Hilary Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture

Abstract

George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, by Hilary Hinds, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011, xi + 215 pp., £60.00/$80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7190-8157-6A specialist in English literature and creative writing, Hilary Hinds has previously published books on radical women's texts of the mid-seventeenth century. She now offers a set of studies of early Quaker culture based primarily on close readings of George Fox's remark- able Journal. Hinds proceeds from the premise that discourse includes both words and deeds, reasonable enough in any case but all the more so with early Quakers, and argues that their 'spoken, written and lived practices together comprised a distinctively Quaker rheto- rical complex' (p. 3). Versions of three of the six chapters have already appeared in print, as have parts of a fourth. They come together here to support the overarching argument that the core Quaker belief in an immanent and universal 'inner light' erased the lines between sacred and secular in ways that led to a denial of other categorical differences as well. In Hinds's words, 'the dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine brought about by the turn to the inward light set the pattern for a distinctive and broader cultural practice, whereby that initial and fundamental fusion of categories brought others in its wake' (p. 4). While this is perhaps no longer a new or surprising insight in itself, it is one with implications still worth exploring, and provides Hinds a starting point for a number of interesting and often important discussions.The first chapter examines the early Quaker notion of the inner light, delving mainly into its cultural rather than theological consequences. These emerge even more clearly in some of the chapters that follow. The second chapter turns to efforts by early Quakers to convince and confront, showing how the Quakers' notion that the inner light dissolved the differences between sacred and secular led them to deny boundaries that usually marked the appropriate places, persons, and procedures for ministry. The third chapter contrasts George Fox's unusual self-confidence with the self-doubt of Calvinist divines and the more general phenomenon of 'anxious masculinities' said to characterize the period. Again, this is rooted in the particular fusion of Christ and Christian allowed by Quaker notions of divine immanence. But Hinds takes the discussion further to explore the implications of this belief for notions of human agency, developing a model of 'dependent potency' and 'heteronomous agency' that should help us rethink dismissals of Quaker radicalism as focused on the divine and otherworldly to the exclusion of human action in the here and now: people who thought themselves transfigured by the indwelling light confound or at the very least complicate standard scholarly distinctions between political radicalism and a lesser religious variant. …