416 Torrance Kirby (Ed.), a Companion to Richard Hooker, With

416 Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 8 (2012) 389–420 Torrance Kirby (ed.), A Companion to Richard Hooker, with a Foreword by Rowan Williams (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008) xxxviii + 670 pp. €142.00/$197.00. ISBN 978-90-04-16534-2 (hbk). ‘Learned’, ‘judicious’, ‘incomparable’ – these are a few of the superlatives that have been applied to Richard Hooker (1553/4-1600). Hooker, the author of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in eight books – which is about a great deal more in heaven and earth than the structures and organisation of the Church – is the prime architect of what became Anglican ecclesiology. Hooker has been credited with inventing Anglicanism and its supposed ‘middle way’. But as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in this collection of essays on various aspects of Hooker’s work, Hooker does not use the term ‘Anglicanism’ and no-where speaks of a via media. However, Hooker remains a primary source of the recognisably Anglican ideology that emerges in the mid-seventeenth century and also something of a precedent since his work contains intimations of the later platform. Hooker has also been claimed as the father of Anglican moral theology: this aspect of his thought is not covered in this volume, though it should have been, but it has recently been exhaustively examined by Alison Joyce in Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford University Press, 2012). Hooker’s authorial persona – mild and non-polemical, irenic and recon- ciling – has often been taken at face value, but this is to be taken in. Hooker is a highly effective controversialist who knows how to manipulate his readers to gain his ends. That does not mean that he was not seeking a change of heart and mind, a genuine conversion of his opponents; only that he goes about it in a formidably effective way. So much so that, apart from A Christian Letter, an almost equally crafty attempt to traduce Hooker by deploying Reformation worthies, such as Cranmer and Jewel, against him, and majoring on his rhetorical tactics, Hooker was not answered in his life- time, though the gap between publication and his death was short. The opposition got its revenge in the 1640s, in the years leading up to the English Civil War and the rule of Oliver Cromwell, when Parliament comprehen- sively dismantled the Church of England, executing first the Archbishop of Canterbury (William Laud) and then its Supreme Governor (Charles I). But for the time being, as the Bishop of Exeter, John Gauden, one of Hooker’s later editors, put it in 1662, Hooker ‘did cast the tortoise of Non-conformity upon its back’. Because Hooker was little answered in his own time and since then has been deployed (and still is) tendentiously, it has taken until the late © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/17455316-00803017 Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 8 (2012) 389–420 417 twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for Hooker’s work to be subjected to rigorous, comprehensive and comparative analysis on the basis of a definitive text (the elegant Folger Shakespeare Library edition, edited by the late W. Speed Hill, in seven volumes, which began to appear in 1977). Those who have attempted to interpret Hooker in our time fall into two camps: reliable guides and unreliable ones. There is no shortage of tenden- tious and idiosyncratic interpretations of Hooker’s theology, the crux here often being Hooker’s relation to the main-line Protestant theology of the magisterial Reformers, particularly Calvin. They will not let Hooker be his own man, but must recruit him to their party. In recent years these seem to have been making the running. These dubious interpretations of Hooker usually show up the interpreter’s own poor grasp of theology and indeed of the theology of the Reformers themselves. Happily, with one exception (see below), the present volume is exempt from this fault, though the false prophets are not taken to task as unsparingly as by Joyce in her recent study of Hooker and moral theology. This handsomely produced Companion to Richard Hooker belongs in Brill’s prestige Companion series. (I reviewed the Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), edited by J. Rollo-Koster and T. M. Izbicki, 2009, in this journal 7.2 (2011), pp. 141-145.) This companion to Hooker is graced by a Foreword by Rowan Williams which affords much more than the usual courtesies of the genre and invites reflection. Torrance Kirby’s editorial introduction tells us that the volume aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic introduction to Richard Hooker’s life, works, thought and repu- tation. It intends to synthesize current trends in Hooker criticism and to summarise the state of the scholarly debate. Kirby singles out the question of Hooker’s relation to Calvin and the magisterial Reformation generally as an issue that divides commentators, acknowledging that his contributors are divided on this question. Although we know from his own publications where Kirby’s sympathies lie, his overview is entirely even-handed. Of the authors, some are veterans of Hooker scholarship; others are cutting their teeth in Hooker studies. Some material has been published before (one chapter as long ago as 1988!), but the antecedents are not always clear. How well does this hefty volume succeed in its aims? First, it dispatches, if that is still needed, the myths propagated by Izaac Walton in his Life (1665). Walton presents a Hooker forced to tend the sheep on his glebe land, rocking the baby’s cradle while trying to read a book, hen- pecked by a shrewish wife, a man of ‘humble, modest, dove-like character’. In fact Hooker had married into wealth and his wife was good to him. .

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