John Selden

The life of John Selden (1584–1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England’s most learned person, he continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to the abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures—Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century’s greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton’s treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius’ view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (“The Law of Nature and of Nations”) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them: his belief in classic rabbinic law (halakha) as authoritative testimony. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly’s scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

Introduction

John Selden was a role model for John Milton, who called him “the chief of learned men reputed in this Land.” But one was primarily a scholar, the other a poet-polemicist, and although they both supported the reform of English family law and the parliamentary side in the civil war, their approaches differ. Milton was more impetuous and daring, Selden more circumspect, always adjusting his discourse to fit his audience, whether in Parliament, at table among friends, or in his scholarship. This introduces the important presence of Jewish law, ignored by editors, in Selden’s Table Talk, and it analyzes Selden’s use of rhetoric to prepare the readers of De Jure Naturali to acknowledge the validity of that law.

“We Are Our Only Way Forward”: Dialogic Re-imaginings and the Cultivation of Homeplace for Girls, Women, and Femmes of Color

This article narrates the contours of a digital “kitchen table talk”–a conversation that brought together WoC from various areas of literacy and language education to discuss the state of the field and the next steps in transforming literacy studies and education for GFoC. Using bell hooks’s concept of “homeplace,” we bring together the reflections of eleven WoC across intersected Black, Latina, and Asian identities to examine the realities of GFoC, the urgency around their lives and needs, as well as self-examination of our role in the academy taking up feminist projects with GFoC.

Table Talk and the Bond of Reading A Jewish Broadsheet for Meals

This chapter talks about Jewish rituals that are considered highly dynamic as they constantly evolve, change, and erode once they emerge. It examines the emergence and spread of Jewish rituals between the mid-seventeenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, detecting numerous changes that have undergone over time. It also cites newly emergent sensibilities, communication technologies, towering personalities, influential books and other printed materials, and the spread of new ideologies as combined factors that modify or alter the course of Jewish ritual practices. The chapter presents an unknown broadsheet that illustrates Jewish domestic table rituals as they developed in eastern Europe during the eighteenth century. This broadsheet comprises of various texts that are studied and performed at mealtimes and is considered an example of the creation of personalized rituals.

Modern Prose As a Multimedia Hypertext (Using the Example of the Table-Talk 1882 Story By Boris Akunin)

This article is devoted to text comprehension in the era of online literature, which implies a closer interaction with the reader than ‘a paper format’ one. As an illustration of the named trends using hypertext, the project by Artemy Lebedev “To Favorable Attention, Illustrations to the Project Table-Talk 1882. (Based on the work of the same name by B. Akunin)”, created in 2004, was chosen. The project is a visualization of text details, divided into eight chapters. The text of Akunin’s story was aimed at play with the reader. First the author and his fans publish an abridged version of the story in the network, then the detective announces the key to the crime, and asks readers to write a sequel. The project of Artemy Lebedev is a kind of attempt to write a sequel particularly by visual means. Similar experiments with a text are characteristic of postmodern literature: numerous interpretations of the text interact with each other and multiply its intertextual connections. Thanks to electronic format authors expand the boundaries of the text, creating various versions. In fact, the text generated by Internet navigation has the same quality: the reader, following the links, independently creates the text seen by each user of the network, as a result — the text is individual. Authors of publications cannot create texts with the same features: many works have a continuously developing plot that does not allow mixing fragments of texts. A detective as a genre that implies a play with a reader: in the classic detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie where the reader tries to figure out who committed the crime. The digital format allows transferring this game with the reader to the network and beating the layering of the text in a new way. Keywords: Postmodernism, Akunin, online literature, digital text