The Family Life of Ralph Josselin [antikvár]

IDiary-keeping in seventeenth-century EnglandThe search for answers to new questions usually coincides with the discovery of new sources of information. The recent shift of interest from political and constitutional to economic and social history has been accompanied by the increased utilization of the vast deposits of local records scattered throughout Europe and North America. The major intellectual advances in the next few years will be made by combining the problems suggested by the social sciences, particularly sociology and social anthropology, with the documents stored in regional archives.' Yet there are a number of dangers inherent in this exciting synthesis. One of these is the tendency for individuab and their attitudes to be overlooked in the search for statistical facts. Another bias is towards the material and outward aspects of human life, the physical condidons of the past. The fundamental problems of attitudes and assumptions, of the mental life of people living long ago, are ignored because local records are peculiarly silentexcept indirectlyabout large sectors of past thought. The following study of the life of a seventeenth-century clergyman is a pardal attempt to restore the balance.This analysis of Ralph Josselin's life deals with the problems of a demographic and sociological kind which currently intrigue many historians. But the use of a diary as a prime source, rather than the parish registers or probate inventories upon which most social history is at present based, allows us to make a more personal and intimate study. It enables us to probe a long-vanished mental world, as well as to describe the social characteristics of a previous civilization. It is an attempt to test Eileen Power's bdief that 'social history lends itself particularly to what may be called a personal treatment'.^ The advantages of such a biographical approach are excellently summarized by Robert Redfield in his description of the 'Litde Community as a typical biography':' Keith Thomas, 'History and Anthropology', P. (S P., vol. 24 (1963), provides a brilliant summary of the possible contributions of social anthropology; there is nothing as good for sociology and history. Two useful outlines of local records are W. G. Hoskins, Local History in England (1959), and John West, Village Records (1962).' Medieval People (university paperback edn, 1963), p. vii.