Quaker Community Research Articles

Peace Studies at Bradford University – Reflections on Fifty Years

2023 marked the 50th anniversary of Peace Studies – a discipline which has been closely connected with the Quaker community – at Bradford. Peace Studies as an academic centre of teaching and research at Bradford University was set up in 1973, starting its first postgraduate course in 1974 and welcoming its first undergraduate students the following year. It would not have been established without the determination of a group of Quakers to see such a centre in a UK university, and this Research Note looks primarily at the first 25 years and how the department came about and survived the many internal and external challenges. It also includes some personal reflections, as I joined the department 45 years ago and have retained a close connection through to the present. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Anne Conway on Heaven and Hell

Abstract This paper examines Anne Conway’s accounts of heaven and hell, as found in her only published work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1690). We see that Conway seeks to portray hell in a manner that she sees as more consonant with the postulation of a loving and just God, partly by denying eternal torment and emphasising the benefits that suffering brings to a creature. I also review Conway’s account of heaven, a realm of ‘perfect tranquillity’ in which creatures enjoy unity and harmony with Christ and other heavenly spirits. We see that Conway’s account of universal salvation in this heavenly state involves an increase of understanding of the world, a continuing process of perfection, and harmony with other heavenly spirits. Throughout the paper, I also consider Conway’s eschatology within the wider intellectual context of the revival of Origenist theology in her intellectual circle and the shifting framework of eschatological thought in the early Quaker community. By reading the Principles as responding to this context, we can deepen our understanding of the radical and original contribution Conway makes to the tradition of eschatological thought.

Early Quaker Identity from the Perspective of Some Ecclesiastical Anti-Quakers

Abstract This empirical case study provides a new approach to the understanding of discursively constructed Quaker identity in the seventeenth century, from the point of view of those opposed to the dissenting Christian movement. This article asks how others may have viewed adherents to the Quaker communities in England. The findings illustrate a range of negative and denigrating discourses that go beyond abstract religious controversy to sow manufactured fear of the Quaker community. Overt and covert linguistic mechanisms used by anti-Quaker writers reveal expressions of emerging moral panic underlying unsubstantiated accusations attacking the minority Quaker community.

Said Nursi and Rufus Jones on the Spiritual Life

Although they almost certainly never heard of one another, Said Nursi and Rufus Jones were contemporaneous mystics and leaders of spiritual renewal in their respective Muslim and Quaker communities. A comparison of their writings reveals a high correspondence of thought on the spiritual life: a sense of awe, a sacramental view of life in which God is available to all and a democratisation of the mystical life. This in turn inspires a pluralistic appreciation of God’s mystical presence in other religious communities, even as one acknowledges the distinctive truth of one’s own. For each writer, this process opened a path to respond to the challenges of modernity in the early twentieth century.

‘The pleasures of traveling in Liberty Plains’: Practical Piety and Childhood Education Through Material Culture in the American Quaker Community

Quaker spirituality encompassed a range of activities, from prayer, meditation and worship to reading, writing and conversation. It also included interaction with what scholars call ‘material religion’. Analysis of an allegorical map entitled ‘A Map of the Various Paths of Life’, created by American minister George Dillwyn in 1794, provides a window into the relationship between Friends’ religious practice and material culture. It enables us to examine the use of objects to inculcate Quaker values and provide a ‘guarded education’ to Quaker youth. A multidisciplinary approach will be utilised to analyse the map and its importance to practical piety among American Friends in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan

Reviewed by: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Sarah Walden Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 In Lives, Letters, and Qailts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan argues for the value of “everyday rhetorics of resistance” or “the conscious, purposeful recontextualization of the seemingly ordinary means and materials available in order to mediate thought and action, and to persuade others” (3). She examines three women or groups of women who demonstrate the power of persistent, everyday acts that recontextualize the means available to them in a particular time, place, and space. Throughout the book Sohan emphasizes two key arguments. First, she argues for the importance of a translingual and transmodal framework in order to avoid oversimplifying language, to understand difference as the norm, to “recover and reclaim the ways individual composers recontextualize within and across languages, genres, modes, and media,” and to adopt “more democratic and descriptive approaches to language” (9). Sohan’s second key argument involves the need to expand what counts as rhetoric, to redefine resistance, and to reframe how scholars situate rhetors who do not necessarily fit within the typical heroic narratives. For example, when Sohan discusses the ministry of Eliza P. Gurney, she describes the legend that one of Gurney’s letters was in President Abraham Lincoln’s breast pocket the night he was assassinated. She writes, in one of the most powerful lines of the book, that this myth serves as “a reminder of how a powerful, feminist rhetorical figure can be pigeonholed and, as a result, remain hidden in plain sight, because her rhetorical practice is evaluated solely in relation to the men with whom she came in contact, rather than on its own merit” (70-71). Sohan’s commitment to feminist rhetorical scholarship is clear throughout the book as she works to articulate and examine the everyday rhetoric available to women and to argue for its value as a site of study. In chapter one, Sohan explores the letter-writing campaigns of the Townsend Movement, a populist movement that advocated pension reform for the elderly by establishing local clubs that could organize and promote the plan through letter-writing campaigns, voter-registration drives, and petitions. These clubs promoted literacy through workshopping letter-writing, which allowed members to “collaboratively imagine” their future without financial worries (41). Pearl Buckhalter, president of the Oregon [End Page 209] City, Oregon, Townsend Club No. 1, is an example of a leader who recontextualized the means available to position herself as an expert, using her own experience as her ethos, rather than simply repeating the words prescribed by Townsend headquarters (52). Sohan argues convincingly that the translingual and transmodal literacy practices of the Townsend Movement allowed individuals like Buckhalter to transform their lives through the literacy training they receive as part of their activism, even if the movement they promote ultimately fails, as the Townsend Movement did. Nevertheless, she argues, this is exactly why rhetorical scholars must fight against the impulse to examine only heroic narratives of activism and must include the everyday in their analyses. In chapter two, Sohan examines the life and work of Quaker minister and activist Eliza P. Gurney. Gurney, Sohan argues, skillfully blends the epideictic form of classical rhetoric with the “nondirective, nonconfrontational, conversational rhetorical approach” of the Quaker community (71-72). Sohan examines several key parts of her ministry: her development as a minister, her traveling ministry in Europe, and her relationship with President Lincoln. Sohan argues that Gurney harnessed silence and kairos to establish an ethos with potentially hostile audiences, at a time when ethos was assumed to be more fixed than fluid. In her discussion of Gurney’s meeting and correspondence with Lincoln, Sohan demonstrates how Gurney recontextualized the epideictic to develop a relationship with the president and to plead with him to imagine a more peaceful and just world. In this chapter, Sohan significantly builds on prior scholarship on Gurney to establish her as a skillful activist and rhetorician through a detailed exploration of Gurney’s speeches, letters, and meetings. Chapter three is perhaps...

Religious Minorities under the Constitution of the Irish Free State, 1922–1937

Abstract The Irish Free State came into existence in 1922 as a self-governing state with a substantial Catholic majority. This article examines the special constitutional provisions adopted in 1922 that were aimed at religious minorities in the new state. The Protestant community comprised the largest religious minority in 1922 and was particularly vulnerable as many of its members had opposed the foundation of the Irish Free State. Nevertheless, this article recognizes the diversity behind the term ‘Protestant’ and also provides some attention to the position of the Quaker community, often perceived in Ireland as neither Catholic or Protestant, as well as that of the small Irish Jewish community. This article examines the origins and operation of the special provisions of the 1922 constitution of the Irish Free State aimed at protecting the rights of religious minorities and giving them a significant voice within the Irish legislature. It also analyses how and why most of these constitutional safeguards were removed from the text of the 1922 constitution. Most of these provisions were not replicated in the 1937 constitution of Ireland that remains in force to this day. The conclusion argues that one of the weaknesses of the constitutional provisions aimed at religious minorities was that they did not openly include this objective in their wording. This facilitated the removal of almost all of these provisions in the 1930s while ignoring or openly denying that they were aimed at religious minorities despite ample historical evidence to the contrary.

Indiana Trainwreck: The Separation Generation, Vol. 1: Divisions in Indiana Quaker Communities Over Inclusion of Homosexuals, Church Authority, Christ & The Bible 2008–2013 by Stephen W. Angell and Chuck Fager

Reviewed by: Indiana Trainwreck: The Separation Generation, Vol. 1: Divisions in Indiana Quaker Communities Over Inclusion of Homosexuals, Church Authority, Christ & The Bible 2008–2013 by Stephen W. Angell and Chuck Fager Andrew S. Taylor Indiana Trainwreck: The Separation Generation, Vol. 1: Divisions in Indiana Quaker Communities Over Inclusion of Homosexuals, Church Authority, Christ & The Bible 2008–2013. By Stephen W. Angell and Chuck Fager. Durham, North Carolina: Quaker Theology 2020. xiv+ 252 pp. Notes, and index. Paper $13.95 This collection of articles, previously published in Quaker Theology, catalogues in almost real time the theological debates within Indiana Yearly Meeting that resulted in roughly a quarter of its meetings being released and ultimately forming the New Association of Friends. The first Quaker schism in Indiana since 1857 was sparked by West Richmond Meeting recording and posting to their website a minute “welcoming and affirming” gay members. Angell demonstrates that the fight over sexuality served as a proxy war for deeper disagreements over Biblical inerrancy and the authority of Yearly Meetings to define the policies and practices of Monthly Meetings, and the volume accordingly focuses less on the usual scriptural and theological debates surrounding gay marriage than the Quaker decision-making processes (or lack thereof) that culminated in the split. His opening essay that provides the historical and theological context for the debates over sexuality is one of the volume’s best. Angell proceeds to marshal documentary evidence supporting his thesis that the division represented less a gradual but necessary separation than a purge of non-conforming meetings by the fundamentalist leadership within IYM. Angell provides numerous instances in which both the letter and spirit of Quaker procedural processes were violated by the IYM and its superintendent David Shoemaker in particular—e.g., clerks claiming to discern a “sense” of meetings in which participants felt no sense was to be found, the use of voting to decide contentious issues, and the inconsistent concern for violations of the [End Page 94] body’s Faith and Practice along political lines. Though this broad thesis is discernable, the editing of the volume leaves much to be desired. Angell and Fager are listed as co-authors even though the vast majority of the articles are written by Angell, and Stephanie Crumley-Effinger contributed more words than Fager, who I assume is a co-editor rather than-author. The volume consists of a confusing mix of journal articles, editor’s introductions to previous issues of Quaker Theology, and primary sources that move chronologically but with no curation. A longer introduction that included a plan for the book could have solved many of these issues. The volume would have benefited immensely from even a basic proofread, as Wikipedia is often cited as a source, and typos and spelling errors abound. (At one point the reader is directed to “Error! Bookmark not defined.”) The titular reference to the outdated term “homosexuals” is similarly cringeworthy. A brief word on tone is also in order. Academics are likely to be uncomfortable with Angell’s explicit invocation of prayer for particular outcomes, and though this reviewer shares much of the theology and political agenda of the editors, their obvious sympathies with the New Association are likely to alienate theologically-conservative readers, even if their documentary evidence is undeniable. Similarly, the authors assume a familiarity with Quaker practices and organizations that will be no issue for folks who have encountered this review in Quaker History, but will present an insurmountable barrier for academics outside the field, limiting the volume’s potential use to specialists in Quakerism rather than historians of American religion or the gay rights movement. Indiana Trainwreck is a timely contribution, as similar splits are cropping up throughout Quaker and Christian communities across America, but its ultimate destiny is perhaps to serve as a collection of primary sources for future histories on denominational schisms over gay marriage. [End Page 95] Andrew S. Taylor University of Virginia Copyright © 2021 Friends Historical Association

Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt

Reviewed by: Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt Julie Husband Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. By Nancy A. Hewitt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xvi + 413 pp. $39.95 cloth/$26.49 eBook. Amy Kirby Post housed self-emancipated people fleeing slavery for Canada, helped Harriet Jacobs find an editor and publisher for her slave narrative, organized fairs and subscriptions to sustain Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, and followed Susan B. Anthony by attempting to register to vote in 1872. She forged many of the interracial, cross-gender, and cross-organizational bonds that drove social changes in the nineteenth-century United States; and yet, until recently, historians have paid little attention to her. In the course of recounting her extraordinary work, Nancy A. Hewitt builds a case for Post’s universal reform philosophy as well as her generous practice of opening her home and life to others. This philosophy and practice made Post, according to Hewitt, into a “conductor” across radical movements (5). For contemporary readers, Post emerges as a model for what it meant in the nineteenth century to be an anti-racist ally, one who need not be in the front, defining an injustice and its solution, but might more effectively work as a part of a team, amplifying the voices of those who speak for themselves. The first three chapters perform considerable world-building, as readers see how the Quaker communities of Jericho (Long Island), Ledyard (central New York), and the boom city of Rochester, New York, fostered a spirit of independent judgment and, for women, an unusual freedom to speak publicly. These communities, too, supported interracial education, which contributed to Post’s later sensitivity to the often fraught interracial dynamics within antislavery communities. White-dominated antislavery organizations welcomed the testimony of fugitive slaves but often rejected African American leadership. The issue could be magnified in the ladies’ antislavery societies where much of the fund-raising took place. Post’s own leadership in the Western New York Antislavery Society provides a model for interracial alliances. She hosted in her home Black abolitionists, including Douglass, his friend and fellow journalist William C. Nell, self-emancipated writer Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth, and became lifelong friends with them all. She facilitated Truth’s speaking career and Jacobs’s writing and speaking career by connecting them to her extensive reform network. She resourcefully established a reading room above Douglass’s offices at The North Star that marketed antislavery products. At one time, it was managed by Harriet Jacobs, thereby giving Jacobs both an income and a place to write. Meetings for the Western New York Antislavery Society also took place at the meeting room, making it easy for Jacobs to participate. [End Page 175] Nonetheless, Post recognized the need for autonomous Black organizations. As Hewitt explains, “Given black women’s relationships with white women—for whom they often worked as servants, laundresses, or seamstresses—and their well-earned distrust of white men, it is not surprising that they chose to labor in a separate society” (121). Hewitt claims that Post’s unique ability to bridge racial and gender divides owed much to her Quaker upbringing. Quakers hold each individual’s reflections on truth and justice—their “inner light”—sacred (3). Post resisted the kind of infighting that poisoned relations between political abolitionists and Garrisonian abolitionists, who rejected voting, public office, and political action. One limit to this strategy was her difficulty surmounting prejudices that made her a less successful fund-raiser than Julia Griffiths, Frederick Douglass’s English friend who became his greatest asset in making his newspaper a success in Rochester. Confident, extroverted, and status-conscious, Griffiths emerges in Hewitt’s telling as an antihero to Post. Griffiths offended many, most especially Frederick Douglass’s wife, Anna, but she likely saved Douglass’s paper from bankruptcy by forging connections with the wealthy and influential in Rochester. One area that remains somewhat under-explored in the biography is Amy and Isaac Post’s leadership within Spiritualism. They were central to popularizing this belief in communication with the dead, promoting the famed “rappers” Kate and Margaretta Fox and...

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. By Priya Satia (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018) 528 pp. $35.00

<i>Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution</i>. By Priya Satia (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018) 528 pp. $35.00

Theology from Listening

Abstract This publication explores the changes and continuities in liberal Quaker theology over the long twentieth century (1895 to 2019) in multiple English-speaking Quaker communities around the world. A close analysis is conducted of Quaker theologising through multiple modes: formal, corporate methods; material produced by individuals and small groups within Quaker communities; and writing by individuals and small groups working primarily within academic or ecumenical theological settings. It is concluded that although liberal Quaker theology is diverse and flexible, it also possesses a core coherence and can meaningfully be discussed as a single tradition. At the centre of liberal Quaker theology is the belief that direct, unmediated contact with the Divine is possible and results in useful guidance.

"Deluded Women" and "Violent Men": Women, Gender and Language in the Hicksite Schism

"Deluded Women" and "Violent Men":Women, Gender and Language in the Hicksite Schism Janet Moore Lindman (bio) On a First Day morning in February of 1823, Priscilla Hunt stood up to preach in the Pine Street Meetinghouse of Philadelphia. Aware of the tension between the elders of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Elias Hicks, she declared that "strife and contention" were contrary to Christianity. "Reason alone," she asserted, would not "any more lead to God than that star which appeared to the wise men would have led them to God." After she had finished, a young man named William Evans rose to refute her sermon, saying, "these are not the doctrines of our religious society, we never professed to the world that reason leads to Christ." After he had spoken, Hunt, in supplication, asked that the "dark veil" spreading over those present would be "rent asunder" so they might see "the light of truth." When Hunt knelt those present immediately stood except for Evans, his father, Jonathan (who was an elder and a member of the powerful Meeting for Sufferings) and one or two others who hesitated; this breach of protocol ended the meeting in "a state of agitation." The Evanses' rude response to Hunt's preaching conveyed their dislike of her quietist theology versus their endorsement of evangelicalism, which had [End Page 1] become increasingly popular among American Friends. Notwithstanding these ill feelings, Hunt felt called to preach again; the next day she appeared at the Green Street meetinghouse and clarified her position on reason and revelation: "Do I say reason is the light that leads to heaven? No. I put no more dependence on reason than is due; for reason alone cannot guide a man in the way that is light." Nevertheless, she also stated that anyone "void of reason cannot know Christ." She reminded Friends to attend to the inner monitor that provided self-knowledge: "for until a man do see and know himself, he cannot come to the knowledge of God." Hunt not only advised her fellow travelers to look within for guidance, she prophesied an impending division among Friends. Providing a "searing communication" to the city's Quaker community, she proclaimed that they "had undermined their own habitations." She scolded them for following "forms" of religion without "the eternal word"; like the Romans at Christ's crucifixion, Friends had been haggling over "the fragments" of faith "to the utter neglect of the living eternal substance." Opinion had supplanted piety. She warned them of the dangers of "contentions, divisions and subdivisions," and feared that through the "blind zeal" and "self-will" of some, the "blessed truth and its advocates" would be "judged down."1 Hunt's vigorous condemnation as well as the indecorous conduct toward her (disapproved by some who attended the First Day meeting), was evidence of the deteriorating relations among American Friends during the 1820s. William Evans' behavior was disconcerting in what it revealed about the fractious situation in the Philadelphia Quaker community: as a youth, he questioned an elder's authority; as a member, he had disrupted the spiritual peace of the meeting; and as a man, he challenged the preaching of a woman.2 This last interaction—gender relations among Friends during the Hicksite schism—will be the focus of this paper. Scholars have attributed the origins of the schism to several factors, from class and occupational differences, to the increasing influence of evangelical religion as well as competing notions of religious authority and worldliness among Friends. This range of causes, however, has paid scant attention to gender. To address this gap in the scholarship, I will argue that gender became a significant attribute in how the "Great Separation" unfolded in 1827–1828. Both groups employed gendered behavior and language to defend their position and to castigate their antagonists. Specifically, men used gendered terminology against women of the opposing camp that played into both customary and contemporary concepts of white femininity. Gendered language, therefore, became a primary pivot [End Page 2] point in the disorder and confusion known as the Hicksite Schism. A crisis that had been building for nearly ten years, this schism exposed underlying gender conflicts that were representative of...

Bankrolling Creative Destruction

Bankrolling Creative Destruction Robin Wolfe Scheffler (bio) Tom Nicholas, VC: An American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. vi + 382 pp. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $35.00. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter hailed entrepreneurs as the vehicles of capitalism's renewal. Unlike sclerotic corporations or government bureaucracies, entrepreneurs were agents of "creative destruction"—their risk-taking fostering ongoing technological transformation. At the close of the twentieth century, the high-technology startups of Silicon Valley appeared to embody this hope, promising the "disruption" of whole industries. However, these enterprises and the bold futures they promised could not have come into being without the support of a new form of financing: venture capital. In VC: An American Story, Tom Nicholas charts the history of venture investing from the nineteenth century through its modern ascendency in four phases. Venture capital is a species of "risk capital"—investments in enterprises that are likely to fail but may occasionally be extraordinarily profitable. Venture capital managers promised investors expert guidance, or "intermediation," to select and structure their investments to minimize the risk of losing money while preserving the potential for large gains. This strategy stands in contrast to a more conventional method of selecting investments that are thought likely to produce modest profits and shield capital from loss. In the first phase, from the nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries, Nicholas seeks the historical antecedents of venture investing. Whaling voyages, for example, had a payout structure similar to venture capital investments. Voyages were too expensive and risky to invest in individually, so wealthy merchants within the Quaker communities of Rhode Island and Massachusetts invested through agents, who offered superior knowledge of the outfitting and crewing of ships. This included not only selecting the right crew but also transferring a share of the financial risk of failure to them by paying via shares of profits (if any) rather than wages (pp. 33–34). A generation later, groups of businessmen in New England towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts pooled money to back engineers who claimed that they could construct improved textile looms based on purloined British technology. This was similar to the style of more [End Page 470] recent high-tech venture investing—investors gained equity stakes in the mills rather than promises of repaid debt (p. 56). Geographic and social clustering was a hallmark of these early investment efforts. With information about entrepreneurs hard to come by, clusters allowed investors to draw on a broad range of technical expertise to evaluate proposals, often provided by local universities. Firms could draw on networks of investors tied by mutual trust to raise more money. Often investors would also take a role in managing new firms they backed—far easier if the firm was in the same city. These dynamics drove clusters of investment around the automobile industry in Detroit and the electronics industry in Cleveland (pp. 62, 86). Not all high-technology-based businesses were appropriate for these approaches. Capital-intensive railroads, for example, turned to issuing bonds (p. 57). The modern outlines of venture investing were suggested by the strategies developed by trustees of the immense family fortunes created during the Second Industrial Revolution (pp. 100–101). Without the need to follow set rules or even generate substantial returns, family funds were often drawn to exciting new technologies such as aviation or electronics rather than more prosaic investments. They also had the ability to structure their investments in more sophisticated ways to address the substantial risks—establishing tiers of financing and taking a role in the oversight of companies. Laurence Rockefeller, one of the heirs to the Rockefeller Oil fortune, popularized the idea that investing in "pioneering projects" even served philanthropic ends by producing industries that would shape the future (pp. 91, 99). During the second phase in the development of venture capital, from the 1940s to the 1960s, the legal structure and regulatory environment of venture funds shifted to tap into larger pools of capital controlled by fiduciary bodies—institutional investors such as insurance companies and pension funds. These organizations were bound by law to avoid risky investments, which foreclosed their support for many entrepreneurs. Seeking to address this challenge, the...

The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726 ed. by Rachel Cope and Zachary McLeod Hutchins

Reviewed by: The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726 ed. by Rachel Cope and Zachary McLeod Hutchins Jennifer Desiderio (bio) The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726 rachel cope and zachary mcleod hutchins, eds. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019 226 pp. The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, edited by Rachel Cope and Zachary McLeod Hutchins, is the first comprehensive collection of Webb’s writing. A Quaker woman who lived in the American colonies and England at the turn of the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Webb crossed the Atlantic five times, dedicating her life to cultivating Quaker communities. Webb’s writings offer students a unique glimpse into a woman who led a public life as a Quaker minister while maintaining a private life as mother and wife. The texts in The Writings of Elizabeth Webb thus range in content and audience, from letters and memorials affectionately penned to her children to a public manuscript on the book of Revelation. In addition to her public and private identities, the collection showcases Webb’s transatlantic identity as she describes the universal love that she experiences for all people in the cluttered, urban London streets and the fear she feels in the wilderness in North Carolina. The Writing of Elizabeth Webb exposes students to the beliefs and agency of an individual Quaker woman and serves as a fitting complement and striking contrast to Webb’s Puritan contemporaries. Editors Cope and Hutchins claim that Webb’s “life and words should stand beside those of women such as Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Abigaill Levy Franks” (5). Their introduction, titled “Webb and Her World,” convincingly supports this claim by situating Webb within her colonial and Quaker context and by describing the tradition of life writing for women. Cope and Hutchins dedicate a section of their introduction to George Fox, Margaret Fell, and [End Page 563] the early modern Quaker movement. Here readers learn of the opportunities available to Quaker women to minister, evangelize, and write. One to two generations removed from Bradstreet, Hutchinson, and Mary Dryer, Webb first traveled to the British American colonies in 1697, when nonconformists, including the Quakers, worshipped without fear of persecution. Due to Parliament’s passing of the Toleration Act of 1689, Webb could travel the expanse of the colonies, publish letters and essays, and preach publicly without danger. Cope and Hutchins write, “Webb’s journey was difficult, but because of the women who went before her, not particularly dangerous” (8). Her active life as a Quaker granted her exceptional agency, mobility, and power, especially in comparison to most British colonial women in the American colonies. The Writings of Elizabeth Webb is a comprehensive collection of all of Webb’s public and private writing. Her public writing includes a letter written in 1712 to Anthony Boehm, a German Pietist who served as chaplain to Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne of England, and a commentary on the book of Revelation. Her letter to Boehm reads much like a personal narrative as she describes her struggles with her upbringing, faith, and travels. Her letter circulated while she was alive, and later, it was reprinted in Philadelphia by a Quaker printer and bookseller in 1781, meriting a second edition in 1783. Cope and Hutchins claim that the letter “inspired thousands of readers” and served as a “spiritual guide to social upheaval in the age of revolution” (3). In her meditation on the book of Revelation, Webb’s mastery of Scripture is apparent as she meticulously responds to individual chapters and verses. Interesting for students, particularly undergraduate students, is a comparison of either Webb’s letter to the reader or publisher Thomas Chaklely’s letter to the reader with Rowland-son’s frontispiece to her narrative. Rowlandson’s frontispiece showcases the power of the Puritan patriarchs, not the female author’s power, whereas Chaklely’s letter describes with great esteem Webb’s intelligence and the strength of her faith. The comparison is a striking reflection of the Quaker and Puritan religions in colonial America and their treatment and encouragement of women in the...

Sustaining Faith

Abstract This article uses the case study of the small Quaker community on seventeenth-century Antigua, as well as sources from Quakers on Barbados and from Quaker missionaries travelling throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire, to question the role of Quakers as anti-slavery pioneers. Quaker founder George Fox used a paternalistic formulation of hierarchy to contend that enslavement of other human beings was compatible with Quakerism, so long as it was done in a nurturing way—an argument that was especially compelling given the sect’s desperate need in the seventeenth century to establish itself economically or risk its destruction by the post-Restoration British State. By exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the eighteenth-century North American colonies, this article demonstrates that it was impossible for Quakers to follow through in establishing a nurturing form of slavery, particularly within the brutal context of the West Indian sugar colonies.

British Quakers and Religious Language

AbstractInBritish Quakers and Religious Language, Rhiannon Grant explores the ways in which this community discusses the Divine. She identifies characteristic patterns of language use and, through a detailed analysis of examples from published sources, uncovers the philosophical and theological claims which support these patterns. These claims are not always explicit within the Quaker community, which does not have written creeds. Instead, implicit claims are often being made with community functions in mind. These can include a desire to balance potentially conflicting needs, such as the wish to have a single unified community that simultaneously welcomes diversity of belief. Having examined these factors, Grant connects the claims made to wider developments in the disciplines of theology, philosophy of religion, and religious studies, especially to the increase in multiple religious belonging, the work of nonrealist theologians such as Don Cupitt, and pluralist philosophers of religion such as John Hick.

Sustaining “the Household of Faith”: Female Hospitality in the Early Transatlantic Quaker Community

Abstract Women occupied a central place in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transatlantic Quakerism. They acted as prophets, missionaries, authors and spiritual leaders of their communities. Recent scholarship has offered important insights into the unparalleled public roles available to women within the early Quaker community. But little is known about the networks of hospitality that developed across the British Atlantic that made itinerant missionary service possible. The generosity of countless female Quakers to unknown “Friends” remains an underexplored aspect of early Quaker history. Using printed spiritual testimonies and correspondence exchanged between Quaker missionaries and their female hosts, this article shows how ministers were “sustained” during their travels. Active religious service did not have to equate to ministerial work, and networks of female hospitality provided an important accompaniment to the national and transatlantic Quaker mission.

Quakers, coercion, and pre‐modern growth: why Friends’ formal institutions for contract enforcement did not matter for early modern trade expansion

AbstractDuring the late seventeenth century, Atlantic trade grew dramatically. The New Institutional Economists attribute this to institutional developments. During this period, Quakers emerged as the region's most prominent trading community. Some historians explain this achievement as the result of the competitive advantage that Quakers gained from their formal institutions for contract enforcement. This article studies the London Quaker community to show that, in fact, they only began to police the conduct of business regularly after 1750, as part of a wider effort to promote the Society's reputation. Formal institutional advantages cannot explain the Quakers’ early trading success.

Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy by Julie L. Holcomb

Reviewed by: Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy by Julie L. Holcomb Emma Lapsansky Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy. By Julie L. Holcomb. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. xiii + 252 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. Read Holcomb’s footnotes first! “Why the footnotes first?” one might ask. Because reading those citations is the way to appreciate the intricacy of the beautifully-crafted fabric Julie Holcomb has woven. Holcomb has intertwined scholarly threads across oceans, across centuries, across race, gender, and disciplines, and across time, to add to the increasingly-complex tapestry of the narrative of early-modern Atlantic-world philosophical and economic relationships. In weaving this narrative, Holcomb argues—solidly and convincingly—that the “free-produce” movement, which aimed to undermine slavery by boycotting products made with un-free labor, “was the first consumer movement to transcend the boundaries of nation, gender, and race, in an effort by reformers to change the conditions of production.” (p.3) The subtleties of this reformers’ effort have heretofore been largely dismissed as unimportant, probably because the economic impact was negligible. But Holcomb has read deeply into several of the 19th-century reformers’ publications (including The Genius of Universal Emancipation, The Liberator, and the Colored American) to explore the process by which free-produce thought emerged, as well as the implications of that thought, and the controversies surrounding it. And Holcomb did not stop there. She has scrutinized and analyzed the raw material of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-slavery reform, to shed new light on new aspects of the stories of “cheap cotton” and “juvenile abolitionists.” And she has blended her argument into the discourse begun by dozens of previous scholars who have set their pens to similar concerns about slavery and production. Setting her argument firmly on the shoulders of those previous scholars, Holcomb, in eight tidy chapters (including 6 evocative period illustrations) efficiently distills many years of her own research into a sweeping transcontinental analysis that draws on (among other documents)—personal correspondence and perspectives of men and women reformers, and abolitionist publications of white and black Americans; as well as British anti-slavery documents, social- and economic-historians’ narratives, nineteenth-century children’s literature, and documentation of choices and strategies by African Americans rather than just for African Americans. By describing boycott organizations and [End Page 72] strategies across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina, and by addressing the tensions and controversies within and between Quaker communities, Holcomb has also helped to blow away some of the clouds around glib generalizations that “the Quakers” were uniformly “anti-slavery.” In the tradition so effectively employed by Brycchan Carey’s From Peace to Freedom, Holcomb examines “process” as well as “product,” thereby spinning a tale that “names names,” and highlights personalities as it interweaves race, gender, politics, theology, and economics into a seamless and riveting narrative. Despite a few proof-reading glitches (e.g., chapter 8, footnote 43), Moral Commerce has cut away some of the underbrush, to expose intriguing pathways for future scholars to explore. For example, Holcomb has largely focused on documents that tell the story of Britain and the eastern United States. We await a deeper investigation of American mid-western networks—such as those described in Thomas Hamm’s God’s Government Begun—which also flirted with “free produce” tactics as part of a larger “Universal Inquiry and Reform,” publishing their perspectives in such publications as Cincinnati’s Philanthropist. And how did anti-slavery networks in other Atlantic-world locations as Canada and Europe fit into the free-produce matrix? Such questions are particularly intriguing with respect to France, where historian Lawrence Jennings tells us that the anti-slavery impulse was shaped by contact with British reformers’ ideas. By providing a multi-textured exploration of the free-produce phenomenon, Holcomb has pointed to some inviting leads for future scholars to follow. Emma Lapsansky Haverford College Copyright © 2017 Friends Historical Association

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison This document is available at the Friends Historical Association website: http://www.haverford.edu/library/fha Many of the current books and articles examine the first period of Quakerism. Stephen W. Angell, “An Early Version of George Fox’s ‘Letter to the Governor of Barbados’,” Quaker Studies 19, no. 2 (March 2015): 277–294, compares the earliest publication of this influential Quaker statement in 1672 to the version published in the 1694 edition of Fox’s journal. Angell’s other contributions include Stephen W. Angell, “Richard Farnworth, Samuel Fisher, and the Authority of Scripture among Early Quakers,” Quaker Studies 19, no. 2 (March 2015): 207–228, and Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion, eds., Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rex Ambler considers “Light” as used by both early and contemporary Quakers in The Light Within: Then and Now, Pendle Hill pamphlet 425 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 2013). Others examining the early period include Michael Birkel, “Robert Barclay and Kabbalah,” Quaker Studies 21, no. 1 (September 2016): 3–13; Marjon Ames, Margaret Fell, Letters, and the Making of Quakerism (New York: Routledge, 2017); Madeleine Ward, “Transformative Faith and the Theological Response of the Quakers to the Boston Executions,” Quaker Studies 21, no. 1 (September 2016): 15–32; Bernard Capp, “The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum England,” English Historical Review 129, no. 536 (February 2014): 47–78; and Jonathan Warren, “‘Out of Whose Hive the Quakers Swarm’d’: Polemics and the Justification of Infant Baptism in the Early Restoration,” Perichoresis 13, no. 1 (June 2015): 97–113. Judith Roads, “Incantational and Catechetical Style in Early Quaker Prose Writings,” Quaker Studies 19, no. 1 (September 2014): 172–181, concludes that Quakers used both styles in the 17th century, though the incantational style was less used at the end of the century. Kate Peters, “The Quakers and the Politics of the Army in the Crisis of 1659,” Past & Present 231, no. 1 (May 2016): 97–128, includes an analysis of Quaker merchant George Bishop. Nicholas Seager, “John Bunyan and Socinianism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 65, no. 3 (July 2014): 580–600, draws on Bunyan’s disputes with Quakers. Works on the material culture of Quakers include Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, “Superfluity & Excess,” Magazine Antiques 183, no. 2 (March 2016): 88–97, and Mary Uhl Brooks, Threads of Useful Learning: Westtown School Samplers (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Westtown School, 2015); and Linda Baumgarten, “Vase-Pattern Wholecloth Quilts in the Eighteenth-Century Quaker Community,” Uncoverings 36 (December 2015): 7–34, identifies the design of the patterns on quilts and petticoats as the work of Philadelphia schoolteacher Ann [End Page 35] Marsh. Other works include Hannah Frances Rumball, “The Relinquishment of Plain Dress: British Quaker Women’s Abandonment of Plain Quaker Attire, 1860–1914” (PhD thesis, University of Brighton, 2016). Terry Tickhill Terrell, “The Elizabeth Stanton Inscribed Quaker Quilt,” Uncoverings 36 (December 2015): 35–60, traces the names inscribed on a quilt, including members of Still-water Monthly Meeting. John Mulcahy, “Burtown House and Friends,” Irish Arts Review 30, no. 3 (September 2013): 124–127, examines the connections of the Burtown House, built ca. 1710 in Kildare, Ireland, and its association with Mary Leadbeater and other Quakers. Mark Reinberger and Elizabeth McLean, The Philadelphia Country House: Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), note the influence of Quaker values on some houses. Conor Lucey, “Owen Biddle and Philadelphia’s Real Estate Market, 1798–1806,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 1 (March 2016): 25–47, includes consideration of Quakerism on Biddle’s career. Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), contains a chapter on “Yokemates: Female Quaker Companionship in the British Atlantic World.” Anna Vaughan Kett, “Quaker Women and Anti-Slavery Activism: Eleanor Clark and the Free Labour Cotton Depot in Street,” Quaker Studies 19, no. 1 (September 2014): 137–156, explores the activities of British Quaker Eleanor Clark, who ran a shop selling “free produce” cottons, and how that illuminates Quaker women’s anti-slavery activity. Three studies...