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Richard Hooker (1553 or 4–1600) 
Richard Hooker had trouble finding someone who would accept the financial risk of printing his academic treatise in defense of an episcopalian church discipline. But, with the politically motivated assistance of Sir Edwin Sandys, he succeeded in having the first four of his eight books published in 1593. The fifth, much expanded, book, came out in 1597, at which point both volumes were customarily bound together. Throughout the early editions, the title page, preface, and table of contents proclaimed eight books, but it was not until much later that the sixth through eighth books actually saw print. In 1611, however, William Stansby printed a new and handsome edition of the first five books, for which he commissioned the elaborate engraved title page shown here (though this is the state from the third edition, 1617). William Hole's engraving, designed to appeal to James I, offers a "dwelling of Peace." The state is presented as a solid edifice with power emanating from the tetragrammaton (the four Hebrew letters used to express the ineffable name of God) to a book (the Scriptures, no doubt) in the hand of a woman representing Protestant piety, to a cathedral, and through his scepter, to King James. The civil edifice is also supported by two female figures representing charity on the left and justice on the right. Finally, at the center of the work on the bottom is a figure of a seated woman (perhaps England) with an anchor at her feet. Seventeenth-century historians have observed that Hooker's work was relatively unimportant in the years after its initial publication. In this edition, we see the first efforts to canonize the work as a "via media" statement. As individuals at court struggled against one another to win James's favor, they frequently claimed the "middle ground" between the supposed extremists of puritans and papists. The preface and engraving both claim that Hooker's Laws will serve to maintain an orderly nation under the rule of the king. The rhetoric of moderation employed in the preface to the 1617 Laws is used tactically to promote a position that Peter Lake has termed "avant-garde conformist." The preface advises, "so much better were it in these our dwellings of Peace, to endure any inconvenience whatsoever in the outward frame, then in desire of alteration, thus to set the whole house on fire." Indeed, the preface ends similarly, stating that the Laws "by satisfying the doubts of such as are willing to learne, may helpe give an end to calamities of these our Civill Warres." For more information, consult the collection Richard Hooker and the Construction of the Christian Community, edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997); Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetoric of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Kenneth Fincham, "Introduction," in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Peter Lake, "The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War: Joseph Hall's Via Media in Context" in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Peter Lake, "Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson," Journal of British Studies 17 (April 1988): 81-116; Peter Lake "Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-garde Conformity at the Court of James I" in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, edited by Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Deborah Shuger, Habits of Thought in English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). See also, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977-1993). |
