The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman

The great merit of Macfarlane s book is that it poses questions; it teaches historians to look very much more closely, and in new ways, at familiar evidence; it brings familiar relationships into the centre of scrutiny; and it offers, in a significant way, the unit of one man s life, and of one man s economic fortunes, as a focus of study. E. P. Thompson, Midland History"