Selden and Milton on Family Law

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relationship between Selden and Milton on family law. Like that of the first family in paradise, it may be mutual, although not equal. Milton drew on Selden’s scholarship for his ideas about concubinage, polygamy, the church’s meddling in marriage, and especially divorce. But Selden’s ownership of two Miltonic treatises on divorce, Tetrachordon and Colasterion (1645), both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646), complicates the question of influence and suggests a possible reverse motion of spirit. The chapter begins by describing some of the differences between Selden’s two discussions of family law, both cited by Milton, the primordial, universal, natural law in De Jure Naturali et Gentium and the civil law of the Jews in Uxor Ebraica. Various hints—seedlings—in Milton’s Tetrachordon might have germinated in Selden’s mind to become the majestic flowering plant that occupies the four full chapters (3.20–3) of Uxor Ebraica devoted to the key phrases on divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1 and Matthew 5:32. Milton expanded the meaning of the Bible’s word fornication to include non-sexual sins or defects. Selden, relying mainly on the Talmud, would have retrojected Miltonic ideas into the debate over divorce that he established as occurring in the first century BCE.