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Source Book Study Questions

Tale of Mother Maud (SB, pp. 336-42)

1. Why does More tell this "silly story" (336)?  How does it differ from Lord Chancellor Audley's tale of the ass and the wolf in More's Dialogue on Conscience?  What revelation is the plot designed to help us discover?  

2. Analyze the character of the fox.  More calls him "good and prudent" on p. 337.  In what ways is this true?  In what ways is it not?

3. Compare the character of the ass as it appears here and as it appears in  More's Dialogue on Conscience.  Are they essentially the same or different?

4. One glaring contradiction between these two treatments of conscience is this: In the Dialogue on Conscience More insists that he will not "pin [his] soul to another man's back, not even if he's the best man I know who is alive today" (325). He then went on to insist upon following his own conscience.   In the "Tale of Mother Maud," however, he advises people to "submit the rule of their own conscience to the counsel of some good person" (341).  What do you make of these contradictory statements?

5. Analyze the "performance" of the wolf's conscience.  What informs his practical judgments?  Did the fox understand the wolf's manner of making decisions of conscience?   (Consider the narrator's claim on page 339: "What now concerns us is the consciences of them both [the ass and the wolf] in the actual performance of their penances.")

6. On page 341, the narrator defends his "preposterous...parable" by claiming that "our purpose is served by the point that it makes."  What is that point?