  Humanism was founded on the philological ambition to recapture the legacy of classical literature, both by the retrieval of texts and by the imitation of classical style; but, equally, it implied the recognition of language as a persuasive medium, the province of rhetoric. The revival of rhetoric is at the core of humanism: in its persuasive role, language is directed out to the social community in the effort to stimulate moral or political response. More's most direct statements on the cultural issue of the age occur in four letters which he wrote between 1515 and 1519 to Martin Dorp, to Oxford, to Edward Lee and “to a monk” (all now in CWM 15). Dorp, a theologian with humanist interests, had expressed uneasiness with Erasmus's scurrilous treatment of scholastic theology, as well as his presumption in correcting Jerome's Vulgate New Testament in light of the Greek text. He also protests at his apparent subordination of the higher faculties, such as theology, to the rule of grammarians; for Erasmus, he implies, the worst heresy is linguistic barbarism. More had seen the exchange of letters between Dorp and Erasmus during his 1515 stay in the Netherlands and intervened in defence of his friend.  While Dorp's view of humanism is essentially cosmetic, a matter of vocabulary and style, More takes the argument to a deeper level. His complaint is about the way dialectic has usurped control of the arts course, the trivium, allowing scant attention to grammar and rhetoric. The later scholastics, in their quest for a meta-language purified of subjective reference, had reinvented Latin as a wholly artificial construction closed to outsiders. It had ceased to be communicative speech. This tendency is then passed on to theology, where the Scriptures and the Fathers are fragmented into proof texts: More describes how his clash with an aged theologian about St Augustine's view on demons arose because he is citing the original work, while the theologian has picked up scraps of Augustine second-hand from Peter Lombard's Sentences (CWM 15, 68–9). One work which attracts More's venom is the Parva logicalia (“Little Logicals”), so-called, More suggests, because it has so little logic in it. This is the section of Peter of Spain's Summulae logicales devoted to supposition theory and, as such, it formed an integral part of most university courses on dialectic. In Utopia, on the other hand, where More again refers to it, we learn that the natives, for all their intelligence, fail to grasp these “elaborate rules about restrictions, amplifications and suppositions” (CU: 157). This is because in their reasoning they use customary speech, the language of the community, and can make no sense of a technical language which deviates from the order of nature. More is not opposed to dialectic, and he probably had experience of the trivium during his stay in Oxford, but he wants a return to the dialectic of Aristotle, especially as now made available by humanist scholarship. Both grammar and dialectic have their part in communication, grammar by clarifying established usage and dialectic by clarifying the structure of nature (CWM 15, 34–35); they must be integrated with rhetoric in speech comprehensible to all who participate in the language community. The quibbles of the logicians, by contrast, exclude those who, like the Utopians, have not been initiated into their artificial procedures.