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Richard Hooker: Invention and Re-invention
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2019
Abstract
This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.
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Footnotes
1
This is the text of the 2018 Lyndwood Lecture delivered at the Temple Church in London on 7 November 2018. Background will be found in D MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England 1547–1603, second edition (Basingstoke, 2000). I extend the arguments presented here in ‘Richard Hooker's Reputation’ in D MacCulloch, All Things Made New: writings on the Reformation (London, 2016), pp 279–320.
References
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16 Keble, Works of Richard Hooker, vol I, p cv. Contrast Benjamin Hanbury's clear-sighted account of the reality of Hooker in Hanbury, B (ed), The Ecclesiastical Polity and Other Works of Richard Hooker …, 3 vols (London, 1830)Google Scholar, vol I, p xiii.