The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker

by Richard Hooker, Georges Edelen (Editor), W. Speed Hill (Editor)

Richard Hooker is the first major voice of Anglican theology, and his defense of the Elizabethan Church against the attacks of the Puritans set the prevailing tone of Anglicanism for centuries to follow. Through his eloquent treatise on ecclesiastical law the medieval political thought of Thomas Aquinas became a part of the English political heritage, to be used by such writers as Locke, Burke, and Coleridge. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is also a primary statement in English of a theory of natural law. Finally, we must turn to Hooker if we are to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance, for he luminously sets forth the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age.

The Folger Library has answered a long-felt need in sponsoring this critical, old-spelling edition of Hooker’s Works , prepared with all the expertise modern scholarship can bring to bear. Six scholars share the editorial responsibility, consulting their eighteen-member Board of Advisers as necessary. The texts for the edition are based on fresh transcriptions of the earliest and most authoritative documents, in many cases manuscripts written or corrected by Hooker himself or contemporary transcripts of these. The critical apparatus for each text records substantive variants among the authoritative documents as well as departures in accidentals from the copy text. The aim of the apparatus is to enable the interested reader to reconstruct the authority underlying the text.

The Preface and Books I–V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity , Volumes I and II of this edition, represent all of Hooker’s work published in his lifetime. These volumes were prepared by Georges Edelen, Professor of English at Indiana University, and W. Speed Hill, Associate Professor of English, Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York.

1030 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Richard Hooker (March 1554 – 3 November 1600) was an Anglican priest and an influential theologian. Hooker's emphases on reason, tolerance and the value of tradition considerably influenced the development of Anglicanism. He was the co-founder (with Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker) of Anglican theological thought. Hooker's great Elizabethan guide to Church Government and Discipline is both a masterpiece of English prose and one of the bulwarks of the Established Church in England. Hooker projected eight books for the great work. The first four books of Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1593, Book V in 1597. Hooker died in 1600 at the age of forty-six and the remaining three books were completed, though not revised, before his death. The manuscripts fell into careless or unscrupulous hands and were not published until long afterwards (1648 to 1662), and then only in mutilated form. Samuel Pepys makes mention of Hooker's Polity three times in his Diary, first in 1661, "Mr. Chetwind fell commending of 'Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity,' as the best book, and the only one that made him a Christian, which puts me upon the buying of it, which I will do shortly." In 1667 Pepys bought the new edition that had been printed in 1666, the first to include the life of Hooker by Izaak Walton.

Reviews

[wyclif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

The Laws are intended to lay down proper principles of interpreting Scripture in terms of both Christian liberty and sanctified reason, and deepened my understanding of how we are both bound and free in those respects. Hooker explains how the Church is bound by the teaching of the Bible in matters of doctrine and morals, but also free to express herself in matters of worship and polity while refraining from anarchy or libertinism.

As for reason, we've all heard about the so-called "three-legged stool" with equal and opposing legs, but a close reading of Hooker shows that his formula is a catena, a chain composed of Scripture > Reason > Tradition, and that the link in the chain we call reason is not that of Descartes nor of 'common sense' but more accurately echoes credo ut intelligam—reason doesn't function independently in terms of authority, and Scripture alone is normative.

Essential "ad fontes" reading for Anglicans and those Protestants interested in the history of the Church of England, 16th-century magisterial Protestant theology, and the history of authority and interpretation.