This book is essentially a survey of how the legacy of Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was contested during the seventeenth century. It informs us that the familiar image of Hooker representing a via media in the English Church is somewhat reductive, and it highlights the ambiguity of many of the themes and arguments of Hooker's magnum opus. Hooker may have become something of an “iconic emblem of Anglicanism” (2), the man who, through his skillful melding of the authority of scripture, reason, and tradition, had sought to banish the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Puritanism. For contemporaries and close contemporaries, however, he was a far more complex figure, and the great benefit of Brydon's book is its demonstration of how, at different times, those of radically different theological and political sympathies—whether Catholic apologists, conformist Calvinists, or Laudians and, latterly, both Whig latitudinarians and their Tory opponents—felt comfortable about recruiting him to their causes.

Michael Brydon begins with a canter through the earliest responses to Hooker: ranging from the curious lack of interest in the wake of the publication of the first part of the Polity to the Calvinist criticism of writers such as Andrew Willet who accused Hooker of, among much else, undermining the role of preaching and marginalizing the doctrine of predestination. Hooker soon began to accrue his champions, however: notably, William Covell, who saw great potential in what he discerned as Hooker's sacrament-centered vision of true religion and his rejection of Puritan radicalism. At the same time, however, Hooker's reputation as the lodestone of what Brydon calls avant-garde conformism was damaged by the use Catholic writers began to make of him. If Hooker was rejecting the sola scriptura tradition, they artfully suggested, then was this not a veiled admission that the tradition and authority of the Church (Roman Catholic shibboleths, to be sure) were also necessary in the pursuit of religious truth? In some quarters, Hooker began to acquire the reputation of a Catholic sympathizer, which duly prompted his supporters (still eager to portray him as a voice of moderation and reconciliation) to begin, in 1612, the publication of his earlier, more ardently reformist writings—the clear intention being to reassert his Protestant credentials and locate him in the Jacobean mainstream.

Similar debates (which cannot be traced in any great detail here) would continue for the remainder of the century. Roman Catholics would never lose sight of the polemical use that could be made of Hooker; Laudians—the heirs, in a sense, of Brydon's avant-garde conformists—would claim him as their own but, at the same time, men like William Prynne would insist that the Arminian camp was grossly misrepresenting what Hooker had said. Undoubtedly, however, a dominant image of Richard Hooker was beginning to take shape. Through the 1640s and 1650s it began to seem increasingly likely that “a more narrow Laudian understanding of Hooker” was in the ascendant. “At the Restoration a difficult struggle still lay ahead to ensure that this vision was triumphant” (80), but as Brydon's final chapters reveal, the battle was certainly won by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The image of the judicious Hooker, the model for supporters of moderate episcopacy, became firmly embedded in the Anglican psyche even if, as Brydon reveals, some of his key ecclesiological principles were twisted or, on occasion, jettisoned. Hooker, for instance, had always put great store in the notion of adiaphora, but this was largely ignored by those eager to secure conformity with the liturgical demands of the late Stuart Church. Thus, Hooker was invoked to demonstrate the indispensability of things such as kneeling, church music, the Gloria Patri, and many other ceremonial practices that, in truth, he would have regarded as things indifferent.

Crises later in the century (the popish plot, the exclusion crisis) would temporarily complicate Hooker's legacy but, thanks in no small part to Isaac Walton's Life, by this period an Elizabethan theologian had already been transformed into “an Anglican Church father who historically vindicated everything that the Restoration religious settlement stood for” (115). Politicians during the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne would certainly find new ways to interpret Hooker's legacy. Brydon's decision to extend his analysis into the early eighteenth century is an astute one, and the new ways of approaching Hooker that emerged in these years bolster Brydon's key point that “no texts are capable of existing in vacuums, and our comprehensions of them are undoubtedly created by the historical circumstances in which they are read” (2). The fact remains, however, that Hooker's book—a work often characterized by studied ambiguity and, on occasion, willful vagueness—had, by 1700, been transformed into one of Anglicanism's definitive texts. As Brydon avers, when John Keble and John Henry Newman claimed that Hooker's theologizing represented the bedrock of the Anglican experiment, they were, in fact, merely rehashing a notion that had been current for numerous generations. The great advantage of Brydon's thoughtful and clear-headed book is that it reminds us how twisting the road to that interpretative destination had been.