what a glorious resource [this] is ... As Milton retreats to his paradise within, crafting his last, great poems, Baxter stays in the fight, keeping alive the spirit of Dissent against persecution from prelates, magistrates, and at times the intimidating attentions of Roger L'Estrange. There is much in his personal history to illuminate with clarity and precision his life and times, now available in this fine scholarly edition.
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.