Hidden in Plain Sight

Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women's Writings 1650-1700

This book is a marvelous collection of early Quaker women's writings and a work of great scholarship. The included tracts, letters epistles and excerpts from journals are reprinted with only minor revisions of the arcane spelling. Features writing from well-known Friends like Margaret Fell, but also from many who are now little remembered.

As an anthology of Quaker women’s writings in the seventeenth century, Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women’s Writings, 1650-1700 does an excellent job of illustrating the lives and theological perspectives of numerous women who joined what was for its time very much a radical sect. The writings are explained with a clarity that would allow even a beginner to Quakerism to understand very clearly the character of seventeenth century England.

Yet, at the same time many of the pitfalls undoubtedly present in modern Quakerism are utterly absent here. The theological reflection, the reflection of the presence of the sacred, is completely central throughout all these writings: this serves to ground them in a truly deep spirituality. The result is that we see exactly how the women felt they were being guided, rather than them being guided by outside sources

Editors: Mary Garman, Judith Applegate, Margaret Benefiel, Dortha Meredith

Publisher: Pendle Hill Publications, 1996

paperback, 540 pages