tells us that More's lectures did not treat The City of God ‘from the theological point of view, but from the standpoint of history and philosophy’; but Stapleton is relatively late (1588), and it is unclear whether he was rather inferring from More's situation as a layman and a common lawyer than speaking out of any real knowledge of the content of More's lectures. The lectures are not extant, but Stapleton's report together with the humanists’ anti-intellectualistic bias helps to shape conjecture on their character; Chambers thought they ‘may have embodied some of the criticism of social evils which More later put into Utopia’.