Joseph Hall (bishop)

Joseph Hall
Bishop of Norwich
A line drawing of Hall with a hood and long beard
Detail of an engraving by John Payne (1628)
DioceseDiocese of Norwich
Appointed1641
Term ended1646
PredecessorRichard Montagu
SuccessorEpiscopacy abolished
Personal details
Born1 July 1574
Prestop Park, Leicestershire, England
Died8 September 1656(1656-09-08) (aged 82)
Heigham, near Norwich
BuriedNorwich Cathedral
NationalityEnglish
SpouseElizabeth Bambridge
ChildrenSix
Previous post(s)Bishop of Exeter (1627–1641)
Alma materEmmanuel College, Cambridge

Joseph Hall (1 July 1574 – 8 September 1656) was an English bishop, satirist and moralist. His contemporaries knew him as a devotional writer, and a high-profile controversialist of the early 1640s. In church politics, he tended in fact to a middle way.

Thomas Fuller wrote:[1]

He was commonly called our English Seneca, for the purenesse, plainnesse, and fulnesse of his style. Not unhappy at Controversies, more happy at Comments, very good in his Characters, better in his Sermons, best of all in his Meditations.

Hall's relationship to the stoicism of the classical age, exemplified by Seneca the Younger, is still debated, with the importance of neo-stoicism and the influence of the Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius to his work being contested, in contrast to Christian morality.[2]

  1. ^ Chisholm 1911, p. 848.
  2. ^ Chew 1950, pp. 1130–1145.

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