La perfezione di Adamo prima della Caduta. Note sul rapporto spirituale di Margaret Fell e George Fox

The author suggests that the relationship established between the first charismatic Quaker leaders and their disciples could be interpreted as a sort of spiritual direction. In fact, in their spiritual journey the first Quakers showed a desire to learn from the experience of those who had preceded them in order to advance themselves and to achieve the perfection of Adam before the Fall. It is no coincidence that, in line with a strong Puritan tradition, the literary genre that strongly characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quakerism was represented by the autobiographical journals in which Quakers narrated their religious experience expressing thus not only a testimony of the Spirit, but a model to follow in order to proceed spiritually. Writing about yourself, reflecting on your spiritual path, laying your conscience bare with a digging job in a sort of written public confession was a way of bearing witness to the Spirit in order to set an example for others: “That all may know the dealings of the Lord with me and the various exercises trials and troubles through which he led me in order to prepare and fit me for the work unto which he had appointed me,” as written in the first pages of the printed version of George Fox’s spiritual diary. The thorough analysis of consciousness that is fixed on the printed pages of early Quakers’ autobiographical accounts is therefore an account of a spiritual path proposed as a model for all who read them. To confirm his theory, Villani investigates the relationship between George Fox and Margaret Fell as a relationship of spiritual direction and Margaret Fell’s actions as that of a spiritual director