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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Going nowhere
T2 - the stranger and pilgrim in the Journal of George Fox
AU - Hinds, Hilary
N1 - © Liverpool University Press 2015
PY - 2015/12
Y1 - 2015/12
N2 - This article examines the rhetoric and poetics of movement and stillness in early Quaker culture. George Fox urged Friends to ‘stand still’, and stillness was valued as the godly heart of the meeting for worship. Nonetheless, the lives of Fox and other early Public Friends were insistently peripatetic, and Fox’s Journal is largely structured around accounts of his travels. How, then, might we understand the place of the journey and the rhetoric of movement in early Quaker practice and culture? By means of a close analysis of the figure of the stranger in Fox’s Journal and a comparative reading of this text in relation to seventeenth-century pilgrimage literature, the article argues that the early Quakerism’s conception of the inward light as a unifying force reframed the meanings of travel in a way that informed both the practice and the writings of early Friends.
AB - This article examines the rhetoric and poetics of movement and stillness in early Quaker culture. George Fox urged Friends to ‘stand still’, and stillness was valued as the godly heart of the meeting for worship. Nonetheless, the lives of Fox and other early Public Friends were insistently peripatetic, and Fox’s Journal is largely structured around accounts of his travels. How, then, might we understand the place of the journey and the rhetoric of movement in early Quaker practice and culture? By means of a close analysis of the figure of the stranger in Fox’s Journal and a comparative reading of this text in relation to seventeenth-century pilgrimage literature, the article argues that the early Quakerism’s conception of the inward light as a unifying force reframed the meanings of travel in a way that informed both the practice and the writings of early Friends.
KW - George Fox
KW - Journal
KW - stranger
KW - pilgrimage
KW - journeys
KW - movement
KW - stasis
KW - rhetoric
KW - potential space
U2 - 10.3828/quaker.20.1.84
DO - 10.3828/quaker.20.1.84
M3 - Journal article
VL - 20
SP - 84
EP - 102
JO - Quaker Studies
JF - Quaker Studies
SN - 1363-013X
IS - 1
ER -