Given his eminent place in the Anglican canon, it is perhaps rather strange that [Richard Hooker] is a writer almost unknown among the general public. And, apart from a small coterie of intensely devoted scholars, who have ground the last ounce out of the most obscure of his works [The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity] is scarcely read either … It is one of those rare works that is pre-eminently alive in its historical and literary contexts, but no longer alive in the world of today. (p 217)
In a pleasantly quirky manner, Scoble seeks to make Hooker more accessible to today's non specialist reader by linking him, in a trio of short studies, with the local novelist of the mid-20th century, Jocelyn Brooke, and with the great Joseph Conrad, who had in common that each lived out their latter days in Bishopsbourne, a village sequestered amongst woodland in the rolling Kentish countryside. The links may be tenuous but they serve to highlight, on the one hand, Hooker's character as a scholar country parson and, on the other, his mastery of the English language.
Scoble starts a brief biography of Hooker with his own recollections as a new student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the 1960s, where much would have seemed unchanged since Hooker studied there in the 1560s and 70s. There is some informative discussion of patrons and of Elizabethan theological controversies and then an outline of the contents of Hooker's famous work, interspersed with judiciously selected and quite ample quotations, which give a taste of his stately prose. With the bonus of introductions to Brooke and Conrad and a medley of topographical and historical information about the area interspersed with other literary references, the book is well priced for a hardback and offers an engaging entrée to Hooker's work for those who may feel daunted by it.Footnote 3
