Letters of Early Friends
The first great gathering of early Quaker correspondence, modernized for today's reader: 150 letters written between the 1650s and 1690s by about forty of the first Friends — George Fox, Margaret Fell, Isaac Penington, James Nayler, Francis Howgill, William Dewsbury, and dozens more — arranged in eight themed parts from the inward call to the prophetic voice, with the persecuted women of the movement given their own place. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references and an editorial introduction to every part.
- 150 letters from about forty of the first Friends — Fox, Fell, Penington, Nayler, Howgill, Dewsbury, Burrough, and many more
- Eight themed parts, each opened by an editorial introduction: The Inward Call, The Suffering Seed, and the prophetic voice among them
- Women's voices restored — Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers from the Malta Inquisition, Barbara Blaugdone, Elizabeth Hooton, Mary Penington, and more
- Linked scripture and historical references throughout · EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read8.7 hours
- Length124,411 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 8.7 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 8.7 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 6.9 hours to 11.8 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 113,189 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 11,222 words |
| Total | 124,411 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 11,222 of the 124,411 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
6.9 hours and 11.8 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 8.7 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 355–498 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.
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About This Edition
For seventy years the people called Quakers wrote to one another constantly — in prisons and on ships, from the northern fells and the London gaols, across the Atlantic and out of the Inquisition’s cells at Malta. These letters were how a scattered movement held itself together: how a convincement was shared, a sufferer comforted, a wavering meeting steadied, a warning sounded to king and magistrate. They are also, quite simply, some of the most alive religious writing in the English language — urgent, tender, fierce, and unguarded in a way that no printed tract ever is.
Letters of Early Friends gathers one hundred and fifty of them, drawn from the earliest sources — George Fox’s Epistles (1698), John Barclay’s Letters of Early Friends (1841), the collected letters of Isaac Penington, Margaret Fell’s 1710 folio, and the Dewsbury, Howgill, and Nayler collections — and arranges them in eight themed parts. The volume moves from The Inward Call through The Suffering Seed, the pastoral care of the gathered meetings, the epistles of counsel and reproof, and closes with The Prophetic Voice. An editorial introduction opens each part, setting the letters in their moment, and every one carries a short headnote naming the writer, the recipient, and the occasion.
Nearly forty Friends speak here. Fox writes as the shepherd of the whole flock; Penington with the inwardness that made him the movement’s contemplative; Nayler out of the wreckage of his fall; Fell as the “nursing mother” who organized a persecuted people. And the women are restored to their place — Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers writing from the Malta Inquisition, Barbara Blaugdone, Elizabeth Hooton, Mary Penington, Elizabeth Stirredge — voices too often left out of the printed record. This Friends Illuminated edition modernizes the spelling and syntax so the letters read cleanly today, keeps the plain speech where it carries meaning, repairs the worst of the old scan-damage without inventing a word, and links scripture and historical references throughout.
