Thomas More's long letter to Martin van Dorp, Louvain humanist turned theologian, has begun to distinguish itself in the minds of many Renaissance scholars as something more than indifferent episode in the long and inconclusive history of Erasmus' personal differences with Dorp. In fact, More's letter is one of the first systematic defenses of humanist method, encompassing a critique of Scholastic grammar, dialectic, and theology, as well as a tightly argued defense of the new philological theology. More's debt to Valla, long obscured by More's strategic unwillingness in this letter to make much of a figure whom Dorp so detests, has finally begun to receive due attention.