The three silences of Sir Thomas More
A pragmatic perspective
The paper discusses three instances of silence in the life and writings of Sir Thomas More in terms of conversational and thematic silence. The first is the silence of the London citizenry in More’s History of Richard the Third (1513). The second is the House of Commons’ response of silence, in 1523, to Cardinal Wolsey’s request to provide him, the Chancellor, with a substantial grant for state affairs; at that time, More was Speaker of the House. The third is More’s fatal silence when he was required to take an oath supporting Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, and his refusal to discuss Henry’s break from the Pope and the Roman Church.
References
Austin, John
1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Bach, Kent and Robert Harnish
1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bellamy, John
1979 The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Berger, Charles R
2004 “
Speechlessness: Causal Attributions, Emotional Features and Social Consequences”.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23 (2): 147–79.
Croyland Chronicles
1486 Available online at:
[URL] (accessed 12 October 2014).
Derrett, J. Duncan M
1960 “
Neglected Versions of the Contemporary Account of the Trial of Sir Thomas More”.
Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 331: 202–23.
Derrett, J. Duncan M
1964 “
The Trial of Sir Thomas More”.
The English Historical Review, 3071: 449–77.
van Dijk, Teun
1977 Text and Context. London: Longman.
Doerge, F.C
2013 “
Performative Utterances”. In
Marina Sbisà and
Ken Turner (eds),
Handbook of Pragmatics: Speech Actions, 204–56. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Fletcher, Catherine
2012 The Divorce of Henry VIII. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Gochnauer, Myron
1991 “
Oaths, Witnesses and Modern Law”.
Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 4 (1): 67–100.
Gurevich, Zely
1989 “
Distance and Conversation”.
Symbolic Interaction 12 (2): 251–63.
Guy, John
2013 “For What Did Thomas More So Silently Die?” Available online at:
[URL] (accessed 8 December 2013).
Harpsfield, Nicholas
1963 [c. 1558]
The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More
. In
E.E. Reynolds (ed.),
Lives of St. Thomas More, 51–175. Available online at:
[URL] (accessed 25 August 2014).
Helmholz, R.H
2011 “
Natural Law and the Trial of Thomas More”. In
Henry A. Kelly,
Louis W. Karlin and
Gerard B. Wegemer (eds),
Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents, 53–70. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
Jaworski, Adam
1993 The Power of Silence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Kelly, Henry A
2011 “
A Procedural Review of Thomas More’s Trial”. In
Henry A. Kelly,
Louis W. Karlin and
Gerard B. Wegemer (eds),
Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents, 1–52. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
Kelly, Henry A., Louis W. Karlin and Gerard B. Wegemer
2011a “
Thomas More’s Trial: Docudrama”. In
Henry A. Kelly,
Louis W. Karlin and
Gerard B. Wegemer (eds),
Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents, 210–21. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
Kelly, Henry A., Louis W. Karlin and Gerard B. Wegemer
(eds) 2011b Thomas More’s Trial by Jury: A Procedural and Legal Review with a Collection of Documents. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
Kurzon, Dennis
1992 “
When Silence May Mean Power”.
Journal of Pragmatics 18 (1): 92–5.
Kurzon, Dennis
2007 “
Towards a Typology of Silence”.
Journal of Pragmatics 39 (10): 1673–88.
Kurzon, Dennis
2009 “
Thematic Silence as Metaphor”. In
Ken Turner (ed.),
Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey – A Festschrift, 255–63. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group.
Kurzon, Dennis
2010 “
A Pragmatic Analysis of Silence in an American Constitutional Issue”.
Łódź Papers in Pragmatics 6 (1): 49–66.
Kurzon, Dennis
2011 “
Moment of Silence: Constitutional Transparency and Judicial Control”.
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 29 (2): 195–209.
Langbein, John H
1994 “
The Historical Origins of the Privilege against Self-Incrimination at Common Law”.
Michigan Law Review 921: 1047–85.
Linder, Douglas
2006 “
The Trial of Sir Thomas More: An Account”. Available online at:
[URL] (accessed 20 July 2014).
Mancini, Dominic
1969 (1483) The Usurpation of Richard III. Ed. by
C.A.J. Armstrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
More, Thomas
1931 (c. 1513) “
The History of Richard the Third”. In
W.E. Campbell (ed.),
The English Works of Sir Thomas More. Volume the First, 399–455. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Pomerantz, A
1984 “
Pursuing a Response”. In
J.M. Atkinson and
J. Heritage (eds),
Structure of Social Action, 152–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, E.E
1964 The Trial of St. Thomas More. London: Burns and Oates.
Roper, William
2003 (c. 1556)
The Life of Sir Thomas More. Ed. by
Gerard B. Wegemer and
Stephen W. Smith. Irving, TX: Center for Thomas More Studies.
Stapleton, Thomas
1612 [1588] Tres Thomae. Coloniae Agrippinae. (Cologne): S. Hemmerden.
Vergil, Polydore
1844 [1534] Three Books of English History Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III. Ed. by
Sir Henry Ellis. London: Camden Society.
Villaseñor, Gala
2013 “
Effects and Interpretation of Silence in Communication: The Case of Silence as an Answer to Requests”. Paper presented at the International Pragmatics Conference, September 2013, in New Delhi, India.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Kurzon, Dennis & Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.