Richard Hooker was an Elizabethan of the greatest importance. He is remembered today almost exclusively for Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Eight Books (1593-1662), his magnum opus. In the composition of this monumental treatise, primarily written to defend the Elizabethan church against the attacks of the English Presbyterians at the end of the sixteenth century, but always with careful secondary attention given to the refutation of what he and his Anglican contemporaries perceived to be the "errors" of the Church of Rome, Hooker decisively helped to shape that via-media way of thinking and making moral decisions that has so dominated Anglican thought and the Church of England from his own day forward. Hooker is also commemorated for the lofty grandeur of his Latinate, English prose style--a style that is now recognized to be inseparable from the method and content of his thought as a whole. Finally, because...