The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Index: Vol 11

The Index to the complete Diary of Samuel Pepys in its most authoritative and acclaimed edition.

This renowned edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, is the first to present a newly transcribed text of the famous Diary and to equip it with a systematic commentary. Published in eleven volumes (nine of the Diary itself, followed by a Companion volume and this Index), it has justly become regarded as the definitive edition.

The Index, compiled by Robert Latham, gives the essential key to the nine volumes of the Diary text, including the introduction and the footnotes. It makes it possible to retrieve a massive variety of information, whether the user wishes to trace successive references to individual people, places and events, or to follow through a general topic, or even to locate specific references and phrases from amongst the wealth of subject matter covered by the Diary.

The entries are made readily accessible by the use of sub-headings, and are also valuably detailed – often reflecting the style of the Diary itself by borrowing from Pepys’s own phraseology. As a result the Index becomes more than merely functional, and offers opportunities for much enjoyable exploration.

In many instances references are gathered together under important group headings that can be used to build up a composite picture of different aspects of seventeenth-century England. General topics such as books, dress, food, ships and taverns are afforded detailed entries which include, where necessary, editorial information to identify or elaborate on Pepys’s own references.

The Index volume completes the set, and maintains the exemplary standards of this great work of scholarship, which was hailed by The Times as ‘one of the glories of contemporary English publishing’.

Robert Latham, cbe, ma, fba was born in Audley, Staffordshire. Educated at Cambridge, he was Reader in History in the University of London at Royal Holloway College from 1947 to 1968 when he went to the University of Toronto as Professor of History. From 1970 he was a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where, as Pepys Librarian until 1982, he had charge of the remarkable collection of books, prints and manuscripts which Pepys left to his old College. He devoted the greater part of his life to the study of the Diary, and died in January 1995.