Prologue

I have become the enemy of the multitude in so far as I examine the follies of the frivolous. For this reason I might disappear into retirement or keep silent; but my tumultuous affairs prevent the first option while the impulses of my soul destroy the other. Whoever is placed beneath some authority, if he is wise, ought to comply with the commands of the governor. Yet when one is moved by the stimulus of deep feeling, one cannot dissimulate, but instead will be inspired to express one's passions. Thus, exultation is stroked by the gentle breeze of what is joyful, hope induces cheerfulness, fear yields anxiety, and grief plunges the soul into confusion. Such alternation between good and bad fortune is experienced by every particular person. In truth, the misery of bad fortune is more pronounced and more often assails everyone. Who is not more often favoured with the annoyance of bad fortune than stroked by the consolation of good fortune? Rare is someone who can protect himself totally from the full onslaught of fortune. Whoever prevails due to his own qualities of strength will be impeded by the health or fate of a friend or a relative. Although he who is not stirred by the loss of his own material goods is not very human, neither is one in a human condition who is not moved by the loss of that which belongs to another.

Prologue

I would have turned away from the company of the frivolous, leaving the palace of the courtier, except that the authority of your precepts has detained my departure on the threshold itself. For when I revealed to you the distress of my heart and complained about the loss of time and of life, you always advised me to carry on with strong heart until God reveals Himself to others and transforms my circumstances for the better, persuading me that, in the manner of the labourer who averts or diminishes the tedium of his labours by old songs and sweet voices, I might be compensated for the waste of time and material goods. For the path seems easier and more brief for travellers if they are refreshed by a story pleasant to the senses or by the melodies of a sweet voice. So also you told me to pursue a devotion to reading or some other activity and, if nothing else is granted, to lament about my situation and the fickle forms of fortune, at least to myself and to the Muses. For in aspiring to philosophy, it is an important step to bewail the lack of virtue in oneself.

John of Salisbury's Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers is commonly acclaimed as the first extended work of political theory written during the Latin Middle Ages. At approximately 250,000 words in length, the Policraticus is however far more than a theoretical treatise on politics. It is equally a work of moral theology, satire, speculative philosophy, legal procedure, self-consolation, biblical commentary and deeply personal meditation. In sum, the Policraticus is the philosophical memoir of one of the most learned courtier-bureaucrats of twelfth-century Europe. The title Policraticus, a pseudo-Greek neologism, itself seems to have been invented by John in order to convey the implication of classical learning and erudition as well as to capture the political content of the work.

Because of the diversity of John's interests, the reader must take care to approach the Policraticus without reference to current disciplinary boundaries. It is anachronistic to ignore or exclude from consideration those sections of the Policraticus which do not meet strict contemporary criteria for political theory. Indeed, even John's conception of what constitutes the realm of the political was different from a modern one, a fact which is reflected in the substance of his writing. Yet if we acknowledge the distance of his fundamental assumptions from our own, we can learn much about the political attitudes and beliefs of medieval Europe as well as about the origins of many of our own cherished political and social values.

This volume is designed to offer the most direct access possible to the argument and sources of a classic of English political and religious thought which has recently become a subject of critical controversy. There are difficulties. Hooker's sentences are long and his chapter-length paragraphs very long. His sources, tersely cited as a rule, are unfamiliar. The solutions to these problems chosen by the great nineteenth-century editor of his works, John Keble, were to segment Hooker's text – by heavy punctuation of sentences and the division of chapters into numbered sections – and vastly augment his notes. These measures had their point, but they are sometimes intrusive. In this edition, spelling has been modernized, but Hooker's punctuation and paragraph indivisions have been left alone for the Preface and Book I (which were published in his lifetime), and only a few changes have been made in the posthumously published Book VIII (the surviving manuscripts of which have paragraph divisions, one indication among others that our version of the book is not a finished one). The lack of paragraphs in the earlier parts of the work may seem a hardship at first, but if the reader will think of immersion rather than quick processing as the right approach to Hooker's prose, the result will be rewarding.

Richard Hooker was born in or near Exeter in April 1554, less than six years before the accession of Elizabeth I and the reestablishment by statute of the religious and political order for which he himself was to attempt a coherent intellectual justification some forty years later. At an early age he came to the attention of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, the first official defender of the English church in Elizabeth's reign. With Jewel's support, Hooker attended Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1579 and taught logic and Hebrew.

Hooker was made a deacon in 1579 and later ordained to the priesthood. In 1585 his appointment as Master of the Temple made him chief pastor of one of the principal centers of legal studies in London. Enough sermons survive from this period of his life to form the basis for a substantial volume in the Folger edition. However, Hooker's chief work – indeed, the chief English prose work of the sixteenth century – was Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Eight Books.

Hooker gave up his place at the Temple to work on the Laws in 1591 and resided for the next few years in the home of his father-inlaw, the London merchant John Churchman. He consulted frequently in the course of writing with two of his former students, Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a member of the parliament of 1593, and George Cranmer, grand-nephew of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury.