ABSTRACT
Ruminating on the eve of his death in 1534, Sir Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor of England, ascribes his Dialogue of Comfort to a Hungarian meditating on the eve of a nation's disaster in 1527 or 1528. Casting his eyes from the West to the East, More examines his own individual fate in the light of the future of a nation – and vice versa. This allegorical and metaphorical setting can also be seen to reflect the existential scope of the historical situation both in Hungary and England. The introduction of these vernaculars turns the universal issue local and national again through the act of translatio, an intellectual transfer from the East to the West. This is how Sir Thomas More brings his ideas home to his readers. The central concept of the Dialogue is 'comfort' itself, as interpreted in the personification of the 'comforter, the holy spryt'. This rendering endows the public-political components with private-personal aspects.
