G.J. Toomer, John Selden. a Life in Scholarship. Oxford University Press, Oxford , Vols., Xxi + Pp. IS

 Book Reviews / CHRC .– () –

G.J. Toomer, John Selden. A Life in Scholarship. Oxford University Press, Oxford ,  vols., xxi +  pp. ISBN . .

Even if he was not quite of the same calibre as Scaliger and Grotius, with whom his English contemporaries liked to compare him, John Selden was one of the greatest scholars in England in the first half of the seventeenth century. His versatility was extraordinary. He excelled as a historian, a classical scholar, and a jurist. He was an accomplished Hebraist and an early practitioner of Arabic. Humble though his origins were, he soon made his mark in the literary and scholarly circle of Ben Jonson, and was patronised by a series of powerful members of the nobility. Despite a couple of bouts of imprisonment for causing the displeasure of the king, Laud admired him and Charles I summoned him to York in . Selden was clearly on the side of parliament during the Civil War and his influence there and in the world of learning allowed him to display his generosity by assisting other scholars. He was in a position to help his royalist friends at Oxford and Cambridge, menaced by parliamentary visitations, as well as the owners of libraries in London and elsewhere. He was, in short, an exemplary citizen of the Republic of Letters for whom learning prevailed over religion or pol- itics. Totackle John Selden is a formidable enterprise and Professor G.J.Toomer is one of the very few historians to have a wide enough command of the material to be able to do so. Certain aspects of Selden, especially his political career, have been studied before, but this is the first attempt to examine him as a scholar. John Selden. A Life in Scholarship contains above all detailed summaries and critical analyses of Selden’s scholarly output, arranged in chronological order, but it also includes chapters on Selden’s youth and education and on his social life and parliamentary activity. One of the greatest qualities of Toomer’s book is that it gives a good idea of the nature of scholarship at the time. The dazzling display of erudition, the use of exotic types to impress a somewhat credulous readership, and the numerous, and often apparently irrelevant, digressions which Selden and his contemporaries favoured, are frequently veils covering ideas that have long lost their value. It is also hard to define the standards by which scholars of the time should be judged. It is in his assessment of Selden’s Dissertatio ad Fletam that Toomer provides a concise survey of Selden’s skills, “a deep and wide- ranging command of the sources and the modern literature, a comprehensive knowledge of the historical background, a flair for discovering the unusual, and an eye for the telling example.”

In his work on Jewish history Selden displays some of his more extraordinary insights. He did his best to consult the most reliable secondary sources and, working in something of an academic vacuum, he managed to combine and compare Jewish traditions with those of other cultures in a highly original manner. Yet his work can be criticised on a number of scores and, if we judge it in the context of the history of scholarship and see such a history as a chart of progress, Selden’s shortcomings might seem to outnumber his achievements. Toomer points out that, in contrast to many of his colleagues on the continent, Selden never had enough personal contact with Jews to obtain direct information about their contemporary practices. Another charge, which can in fact be made against other orientalists of the period working in different fields, is his somewhat monolithic representation of Jewish law. He was excessively dependent on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and failed to take into account the various positions which emerge within the Talmud. All too ready to accept Jewish legends as history, he showed little awareness of the changes of Jewish law across the centuries. Much of Selden’s other work is equally open to criticism. De Diis Syris of  was an influential book. It prompted investigations into the gods of different cultures which would reappear in the writings of orientalists throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Toomer, however, is justly critical. “Of all Selden’s writings, this has endured the passage of time least well. The other works of his maturity have indeed become outdated through increase in knowledge and developments in scholarship over nearly  years, and all could be corrected and enlarged in the light of those, but much in them remains valid today. In contrast, not one of the principal theses advanced in De Diis Syris would now be taken seriously.” The main thesis is entirely flawed—the idea that the pagan deities were perversions of the god of the Bible and that polytheism was a bastard offshoot of monotheism. And yet, Toomer agrees, the work has a number of the qualities which we find elsewhere in Selden—emendations of classical texts “all plausible and at least one brilliant,” the publication of previously unknown inscriptions and texts—in short those same features we find in Selden’s most successful achievements such as the publication of the inscriptions on the Arundel marbles in . Selden can also be criticised as an Arabist. He seems to have started to learn Arabic (as well as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac) from James Ussher, the future archbishop of Armagh, in , and then to have proceeded largely on his own. He assembled an interesting collection of Arabic manuscripts and began to edit a brief text concerning episcopacy in the primitive Church by Eutychius, the tenth-century Melkite patriarch of Alexandria. It would subsequently be