l events during Cromwell's reign and the Restoration. What The Family Life of Ralph Josselin does is place in grand-historical context the manner of experience of common folk, and at the same time suggest that few in England could escape the obligation of declaring for one side or the other. More, the book suggests the content of the social, political, and moral environment--what today we would call the popular culture or perhaps the popular political culture--into which ordinary folk as well as their nobler counterparts entered. Finally, the extraordinarily detailed attention that Josselin gave to the diarist enterprise is of note in itself, for surely not every country parson of the Cromwellian era devoted extended personal time to writing.
Macfarlane sets the context for an examination of Josselin's diary by looking at the apparent rationale for keeping a diary in the first place. Self-improvement and an impulse toward piety are cited by Macfarlane, but he cautions that "if we used diaries on their own we would receive a picture of Tudor and Stuart England that was biased towards the more methodical and the more introspective sides of life. It is therefore important that they should be studied alongside all the other sources for the period. only then will it appear how far their authors were unrepresentative" (8). Another view of this is the caution that any diarist might be typical only of himself, or typical of an entire category of social behavior.
The Family Life of Ralph Josselin is structured to place Josselin's life in a specific sociohistorical context, and then to examine its details. The social and economic environment in which a more or less "typical" country parson of the Civil War period is described first. This is followed by an analysis of Josselin's fairly unsettled young life implied in the diary, as well as the laconic diary entries that concern his familial and friendship ties. Finally, Macfarlane ...