Intellectual Ambitions and Interests

Highly educated seventeenth-century noblemen and gentlemen frequently studied theology, history, and philosophy privately for pleasure; wrote verse; and acquired libraries, but rarely wrote books and treatises. Chapter 9 builds upon the literary, philosophical, and theological interests identified in earlier chapters and provides the intellectual context for Herbert’s emergence as a respected gentleman scholar and published academic writer. It introduces the scholarly circles with which he was associated in London and Paris, his membership of the European Republic of Letters, and his links with scholarly irenicism. It establishes his scholarly connections with John Selden, William Camden, Sir Robert Cotton, Hugo Grotius, Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Tommaso Campanella, Fortunio Liceti, Gerard Vossius, John Comenius, and others. It examines Herbert’s scholarly practices and rebuffs claims that he was a dilettante. It browses the collection of books he accumulated in his substantial libraries in London and Montgomery, which ranged across the academic spectrum from theology, history, politics, literature, and philology through the various philosophical and mathematical disciplines to the natural and physical sciences, jurisprudence, and medicine, but also included works on architecture, warfare, manners, music, and sorcery and anthologies of poetry and books of romance literature. It suggests that Herbert’s scholarship was motivated as much by intellectual curiosity and the need to reduce religious conflict as by a desire to secure personal recognition and approval.

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.

Reading the Talmud in Prison

A corollary of Hebraism’s orientation to this world is law as the vehicle by which to organize this world. This chapter examines the Hebraic understanding of law, its relation to tradition, and its national jurisdiction in contrast to the universal jurisdiction of Roman law and canon law. Regarding this contrast, the Lex Salica, François Hotman’s Francogallia, and Hugo Grotius’ Antiquity of the Batavian Republic are discussed briefly. The contrast does not mean that universal principles of justice are absent in national law, but the relation between those principles and a national jurisdiction presents a problem, as Edward Coke saw. Within the Christian tradition, the prototype of national law is the law of ancient Israel and subsequently Jewish law. In his examination of Jewish law, especially the Noahide laws of the Talmud, John Selden recognized an affinity between Jewish and English common law that supports Hebraism as a cultural category.

Hebraism

This chapter examines Hebraism as the ‘third culture’, distinct from Greek and Roman Christianity, as a kind of Jewish Christianity. Hebraism, as a current of intellectual history, is expressed in the work of the Christian Hebraists of early modern Europe, the quintessential example being John Selden. Hebraism’s focus on life in this world led to the problems of how life should be organized through law, the territorialization of tradition, and the paradoxical national monotheism of the ‘new Israel’. A different interpretation of the Old Testament emerged, influencing the relation between the Old and New Testaments. The theological, political, legal, and social characteristics of Hebraic culture are clarified.

Hebraism in Religion, History, and Politics

This work is an investigation into Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within the history of Christendom. Its aim is to determine what Hebraism means or should mean when it is used to refer to a culture or characteristics of a culture. In tracing those characteristics that arose in the changing relation between a doctrinally orthodox Christianity and the nation of a ‘new Israel’, sovereignty, and their legal anthropology, Hebraism refers to the development of a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or an ‘Old Testament Christianity’. It represents a ‘third culture’ in contrast to the cultures of the Roman or Hellenistic empires and Christian universalism. While the initial formulation of Hebraism as a cultural category was by Matthew Arnold, an earlier approximation is found in the work of John Selden, with considerable refinements by several scholars in the twentieth century. The categories of Hebraism and Hebraic culture provide a means by which to examine differently the history of religion and the history of early modern Europe.

History, Literature, and Authority in International Law

One consequence of international law’s recent historical turn has been to sharpen methodological contrasts between intellectual history and international law. Scholars including Antony Anghie, Anne Orford, Rose Parfitt, and Martti Koskenniemi have taken on board historians’ interest in contingency and context but pointedly relaxed historians’ traditional stricture against presentist instrumentalism. This chapter argues that such a move disrupts a long-standing division of labor between history and international law and ultimately brings international legal method closer to literature and literary scholarship. The chapter therefore details several more or less endemic ways in which literature and literary studies confront challenges of presentism, anachronism, meaning, and time. Using examples from writers as diverse as Anghie, Spinoza, Geoffrey Hill, Emily St. John Mandel, China Miéville, John Hollander, Pascale Casanova, Matthew Nicholson, John Selden, Shakespeare, and Dante, it proposes a “trilateral” discussion among historians, international lawyers, and literary scholars that takes seriously the multipolar disciplinary field in which each of these disciplines makes and sustains relations with each of the others.

The Gap Between Fairness and Law

This chapter explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. The aim is to suggest how embodied versions of current cognitive science afford a helpful way of talking about the breach between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, on one hand, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems on the other. It turns out to be remarkably easy for creatures with brains like ours to leap over the gap, to close the rift produced by evolved brain physiology between abstractions and their physical manifestations. The cognitive theory engaged here is the hypothesis that the grounds of morality and social decision-making—both the feeling of fairness and the institutionalized court systems—can be understood as produced by the structures and processes of human brains in their bodies. My inquiry rests on the co-occurrence of the highly popular revenge tragedies of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century (such as Hamlet) and the conflicts and arguments over the authority of the Chancery, or Equity Courts in London. Was equity, as John Selden later called it, “a roguish thing” that simply reflected the chancellor’s own feelings, in which case the judgments of the court were “above the law,” or was it, as Saint German claimed, grounded in sinderesis, the human mind’s natural understanding of right? The performances of revenge on stage, it is hypothesized, may have helped their audiences understand the direction of change that was needed.