Introduction

History locates the first hint of the American religious sect called the Shakers during the year 1770, when an English woman named Ann Lee announced the details of a dramatic personal revelation to a small, ecstatic religious community known to contemporaries as "shaking Quakers." Accordingly, what follows is an analysis of Shaker pre-history.

This paper is about the emergence of the Shakers as a sect in mid-18th century Manchester, England. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss heresy in European Christianity during the pre-Reformation era, in the context of motivating factors in Shaker origins and theology. Chapter 3 and 4 describe the immediate antecedents to the Shakers: the French Prophets, the Quakers, and the small, Manchester-based assembly that combined these two groups, the Wardley Society. An underlying theme to this examination, then, is the functioning of a sect within the religious and social milieu into which it arises.

• Most modern

• conclusions

• persecution

• communism

• notion

• cohesive factor

• sect and religion

• Medieval heresy

• Although

• basis