The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654

‘And now in these suffering times how common and oftten have I ben mocked and called roundhead in as reprochfull a maner as they can and saying you that preach in a toub by those that know me not nor never see me’ (p. 169). Thus Nehemiah Wallington shed rare light on the experience of the common man in the civil wars, of the pained response to stereotyping and name-calling by his social superiors. He turned his cheek, and then wrote it down. Wallington's modest celebrity among modern historians is based not only on his ability to offer insights such as this, nor only on Paul Seaver's excellent study Wallington's World (1985; rev. ante, ciii [1988], 1045–6), but also on his engaging and at times eloquent prose. This edition by David Booy offers selections from all seven extant notebooks (at least fifty are known to have existed). The notebooks are long and sometimes repetitive, so a complete edition, at least in printed form, is impractical. The editor faces tough choices about how to represent their riches. Booy seeks in his selections to offer a lens not upon Wallington's society so much as upon Wallington himself and his spiritual fortunes. His introduction examines Wallington's religious life. Booy focuses on the notebooks as life-writings, following those threads that offer a kind of spiritual autobiography. The selections are organised on a manuscript-by-manuscript basis, and the excerpts themselves are long, enabling the reader to savour the turns of Wallington's prose: and there are slow undercurrents as well as sharp phrases. The late notebook, ‘An Extract of the passages of my life or the Booke of all my writting books’, in which Wallington looked back upon and summarised his earlier writings and gives a synoptic view of his spiritual condition, is generously represented; this provides a useful context for the edition, providing a framework for its more disparate parts

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