Synopsis
Between 1655 and 1755, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) changed from radical movement to established sect. Author Richard Vann is concerned with what happens to religious urgency when it is extended over long periods of time and, specifically, how a group of vagrant preachers and their “ecclesiastically subversive followers…reached within a century a state of…decorous piety.”
Vann has made a family reconstitution of the total membership of the Society in three selected areas. He has shown how their position in English society changed during a century and how, by the eighteenth century, most of them belonged to the English bourgeoisie.
