Arthur Stephen McGrade

Arthur Stephen McGrade, Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus), the University of Connecticut, has published on medieval philosophy and on the 16th-century English philosophical theologian and political thinker Richard Hooker.

McGrade’s most recent publication is a modern-spelling edition of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, an edition intended to make the work accessible to non-specialist readers. The Laws is the major prose composition of the English sixteenth century, the first enduring contribution to theology, philosophy, and political thought written in English. The editor’s substantial introduction places the Laws in historical context, identifies the surpisingly wide range of readers Hooker sought to engage, helps new readers approach Hooker’s style, and guides them on a tour of the Laws that relates each part of the work to the argument of the whole. Translation of all non-English material, expansion of Hooker’s often cryptic footnotes, a Guide to his Sources, a Glossary, and extensive indexes are also provided.

This edition, published in three volumes by Oxford University Press, is based on the authoritative Folger Library text of the Laws with some further emendations. Hooker’s punctuation and other features of the Folger text are preserved, and his foreign-language notes are given in their original form in an appendix, making the edition a useful basis for any scholarly research that does not focus specifically on Elizabethan spelling. The editor hopes however, that it will be of interest to more than academic readers. He believes the Laws is a great book which merits wider reading than it has recently enjoyed.