Richard Baxter: Reliquiæ Baxterianæ Or, Mr Richard Baxter's Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times

Richard Baxter's Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (1696) is a key text for early modern historical, ecclesiastical, cultural, literary, and bibliographical studies but in its original printed form it is textually defective in a number of ways and, lacking structural coherence or adequate indexes, the wealth of historical data and immediately observed experiences during the Civil Wars, Interregnum, and Restoration period in its 800 pages are very difficult to access. It is similarly challenging to follow the compelling case that Baxter mounts to vindicate moderate Puritanism against the misrepresentations of the prevailing royalist narratives published in the later seventeenth-century, culminating in Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. No other work from the period articulates so fully this much maligned tradition, and no other example of life writing so fully explores the relationship between public affairs and personal spiritual and emotional experience. The result is not only a unique primary source but also a fascinating combination of autobiography, historiography, and apologetic in a work crucial to our understanding of the development of modern narrative genres. This edition, prepared by an international team of early modern scholars and based on Baxter's autograph manuscript where this is extant, for the first time makes this unique work available in a reliable text with a full supporting apparatus. This apparatus includes: extensive general and textual introductions; explanatory commentary and textual notes; supporting documentation, much of it never before published; a detailed chronology; an expository linguistic and historical glossary; the fullest available bibliography of Baxter 140 or so published titles, whose occasion and publication are a recurrent topic in the text; and four indexes.

Professor N. H. Keeble is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, from which he retired in 2010 as Senior Deputy Principal. His academic and research interests lie in English cultural (and especially literary and religious history) of the early modern period, 1500-1725. His publications in this field include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002), a two-volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991; with Geoffrey F. Nuttall) and editions of texts by Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Lucy Hutchinson, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the English Association. John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. He works on the culture of Protestantism in Britain and America, and has published on the Scottish Covenanters, the English Revolution, John Milton, toleration debates, evangelicalism, and abolitionism. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008), and Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (2009). He is the author of four monographs: Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (1997), Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (2000), John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (2006), and Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (2013). He is currently editing the first volume of The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions. Tim Cooper is Associate Professor of Church History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published scholarly monographs and research articles on the English Puritans, particularly Richard Baxter. In 2013 his monograph, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (2011), was runner-up for the Richard L. Greaves Award, presented every three years by the International John Bunyan Society. Tom Charlton is a writer and broadcaster with a particular interest in the political and religious polemic of the early modern period. He has undertaken research and taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Liverpool, and Sheffield, and published on subjects including Elizabethan republicanism and responses to the regicide in Restoration England.