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Insider and Outsider History: Theories of Quaker Origins from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
In the words of a modern Quaker historian, ‘Friends are an historical people, and we derive much of our identity from our tradition’. During the past hundred and fifty years the history of Quaker beginnings has several times been reinterpreted, as different Quaker theologies have risen to prominence and been given historical underpinning, and the interpretations themselves then subjected to historiographical reflections by later scholars. Much of this process has been ‘insider’ history, written by Quakers, but in the second half of the twentieth century Quaker beginnings became for a time a preoccupation of mainstream secular history, which has greatly changed the understanding of early Quakerism.
- Type
- Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to Stephen W. Angell, Pink Dandelion, J. William Frost and John Punshon for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
References
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