New Year, Old Books

It is, and of long time hath been, my well-beloved sister, a custom in the beginning of the New Year, for friends to send between presents or gifts, as the witnesses of their love and friendship, and also signifying that they desire each to other that year a good continuance and prosperous end of that lucky beginning.

With these words, Thomas More sent a New Year gift in around 1510 to a young woman named Joyeuce Leigh. The tradition he references was a well-established one: before it became customary in Britain to exchange presents at Christmas, New Year was the usual time for giving gifts, with the intention that they would be a token of luck for the year ahead. As More goes on to say, people often gave food or clothes, ‘such things as pertain only unto the body, either to be fed or to be clad or some other wise delighted’.

However, there was also a tradition of literary New Year gifts, writing poems or books to give to friends, lovers, or patrons. This is what More is doing: he sends Joyeuce Leigh his translation of the life of Pico della Mirandola, as a present which will bring her not only luck but ‘witness of my tender love and zeal to the happy continuance and gracious increase of virtue in your soul’.

We may not all feel able to write a poem, let alone a book, as a New Year’s gift for our friends (perhaps not every friend would be eager to receive one). But a book for the new year feels like a custom worth reviving, and an old book may be as welcome as a new one. The book which is accompanying me into 2025 is one which will celebrate its 90th birthday this year: a biography of Thomas More by the British scholar Raymond Wilson Chambers, published in 1935. There have been many biographies of More, reflecting the ebb and flow of his contested reputation, and Chambers’ book was written at a particular high point. 1935 was the 400th anniversary of More’s death, and the year he was proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church.

Unsurprisingly, given that context, Chambers’ book is deeply in sympathy with More, in a way that some modern readers will find off-putting. But if the book is a product of its time, at the distance of 90 years that only adds to its charms. It is a wonderful read, lively and imaginative, with a sly sense of humour. I enjoyed, for instance, Chambers’ wry observation on the enduring popularity of Henry VIII: 
 

Henry VIII destroyed more things of beauty, and more things of promise, than any other man in European history. And many of his countrymen admire him for it. To the sporting Englishman, there is something admirable in having created any kind of a record.

Chambers was a respected scholar of medieval literature, and in the years around the First World War he had published influential studies of Beowulf and the Old English poem Widsith. His medieval scholarship colours his sense of More’s age, poised between the old and the new: 

We think of More, and rightly, as our first great modern … But More was also the last great man who lived the whole of his life with the England of the Middle Ages yet undestroyed around him; a land of great libraries which had been accumulating since Anglo-Saxon times; of ancient religious houses where the walls were covered with paintings, and the windows shone with the glorious English glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Yet this book is, for 1935, a very modern work. The ‘sporting Englishman’ who admired Henry’s record of destruction is not the only trace it bears of the interwar world. Chambers comments approvingly on the marriage of two members of More’s household, both with medical interests, that:

Their marriage is probably the first English example of that union between the man and the woman student of medicine, which is one of the most gracious and hopeful products of our modern education. 

More importantly, the book muses at length on what it could mean to be both English and truly European, not only in 1535 but in 1935, a few years away from another war in Europe.

A new book for the new year is a lovely custom. But an old book like this may have just as much to offer, transporting us back to years past, as well as bringing luck in the year to come.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford and the author of Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).