First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism.

Ingle prefaces his meticulously researched and compellingly written biography by stating that George Fox's life deserves rescue from "poorly grounded, usually uncritical, and theologically oriented" synopses of Fox's creation and management of the Society of Friends (iii). Quakerism was one of the major religious uprisings of seventeenth-century England and the Quakers remain the only interregnum sect that exists today. Ingle ventures far beyond partisan texts that privilege Fox's determined efforts to establish the individual conscience as the quintessential factor regarding matters of faith, as well as his equally persistent later authoritarian impositions on the burgeoning radical movement. The author perceptively details Fox's obscure beginnings in provincial Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire, where religious nonconformity thrived via Catholic recusancy, remnants of Wycliffian profligacy, and Presbyterianism, and illustrates how these cultural groupings contributed to Fox's later states of melancholy, paranoia, and his mercurial Quaker infrastructural strategems.

Ingle provides an account of Quakerism's universally acknowledged aspects - opposition to tithes and oaths, millenarianism, "inner light," pacifism, refusal of "hat honour," and insistence on "thou" rather than "you." Especially interesting, however, is his overview of the Quakers as a factious sect that, at any time during its formative years, encompassed many competing ideologies. Ingle's handling of these schisms develops through discussions of the men and women who informed Quakerism, and through their tumultuous relationships with Fox. Richard Farnsworth, John Pennyman, William Penn, Margaret Fell, and James Nayler - the men and women who intermittently co-opted and rivaled each other in furthering the nascent sect - are afforded full character development.

James Nayler, an equally prodigious "father" of the Children of the Light, receives extensive attention. Nayler - whose riding into Bristol on a donkey in 1656 in imitation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem resulted in his brutal punishment, imprisonment, and later rejection by Fox - slowly becomes the object of Fox's wrath as Fox realizes Nayler's conviction that he too is a "son of God" (122). Fox megalomaniacally claimed Nayler's beliefs as solely his own, and Ingle expertly balances Fox's pleas for individual sovereignty with his often egregious self-aggrandizement and compromises with established powers in order to maintain hegemony over others. In Ingle's words, "Fox wanted religious freedom for his own group, and that freedom, he implied, should include the right to restrict the freedom of others when their actions conflicted with his definitions of what was right" (180).

Margaret Fell, Fox's first financially malleable convert and later wife, serves as the model for Fox's progressive views on women. Fox, as Ingle suggests, never departed from his early conviction that God also calls women to preach. Fell's tireless evangelism, industriousness, autonomous nature, and the immense respect she garnered from Fox, while simultaneously expressing a complicit assurance in Fox's own divinity, caused Fox steadfastly to proclaim women "a companion, an equal in the holy image of God, for the man a meet help in righteousness" (261). Fox's position intensified the already pervasive suspicions of Quakers as heretics and moral reprobates, yet also later enhanced Fox's growing pacifist inclinations, even though his converts frequently hailed from military backgrounds.

One shortcoming of Ingle's study is its seeming promise to treat Fox's sect in terms of its informing society's growing capitalist underpinnings. While Ingle briefly discusses Fox's subtly misleading promises that for those who converted would come "greater trading, double than you ever had, and more than the world" (47), Ingle's statement that "Fox sensed a need for, then captured in his movement, the sense of individual responsibility and initiative without which the newly emerging world of capitalism would have had tougher going" (3) gets lost in the wealth of material dealing with other aspects of Fox's sect.

Dana E. Aspinall UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT