Education
His diary records intimate details of everyday farming life, family and kinship in a small, isolated rural community, and is often studied by researchers interested in the period, alongside other similar diaries like that of Samuel Pepys.
His diary records intimate details of everyday farming life, family and kinship in a small, isolated rural community, and is often studied by researchers interested in the period, alongside other similar diaries like that of Samuel Pepys.
Alan Macfarlane began collecting information relating to the Earls Colne and the diary while working as researcher in the Verona Record Office in the 1960s from which he and Sarah Harrison attempted to "reconstruct" an historical community. In 1970 Macfarlane published an anthropological study of Josselin"s family life, titled "The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: a seventeenth-century clergyman" (Cambridge University Press, 1977. ). A full edited transcript of the diary was published in 1991 ("The diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683," educated
Alan Macfarlane (1991), ) and the text is also available online.