Complete Works of Edward Burrough, Volume 1
The opening volume of Edward Burrough's collected writings — the earliest tracts of the Quaker movement's most electrifying voice, a young preacher who shook England before dying in Newgate Prison at twenty-nine.
- Volume 1 of 7
- 500+ pages
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read8.1 hours
- Length115,066 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 8.1 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 8.1 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 6.4 hours to 11 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 112,631 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 2,435 words |
| Total | 115,066 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 2,435 of the 115,066 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
6.4 hours and 11 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 8.1 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 329–460 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
- Secure checkout by Stripe
- Instant download
- 7-day money-back guarantee
About This Edition
Edward Burrough was called the “Son of Thunder” by his fellow Friends — a young man from Westmorland who encountered George Fox at seventeen and within months was preaching across England with a power that drew thousands and terrified the authorities. He died in Newgate Prison in 1663, not yet thirty years old, a victim of the Quaker Act that made it illegal to attend meetings of more than five persons. In those brief years he wrote with astonishing volume and force. This first volume gathers his earliest tracts: the passionate defenses of Quaker faith against critics who called Friends heretics, blasphemers, and enemies of the social order. Here Burrough establishes the central arguments that would run through all his writing — that Christ is present and teaches his people directly, that outward forms and hireling priests are obstacles to true religion, and that the Light in every conscience is sufficient to lead to salvation.
These early writings have a raw urgency that even Burrough’s later, more polished work cannot quite match. He was writing in the heat of controversy, responding to specific attacks, yet always turning the argument back to first principles. This modernized edition preserves the rhetorical force of the originals while making the texts available to readers who would otherwise be stopped by seventeenth-century conventions of spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure.
