Blackwell Reference Online

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George Fox was founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the mid-seventeenth century. A social and spiritual reformer, Fox asserted that true knowledge came directly from God, without intercession from textual or priestly authority, and he encouraged his followers to recognize the “inner light” of faith available to all regardless of gender or class. His followers, dubbed Quakers by critics of their emotional enthusiasm, eschewed social conventions of speech, dress, and manner that maintained class boundaries. Fox's spiritual doctrine and practice represented a profound challenge to the social and political structures with which the institutional church was entwined. For over three decades he and his fellow Friends endured dispossession, imprisonment, physical abuse, and death as they asserted their right to freedom of conscience and responsibility to reshape the world in accordance with their view of social justice. Fox was born in Drayton-in-the-Clay (now Fenny Drayton), Leicestershire, England to a relatively affluent Puritan family and was apprenticed to a cobbler in his late teens. In 1643, at the beginning of the Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, a spiritual crisis prompted him to begin wandering about England wrestling with depression and pondering religious questions. He sought relief to no avail from clergy, an experience that shaped his perspective that ... log in or subscribe to read full text