Seventeenth-century England has been richly documented by th lives of kings and their great ministers, the nobility and gentry, and bishops and preachers, but we have very little firsthand information on ordinary citizens. This unique portrait of the life, thought, and attitudes of a London Puritan turner (lathe worker) is based on the extraordinary personal papers of Nehemiah Wallington—2,600 surviving pages of memoirs, religious reflections, political reportage, and letters. Coming to maturity during the reign of James I, Wallington witnessed the persecution of Puritans during Archbishop Laud’s ascendancy under Charles I, welcomed what he thought would be the godly revolution brought by the Long Parliament, and watched with increasing disillusionment the falure of that dream under the Rump republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate. The author reconstructs Wallington’s inner world, allowing us to see what an ordinary man made of a lifetime of reading Puritan doctrine and listening to the sermons of Puritan preachers. For the first time we can penetrate the mind of one of those who made up the London mob calling for the end of episcopacy and the death of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, who welcomed the revolution, if not the war that followed, and who finally came to approve the death of his king.

"Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century more than 15,000 Londoners suffered sudden violent deaths. While this figure includes around 3,000 who were murdered or committed suicide, the vast majority of fatalities resulted from unexplained violent deaths or accidents. In the early modern period, accidental and "disorderly" deaths - from drowning, falls, stabbing, shooting, fires, explosions, suffocation, and animals and vehicles, among others - were a regular feature of urban life. This book is a critical study of the early modern accident. Drawing on the weekly London Bills of Mortality, parish burial registers, newspapers and other related documents, it examines accidents and other forms of violent death in the city with a view to understanding who among its residents encountered such events, how the bureaucracy recorded and elaborated their circumstances and why they did so, and what practical responses might follow. Additionally, the book explores the way in which these events were transformed to become a recurring cultural trope in oral, textual and visual narratives of metropolitan life and how sudden deaths were understood by early modern mentalities. By the mid-eighteenth century, providential explanations were giving way to a more "mechanically" rational view that saw accident events as threats to be managed rather than misfortunes to be explained."--

In the seventeenth century, in England, a remarkable number of small religious movements began adopting demonstratively Jewish ritual practices. They were labelled by their contemporaries as Judaizers. Why did this happen? Was it an excrescence of over-exuberant biblicism? Was it a by-product of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition? Was it a response to the changing status of the Jews in Europe? In Jewish Christians in Puritan England, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce argues that Puritan Judaizing was in fact an expression of another aspect of the Puritan experience: the need to be recognized as a 'singular,' positively distinctive, and Godly minority.

The Great Fire of London was the greatest catastrophe of its kind in Western Europe. Although detailed fire precautions and firefighting arrangements were in place, the fire raged for four days and destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 of the City of London's great livery halls. The great fire of 1666 closely followed by the great plague of 1665; as the antiquary Anthony Wood wrote left London "much impoverished, discontented, afflicted, cast downe." In this comprehensive account, Stephen Porter examines the background to 1666, events leading up to and during the fire, the proposals to rebuild the city, and the progress of the five-year programme which followed. He places the fire firmly in context, revealing not only its destructive impact on London but also its implications for town planning, building styles, and fire precautions both in the capital and provincial towns.

This innovative exploration of Puritan reading practices from c.1580-1720 connects the history of religion with the history of the book.

This biography recalls the fascinating life of the second Reformed minister of New Amsterdam (New York), from his mystical experience as a 15-year old orphan in Holland until his tragic death as a spokesman of the opposition during Kieft's War.

This book explores the nature of religious community at a time when, by some accounts, it was in its death throes. Many have argued that early modern communities suffered too much damage to survive, as cumulative assaults of the Reformation, the rise of Puritanism, and the denominational fragmentation of the Interregnum and Restoration destroyed parish unity forever. Without minimizing the significance of these events, this book argues for the resilience of religious community. By analyzing the religious networks of Oliver Heywood (1630-1702), a strategically-placed and well-documented Presbyterian minister, this work illustrates the flexibility of the communal ideal in the face of the challenges presented by the Long Reformation. Through Heywood’s eyes we watch the inhabitants of the northern parish of Halifax as they cross, and at times blur, the denominational boundaries that loom large both in the heated rhetoric of the time and in recent historiography.