‘One cannot help but suspect that Hooker would have been surprised to find himself credited with being the founding father of the Anglican tradition of moral theology’. So Alison Joyce observes in the conclusion to Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology in which she undertakes to elucidate this connection. At the outset of this scholarly monograph, Joyce asks how we are to ‘rate’ Hooker as a moral theologian? Was he indeed the founder of a tradition of moral theology? And does Hooker continue to exert authority for modern Anglicans? In seeking to address these admittedly teleological questions Joyce undertakes an extensive analysis of Hooker's theological anthropology; she discusses his views on the authority of scripture, his concepts of moral law and practice, and explores the interrelation of all of the above. In addition this volume also offers an assessment of Hooker's literary style, the structure of his argumentation, as well as of his rhetoric and polemics, with a view to revealing how they contribute to the shape of his thought. The project is somewhat complicated by the fact that Hooker's treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593), the main textual subject of the inquiry, is not itself a work of moral theology, but rather a polemical defence of the constitutional and ecclesiological terms of the Elizabethan religious settlement. Furthermore, a significant foundational element of Hooker's moral theory is expounded outside the Lawes in his treatment of the doctrines of justification, faith and works in various extant sermons. Hooker introduces moral theology in the context of the Lawes under the aspect of his discussion of natural law as one legal species, as it were, of an elaborate generic division of the manifold kinds of law all of which ‘proceed’ dispositively from the eternal law of God's own being. A major methodological difficulty of Joyce's approach stems from the early decision to isolate this inquiry into Hooker's ethical thought from the deep soteriological foundations upon which it rests. The consequence, no doubt unintended, is the depiction of Hooker as what might well be described as an ‘Elizabethan Averroist’. By representing Hooker's moral thought narrowly through the lens of his teaching on the natural law, Joyce portrays his position as a reiteration of Thomist-Aristotelian ‘virtue ethics’, whereas Hooker's Learned Discourse on Justification makes abundantly clear that in his view all Christian moral endeavour in the form of the active good works of ‘sanctification’ is wholly dependent upon the antecedent divine gift of ‘justification’. In short, Hooker adheres to the magisterial reformers’ grounding of Christian ethics in the key Reformed teaching concerning justification by faith alone. While Joyce admits that ‘Hooker can no longer be regarded as the founder of an Anglican via media as traditionally understood’, the thrust of her argument is to reformulate the definition of this middle way together with its concomitant notion of English exceptionalism. In a fashion curiously reminiscent of the anonymous authors of A Christian Letter (1599), Joyce seeks to drive a wedge between Hooker and the continental magisterial reformers: ‘[Hooker] has no hesitation whatsoever in drawing upon the wisdom and insights of traditions that reformed Protestantism rejected out of hand’. To suggest that appeals to Aristotle, Aquinas, the Stoics and indeed broadly to the tradition of natural law were ‘rejected’ by Reformed Protestantism is to conflate the sophisticated mainstream magisterial reform of the likes of Philipp Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, John Gerhardt and other magisterial divines of their ilk with the narrow biblicising tendencies of Hooker's disciplinarian puritan opponents. Such are the perils of teleological reading. By summoning Hooker to the bar of enlightened post-modern judgement to require that he offer up his reasons in order that he might be ‘rated’ for his usefulness to contemporary Anglican moral reflection, something of the elusively alien character of his mentalité has been overlooked. Like virtually all of his contemporaries among the magisterial reformers, both in England and on the continent, Hooker's moral theology is wholly inseparable from his theology of grace. That such is the case is made clear in the argument of chapter 11 of the first book of the Lawes. ‘Had Adam continued in his original state’ then the natural law would have been sufficient for the attainment of human ethical fulfilment. Yet, as Hooker very plainly states, ‘the light of nature is never able to finde out any way of obtaining the reward of blisse, but by performing exactly the duties and works of righteousnes. From salvation therefore and life all flesh being excluded this way, behold how the wisedome of God hath revealed a way mysticall and supernaturall. . . prepared before all worldes’ (Lawes, 1.11.5, 6). Grace – a ‘way supernatural’ – is for Hooker the source of the so-called theological virtues, without which there can be no attainment to moral fulfilment – eudaimonia. If it is the case that human value systems are, to a large extent, contextually determined, then with Hooker, as indeed with all of the magisterial reformers of the sixteenth century, the regulating context of moral theology is shaped ineluctably by the parameters established by the doctrine of grace. As Hooker observes in his Sermon on the Nature of Pride, ‘the want of exact distinguishing between these two waies [viz. of nature and grace] and observing what they have common what peculiar hath bene the cause of the greatest part of that confusion whereof Christianity at this daie laboureth’ (Pride, 5.313.19–23). The chief concern of the Protestant Reformation bar none is the formulation of the principles of soteriology, and it is entirely within the frame of this task that moral theology is undertaken by the reformers. It is certainly a perilous business to attempt to read Hooker outside this determining theological context. While Hooker most emphatically embraces ‘virtue ethics’ he nonetheless does so in a manner closely comparable to that achieved by Melanchthon and Vermigli, for example, and altogether consistent with Article XII of the Articles of Religion: ‘Good works are the fruits of Faith and follow after Justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God's Judgement: yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring necessarily of a true and lively Faith.’ Such soteriology is the source of the reformers’ classic distinction between the ‘two realms’ of passive and active virtue, justice ‘before God’ and ‘before men’, a distinction upon which Hooker's moral theology rests. This monograph constitutes a very learned exploration of the moral thought of Richard Hooker. Its assumed point of departure, however, leads the argument into Averroist territory in its assumption that the ways of nature and of grace are separable. That such an assumption shapes some contemporary approaches to Anglican moral discourse is certainly possible, but its authorship cannot be traced to Richard Hooker.