Letter to Bugenhagen; Supplication of Souls; And Letter Against Frith

This book contains three works by Thomas More. The first, More's Latin reply to Bugenhagen (1526), given here with facing English translation, is a rebuttal of the principal points of Lutheran teaching concerning scripture and tradition, faith and works, grace and free will, clerical celibacy, and the sacraments. It presents arguments elaborated at much greater length in More's other polemical works. "Supplication of Souls" (1529) refutes "A Supplication for the Beggars", an anticlerical pamphlet by Simon Fish which Henry VIII seems to have regarded with some favour. More places his response in the mouths of the souls in purgatory. In the first book, he demolishes Fish's loose railery with accurate statistics and historical analysis. In the second, he defends the traditional doctrine of purgatory with arguments drawn from reason and an analysis of scriptural passages. "Letter Against Frith" (1532) answers John Frith's Zwinglian arguments against the physical presence of Christ in the eucharist. Written to an unknown correspondent, it is the briefest and mildest of More's polemical works. This volume also contains seven appendices giving the works to which More is replying and other thematic, historical, and bibliographical matter closely related to the three works by More.