Keynote Address, Borders and Crossings conference, 2012
Hilary Hinds is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University. Her 2011 book, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture (Manchester University Press) explored the question, ‘What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism?’ Taking an original perspective on Quakers and combining literary and historical approaches, she demonstrated how the light within became the organising principle of seventeenth-century Quakerism, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine.