Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London

by Paul S. Seaver

Book Overview

Seventeenth-century England has been richly documented by th lives of kings and their great ministers, the nobility and gentry, and bishops and preachers, but we have very little firsthand information on ordinary citizens.

This unique portrait of the life, thought, and attitudes of a London Puritan turner (lathe worker) is based on the extraordinary personal papers of Nehemiah Wallington--2,600 surviving pages of memoirs, religious reflections,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804714320
• ISBN13: 9780804714327
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Best Description of an English Puritan Around

Seaver turned very forbidding material into gold. Understanding the mentality of people in the past is very tricky, especially people outside the elite. Seaver found over thirty volumes of notes, transcribed sermons, and other writings and turned them into an intellectual biography of an obscure man. If you want to get inside the skin of a seventeenth-century English Puritan, there's no better way to do it than to read this book.

an excellent read

A better book on the Puritain worldview I have not read, and I've read quite a few. Seaver takes the copious diaries of a single London artisan and converts it into a cornucopia of knowledge about the godly movement that it impossible to put down. This book holds enough speculation about Wallington and his motivations to fulfill any desire of a biography-reader. He has bouts of melancholy which make him human. Those of us who have had to deal with depression, panic disorder, or other mental illnesses will be heartened by the fact that people in the past were just as we. Wallington leads the self-examined life, which may be foreign to some, but will strike others as very typical of medieval Catholic monasticism, the English godly movement (Puritains), and Ming-Qing neo-Confucists like Li Gong. For those who prefer a short read, Wallington's World has very few pages. For those who are tired of the scholarly establishment's contempt of Christians of the past, look no further. Saylor treats his subject with delicacy and understanding, carefully seperating modern prejudices from historical worldviews. Even if you-- like myself-- aren't into reading about England during the Stuart revolutions, this book will fascinate you. A treasure I'd guarantee fit to read for anyone.