| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Reid Barbour. John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2003. Pp. x, 417. $70.00.
In The Compleat Gentleman (1622), Henry Peachman called John Selden "the rising Starre of good letters and Antiquitie." Peacham based his assessment, as a marginal note made clear, on Iani Anglorum facies altera (1610), the Titles of Honor (1614), and a manuscript version of Mare clausum (written around 1619, but published in 1635). In addition to these, however, Selden had already published a study of single combats, The duello (1610); of English government before the Norman Conquest, Analecton Anglobritannicon (1615); and of Semitic mythology, De dis Syris syntagmata (1617); had edited John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Angli (1616); and had written notes on Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1613). Between the early 1620s and his death in 1654, he produced a number of further studies and treatises on British and Judaic history and laws, antiquities and myths, and also played an important political role especially in the 1620s and 1640s.	1
In the face of such polymathic learning, it is no wonder that scholars have usually examined only parts of Selden's writings. Thus we have excellent studies of his early career by David Sandler Berkowitz and Paul Christianson, of his views of natural law by Richard Tuck and J. P. Sommerville, and of his historical writing more generally by Daniel Woolf. Reid Barbour's new volume is an exception to this trend. It offers a vigorously argued and beautifully written comprehensive account of Selden's writings. The book is not meant to be an introduction to Selden's works. In order to benefit fully from it, the reader is expected to be familiar with Selden's life and writings.	. . .

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