ABSTRACT
As all students of Quaker history know, Quaker historical writing did change, even while it remained the province of Friends. By exploring manuscript sources unused by other historians, by attempting to place Friends in the context of the English Civil War, and especially by recognizing that religious ideas do not rise out of a vacuum, showing the connection between the ideas that George Fox and others among the first generation of Friends set forth, and those of other sects, Barclay anticipated the features that we associate with modern Quaker historical scholarship. William Tallack’s main concerns, however, were to elucidate the origins of Quakerism, and to show how Fox had appropriated many ‘distinctive’ Quaker practices from the Baptists. ‘The main and characteristic principles arrived at and promulgated by George Fox and his followers,’ Tallack wrote, had ‘with little exception been previously the characteristics of the Baptist theology also.’
