The world is fracturing. Nationalisms are resurgent, and sectarian policies dominate with growing cynicism. In this climate, history can seem powerless—an idle discipline removed from urgent realities. Yet power has often feared history’s illuminations. Consider the seventeenth century: a time of revolution in England, of mourning and cosmological collapse across Europe. An old order wavered; a new physics arose. Jurists, caught in the upheaval, grappled with the consequences.
At the crossroads of historical interpretation and jurisprudence, this project re-evaluates the intellectual force of a burning age in legal speculation. Through the work of John Selden—jurist, historian, and Hebraist—it examines how seventeenth-century legal thought harmonized individual and national narratives within the broader European legal landscape and the inclusive order of nations envisioned by Selden’s jurisprudence.
Selden’s legal thought revolved around uncovering deep analogies—patterns that revealed affinities between legal systems and made them comparable. Yet he wrote in a time when the world, as his contemporary John Donne lamented, seemed "all in pieces," its coherence shattered. Today, we face a similar crisis. We, too, struggle to see analogies. And when we do, our disenchanted gaze distrusts them. Selden’s writings, and the intellectual world he inhabited, invite reflection on what happens to law, legal comparison, and historical understanding when the ability to think analogically is lost.
This project seeks to reassert Selden’s relevance and reshape modern legal discourse. At its core is a reappraisal of his effort to preserve and harmonize English legal history within a European order of nations, drawing on medieval and early modern jurisprudence. By restoring the constitutional force of comparative legal history, the project directly engages with contemporary struggles against nationalism and sectarianism.
Its inquiry unfolds along three lines. First, it underscores the significance of medieval and early modern European legal literature for seventeenth-century English jurisprudence and Selden’s intellectual trajectory. Second, it uncovers the theoretical depth of his legal thought, tracing how he 'Platonized' ius commune scholarship to develop a general theory of legal systems. Third, it demonstrates how Selden’s European perspective on English law led him to craft a distinctive harmonic jurisprudence—one that fused philological precision with an analogical vision of law’s interconnections.
