Book Review

How do you write the intellectual biography of a polymath? John Selden was one of the most vicariously learned men in a learned age, second in range perhaps only to Francis Bacon, although perhaps also to a small number of unwise men who combined classical and biblical learning with the exploration of necromancy and other lengthy pseudo-scientific cul-de-sacs. Selden was one of the greater common lawyers of his time, second in reputation (then and now) only to Sir Edward Coke. He combined his deep knowledge of English law and its processes with an equal grasp of Roman law and its many developments in the civil law systems of Latin Christendom (including canon law) and with an unrivaled understanding of the law and legal systems of ancient Israel. He was also at the forefront of much of what we might term Jacobean neo-historicism, a purposive antiquarianism with a sophisticated hermeneutic of change. He was a formidable philologist, and much of his writings explored, worked with, the etymology of words. He knew all the biblical and classical languages and the most important European languages of his day.	1
No wonder there has never been a full-length biography of Selden, although aspects of his life and career are discussed in more than sixty works (according to The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM [Oxford University Press, 1998]). David Berkowitz wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1946 on "Young Mr Selden" and in 1988 he published his study of John Selden's Formative Years (to 1629). He spent forty-five years trying to read everything that Selden read in order to make sense of Selden's interaction with his reading. Sadly the book appealed only to polymaths.	2
Paul Christianson's response to the challenge is not to read what Selden read, but to read about all the things that Selden was reacting to within his own political culture. He evaluates Selden's achievement by comparing his writing with the writings of his contemporaries, especially with the writings he engaged with in his own work. This is a "horizontal" reading of Selden (a study of the mental world he inhabited and of what it was that made him write what and how he did) rather than a vertical one (a study that filters off the dross of the contingent from the residual gold of enduring legacy).	3
Christianson has been writing about Selden for about fifteen years and some five articles have whetted our appetite for this study. But this is a very great deal more than a collection of these essays. It is a study of a man at the center of many of the toughest intellectual debates of the early Stuart period as thinker and actor, and a man who defies most of the categorizations. He was twice imprisoned in the 1620s for his "opposition" in Parliament to the king's policies and to his ministers; but his learning was also put at the Crown's disposal—not least in the last of the great works here considered, the Mare Clausum of 1635, a defense in international law of the principle of dominion on the high seas and the historical exercise by British kings of dominion of the seas around the island of Britain. He was a profoundly anticlerical friend of that most clericalist of archbishops, William Laud. His history was admired by lawyers and his legal knowledge revered by historians.	4
All this is brilliantly captured by Christianson. His background is in religious history and in radical religious discourse (as in his first book, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War, Toronto, 1978); and he has also written influentially about aristocratic political culture, anticipating the revisionist revolt in early Stuart studies in a number of powerful synoptic articles. This background has ensured that when he came to write about the political science of the period—what he prefers to call the study of governance—he was at once more familiar with the workings of the political system and of the various discourses in which debate about governance was conducted than most of the other writers who have written about the "political thought" and "legal thought" (two very different approaches) of the period 1603-40. He is, in a modest way, a mini-polymath of his own. He therefore respects both the self-sufficiency of the common law discourse of the period and is aware of how men like Selden worked both within it and from it into adjacent discourses.	5
This book, with its forbiddingly accurate title (and note the cut-off point—almost twenty years before Selden's death), is a masterly account of an eclecticism grounded in law but not confined to it. It offers the best currently available published accounts of Selden's writings on the Ancient Constitution (Jani Anglorum), The History of Tithes, the contrasting 1614 and 1631 editions of Titles of Honour, an annotated edition of Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae, and the Mare Clausum. But even more impressive is Christianson's discussion of Selden's political career in the 1620s and his subsequent imprisonment for sedition. This involves him in a detailed examination of his close involvement in many fierce debates about parliamentary privilege and most of the parliamentary challenges of the 1620s to the royal definition of discretionary power. Christianson manages in the course of his close reading of the fragmentary records to be at once revisionist and able to demonstrate how men who respected one another's minds could still differ profoundly. This is a study of how cosmopolitan reading could produce deeply held differences about how the past shaped the political possibilities of the present and how they created different patterns of hope and fear about the political future. This rich, intelligent, articulate book is essential reading for all who are willing to engage in a necessarily complex tale about a group of able men, each convinced that he was the key to crossing a minefield and who had to persuade colleagues (all with their own strong ideas about how to do so) to follow his route as the only safe one. I for one am exhilarated as well as much better informed for having joined him in the adventure.	6
John Morrill Selwyn College, Cambridge

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.