This book is the fruit of three meetings of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference between 2000 and 2002, and the line‐up of contributors very much reflects its North American origins. It is largely for the Hooker specialist, but the most important essays, on Hooker's theory of predestination, definitely merit a wider readership. This is especially true of W David Neelands's excellent essay on predestination, which adopts a rigorous and analytical approach essential for coming to grips with this complex topic. Examining a wide range of Hooker's writings, Neelands argues that Hooker had a consistent and well‐developed account of unconditional election throughout his career, which was neither proto‐Arminian nor that of the English Calvinists of the 1590s. A similar line is taken by Daniel Eppley in another interesting and probing study, but neither writer looks in detail at Hooker's views on the freedom of the will, which apparently sit awkwardly with his support for unconditional election. Further work needs to be done by these scholars in this area, and this would be well worth following.
Neelands has also written an important and thought‐provoking essay on baptismal regeneration and election, and what for Hooker constitutes membership of the invisible church. He takes the controversial line that justification, as opposed to election, is the key to the invisible church for Hooker; faith, rather than perseverance in faith. Rudolph P Almasy and Lee W Gibbs provide two stimulating pieces, albeit for the specialist, arguing for and against whether the material on repentance in Book VI of the Lawes was genuinely intended by Hooker to form part of his great work. I also enjoyed John K Stafford's article on Hooker's surviving funeral sermon, which makes good use of background material.
It is a pity that the essays on grace and on the sacraments are not of the same quality as the essays on predestination. They are in some instances marred by an unsupported assumption that Hooker was a Reformed theologian, with statements such as ‘Certainly, Hooker is a Calvinist’. Although a significant number of scholars now hold this view, this is a position that still needs to be argued for, and one would have liked to have seen a detailed case made. Despite its title, this book does not focus in any especial way on Hooker's relation to the Reformation, and, predestination perhaps apart, the question of whether Hooker should be considered a Reformed theologian is not here materially advanced beyond the work of earlier studies.
