Writing contexts in William Roper's life of Thomas More

Mark Róbson

pp. 79-89

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

In this essay I would like to offer a reading of a sixteenth-century biography of Thomas More written in the 1550s by his son-in-law, William Roper. In the course of this reading, I will sketch the text's relationship to a tradition of lives of More, to questions of the generic status of biography, and to the importance of framing and contexts to interpretation.