Reconsidering the Place of Women in Transatlantic Quaker Studies

Abstract

Reconsidering the Place of Women in Transatlantic Quaker Studies Lisa M. Logan (bio) The Quakers, 1656–1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community richard c. allen and rosemary moore, eds. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018 346 pp. Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 naomi pullin Cambridge University Press, 2018 302 pp. New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 michele lise tarter and catie gill, eds. Oxford University Press, 2018 284 pp. Six years ago, I began a collaborative project on a Quaker manuscript, entering the terrain of Quaker studies as an early Americanist for the first time. The archival study of Quakerism and those writing and operating in it requires an intimate understanding of its meeting structure and organization and an awareness of the historical waves of the early Quaker movement. Three reference books enabled me to untangle unfamiliar language, structure, and people: William Charles Braithwaite's The Beginnings of Quakerism (1919, rev. 1955), The Second Period of Quakerism (1919, rev. 1961) and Rufus Jones's The Quakers in the American Colonies (1909). I remember being struck by the publication dates of these important tomes and wondering that such a rich field depended on reference works published before the 1960s. Besides the methodological shifts in academic disciplines since the publication of these touchstones in early Quaker studies, another reason to welcome the three books reviewed here is that they make the scholarship on [End Page 821] Quaker works and lives more accessible to those who live far from archives. These works emerge at a time when early Quaker texts and records are becoming available through digitization. Digital platforms such as Ancestry.com, which houses many early American Quaker meeting records, have improved accessibility to the rare manuscript materials necessary for this work. Modern editions bring early Quaker texts to new generations of scholars and students. For example, in 2019 alone, Penn State University Press, which produced two of the books under review, published The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader: Writings by an Early American Polymath, a selection of works by the German settler who lived among Pennsylvania Quakers, edited by Patrick Erben, Alfred Brophy, and Margo Lambert, and The Writings of Elizabeth Webb, an early Quaker minister, edited by Rachel Cope and Zachary Hutchins. That same year Early American Literature printed a newly discovered letter by eighteenth-century Quaker autobiographer Elizabeth Ashbridge, edited by Jay David Miller, who found the document. A renewed interest in Quaker studies is afoot, signaled by the recent publication of Jordan Landes's London Quakers in a Transatlantic World: The Creation of an Early Modern Community (2015), which recognizes the transatlantic community in which London Quakers operated; The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (2013), edited by Stephen Angell and Ben Pink Dandelion, which takes a comprehensive geographical and temporal approach; and the appearance of Dandelion's slim The Quakers in Oxford's Very Short Introduction series. The time has certainly come for revisiting the lives and works of Quakers in the early modern period. The three books under review are those I wished for six years ago. The Quakers, 1656–1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community, Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750, and New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 use contemporary literary and historiographical methodologies to guide our understanding of early Quakers and their writings in new, inclusive ways. Together these studies inform, serve as foundations for, and suggest paths for transatlantic Quaker studies in the twenty-first century. The Quakers 1656–1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community, part of Penn State University Press's new historical series, The New History of Quakerism, succeeds in its aim to update our general understanding of Quakers in the so-called second period. Aimed at the "specialist and nonspecialist reader alike," the volume includes thirteen chapter-length essays, [End Page 822] seven written singly or collaboratively by volume editors and eminent historians Moore and Allen and six by other experts, most from history and church history fields. The chapters follow broadly the chronology of Quaker history from its beginnings to the final years of the Stuart period. Each robust and extensively documented chapter concerns...