English radicalism in the 1650s: the Quaker search for the true knowledge

This chapter is a survey of first generation Quaker attitudes towards unlearnedness. Quakers regarded learning as a demarcation between the godly who relied on inward learning and the ungodly who adopted a rational approach to knowledge. Their antihumanism even led them to consider spirituality a preferable attitude to scripturalism. The Quakers’ sufficiency of inward learning has been extensively researched by students of mid seventeenth-century sectarian radicalism. However, Catherine Gill’s contention in this essay is that the Quakers’ position on learning is not as clear and monolithic as appears first. The way Quakers described inward-learning changed from writer to writer and required justification which they expressed in a variety of writings. Catherine Gill draws upon conversion narratives, poetry and polemical tracts penned by Quakers to explain how nuanced their position was, a far cry from a monochrome episteme. Gill insists that the Quakers’ responses to criticism contribute to a better understanding of these radical voices.