Abstract
The document we're going to talk about today is a set of extracts from Richard Hooker's work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity written in 1593 (the 3 dots suggest that they were cuts in the text). Actually, this is his main work and it consists of eight books that were published during the reign of Elizabeth I (she came to the throne in 1558). In 1890, Isaac Walton published The work of Mr Richard Hooker with an account of his life and death, a book in which he gathered Hooker's written works and his biography. This very extract relates the debate opposing the Puritan wing of the Church of England and the partisans of the Church of England in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I. You all remember that Elizabeth was a protestant: she reformed the English Church, setting up a Via Media which is a middle way between the positions of the Roman Catholics and the Protestants.
