By Reid Barbour

John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England is the 1st textual content in over a century to ascertain the total of Selden's works and inspiration. Reid Barbour brings a brand new point of view to Selden reviews by way of stressing Selden's powerful dedication to a 'religious society,' through taking a more in-depth and extra sustained examine his poetic pursuits, and through systematically interpreting his Latin guides (particularly these utilizing Jewish sources).

Offering serious shut readings of Selden's oeuvre, Barbour posits that the overriding target of Selden's profession used to be to strengthen non secular society within the face of its coming near near loss of life. He argues that Selden's scholarly occupation used to be devoted to resolving an primarily spiritual query approximately how top to set up the holy commonwealth in either lawfulness and non secular abundance.

Perhaps the best energy of Barbour's research emerges from his total interpretation of Selden's corpus in the context of what the writer calls a "religious society"; this method emphasizes the spiritual commitments of Selden and subverts prior readings of him as a cynical, skeptical, secular philosopher who attacked, instead of upheld, a Judeo-Christian version of society. conducting sort and sizeable in research, Barbour's John Selden will upload significantly to the constrained physique of labor in this very important seventeenth-century savant.

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True, the Tudor Protestant church was rightly founded on parliamentary dispensations; but in contrast to Selden's approach to Judaic studies, Hooker had not taken the challenge offered by Jesus himself in the Gospels, namely, that even if God's law must not be altered, nonetheless it requires a gracious transformation and spiritual fulfilment. In the 1640s Selden conversed about how the leaders in Protestant and Catholic Christendom had not solved the great but problematic double injunctions of the New Testament: of obeying the higher magistrates but also of fulfilling the law with the gracious afflatus of abundant spirituality.

Yet Selden faced a dilemma in which Jonson only partly shared: the sceptical scholar's desire to get the distant past exactly right, and, in so doing, to give seventeenth-century readers authentic ways of thinking through the seemingly insoluble problem of measuring the holy commonwealth after the post-Reformation had generated so much fragmentation and violence. The strange truth of Selden's life, works, and legacy was that he came to be associated with the destruction of the very holy commonwealth that he had laboured so monumentally and inventively to save.

In his introduction to a collection often medieval historical writings in 1652 he continued to contribute to the welfare of his nation's historical documents, a goal dear to him also in his role as the keeper of the records for the Tower of London. There is no indication that Selden ever married, though some have speculated that he married his patroness, Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, after her husband's death; he certainly lived and died in her residence at White Friars and was buried in the Temple church.

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