Ralph Josselin (January 23, 1616 – 1683) was the vicar of Earls Colne in Essex from 1641 until his death in 1683. 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.[1]
Alan Macfarlane began collecting information relating to the Earls Colne and the diary while working as researcher in the Essex Record Office in the 1960s from which he and Sarah Harrison attempted to "reconstruct" an historical community.[2] 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; ISBN 9780393008494). A full edited transcript of the diary was published in 1991 ("The diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683," ed. Alan Macfarlane (1991), ISBN 9780197261033) and the text is also available online.