This comprehensive interpretation of the writings of the Quaker Margaret Fell (1614–1702) goes beyond a synthesis of existing scholarship to place Fell's theology within her own social, political and religious context. Sally Bruyneel demonstrates that Fell's Christ-centred ‘realized eschatology’ was intellectually and theologically coherent and a vital element in the formation of early Quaker doctrine. One of the earliest ‘publishers of Truth’, Fell is usually overshadowed by her second husband George Fox and is traditionally assigned the function of protector, ‘nursing mother’ and helpmeet. Bruyneel rescues Fell from such constraints, demonstrating the enhanced social status enjoyed by Fell in her own right and during her first marriage to the judge Thomas Fell, both providing privileged access to the establishment and placing her in a de facto leadership role in the Quaker movement. Fell, a serious child and earnest spiritual ‘seeker’ before her convincement by Fox, developed her theology within the radical Protestant millenarian context and the peculiarly English strand of biblical apocalyptic thinking that allied religious symbolism to the nation's political history. She emerged as a polemicist with a ‘powerful theological and hermeneutical voice’; she was prophetic, proselytising (not least of the Jews of whose conversion to Christianity there was an eschatological imperative) and challenging of social and gender hierarchies, albeit within constraints. Her soteriology, grounded in the actions of the human conscience and the saving guidance of the inner Light, argued that the Light (a concept derived initially from the Gospel of John) was the spirit of God conveying revelation of the new covenant. Challenging Reformed Calvinist orthodoxy, she held that justification and sanctification were available (if not automatically achievable) to all who embraced that Light. To counter this doctrine's implicit individualism, Fell's ecclesiology, a robust indictment of ‘false’ Churches and ‘hireling’ clergy, emphasised the necessity of group witness in Quaker meetings, the need to verify individual promptings in the unifying consensus generated by the true Light. By 1660, when the Quaker movement had to adapt to the political realities of the Restoration, Fell took a high profile role as an advocate of Quaker liberty of conscience, loyal citizenship and the ‘peace testimony’, her own pacifism not the product of expediency but predating the return of the king by at least seven years. The persecution of Friends, often dictated by court factionalism and the vicissitudes of Charles ii's politics, left Fell imprisoned and diminished in rank, but her marriage to Fox (an affectionate but nevertheless strategic union) was vital to Friends' institutional development and the early codification of Quaker doctrine and practice. Yet if Fell's theology and ecclesiology were clearly consonant with George Fox's own teachings, Bruyneel concludes that she was no mere acolyte, but had developed her own mature and independent thought. If this study is more accessible to the academic than to the general reader, it is nevertheless a fine analysis of Fell's intellectual paradigm, providing excellent background for broader historical study of the period.