Recording and reordering

"The essays in this collection consider the diaries and journals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Diaries and journals took many forms - depending on the occupation, gender, social status, and religious commitment of the writer. They ranged in their forms from brief notes related to family business, and national events in preprinted almanacs or the pages of a family Bible, to examinations of spiritual and material states in books dedicated to that purpose."--Jacket.