Joan Vokins

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JV , a late-seventeenth-century Quaker preacher, is best known for her autobiography; she also left letters addressed to individuals and epistles officially addressed to Quaker communities.
  • BirthName: Joan Bunce
  • Married: Vokins
Title-page of Joan Vokins's book, "God's Mighty Power Magnified: As Manifested and Revealed in his Faithful Handmaid Joan Vokins", 1691: a new edition published at Cockermouth in Cumbria, 1871. It bears the signature of a former owner.

Milestones

1671

JV published a tract or epistle entitled A Loving Advertisement.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

22 July 1690

JV died on her way from London to Berkshire, having got as far as Reading, having finished her course, and kept the faith, as the title-page of her work reminded its readers.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
qtd. in
Graham, Elspeth et al., editors. Her Own Life. Routledge, 1989.
211

1691

JV 's letters and autobiography were posthumously published in God's Mighty Power Magnified: As Manifested and Revealed in His Faithful Handmaid Joan Vokins.
Graham, Elspeth et al., editors. Her Own Life. Routledge, 1989.
211

Biography

The details of JV 's birth are not known. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests a date of around 1630, a guess based on the date she bore her eldest child.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Born in the yeoman class, she was brought up an Anglican . In youth and for years after her marriage she felt spiritually lost, as a ship without an anchor among the merciless waves.
qtd. in
Graham, Elspeth et al., editors. Her Own Life. Routledge, 1989.
216
After long striving and seeking she discovered the Quaker faith, to which she eventually converted her family. And now when my husband and children and relations are with me in a good meeting, and the powerful presence of the Lord is amongst us, it is a blessed reward for all.
qtd. in
Graham, Elspeth et al., editors. Her Own Life. Routledge, 1989.
217

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