The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, Volume IV: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Attack and Response

by Richard Hooker, John E. Booty

Overview

We turn to Richard Hooker to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance. He sets forth in his writing the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age. This magnificent old-spelling edition of Hooker’s works has long been needed, and is being greeted with universal admiration.

Volume Four presents the text of the first and only major attack on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—namely, A Christian Letter, 1599—with Hooker’s marginal notes made on his own copy of the Letter; and the more extensive essays which he left in manuscript, written in preparation for a published reply. The importance of these notes and essays lies in their expansion of some of the more controversial points made in the Laws, and in the light they shed on Hooker, his personality, method, and sources.

John Booty’s Introduction and substantial commentary place Hooker’s arguments firmly in their historical and theological contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674632165
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1982
Series:	Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Series , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

W. Speed Hill was Associate Professor of English at Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Sigla and Abbreviations

Acronyms

A Christian Letter with Hooker's Notes

Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination

The Dublin Fragments

Nonsubstantive Variants

Commentary

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Volumes worthy to stand next to the other great monuments of modern editing of English Renaissance literature… Thanks to the new edition a full assessment of Hooker will now be possible.

Queen’s Quarterly

A triumph… The scholarship is professional, the introductory material helpful, and the text itself both accurate and attractive. Indeed, this is the most inviting edition of the Laws ever published.

Seventeenth Century News

Volumes worthy to stand next to the other great monuments of modern editing of English Renaissance literature… Thanks to the new edition a full assessment of Hooker will now be possible.

Queen’s Quarterly