Hooker, Richard, 1554?–1600, English theologian and clergyman of the Church of England. He studied and lectured at Oxford and preached at Drayton-Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire; at the Temple Church, London; at Boscombe, Wiltshire; and at Bishopsbourne, Kent. His famous Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (in 8 books, of which only 5 were published in his lifetime) was an epoch-making discussion of church government, written in an excellent prose style. It helped to formulate the intellectual concepts of Anglicanism, and its influence on the theory of government (civil as well as ecclesiastical) as based on rules of reason was widely felt in England. An edition of Hooker's works (1666) contained a celebrated biography by Izaak Walton (1665).

Bibliography

See the critical edition of his complete works, ed. by W. S. Hill et al. (2 vol., 1977–80); W. S. Hill, Richard Hooker: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Early Editions, 1593–1724 (1970); W. S. Hill, Studies in Richard Hooker (1972).

Hooker, Richard

(born March 1554?, Heavitree, Exeter, Devon, Eng.—died Nov. 2, 1600, Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, Kent) English clergyman and theologian. He attended the University of Oxford, became a fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1577, and was ordained in 1581. He served as master of the Temple Church (1585–91) and later was vicar of churches at Drayton Beauchamp, Boscombe, and Bishopsbourne. He created a distinctive Anglican theology during a time when the Church of England was threatened by both Roman Catholicism and Puritanism. His great work was Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594–97), in which he defended the threefold authority of the Bible, church tradition, and human reason.