Transatlantic Quaker Research Articles

Reconsidering the Place of Women in Transatlantic Quaker Studies

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...

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.

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution. By Sarah Crabtree . American Beginning, 1500–1900. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. vii + 276 pp. $45.00 cloth; $10.00 e-book.

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution. By Sarah Crabtree . American Beginning, 1500–1900. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. vii + 276 pp. 10.00 e-book. - Volume 86 Issue 1

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution by Sarah Crabtree

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution by Sarah Crabtree

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution by Sarah Crabtree

<i>Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution</i> by Sarah Crabtree

Sarah Crabtree. Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution .

In Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution, Sarah Crabtree calls on historians to integrate the Society of Friends into “mainstream historical literature” to highlight “the inherent tension” (218) between religious belief and nationalism between 1750 and 1830. Quaker historians—most notably Frederick B. Tolles—have long recognized the transatlantic nature of the Society in the eighteenth century, but Crabtree makes transnationalism the primary frame through which to understand Quakers before 1830. Her perspective offers some valuable insights about the relationship between religion and nationalism before 1815, but it also leads her to make less credible claims about the sources of the schisms that plagued American Friends after 1820. After 1750, Crabtree argues, Quakers, guided by their traveling ministers and influential elders (Public Friends), forged a transnational “holy nation” that transcended the geographic boundaries of rising nation-states. Embracing their cosmopolitan community, they rejected mounting patriotic appeals and the military demands of citizenship. Crabtree emphasizes the theological roots of Friends’ identity as a chosen people who believed themselves subject to divine authority and responsible for criticizing political leaders and non-Quakers who lacked righteousness. But their posture, she emphasizes, had political consequences. In an era of war between empires and nation-states, pacifist Friends faced persecution and suspicion from political leaders and fellow citizens who viewed their cosmopolitan community as a threat to a cohesive and united nation. Still, Crabtree notes, Friends survived the period with their community largely intact. After 1770, Friends embraced benevolence to contribute to the societies in which they lived, seeking to gain the acceptance of their fellow citizens by improving the moral and physical welfare of all. In the process, they forged alliances with non-Quaker reformers and their transatlantic networks provided the infrastructure and much of the wealth that undergirded the reform movements of the era. Friends also established sectarian schools—“walled gardens”—where their children enjoyed a “guarded” Quaker education and learned the skills and confidence to pursue reform in the wider world. But if Friends’ transnational holy nation survived the stresses of war and persecution, it disintegrated in the face of peace after 1815. By the late 1820s, American Friends had divided into Hicksite and Orthodox factions, the result, Crabtree argues, of “a changing definition of citizenship, the growing power of the state, and an increasing pressure to adopt a nationalist identity” (206).

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution

Holy nation: the transatlantic Quaker ministry in an age of revolution

Holy nation: the transatlantic Quaker ministry in an age of revolution

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution by Sarah Crabtree, and: London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early Modern Community by Jordan Landes

Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution by Sarah Crabtree, and: London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early Modern Community by Jordan Landes

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750, edited by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) includes a chapter by Genelle C. Gertz, “Quaker Mysticism as the Return of the Medieval Repressed: English Women Prophets Before and After the Reformation.” Kristianna Polder, Matrimony in the True Church: the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Marriage Approbation Discipline (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015) examines marriage among English Friends, with particular attention to the marriage of George Fox and Margaret Fell. Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) includes a chapter, “Female Prophecy, Election, and the Transatlantic Quaker Community” and other references to Quakers. Other studies of Quaker religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include: Jonathan Warren, “‘Out of Whose Hive the Quakers Swarm’d’: Polemics and the Justification of Infant Baptism in the Early Restoration,” Perichoresis, 13:1 (June 2015) 97–113; Carol Dale Spencer, “James Nayler and Jacob Boehme’s The Way to Christ,” Quaker Religious Thought, No. 125 (Oct. 2015), 43–56; Jon R. Kershner, “Mysticism and Revelation in John Woolman’s Theology,” Quaker Religious Thought, No. 125 (Oct. 2015), 34–42; and Judith Roads, The Distinctiveness of Quaker Prose, 1650–1699: a Corpus-Based Enquiry (Thesis (Ph.D.), University of Birmingham, 2015). Works on early Quakerism with an American context include: Natalie Spar, “The Politics of the Pure Language in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism: Speech, Silence, and the Founding of Pennsylvania,” Early American Studies 13.3 (Summer 2015), 692–713; Andrew R. Murphy, “The Emergence of William Penn, 1668–1671,” Journal of Church & State, 57:2 (Spring 2015), 333–359; and Heather E. Barry, “Naked Quakers Who Were Not So Naked: Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 43.2 (Summer 2015) 116–135. Two recent studies examine the meaning of travel among seventeenth and eighteenth century Friends. Hillary Hinds, “Going Nowhere: the Stranger and the Pilgrim in the Journal of George Fox,” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 84–102, looks at the place of the journey, the rhetoric of movement and the figure of the stranger in the writings and behavior of early Friends. Jon R. Kershner, “‘A More Lively Feeling’: the Correspondence and Integration of Mystical and [End Page 70] Spatial Dynamics in John Woolman’s Travels,” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 103–116, examines the impact of his travels on his social and religious convictions. Tony Seaton, “Travel and Touring in England by Elite Quaker, Industrial Families in The Long Nineteenth Century: the Journeys of Mary-Anne Schimmelpenninck (née Galton) of Birmingham (1778–1856),” Quaker Studies 20:1 (Sept. 2015), 117–144, considers the role of tourism in promoting connections among British Quakers in the nineteenth century. A related work is by Jordan Landes, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: the Creation of an Early Modern Community (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [UK]: New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Two studies examine material culture among American Quakers: Michael Lawrence Young, The Style of Quaker Consumption in British Colonial New Jersey: the Link Between Religious Beliefs and Values and the Archaeological Record of the Society of Friends (Thesis (Ph.D.), School of Archaeology and Ancient History, 2015); and Neil Larson, “The Architecture of Quaker Meeting Houses in Dutchess County,” Hudson River Valley Review 31.2 (Spring 2015), 62–87. Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808, edited with an introduction by Maurice Jackson and Susan Kozel (Abingdon, Oxon. [UK]; New York: Routledge, 2015) contains a wealth of chapters by leading scholars: Gary B. Nash, “Warner Mifflin (1745–98): The Remarkable Life of an Unflinching Abolitionist”; Geoffrey Plank, “Sarah Woolman and the Anti-Slavery Family”; Julie Winch, “Friends, Family and Freedom in Colonial Philadelphia: A Black Slave-Owner Settles Her Accounts”; Maurice Jackson, ‘What Shall Be Done with the Negroes?’: Anthony Benezet’s Legacy: Then and Now”; Richard C. Allen, “Samuel Meredith (1741–1817): American Patriot and Welsh Philanthropist”; Jon R. Kershner, “‘Come Out of Babylon, My People’: John Wool-man’s (1720–72) Anti-Slavery Theology and the Transatlantic Economy”; Julie L...

‘I am Getting a Considerable of a Canadian they Tell Me’: Connected Understandings in the Nineteenth-Century Quaker Atlantic *

In July 1821 William and Mary Mullet and their eleven children emigrated from the county of Somerset, England to the colony of Upper Canada, British North America. The failure of William’s tannery in the depression that followed the Napoleonic wars led Friends and extended family to raise funds to send the family to Upper Canada where it was hoped that they would prosper. The Mullets settled in the Quaker community of Adolphustown and married into the established Quaker families in the area. About the same time, another branch of the family emigrated from England to Maryland, United States. The family’s correspondence with their English and American relatives along with other personal papers provide a unique window through which to view the experience of migration and British-Quaker identity in the context of the rapidly changing transatlantic Quaker community of the early nineteenth century. In this era of tremendous change, transatlantic identities were reclassified within specific nation-building narratives. As much as these English Friends were shaped by the world they encountered, they influenced the communities in which they settled, helping to create a unique British-Canadian Quaker identity that was similar to, yet distinct from, both its British and American counterparts.

“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution

“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution

Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture (review)

Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture. By Carla Gerona. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pp. x, 290. Cloth, $35.00.)There is something deeply private about dreams, and while they have been used for years by psychologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars map the mystic terrains of mind and culture, have remained peculiarly passive, elusive, and resistant historical analysis. a fascinating new book, Carla Gerona seeks rectify this situation, inverting the usual approach dream analysis by examining the social and political dimensions of early modern night journeys and their importance in actively shaping the culture of American Quakerism. Gerona's chief insight is this: are not only models of culture, they are models for it. Rather than understanding as simple (or complex) reflections of internal psychological states, she convincingly demonstrates that in Quakerism, as least, were a collective endeavor (12).Building upon the insights of Phyllis Mack, Mechal Sobel, and Susan Juster, Gerona offers a trenchant analysis of the evolution of Quaker from revolutionary England postrevolutionary America, illuminating the dynamic tension between the implications of direct revelation and the social demands of group membership-or less subtly, between individual agency and social control. The Society of Friends, she notes (in familiar fashion), emerged from a revolutionary milieu in which a belief in the prophetic potential of was ubiquitous, and Friends exploited this potential its fullest, leveling a critique against the state and established church. More than any of their sectarian peers, Quakers developed a uniquely intense practice of recording and circulating their prophetic within their meetings and beyond, each minister sharing in the discussion and interpretation, each dreamer and each auditor imparting his or her own shades of meaning, dialectically, collectively shaping a common Quaker identity in the process.Favoring the historical Weber over the ahistorical Freud, Gerona demonstrates that despite the egalitarian ethos of early Quakerism, not all interpreters were created equal. Following the Restoration, weighty Friends pioneered ways of doing dreamwork that controlled the sect's most radical elements, shifting the interpretive focus of dreaming from church and state onto individuals and the Society (50). Particularly among women, became moralistic, increasingly concerned the regulation of behavior and self (110). Particularly in America, ministers seized control of dreams, encouraging those that instilled a sense of internal restraint and discipline in a widely scattered flock.It is here, when examining the American experience, that Gerona's book is simultaneously at its most provocative and most in need of greater nuance. Her otherwise persuasive narrative is at times held back by a suite of terms that defy easy characterization-empire, radicalism, and privacy among them. America, she argues, became maps for an imaginary (and sometimes tangible) New World, enabling Quakers to structure experiences diverse peoples, especially Native Americans and Africans and develop the cultural characteristics now regarded as peculiar Friends. In short, she argues, Quakers turned dreams into mental maps that guided their expansionist movements, sometimes literally, enabling them deal creatively the new multicultural world into which they had entered, and put a unique stamp on British imperialism (71-72, 129).Yet the unique imperial role Gerona claims for Quakers requires additional attention. The assertion that Quakers were complicit in imperial expansion, pressing forward, as she writes, with much blood and at the expense of indigenous peoples, Africans, and less fortunate Europeans, seems both too obvious and too simple, and Gerona never adequately plumbs what she admits is an ambiguous relationship between Quakers and the state (5, 82). …

Building, Sustaining, and Reforming Quaker Community in Upper Canada: Informal Education and the Yonge Street Women Friends

Building, Sustaining, and Reforming Quaker Community in Upper Canada: Informal Education and the Yonge Street Women Friends Robynne Rogers Healey* In the spring of 1801 two groups of Quaker immigrants—one from Vermont, the other from Pennsylvania—arrived in Upper Canada1 to begin a settlement on Yonge Street, the North-South arterial road that connected the provincial capital of York (later Toronto) on Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe. There these Friendsjoined forces to create a thriving faith communityinthebackwoods ofUpperCanada. TheYonge Streetsettlement,which quickly grew to be the largest community ofFriends in Upper Canada, was an extension of the eighteenth-century Quaker retreat from mainstream society. 2 Those who settled in the area could live out the tenets oftheir faith relatively free from the laws ofthe larger society with which their testimonies often disagreed. Through the use of kinship, marriage, socialisation, and informal education this community became strong enough to withstand a number ofchallenges to its integrity. Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, Yonge Street Friends had become integrated into mainstream Canadian society.3 The movement away from exclusivity and back into mainstream society in the nineteenth century did not result in a loss ofthe faith even though it was partially due to the fracturing of the community through schisms. Althoughthe faithbecame less sectarian amongUpperCanadian Friends, its centraltenets—peace, equality, andsimplicity—remained. Thiswas largely the result ofQuakerwomen who laboured in the Society's fields to keep the faith alive from generation to generation. Ironically, these same women were integral in the fragmentation ofthe very community that gave life to their faith. Not only were they active sustainers, they were active reformers as well. Quaker women's participation in building, maintaining, and reforming their faith community was viewed as both a right and a responsibility. As such, they were at the centre ofthe issues that defined the Society ofFriends. In the case of the Yonge Street Friends, this activity was expressed most clearly in women's participation in informal education, socialisation in the business meeting, and the schisms that tore apart the community. This article examines one of these areas—informal education. It was through informal education that women were able to nurture and sustain their faith, even as they worked alongside men to reform it. In doing so, they created a legacy of spiritual equality and activism that had a great impact on the * Robynne Rogers Healey is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada. Quaker History societies in which they lived. The socialisation ofwomen inthe Society ofFriends setthe stage fortheir larger involvement in the nineteenth-century reform movements oftemperance , abolition, education, and suffrage.4 Although a discussion of these movements is beyond the scope of this article, it is the association of activism and organised religion that has dominated works in Canadian women's history which incorporate an analysis ofreligion or faith.5 Early work in this field was particularly interested in how the role of women in evangelical churches served as the basis for women's increased involvement in the public sphere and the expansion of their role in Canadian society.6 Organised religion is an understandable focus in the study of nineteenth-century women since it was generally regarded as one ofthe few legitimate areas of the public sphere in which women could demonstrate their superior moral virtue.7 These studies generally conclude that the lessons women learned through their work in philanthropic and missionary societieswere carriedinto social andpoliticalreformmovements. However, it is my contention that the social activism ofQuaker women was based on far more than learning how to run business meetings and work in cooperative church activity. It was based on the acceptance of spiritual equality andthe expectation thatFriends, male and female, were responsible forreforming theworld aroundthem inkeepingwiththe tenets oftheir faith. Unlike women in the major Protestant denominations who used church activity as "their first tentative step outside the domestic sphere,"8 Quaker womenwere socialised from infancyto move much more freelybetween the gendered spaces ofpublic and private. The Yonge Street Friends Community: An Overview The history ofYonge Street Friends9 is tied closely to the larger story of the transatlantic Quaker community. Friends who immigrated to Upper Canada saw themselves as members of...

Quaker Books in Colonial Pennsylvania

Quaker Books in Colonial Pennsylvania J. William Frost* In 1690 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting requested six copies of every book printed by English Friends. In 1702 Philadelphia and London agreed to send each other copies of each book defending or criticizing Friends.1 English and American Friends, if these policies had been consistently followed, would have enjoyed an important source of information about each other in addition to having a ready reply for any controversy on either side of the Atlantic. But after the theological disputes involving George Keith, the Church of England, and other dissenters quieted, neither American nor English Friends consistently shipped all publications to each other. Historians should not now, therefore, assume that Philadelphia Friends read or were even aware of most of the books printed by English Quakers. And if English Quakers relied on books published in America for information on events here, they would have learned little about their colonial cousins—particularly in the period before 1750. This article contains an analysis of the Quaker books and tracts produced and read in colonial Pennsylvania and West Jersey. It contains a description of the Quaker books printed in Philadelphia, a discussion of why there were so few, and a comparison of American and English publications. Finally, it seeks to determine the availability of Quaker titles in the Delaware River valley by looking at the contents of meeting libraries and library companies. The absence of certain kinds of information available for other regions requires an indirect approach. For example, a focus upon books printed and in libraries is necessary because it is not possible to determine private holdings of books. Inventories of estates occasionally value a parcel of books but rarely list titles except for folios or the family Bible.2 In spite of the indirect evidence, an assessment of the availability of Quaker books in early Pennsylvania-West Jersey is important as an indicator of the existence of a unified transatlantic Quaker culture and as an index to the intellectual acuity in religious subjects of the generality of Friends. Recent research on New England Puritanism illustrates what historians seek to learn from knowledge of publications and reading habits.3 In colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut ministers published numerous sermons, devotional readings, and theological inquiries. Scholars of New England Puritanism have long debated the degree to which the common people knew, understood, and cared about the theological controversies. They have sought to delineate the New England mind by reading unpublished letters, analyzing diaries, quan- 2 Quaker History tifying literacy rates for males and females, and determining numbers of schools, newspapers, and publishers. In spite of copious research, there has been no agreement on the theological acuity of lay church members or when so-called secular subjects became primary. Quaker scholars have not engaged in debates over degrees of theological sophistication among ministers and laity because the subject did not seem relevant. Unlike New England Puritans, Friends did not require the entire populace to attend worship. The gifts of their ministers came from the spirit, not from a Harvard, Yale, or Cambridge degree. Speaking in meeting should not result in a sermon filled with theological conundrum, clothed in rhetorical finery, and published in a local vanity press. Rather, Quakers sought in meeting and in daily life an experience of the inward light of Christ, not a blend of piety and rational disquisition on the nature oftrue virtue. Quakerism produced few scholars but required a high degree of knowledge of the tenets of the faith and procedures of the meeting as well as commitment by members to keep operating. Historians have not ignored the religious books of Friends. Thomas Woody, in studies of early Quaker education in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, compiled a list of the volumes most frequently listed in the records of seventeen monthly meetings and Philadelphia." In 1948 Frederick Tolles demonstrated the culture of the Philadelphia merchants in Meeting House and Counting House.5 Using marriage certificates as a base, I calculated in 1973 that in spite of a shortage of schools, Middle Colony Quakers had achieved virtually universal literacy by the 1720s.6 Eighteenth-century Philadelphia became a cosmopolitan city symbolized by the erudition of James Logan...