The Prophetic Visions of Mother Ann Lee

Record summary

Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, was remembered by followers as receiving revelations concerning the second coming, communal discipline, celibacy, and the spiritual status of women. Shaker testimonies, church records, and later histories preserve a developing prophetic biography rather than a single incident report. The material is useful for comparing charismatic authority, millenarian expectation, visionary language, and institutional memory across Atlantic religious movements. Accounts differ depending on whether they are devotional, hostile, or later antiquarian, and the chronology of particular sayings can be difficult to establish.