For the social historian, the task of understanding how the “ordinary people” of early modern Europe lived—to say nothing of what they thought—is quite challenging. Most of the non-elite in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were illiterate and thus left no self-composed evidence of their existence. Historians studying the period have to rely on the limited writings left by common people or try to interpret their lives through the lens of the better-off classes. Nonetheless, careful attention to the available sources is rewarded with glimpses of a variety of aspects of the changing social and cultural world of the eighteenth century. The documents included in this chapter offer an opportunity to explore eighteenth-century attitudes about mortality, religious belief, children and education, and the state of medical knowledge. ■