Although recent revisionist interpretations have done a great deal to undermine the picture, Richard Hooker today remains stubbornly for many one of the classic early defenders of Anglicanism. Brydon's quest is to investigate how by the end of the seventeenth century this image of Hooker as a distinctive Anglican figurehead had become a component part of the post-Restoration understanding of the Church of England, when the century broadly began with the assumption that Hooker lay within an anti-Puritan moderate Reformed tradition. Building considerable original research on earlier criticism, Brydon skilfully maps out this evolution having regard both to the detail of individual interpretations of Hooker's work, as well as the larger historical framework. He begins with Andrew Willet's early attacks on Hooker's Reformed credentials, and William Covell's subsequent defence of Hooker, which endeavoured to claim him for the avant-garde conformists. Given Roman Catholic interest in Hooker's work, particularly his negative assessment of the principle of sola scriptura, it is perhaps not surprising therefore that he was cited only occasionally by Jacobean theologians, notwithstanding attempts to reassert his Reformed credentials by the publication of his minor writings.

Brydon convincingly argues that after the Reformation the old avant-garde interpretation of Hooker appealed to mainstream churchmen looking for a figure to defend the newly-established Anglican status quo. There is an excellent discussion of Isaac Walton's tremendously influential Life of Hooker, which created an Anglican church Father who vindicated everything that the Restoration religious settlement stood for, and carefully marginalised those parts of Hooker's work that were potentially embarrassing, such as his political theory and views on church government in the then recently published last three books of the Lawes. Brydon also charts how Hooker's political theory became important post-1688, as Whigs realised that his views on an original compact between the people and the governor could lend respectability to the Glorious Revolution.

Many authors have been subject to widely contradictory interpretations, but reading this book one is struck by the slipperiness of Hooker's writings, and the difficulty of pigeon-holing him into any particular theological camp. It is not only Brydon's description of the manner in which Hooker was ‘cited in support of Parliament, the Commonwealth, the Levellers, and by Catholics’ which gives this impression, but his overview of the radical diversity of Hooker criticism in the last thirty years, which frames his historical survey. Brydon is understandably circumspect in the light of this to categorise Hooker's theology precisely himself, for which one may have much sympathy. Whether a further thirty years will bring greater critical agreement will remain to be seen. One may assuredly conclude, though, that Brydon has provided a fascinating account of the early formative evolution of Hooker's reputation that will be of interest to a wide range of potential readers.