This collection of essays originated in a symposium held at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in 2014. The symposium began as a response to a paper delivered by W. B. Littlejohn at the Richard Hooker Society meeting of the previous year. In that paper, Dr. Littlejohn argued that the time had come for further exploration of the links between Reformed Orthodoxy and Hooker's theology, which has often been characterized as a kind of via media between Geneva and Rome. His suggestion struck a chord and the result was this series of essays, written in the space of a few months but reflecting currents of scholarship that go back about three decades.

Richard Hooker has long been perceived as something of an oddity in post-Reformation England. On the one hand, he conformed to the national church and defended its reformed character against all comers, much in the tradition of his mentor John Jewel. On the other hand, he was a staunch opponent of the Puritans, some of whom denied his right to be called a Reformed theologian at all. For a long time, Hooker's influence was not particularly great, but with the appearance of Tractarianism in the nineteenth century, all that changed. From having been somewhat marginal, his image was turned inside out, and he was transformed into the fount and origin of an Anglicanism that was neither Roman nor Protestant.

In the mid-twentieth century, this interpretation became the inspiration for a mini-industry, based mainly among American Episcopalians, that did its best to raise Hooker to the level of the English Calvin or Aquinas. It is now generally recognized that this approach was too extreme, though it still has some defenders. Today, most Hooker scholars agree that he was closer to the Protestant than to the Catholic world of his time, though there is still a lively debate between those who follow Peter Lake in believing that his work is deceptive and must be read between the lines, and those who prefer the more straightforward approach advocated by Torrance Kirby, who maintains that Hooker was an independent but clearly Reformed theologian.

This collection of essays reflects the Kirby line, with varying degrees of nuance. Dr. Kirby himself maintains that Hooker was fully Reformed in the late sixteenth-century sense of the word, and the other contributors to the volume follow him in this. Dr. Brown Patterson, for example, maintains that Hooker was fully in line with his contemporary William Perkins, who later became a theological hero of the Puritan movement even as Hooker was being appropriated (and misinterpreted) by its enemies. The two men never met, and they moved in different circles, but their thought world was similar, and their views were mutually compatible. As several contributors point out, on all the main points of dispute at the time, Hooker came down on the Protestant, and more especially on the Reformed, side of the argument. For example, he denied both the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran belief in the ubiquity of Christ's resurrection body, putting him clearly in line with the Reformed doctrine of the Church of England's Thirty-nine Articles.

The key to understanding Hooker lies in appreciating how he distinguished between the internal working of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, a point on which his view was virtually identical with that of someone like Calvin, from the external ordering of the visible church, the subject on which he clashed with the Puritans. Furthermore, Hooker did not so much disagree with their views as think that they were making secondary issues primary and dividing the church on matters that were of little real importance. As David Neelands and Daniel Eppley both point out, Hooker had a strong sense of the adiaphora, things which did not matter theologically but which had to be accommodated for the sake of decency and order. Hooker admitted that celebrating Christmas or using the set liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer were not essential to the Christian faith, and he was open to the possibility of further reform in such matters. But he accepted that the Church of England functioned in a certain (rather conservative) way and that non-conformity to its practices could not be justified by the naive Biblical fundamentalism that he detected among many so-called “Puritans.”

Hooker was also very eclectic in his reading and did not hesitate to borrow ideas and approaches that suited his purpose, wherever he found them. Thus, for example, he did not hesitate to appropriate Thomas Aquinas, though as Paul Dominiak shows, he can only be called a “Thomist” in a qualified and historically conditioned sense. As several contributors point out, Hooker's affinities with medieval scholasticism can be paralleled in many contemporary Continental Reformed thinkers, notably Peter Martyr Vermigli and Girolamo Zanchi. Hooker readily absorbed their thought, but because he wrote in English rather than Latin, the intellectual commerce did not travel in the opposite direction, as Bradford Littlejohn makes clear.

Inevitably, there is a good deal of overlap in the essays, but they are clearly arranged into three sections, the first of which deals with general questions of background, the second with pastoral and theological issues, and the third with a detailed analysis of Hooker's relationship with Reformed Orthodoxy in particular. On the whole, the volume is well presented, but there is no index, which makes it much harder to consult than it ought to be. That really is a serious weakness, especially in a book that is destined to become one of seminal importance in its field.