John Selden : measures of the Holy Commonwealth in seventeenth-century England / Reid Barbour.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Engaging in style and substantive in analysis, Barbour's John Selden will add considerably to the limited body of work on this important seventeenth-century savant.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Author of the debunking History of Tithes (1618), subject of his own Table Talk (1689), and coincidental proponent of Charles I's maritime policy, John Selden cuts a prominent figure in 17th-century intellectual history and was the legal conscience of civil war England. Barbour's book is not a biography but a series of sophisticated readings of problems confronted by Selden's scholarship. Barbour suggests that Selden, who is generally regarded as an anticlerical of secular tendencies, advocated Christian reconstruction of a "holy commonwealth" based partly on norms realizable by historical study of the Jewish Sanhedrin. There are many shrewd readings here of Selden's "oracular obscurity." The density of Barbour's own prose will limit the audience of his book to graduate students and faculty, for whom it will, nevertheless, be a valuable resource. Barbour's argument, which places Selden in the company of theologically reenergized personages such as Sir Isaac Newton, has much to commend it and will no doubt provoke scholarly rejoinder. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty. M. C. Noonkester William Carey College