Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden By Jason P. Rosenblatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, ix + 314 pgs.

Trained in English literature in the United States (B.A., Haverford; M.A., Columbia; PhD., NYU), Noam Flinker first came to Israel in the 1960’s and settled in Haifa in the early 1970’s. He has taught at Ben-Gurion University and at the University of Haifa where his current rank is associate professor. Flinker has published on various aspects of English and American literature with a special interest in the intertextual pressures of the biblical world on these cultures. His articles on Milton, Donne, Herbert and the Ranters in England as well as on Frost and Cummings in the United States have examined various ways in which earlier cultures make themselves felt in the literary productions of later periods. His recent book, The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of Their Mouths (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000) examines treatments of Solomon’s Song by William Baldwin, Spenser, Shakespeare, Robert Aylett, some Ranters and Milton. He is currently working on a study of the theme of Odysseus in seventeenth-century English texts that look forward to Joyce’s Ulysses.