These three journals are indispensable tools for understanding the origins of the Quaker movement.

Originally published in 1952, this book presents the revised text of the journal of George Fox, the charismatic and devout founder of Quakerism. The journal contains the events from 1624 to 1675, when Fox was released from prison and returned to Swarthmoor Hall. The language of the journal is modernised to appeal to the general reader, and the text is footnoted where necessary with explanatory notations. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of Quakerism or in English religious history more generally.

In First Among Friends, the first scholarly biography of George Fox (1624-91), H. Larry Ingle examines the fascinating life of the reformation leader and founding organizer of the Religious Society of Friends, more popularly known today as the Quakers. Ingle places Fox within the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, Revolution, and Restoration, showing him and his band of "rude" disciples challenging the status quo, particularly during the Cromwellian Interregnum. Unlike leaders of similar groups, Fox responded to the conservatism of the Stuart restoration by facing down challenges from internal dissidents, and leading his followers to persevere until the 1689 Act of Toleration. It was this same sense of perseverance that helped the Quakers survive--the only religious sect of the era still existing today. Firmly grounded in primary sources and enriched with gripping detail, this well-written and original study reveals hitherto unknown sides of one who was clearly "First Among Friends."

What society considers blasphemy - a verbal assault against the sacred - is a litmus test of the standards it believes to be necessary to preserve unity, order, and morality. Society has always condemned as blasphemy what it regards as an abuse of liberty

Like many other denominations, seventeenth-century Quakers were keen to ensure that members married within their own religious community. In order to properly understand the ramification of such a policy, this book explores the early Quaker marriage approbation process and discipline as demonstrated through the works and marriage of the movement’s leaders, George Fox and Margaret Fell. Through this close investigation of Quaker marriage approbation, the book offers fascinating insights into early modern English society, attitudes to gender and the early Quakers’ self-perception of themselves as the one and only True Church.

This study is a discussion about Fox's meaning of the inner light. It argues that Fox's inner light was the celestial Christ who inhabited and divinized the believer. Fox argued for a celestial inhabitation of the believer that was almost corporeal. This helps explain Fox's thaumaturgical powers; the exalted language used among early Quakers, especially toward Fox; and the blasphemy trials and the Nayler incident. These belong at the very centre of early Quakerism, and are the logical result of the core elements of Fox's teaching. His notion of celestial flesh was one of the greatest challenges to Christian orthodoxy to appear in Christian history and it may be compared to Jesus' own challenge to Orthodox Judaism or the appearance of the high heresies of the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Jesus. Early Quakerism, as a result, was the most charismatic sect to appear since the days of the early Church, or at least since the era of Montanism.