Witnessing the Last Days: a Review Article

Abstract

Early Quakers in 1650s wrote voluminously, and have been examined exhaustively, by Friends within and rebels against Quaker establishment, by Mennonites, by mystics, by British social historians led by Marxist Christopher Hill and Barry Reay, and also by Richard Bauman, an expert on speech and Quaker silence. A new perspective has been opened by scholars of English literature, who look in detail at what early Friends wrote and meant, rather than simply decoding Quaker texts into symbols of social conflict or mystical states. Without undue dependence on earlier studies of radical puritans and Friends by Geoffrey Nuttall, and the Lamb's perspective developed by T. Canby Jones, Douglas Gwyn, and me, new writers explore most of same early Quaker writings we assembled or cited. They deal responsibly with questions that Richard Bailey raises about Fox (and others did about Nayler) who called themselves reincarnations of Christ, by extending their critical search into all early Friends' trust in Spirit's guidance, and thus into implications of Quaker perfectionism and ethic of inner leading that scholars call antinomian. Friends avoid careful thought about this ethic: Kenneth Henke, a star student at ESR, tried in vain to systematize it for a thesis at Princeton. Corns and Loewenstein have each written on radical religion and politics in English Commonwealth. They do not explain how, from Universities of Wales and Wisconsin, they drew out their collection of essays by other scholars mostly new to early if not to early Friends' world of thought. (Most have worked on Milton, Winstanley, or Puritan women.) Kate Peters' survey of Patterns of Quaker Literature, placed as an introduction, rightly criticizes too tight classifications of genres or topics. She notices letters as well as early Quaker processes for supervising printing and distribution of tracts. She stresses leaders' discipline of doctrine, and denies Quaker writers' personal involvement in a cosmic struggle. But Lowenstein's own essay, The War of Lamb: George Fox and Apocalyptic Discourse of Revolutionary Quakerism