The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683

“RALPH JOSSELIN was vicar of Earls Colne, Essex from 1641 until his death in 1683 and the Diary which he kept during this period is now published for the first time in its entirety. The Diary ranges over a variety of topics from sin and disease, dreams and money, to millenarianism and the Civil War, and gives an invaluable picture of day to day life in seventeenth-century rural England. From Josselin’s own preoccupations, both religious and worldly, a sympathetic and entirely human figure emerges.In this third volume in the British Academy’s new series of Records of Social and Economic History a detailed personal record reveals the demographic and sociological problems to which many historians are now paying attention. As well as providing original material for a description of the social characteristics of a previous age, the Diary can claim to be a fuller and more intimate record than any other single surviving source enabling us to probe a long-vanished mental world.” - Publisher