Late Seventeenth-Century Quakerism and the Miraculous: A New Look at George Fox’s ‘Book of Miracles’

Abstract

George Fox, chief among the founders of Quakerism, died in 1691, leaving a huge mass of papers for publication together with funds to support the project. In the event, some of his papers were never published and were lost, and little was known about them until the discovery in 1932 of an annotated list of all Fox’s papers, which had been compiled in the 1690s, and which included references to two unknown books, a ‘Book of Miracles’ and a ‘Book of Examples of God’s Judgements on Evildoers’. The finder was Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), who is best known in non-Quaker circles as a New Testament scholar, and the skills he needed for the analysis of New Testament documents were invaluable in handling the Fox corpus. He was able to gain an idea of the contents of these lost books, particularly the ‘Book of Miracles’, and his partial reconstruction of it, published in 1948 with a comprehensive introduction, is still an important source for any study of the miraculous element in early Quakerism.