Alison Joyce's careful reading of Hooker's Of the Lawes of Eccleiasiticall Politie offers a consideration of Hooker's role in shaping Anglican moral theology whilst raising significant questions about previous interpretations of Hooker, and in particular those which present him as unambiguously Reformed. Joyce's intention is ‘to reconsider and re-evaluate Hooker's contribution to the development of Anglican moral theology, rooting this, first and foremost, in a careful investigation of Hooker's text in its own terms, and in its specific historical setting’ (p. vii). However, whilst her reading of Hooker will certainly admit her to the ranks of significant interpreters of his work, Joyce's definition of his ‘specific historical setting’ leaves much to be desired.

Joyce's work falls into two parts. The first, ‘Orientation’, begins with a survey of the multifarious and often mutually contradictory literature on Hooker: ‘Anglicanism, moral theology and the misappropriation of Richard Hooker.’ Joyce explores claims for Hooker's seminal contribution to an Anglican moral theology and the surprisingly limited evidence for such claims. Observing the partiality of much writing about Hooker, Joyce affirms that for her, ‘an overriding concern is to respect the integrity of Hooker's work’, which requires ‘a readiness to acknowledge and explore, rather than to avoid or attempt to explain away, the tensions and ambiguities that undoubtedly exist in Hooker's writing’ (p. 18). Joyce then considers ‘Hooker in historical context’, placing him against the backdrop of the Elizabethan Settlement, exploring the way in which popular publications were used to propagate arguments for and against the Settlement, and considering Hooker's relationship with Walter Travers, his fellow preacher at the Temple, the nature of their theological disagreements, and the text of Hooker's Of the Lawes of Eccleiasiticall Politie. The final chapter in this opening section explores the complexities of ‘reading Hooker’, and particularly the role of ‘rhetoric, irony and wit’ in his writing. Here Joyce argues, not only that Hooker's writing is often highly polemical, and not as reasoned and objective as he himself presents it to be, but also that many previous scholars have been seriously misled by Hooker's rhetoric, leading them to misunderstand the import of his text. Despite her attempts to sidestep it, the same criticism will doubtless be applied to Joyce's own reading.

Part Two opens with a consideration of Hooker's theological anthropology. Here Joyce argues – particularly against Torrance Kirby and Nigel Atkinson – that Hooker's understanding of human nature ‘owed much to Aristotelian-Thomist tradition’ and that ‘although Hooker is swift to acknowledge that all human faculties, including reason, are profoundly impaired as a consequence of the Fall … there is no equivalent within the Lawes of the acting disparaging and deriding of human reason that one finds in Luther and Calvin’ (p. 87). Although she concedes that ‘one can point to individual passages’ in which Hooker expresses his belief in the total depravity of human beings, Joyce regards Hooker's underlying assessment of human reason as much more positive: ‘human beings gradually grow towards God, as they develop their understanding through instruction, experience, and the exercise of virtue’ (p. 86). Joyce's presentation of Hooker's human anthropology is, however, rather more nuanced than her understanding of Luther and Calvin (she gives no references for her claim cited above, and seems not to engage with Institutes I.i-v at all); neither does she consider Philip Melanchthon, whose praise of reason and philosophy offer some interestingly similar claims for the importance of human reason. Moreover, although she notes, citing Bouwsma, that Calvin's theological anthropology is also marked by tensions between his assertion of human fallenness and his (cautious) affirmation of human reason, Joyce does not draw out these similarities; nor does she observe that the focus on human ‘total depravity’ after the Fall is itself a development in Calvinist thought, decisively articulated only at the 1618/19 Synod of Dordt. Joyce's exposition of Hooker seems, therefore, to be juxtaposed against a selective reading of Protestant anthropology. Similarly, in her discussion of Hooker's concept of Law, Joyce traces to Aquinas arguments and distinctions found in Hooker which could also plausibly be located in the thought of Melanchthon and other closer contemporaries.

Joyce proceeds to a very useful exploration of Hooker's view of ‘the nature and authority of scripture’, showing how he juxtaposes arguments from Scripture and reason, and arguing that for Hooker Scripture must be read with an awareness of context and of historical development. Here, Hooker clearly draws on humanist methodology, and it might have been useful to explore his use of Erasmus. Joyce concludes that for Hooker the moral law of Scripture and natural law, rooted in reason, are essentially coterminous, and shows that for Hooker the principles of law contained within them may be mandatory, permissive or admonitory. This discussion forms the basis for Joyce's consideration of ‘Hooker and the Moral Life’, in which she draws out the inter-relationship between Scripture and reason and the importance – indeed, authority – which Hooker attributes to human custom and consensus. Here too, Joyce identifies Aquinas as an important influence on Hooker's thought. Turning to the practice of moral theology, Joyce demonstrates the importance to Hooker of the exceptional case, before offering a case study of the application of his thought in an exploration of Hooker's views of marriage. Joyce concludes that ‘Hooker's contribution to the development of Anglican moral thought is certainly significant, but only in the relatively informal sense that he introduced a number of devices and motifs that were to be taken up and developed by some subsequent writers on the subject within the Anglican tradition’ (p. 242). Joyce is thus rightly cautious about the tendency to overestimate Hooker's contribution to Anglican theology.

Joyce's reading of Hooker as well as her engagement with earlier interpreters of his work offers a valuable contribution. However, there are some real deficits. Joyce argues for Hooker's dependence on Thomist categories, but says nothing about how or where he might have encountered Thomist theology: did he have access to the 1570 edition of Aquinas's works, the earliest printed edition? This is symptomatic of a historical naivety which permeates Joyce's argument, and reflects her failure to locate Hooker in the context of larger European debates, and in particular within the complex landscape of ‘Reformed’ theology and moral thought. Late sixteenth-century theology and philosophy were shaped by a complex interaction between humanist and scholastic approaches, and Joyce's discussion would have benefitted greatly from an engagement with the intellectual developments which Carl Trueman long-since termed ‘Protestant Scholasticism’, with key scholars such as Philip Melanchthon (who at least appears in the index) and Peter Martyr Vermigli (who does not), and with the approach taken by Hooker's contemporaries to moral theology, for instance in their commentaries on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Without a nuanced assessment of the influence of Thomism on the Reformed tradition, the implications of the parallels between Hooker and Thomist thought are difficult to assess: the same claim can legitimately be made for Melanchthon, Vermigli and indeed Calvin himself. An indication of the complex publication history of the Lawes would also have been illuminating. Joyce focuses her discussion on Books I to V, all published during Hooker's lifetime (Books I–IV in 1594, and Book V in 1597); some indication of what she considers to be the status of Books VI, VII and VII, published between 1648 and 1662, would have been helpful.

Joyce frequently refers to the critiques of the anonymous author of A Christian Letter, written in Hooker's lifetime, to justify her own reading of Hooker, appearing to discount the evidence cited by Michael Brydon (in The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 [Oxford, 2006]), that from the beginning assessments of Hooker's work were mutually contradictory, revealing as much about the author's interests as about Hooker himself. Joyce's reading of Hooker, careful though it is, is as susceptible to this criticism as any other. There can be no doubt that this study offers a useful and significant contribution to the debate about the interpretation of Hooker, and in particular his moral theology, but Joyce's will certainly not be the final word.