This two-volume study of the writings of John Selden – arguably seventeenth-century England's greatest scholar – displays immense learning worthy of its subject. Toomer is to be congratulated for his magnificent achievement. Focused primarily on Selden's published output, most of which appeared during his lifetime, the chapters (which are arranged chronologically or thematically) and their sections give an awesome sense of the breadth of Selden's interests and where, through characteristic if sometimes pre-planned digressions, his intellectual curiosity could lead: antiquarianism, duels, honorific titles, English legal history, ancient Near Eastern pagan deities, tithes, English medieval history, inscriptions, maritime law, Jewish law (on inheritance of the property of the dead, the historical succession of the high priests, their qualifications and privileges, marriage, incest, adultery, divorce), natural law, chronology (illustrated through an Arabic work), the Koran, the ancient Jewish calendar and the Sanhedrin (with a significant excursus on excommunication). Although students of early modern intellectual history will be familiar with other – some extremely good – discussions of different aspects of Selden's polymathic scholarly concerns, there has been an understandable tendency in the historiography towards compartmentalisation. Using sources in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Samaritan, as well as modern western European languages, Toomer's triumph has been to present a unified picture of Selden's scholarship (even if he does not attribute to him any ‘world picture’) by providing a detailed commentary on his writings.

Locating Selden within ‘interlocking circles’ (p. 24) of poets, lawyers, ecclesiastics, historians, heralds and antiquaries that included Lancelot Andrewes, Francis Bacon, William Camden, Meric Casaubon, Sir Robert Cotton, Robert Fludd, Ben Jonson, Edward Pococke, James Ussher and Augustine Vincent, Toomer convincingly shows how Selden's legal training stimulated his intellectual development. Indeed, Selden's ‘formidable knowledge of legal systems’ – ‘English, Roman, canon, European customary and statute, and finally Jewish’ – informed many of his scholarly judgments (p. 818). Beyond knowledge for knowledge's sake, another driving factor was emulation: Selden set out to rival the great continental European scholars of his own and the previous generation, Hugo Grotius and Joseph Justus Scaliger. An autodidact, Selden's method was to return to the original sources whenever possible; ‘“it has always been abhorrent to me to draw from the streams, except when it was impossible to do so from the sources”’ (p. 69). Since these were not always readily accessible, he accumulated material through borrowing, transcription, donation and purchase, eventually amassing what became ‘an indispensable resource for his later work’ (p. 445). At his death he had acquired a great private library, incorporating an extensive collection of Hebraica, that was, if not the largest, then ‘the richest of its kind in seventeenth-century England and perhaps Europe’ (pp. 794–5). In Toomer's view, Selden's genius lay, ‘not in the overarching theory, but in the significant detail’ (p. 820). Yet if one may venture a note of criticism, much the same may be said of Toomer's study as well. For it makes few concessions to the uninformed reader: often Toomer seems in dialogue with Selden, his contemporary critics and their successors rather than a non-specialist audience; with some exceptions – notably the discussion of tithes, Arabic studies, Selden's anticlericalism and Selden's exploration of the origin of excommunication against the backdrop of his bitter attack on the Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly of Divines – there is too little on the bigger picture. Indeed, there is generally too little engagement with modern secondary literature either on Selden or his milieu, and too often the reader is referred elsewhere. Even the concluding chapter is largely taken up not with an overview but with a comparison between Selden's and Ussher's views of scholarship. None the less, Toomer has brilliantly laid the foundations both for a detailed examination of Selden's library and its partial dispersal, and for locating Selden's writings within broader contexts beyond the realm of early modern scholarship.