HOOKER, Richard.

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Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Eyght Bookes. First edition of both parts of the first major philosophical work written in English, a key precursor of 17th-century contract theory. Hooker's Lawes was a foundation of the Church of England's via media, a middle course between the twin threats of Roman Catholicism and English Puritanism.English Puritans remained unsatisfied with the religious compromise reached in the early years of Elizabeth I, consciously positioning their conventicles as alternatives to the Anglican establishment. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) had first-hand experience of navigating this tension, as the Anglican master of a church with a Calvinist preacher, and this Anglo-centric focus explains his use of the English vernacular to reach the widest audience. Hooker was also given free access to the Archbishop's library at Lambeth to write the work.The Lawes justifies the Anglican form of church government by placing it in a wider analysis of government itself - an analysis in which Hooker emphasizes popular consent as the only foundation of political authority. This aspect of the book was cited extensively by Sidney and Locke, and it was through Locke that "Hooker's ideas passed directly to the eighteenth-century political malcontents in America and France" (Shirley, p. 215). In later generations, Hooker's distinctive vision of a unified church and state influenced Coleridge, and several leaders of the Oxford Movement, underpinning Shirley's judgement of

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