Abstract
William Barlow’s The Summe and Substance of the Conference which it pleased his Excellent Majestie to have ... at Hampton Court recounts the three days of debate in January 1604 between representatives of the established church and those challengers who sought further reformation as reflected in the Millenary Petition.1 The debate took place within a typical disputational arena: one side spoke first and on the next day, the other side, all performed before the judge, in this case the new King James. Although James as a disputant of sorts enters—quite literally—the disputational arena in the Privy Chamber, he functions most obviously in Barlow’s partisan reconstruction as the judge or traditional indifferent reader before whom debate transpires and by whom judgement is to be rendered. He decides who has won the disputation, as well as what the definitive sentence is, to use a Hookerian phrase.
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References
Petition presented to King James VI and I in April 1603 enroute from Scotland to London in which certain of his subjects sought relief from the “common burden of human rites and ceremonies.” Text in J.P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 132–34 (no. 37).
William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference, which it pleased His Excellent Maiestie to have with the Lords, Bishops, and other of his… Clergie… at Hampton Court (London: John Windet, 1604), 97 [misprinted as 93].4 Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 ), 4
In a genuine sense W.D.J. Cargill Thompson’s “The Philosopher of the `Politic Society’: Richard Hooker as a Political Thinker” began the process of reevaluating Hooker as a controversialist within the late Elizabethan church. See SRH,3–76. This understanding came to inform the various introductory essays in the Folger Library Edition of Hooker’s works which followed, as well as my own work. See, for example, Rudolph Almasy “The Purpose of Richard Hooker’s Polemic,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978) 251–70. There still remains reluctance in some scholarly circles, however, to fully embrace this approach to Hooker; and when it is acknowledged, it is always judged as somehow less important to the larger enterprise of understanding Hooker’s constructive theology. For example, Lee W. Gibbs writes in his introduction to Book I in the Folger Library Edition: “Recognition of the practical origin and intent of the Lawes,including Book I, does not minimize the distinctiveness of Hooker’s moderation in the heat of debate, the uniquely lofty level of his discourse about the first principles underlying the disputed issues, the genuineness of his appeal to persuasive reason… The fundamental problem in the interpretation of Book I is therefore that of seeing an apparently serene essay in philosophical theology within the context of the practical crisis faced by the Elizabethan church during the closing decade of the sixteenth century.” See FLE 6(1):82–83. I hope to show that Book I is not as “serene” as Gibbs and others say.
Brian Vickers, “Introduction 2: Hooker’s Prose Style,” Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: An Abridged Edition, eds. A.S. McGrade and Brian Vickers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 4616 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England ( Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 ), 254
Kevin Sharpe would call this the “performance of power,” suggesting that when a writer like Hooker performed linguistically his playing reflected the rhetoricity of Renaissance culture. See his Reading Revolutions: the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), especially chapter 1 “Reading in Early Modern England.” I am indebted to Sharpe’s sense of textual performance, a sense which is built, to a degree, on the work of J.G.A. Pocock. See, for example, Pocock’s essay “Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought” in Politics of Discourse: the Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England,ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Arthur Stephen McGrade, “Introduction,” Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I, Book VIII,ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xx. Recently Peter Lake has argued that modern commentators of the Lawes continue to miss the “polemical and ideological aggressions” of Hooker’s book, preferring to see Hooker “principally as moderate and irenic.” See his “Business as Usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 (July 2001), 456–486.
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I, Book VIII,ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xxx
Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 182. Lake is, of course, correct that the fundamental problem with Hooker’s opponents is their epistemological error or lapse. But what Lake does not stress is Hooker’s hierarchy of learners and thinkers that has implications for how the presbyterians are finally categorized.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977 ), 183
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Almasy, R.P. (2003). Language and Exclusion in the First Book of Hooker’s Politie. In: Kirby, W.J.T. (eds) Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. Studies in Early Modern Religious Reforms, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0319-2_14
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