Richard Hooker was a learned philosophical theologian and engaged polemicist of the later sixteenth century who explained and defended the Elizabethan religious and political settlement, and shaped definitively the self-understanding of the English ecclesiastical establishment for centuries to come. This Companion to Richard Hooker brings together a representative body of contributors with a view to offering a summary of the current state of scholarly debate and a synthesis of emerging trends in criticism. Contributions to this volume reflect the major current trends of scholarly opinion on...

From Greco-Roman Antiquity through to the European Enlightenment, philosophy and religious thought were inseparably interwoven. This was equally the case for the popular natural or 'pagan' religions of the ancient world as it was for the three pre-eminent 'religions of the book', namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The lengthy and involved encounter of the Greek philosophical tradition - and especially of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic strands of that tradition - initially with the Hellenistic cults and subsequently with the three Abrahamic religions, played a critical role...

The open-air pulpit in Paul's Churchyard in the City of London, known as Paul's Cross, is one of the most important vehicles of popular public persuasion employed by government from the outset of the Henrician Reformation in the early 1530s until the opening salvos of the Civil War when the pulpit was demolished. Paul's Cross became especially prominent as the public face of government when Thomas Cromwell orchestrated propaganda for the Henrician reformation in the early 1530s. Here too, after the accession of Edward VI, Hugh Latimer preached his 'Sermon on the Ploughers', one of the most...