Reading John Selden’s <i>Titles of honor</i> (1614) as a Work of Polemic

Abstract First published in 1614, John Selden’s Titles of honor has long been ignored by historians of political thought. A large and compendious description of the various titles of Europe and the Near East; by its structure and tone, it resembles nothing more than a work of dusty antiquarianism. It attracted none of the controversy that would plague Selden’s Historie of tithes (1618); and it did not state its polemical purpose in such explicit terms as his Mare clausum (1635). If historians of political thought have remembered it at all, they have done so because Thomas Hobbes recommended the work in chapter 10 of Leviathan (1651). This article will treat Titles of honor as a work of political intention. Following Selden’s engagement with Roman Civil Law, it will argue that he composed the treatise to criticize sixteenth-century theories of resistance, and the medieval theories of divided sovereignty upon which they were founded. In short, this article will seek to reframe Titles of honor as a defence of state sovereignty against theories of noble resistance – and so explain Hobbes’s affection for the work.