Reproduces in full size and transcribes a number of letters from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries

Before the mid-seventeenth century, scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes. One simply could not put a numerical value on the likelihood that a particular event would occur. Even the outcome of something as simple as a dice roll or the likelihood of showers instead of sunshine was thought to lie in the realm of pure, unknowable chance. The issue remained intractable until Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat in 1654, outlining a solution to the "unfinished game" problem: how do you divide the pot when players are forced to.

Proposes that the emergence of the concept of privacy as a personal right and the core of individuality is connected in a complex way with the easy availability of printed books and the spread of the ability to read that emerged during the period. Looks at representations of reading and readers, especially women, in devotional books, conversion narratives, personal letters, drama, and the novel. Also explores how privacy became gendered in the early modern periodAnnotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

John Cotton (1584-1652) was a key figure in the English Puritan movement in the first half of the seventeenth century, a respected leader among his generation of emigrants from England to New England. This volume collects all known surviving correspondence by and to Cotton. These 125 letters--more than 50 of which are here published for the first time--span the decades between 1621 and 1652, a period of great activity and change in the Puritan movement and in English history. Now carefully edited, annotated, and contextualized, the letters chart the trajectory of Cotton's career and revive a variety of voices from the troubled times surrounding Charles I's reign, including those of such prominent figures as Oliver Cromwell, Bishop John Williams, John Dod, and Thomas Hooker, as well as many little-known persons who wrote to Cotton for advice and guidance. Among the treasures of early Anglo-American history, these letters bring to life the leading Puritan intellectual of the generation of the Great Migration and illustrate the network of mutual support that nourished an intellectual and spiritual movement through difficult times.