Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker 1554?-1600, English theologian and clergyman of the Church of England. He studied and lectured at Oxford and preached at Drayton-Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire; at the Temple Church, London; at Boscombe, Wiltshire; and at Bishopsbourne, Kent. His famous Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (in 8 books, of which only 5 were published in his lifetime) was an epoch-making discussion of church government, written in an excellent prose style. It helped to formulate the intellectual concepts of Anglicanism, and its influence on the theory of government (civil as well as ecclesiastical) as based on rules of reason was widely felt in England. An edition of Hooker's works (1666) contained a celebrated biography by Izaak Walton (1665).

Bibliography: See the critical edition of his complete works, ed. by W. S. Hill et al. (2 vol., 1977-80); W. S. Hill, Richard Hooker: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Early Editions, 1593-1724 (1970); W. S. Hill, Studies in Richard Hooker (1972).

Hooker, Richard (?1554–1600), theologian. Of his great prose classic, the defence of the Church of England as established in Queen Elizabeth's reign entitled Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie, four books appeared in 1593, the fifth in 1597. A biography of Hooker was written by I. Walton and published with the 1666 edition of his Works. There is some reason to credit Hooker with the first steps towards making known in England the theory of ‘original contract’ as a basis of sovereignty.