Special Collections
Book of the Month, July 2006
Of the Church, 400 years old this year, is the chief work of the Church of England clergyman Richard Field (1561-1616). The words “five books” on the title page are misleading, only the first four having been published at the time. (Book 5, which answers some of the objections raised to Books 1-4, followed in 1610 and is bound with the first four books in the Senate House Library copy.)
One of the most learned and acute theologians of his age, Field preached before both Elizabeth I and James I and was chaplain to the latter. His intimate friends included his fellow theologian Richard Hooker, mathematician and classical scholar Sir Henry Savile; and Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, Sir Henry Nevill. Field’s Of the Church has, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, “long taken its stand by the side of Hooker among the grandest monuments of polemical divinity in the language”; writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vernon Wilkins contrasts it favourably with Hooker for Field’s “eminently readable English”. It is an apology for the Church of England against Rome, arguing that the Church of England was the true Catholic continuation of the historic Latin church in England. Field describes the roles of the true church as antiquity; succession; unity; universality and the name “Catholic”. He was inclusive of Protestant churches on the Continent as part of the body of Christ, but was strongly against the Roman church of his time. His book was therefore controversial.
Field was an almost exact contemporary of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), which may at least partly account for the presence of his book in the Durning-Lawrence Library with that collection’s strong Baconian emphasis. This copy is rendered individual by its seventeenth-century English and Latin manuscript annotations, sometimes relatively lengthy, and sometimes taking issue with Field, as the beginning of the annotation on the first page of the dedication: “These words slipt unadvisedly from his pen”.
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