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Utopia Transformed: The Calculated Indirection Of Thomas Starkey’S Dialogue Between Pole And Lupset, Robert W. Haynes

Quidditas

Thomas Starkey’s effort to employ guarded speech and to distance himself from some of the risky views discussed in his Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (1529- 1536?) emulated similar features of Thomas More’s Latin Utopia and, in fact, sought to improve on More’s striking dialogue. Though doomed by the break between Henry VIII and Rome (and that between the king and Starkey’s dialogue’s chief speaker), this unfinished work exhibits a particularly ambitious and in some ways quite skillfully wrought humanist project.