After he conquered the island that would bear his name, King Utopus decreed that “everyone was free to practise what religion he liked.” The force of the decree was such that when one overzealous Christian publicly condemned other faiths, he was sent into exile — not for his beliefs but for disturbing the peace. The king believed that “it was stupid and arrogant to bully everyone else into adopting one’s own particular creed.”

This defense of religious tolerance occurs, astonishingly enough, in Thomas More’s “Utopia,” first published, in Latin, in 1516. The passage is astonishing not only for its modern ring, but because it stands in such puzzling contrast to More’s subsequent career. A little more than a decade later, as Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532, More would preside over the trials and executions of at least six Lutheran “heretics,” all of whom ended up at the stake. What turned this witty and elegant humanist, the friend and admirer of Erasmus — and the man canonized as a saint centuries later — into so implacable an inquisitor? In his provocative new study, “Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents” (Harvard, 355 pages, $27.95), James Simpson undertakes a bold reassessment not only of Thomas More as embattled “defender of the faith,” but of the English Reformation itself. His focus is quite specific; he identifies the years 1520 to 1547 as crucial. Though Martin Luther had nailed his inflammatory 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, it was during these tumultuous later years that the Reformation established itself decisively in much of Britain. In 1526, William Tyndale (1494–1536) published his English translation of the Christian Bible; copies began to be smuggled almost immediately into England, where they were snapped up both by laymen eager to read the Scripture in their own language and by ecclesiastical authorities who fed them into public bonfires. (Today, only three copies of that first printing survive.) Though not opposed in principle to translation of Scripture, More proved Tyndale’s fiercest adversary and the two engaged in savage (and often unprintable) polemics. Ironically enough, both would end up on the block: More was beheaded in 1535, Tyndale strangled and burned at the stake a year later.

Tyndale’s Bible — and the English Reformation itself — are often presented as precursors of a new and unprecedented dispensation of individual freedom. In his monumental “The Bible in English” of 2003, the historian and Tyndale biographer David Daniell speaks of “the sense of liberty, the release of being able to say things without a charge of heresy” that the Reformation in England made possible. Another historian, Anne Richardson, quoted by Mr. Simpson, sees “a direct line between Tyndale and the U.S. Bill of Rights of 1791.” For this school of thought, the freedom to read and to interpret the Bible, on which the authority of both church and state rested — and to do so in one’s own language — was profoundly democratizing.

Mr. Simpson will have none of this. As he puts it, far from being liberating, “for the evangelical reader, the Bible was in the first place a tightrope of terror across the abyss of damnation.” For contemporary readers of the English Bible, like John Firth, awaiting martyrdom in the Tower, the newly liberated “word of God” was without comfort: It “boileth in my body,” he wrote. Where others see sudden light, Mr. Simpson finds only creeping darkness; for him, the Protestant, or “evangelical,” culture of reading constitutes a “dark paradox.” For Mr. Simpson, the paradox lay in the fact that while the Bible now fell open to the common reader, the text itself, stripped of the scaffolding of church teaching, led only to bafflement and despair. (As Mr. Simpson notes, it was as though every man and woman might have a private, individual understanding of the Bill of Rights with no authoritative judicial force.) The Lutheran insistence on the pointlessness of “works,” allied with the harsh doctrine of predestination, meant that the Bible constituted little more than a detailed road map to an inaccessible destination.

Faith alone could save, many believed, but faith had been allotted by God in his “inscrutable heights” (as Calvin put it) only to the elect, chosen from all eternity. Now the chief motive for consulting Scripture lay in searching the text for hidden signs of one’s own election or, more terrifyingly, its opposite. Small wonder then that Mr. Simpson can speak of “textual hatred,” or call evangelicals “the victims of a textual virus of distrustful literalism.” The door to salvation had been flung open, but the way was still blocked.

Mr. Simpson makes his case well and he doesn’t mince words. For him, the “evangelical culture of the first half of the 16th century produced an exclusivist, intolerant, persecutory, distrustful, and inevitably schismatic culture of reading.” He is scornful of the rosier picture of the Reformation painted by such scholars as Mr. Daniell; and in fact, throughout the book, he pursues Mr. Daniell, attacking him for making factual errors, and for his “strident nationalism,” with all the zeal of a Thomas More hot on the heels of an apostate. The 27 years of British history Mr. Simpson brings into such sharp and appalling focus were in fact decades of widespread persecution and paranoia, set in motion by “words of hot effect,” as the poet Henry Howard, betrayed by friends and family, put it while he awaited execution in the Tower.

eormsby@nysun.com