Between the years 1677 and 1691 the puritan minister Roger Morrice compiled an astonishingly detailed record of the day-to-day public affairs in Britain. His 'Entering Book' provides a unique record of late seventeenth-century political and religious history, and charts the rise of British party politics and the transformation of Puritanism into the 'Whiggery'. Drawing on many of the key issues raised in Morrice's entering book, this collection of essays provides a fascinating snapshot of Britain in one of its most troubled and uncertain decades, the 1680s.

Contents: Introduction: Stabilizing and destabilizing Britain in the 1680s, Jason McElligott; Reformation and 'arbitrary government': London dissenters and James II's polity of toleration, 1687-88, Gary S. De Krey; Roger Morrice and the Huguenot refugees, Robin Gwynn; The politics of religious imagery in the late 17th century, Clare Haynes; L'Estrange and the publishing sphere, Geoff Kemp; London besieged? The city's vulnerability during the glorious revolution, Charles-Edouard Levillain; 'Eminent cheats': rogue narratives in the literature of the exclusion crisis, Kate Loveman; The 'prints' of the trials: the Nexus of politics, religion, law and information in late 17th-century England, Michael Mendle; Gilbert Burnet's Reformation and the semantics of popery, Andrew Starkie; 'High feeding and smart drinking': associating hedge-lane Lords in exclusion crisis London, Newton E. Key; Dissenters and the writing of history: Ralph Thoresby's 'lives and characters', David L. Wykes; Nursing sedition: women, dissent, and the Whig struggle, Melinda S. Zook; Judging partisan news and the language of interest, Mark Knights; Index.