This analysis of Ralph Josselin's life deals with the problems of a demographic and sociological kind ...

Josselin was vicar of Earls Colne, Essex, from 1641 until his death in 1683, and this is the intimate record of his ministry and his private doubts and triumphs as a Christian that give the Diary its shape. As a prosperous farmer, he also noted details of harvests, accounts, the weather and farming methods, which pieces together a picture of yeoman farming at that time. As father and husband he felt impelled to record a series of observations on family life that seem unique for this period. Recognized as one of the great seventeenth-century diaries, ranging over topics from sin and disease, dreams and money to millenarianism and the Civil War, this richly rewarding document reveals Josselin as a sympathetic and entirely human figure, and provides fascinating insights into the thought-world of seventeenth-century life.

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life by providing a new stance for the self. Grounding its argument in recent theories of play and in a historical analysis that sees the seventeenth century as a point of crisis in the formation of the western self, the author demonstrates how play helped mediate this crisis and how central texts of the period enact this mediation.

The diary of a prominent Boston jurist and merchant whose nurturing relationship with his family contradicted the Puritan stereotype.