HOOKER, RICHARD. – Protestant theologian and jurist, born at Heavitree, near Exeter (England), in 1554, died at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, on 2 November 1600. From a poor family, he was able, with the assistance of the bishop of Salisbury, Jewell, to attend the University of Oxford, where in 1578 he taught Hebrew and was ordained an Anglican minister in 1581. The following year he married, but the marriage did not prove happy because of his wife’s character.
Appointed «Master of the Temple» by the archbishop of York, in this office he came into contact with his colleague Walter Travers, who, however, professed Calvinist doctrines: both preached in the same church. Travers attacked H. on many points (cf. A supplication made to the privy council by master Walter Travers). In order to rebut his opponent and explain his own doctrines, H. wrote the famous The laws of ecclesiastical polity. The work consists of eight books. The first four were printed in 1594; the fifth in 1597; the other three were lost, and this loss is attributed by some to H.’s widow; however, some outlines and notes remained, which were first published around the middle of the seventeenth century. The work was written chiefly against the Puritans who, in H.’s time, unwilling to remain in the State Church, continually looked toward Geneva and Calvin and sought to purify the Anglican Church by leading it to Calvinist forms of government and doctrine. It marked the path that the «Caroline divines», or Caroline theologians, of the seventeenth century would later follow; it is therefore not surprising that Anglicans hold H. and his work in such high esteem. The work has had
many editions. The best is that of J. Keble (1836, revised in 1888 under the direction of R. W. Church and F. Paget; of book V, ed. R. Bayne, 1922; of book VIII, ed. R. A. Honk, 1931).