Richard Marius - Scholarship

Scholarship

One of the pre-eminent Reformation scholars of his generation, Marius' two major scholarly works were biographies of Thomas More (1983), the English lawyer, Utopia writer, and politician who persecuted Protestants before being beheaded for refusing to accept Henry VIII's break with Catholicism, and of Martin Luther (1999), the monk whose criticism of the Catholic Church inspired the Protestant Reformation.

Both books were widely praised. The More volume was finalist for a National Book Award, and both biographies were History Book Club main selections. Both books were also controversial because they stripped their subjects of the sanctity ascribed to them by admirers, instead presenting them as human beings struggling with their beliefs, fears, ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses. Marius also judged his subjects from a modern perspective, criticizing More for religious fanaticism and intolerance because he persecuted heretics, and criticizing Luther for his anti-Semitic writings, for example.

In the final year of his life, Marius traded bitter and sometimes personal academic attacks with Heiko Oberman, a rival Reformation historian at the University of Arizona, who had written his own biography of Luther. Oberman attacked Marius for having analyzed Luther's personality from the modern psychological perspective of a man who feared death, insisting that Luther should be analyzed only in the terms of his own time—as a man who feared the Devil.

Marius also translated from Latin More's Utopia and co-edited three volumes of the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More.