SOURCE: Monahan, Arthur P. “Richard Hooker: Counter-Reformation Political Thinker.” In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade, pp. 203-17. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997.

In the following essay, Monahan contrasts the views of Hooker to those of Martin Luther and John Calvin.

A broad continuum of basic concepts exists across the all-too-often asserted gap between medieval and modern thought. In particular, the assumed or alleged modernity of Renaissance and Reformation political thinking, with its stress on individual freedom and rejection of absolutism, is more fiction than fact. We come closer to fact when we read texts in the context of their contemporary and earlier background rather than as containing twentieth-century political concepts read back into them; history, that is, should be read forward rather than backward. Many others have insisted on this same methodological point, of course, although too often such...