Scholars of Richard Hooker and Elizabethan Protestantism will rejoice at the addition of another fresh study to the rapidly growing body of Hooker scholarship. This, like many of the recent contributions to the field, represents a first foray by an up-and-coming scholar, a doctoral dissertation adapted into a monograph. As such, we should not be surprised to find some of the handicaps common in such works: a somewhat narrowed focus, a slow start as it navigates its way through an obligatory literature review and outline of methodology, a tendency to rely over-heavily on quotations from the primary sources, a certain repetitiveness, and an occasionally laboured prose style.
Thankfully, however, Kindred-Barnes successfully avoids more serious dangers. Anyone familiar with Hooker scholarship knows what a minefield the subject has become in recent years, with bitter disagreements about the relative importance of Hooker's Thomistic and Reformed influences, his relation to Elizabethan conformism more broadly, and the relation of his irenical and polemical agendas. Kindred-Barnes deftly manoeuvres through this minefield without giving too many hostages to fortune, providing a fairly balanced reading on most of the disputed points. He also resists the temptation toward novelty and the sometimes unhealthy fixation with rhetorical criticism that have afflicted some recent Hooker research. While too many Hooker scholars have concluded that we already know all there is to know about Cartwright and the Admonition Controversy, and can safely leave this well-mined ground behind and turn our attention to more interesting questions, Kindred-Barnes knows better. At every point, he reads Hooker's argument as a sort of continuation of Cartwright and Whitgift's earlier debate, contending that Hooker's response to the ‘primitivism’ of the radical puritans lay at the heart of his concern in the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. But the topic that the book undertakes to survey – Hooker's appeal to history and church tradition in defence of the polity and liturgical practices of the Elizabethan Church – is hardly a head-turning one, and we might be forgiven for wondering wherein lies this book's new contribution to scholarship.
Kindred-Barnes foregrounds for us two new contributions which, he hopes, help to shine fresh rays of insight on an old debate: Hooker's concept of ‘conveniency’ and the importance of Henry Barrow as an interlocutor. By means of the former, he seeks to unify Hooker's defences of various liturgical practices, which seem at times ad hoc, under a single principle. By means of the latter, he seeks to correct the one-sidedness of readings that have observed Hooker's concern with responding to radical puritans Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers, but neglected the passages aimed at Henry Barrow and the separatists. Kindred-Barnes sets out these two foci in Chapter 2, and then uses them to help structure his discussion in the six following chapters, which comprise the body of the work. These are organized in three pairs, each concerned with a different general topic of debate: ‘the Politics of the Visible Church’, ‘Public Prayer’ and ‘the Sacraments’. The first chapter of each pair surveys the ‘primitivist’ approach to the topic, in the works of Cartwright and of Barrow; the second displays Hooker's use of ‘the rule of the convenient’, and keen sense of how to make use of the testimony of history, in responding to both interlocutors. The result is an illuminating, though at times somewhat tedious, new overview of Hooker's defence of the Elizabethan Settlement.
It is not clear, however, that Kindred-Barnes's two new themes – ‘conveniency’ and Henry Barrow – have as much to contribute as he hopes for them to. The first is decidedly lacking in clarity; Kindred-Barnes never really tells us quite what he means by it, although we might attempt to summarize it as follows: the principle that the church should always seek that which is best suited to reverence, order and edification in the midst of contingent historical circumstances. By this means, Hooker navigates between the Scylla of necessity (which we find in the radical puritan appeal to biblical law) and the Charybdis of arbitrariness (which lurks behind some of Whitgift's blind appeals to royal authority). In short, the concept appears to cover roughly the same ground that other scholars have discussed under the headings of ‘adiaphora’ and ‘edification’, and it is not altogether clear what is gained by it. The second, the role of Henry Barrow, is more helpful; Kindred-Barnes compellingly demonstrates Barrow's presence in the text of the Lawes, which has received relatively little attention by scholars before. However, at most points, the relevant arguments from Barrow seem to match fairly closely those of Cartwright, so the attention to Barrow's voice fails to add much of a new dimension to our reading of Hooker's polemic.
Nevertheless, while the fresh insights in this book do not perhaps merit the 344 pages expended, Kindred-Barnes has certainly given Hooker scholars valuable new food for thought.
