In June 1497 Cornish rebels, some sixteen thousand strong, were crushed by royal forces on Blackheath, within sight of the capital. Thomas More, then a law student at Lincoln's Inn, may well have walked over the field and the event had sufficient impact for him to allude to it years later in Utopia. The uprising had similarities to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, which in its time had sparked a literature of social debate, and the aim of Thomas Betteridge's study is to link More to this native and largely vernacular body of thought, expressed pre-eminently in the writings of Chaucer and Langland, whose relevance to the Tudor scene is only now being fully appreciated. But while he detects continuity, he is anxious to emphasise the disparities within the tradition, the tensions between those who sought to impose a strictly rational social order and those who argued for a more Aristotelian and pragmatic sense of community. The most important insight to emerge is More's absolute dedication to the idea of community, whether this be in the political sphere or in his concept of the Church – which was to him, as Betteridge claims, ‘a meaning-producing community’. Debate, understood as the expression of community, reflects human imperfection: in More's epigram on the best form of government it is a senate that can best balance out qualities, whereas a king will be either good or, more probably, bad. Withdrawal from counsel is the route to tyranny, and in the first chapter, on ‘Politics’, it is argued that the corrosive disregard for conciliar government presented in Richard III reflects More's growing concerns about Henry viii. It is revealing that Utopia is treated in the second chapter, ‘Reason’, since Betteridge reads that work primarily as a warning against the sterility of an abstract and imposed social order, one which by its indifference to human realities renders virtue meaningless. Some might feel that, in his anxiety to expose Utopia, he oversimplifies (the platonic philosopher-king Utopus is surely more than a wilful tyrant) but his Augustinian reading of the book is entirely persuasive, and this is where ‘telling tales’ comes in. In the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt both Langland and Chaucer look to a politics which disables violence but, instead of imposing an arbitrary model of order, leaves space open for negotiation. Their adoption of fiction, of ‘tales’, calls for an interpretive community, one prepared to admit the vagaries of human nature. More's familiarity with this Ricardian legacy coheres with his later defence of humanism: Langland's Friar with his taste for over-sophisticated meats anticipates those theologians in More's ‘Letter to Dorp’ who are condemned for cutting themselves off from the shared speech of the community. It is in this letter that More argues for ‘positive’ theology, the cumulative self-understanding of the Church since the days of ‘the old holy fathers’, which he sets against the arid quaestiunculae of the scholastics. His sense of the Church as the whole people of God distinguishes him from the clericalist views of writers like Hoccleve or Lydgate, and because he sees the Church as above all a community there is room in it for ‘doubt, reason, scepticism, and faith’ (p.136). An important consequence of Betteridge's attention to More's medieval antecedents is that it places his handling of heresy within an established tradition of church discipline reaching back to the crisis of the late fourteenth-century; instead of the jarring transition from humanist to inquisitor so often proposed for him, we can see More as drawn into an established campaign which antedates Luther. The severity of his opposition to heresy is prompted less by his rejection of erroneous ideas than by his dismay at the rupture of church unity, the setting within which a collaborative understanding of truth might emerge. Betteridge resists the common tendency to divide More's writings up into discrete biographical units (the ‘Tower works’ for example) precisely so that he can bring out the continuity in More's concerns. In his final chapter, on ‘Devotion’, he contrasts More with clerical writers, like Nicholas Love, who use affective exercises as a means of shepherding the laity out of doctrinal danger zones. Where they can be said to close down the text, in a work like The treatise on the Passion More does the opposite, opening out the productivity of the text and enabling the reader to participate in a wider interpretive community. His sense of devotion coheres with the ‘positive’ theology to which he appeals in his defence of Erasmus; as Betteridge remarks, ‘Reading Christian parables was for More a, possibly the, key way of travelling with and towards Christ’ (p.189). But it was a journey undertaken in company, and it was his understanding of the Church as an interpretive community that ultimately prompted his resistance to royal policy. It is difficult within the span of a review to do full justice to the range and originality of this book which, despite its relative brevity, proposes a series of insights which substantially modify many current ideas about More and his engagement with his world. These invite further exploration, but in the meantime the book deserves to be widely read and discussed.