The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1650s-1815 · England, Atlantic world
The Quakers (Religious Society of Friends)
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About This Movement
In the turmoil of the English Civil War years, a shoemaker's apprentice named George Fox began telling anyone who would listen that Christ could teach his people himself. That every person carried an inward light, that no paid clergy or consecrated building was needed, and that a meeting could sit in silence until someone was moved to speak. Friends refused oaths, hat-honour and titles, refused to fight, and let women preach on the same footing as men. Thousands of them were fined, jailed and transported for it, and they kept a running written record of their own sufferings as they went. By the eighteenth century the movement had settled into a quieter, disciplined life of meetings and plain dress, and turned outward. The New Jersey tailor John Woolman spent decades travelling among Friends, pressing them to free the people they held as slaves, until the American yearly meetings made slaveholding a bar to membership.
Sources
- The Journal of George Fox (ed. John L. Nickalls, CUP, 1952; reissued 2010), with the epistles to the meetings (primary) — The journal genre was the movement's own native form, not just Fox's.
- Margaret Fell, Women's Speaking Justified (1666) and Works (1710); the separate women's meetings' minute books (from the 1670s) (primary) — Women's ministry defended in print from inside the leadership; women's business meetings as standing church government.
- John Woolman, The Journal and Major Essays (1774; ed. Moulton, OUP, 1971); Elizabeth Ashbridge, Some Account; the published Friends' journals corpus as a genre (primary) — A moral-formation classic; the journal genre beyond the founder.
- The sufferings archive: the Great Book of Sufferings (from 1675) and Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers (1753); Katharine Evans & Sarah Cheevers's Malta captivity narrative (1662) (primary) — Persecution documented by the movement's own record-keeping, compiled for advocacy purposes; women's prison voice in their own words.
- Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646-1666 (Penn State, 2000), with Angell & Dandelion (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (2013) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7: nearest coverage in the 'Great Britain and Ireland' chapter (Clark) and the toleration chapter (reference)