Quaker History

For more than a century, William C. Braithwaite's history of Quakerism—The Beginnings of Quakerism (Macmillan, 1912) and The Second Period of Quakerism (Macmillan, 1919)—along with Rufus Jones's Quakerism in the American Colonies (Macmillan, 1911), has cast a long shadow over scholarship on the Religious Society of Friends. The works gained canonical status; their interpretations often persisted, even as additional archival work yielded anomalous new findings. Without diminishing the importance of these iconic texts, scholars are deeply indebted to Penn State Press for its New History of Quakerism series: Rosemary Moore's The [End Page 91] Light in their Consciences (2000); The Quakers 1656–1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community, edited by Richard C. Allen and Moore (2018); and now this volume, spanning from 1690 to 1830. It is, as editor Robynne Rogers Healey admits in a bit of understatement, "a generous periodization" (3). It is also expansive one: Moore's book covered two decades; Allen and Moore's, seven; this volume, thirteen.

A generous periodization, to be sure, but a defensible one. "During the long eighteenth century," Healey writes in her introduction, "Quakers articulated many of the characteristics associated with Quakerism today" (1). Opening the volume in 1690 puts Quakerism's formative period of persecution in the rear-view mirror, and many of the essays grapple with the effects of the Religious Society of Friends' maturation on its role in the wider world. The book's chapters guide the reader through this long eighteenth century, which saw radical transformations in both Quakerism and the broader Atlantic world. In 1690, George Fox was still alive, the Toleration Act had been in effect for just a year, and Quaker Pennsylvania was in its first decade. In 1830, the United States had entered its second half-century, and the aftershocks of the Hicksite Schism still reverberated. Healey opens the volume with a concise, synthetic overview of the period, highlighting not only developments in Quakerism itself but also the way that scholars have turned their attention anew to its relationship with gender, race, peace, and commerce.

The essays in the volume's first section explore some of the distinctive aspects of the Quaker tradition, beginning with Erica Canela and Healey's fascinating analysis of nearly 200 memorial testimonies recounting the lives, deaths, and faith journeys of Friends from a variety of backgrounds. They view such memorials as helping to craft a Quaker identity and warn young Friends away from the temptations of the world, fruitfully describing them as literary forms, "spiritual biographies through which yearly meetings could highlight the lives of those they considered exemplars of the faith" (36). Elizabeth Cazden argues that theological embraces of equality did not lead, for most Quakers, to broader egalitarian commitments. In the family, in the meeting, in the community, even (to the horror of later Quakers, to be sure) between masters and slaves: "For eighteenth-century Friends, living a faithful life meant living within an ordered and hierarchical household and social fabric. … With the … exception of [women in ministry] little in Quaker rhetoric or a century of Quaker practice challenged that assumption" (59-60).

Quaker discipline predated the long eighteenth century, but the end [End Page 92] of persecution after 1690 raised new questions about the maintenance of Quaker identity in a rapidly developing Atlantic environment. Andrew Fincham provides an illuminating comparison of books of discipline produced by London and Pennsylvania/New Jersey Yearly Meetings. Overall, Fincham argues, the story of Quakerism's internal development is one of increasing centralization in pursuit of "purity": "the transatlantic leadership concluded that the interests of the Society demanded the imposition of a more homogenous…set of rules" (83). Such a move involved exercising control over local practices worked out by local meetings, often on an ad hoc basis, far from the watchful eyes of London or Philadelphia elites. Even Quaker worship—specifically, its relationship with traditions of...