The Emergence of Quaker Writing

Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England

T. Corns, D. Loewenstein, T. Corns, D. Loewenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317960683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Among the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word to promote their prophetic visions?and unorthodox beliefs.This collection of new essays by literary scholars and historians looks at the diversity of seventeenth-century Quaker writing, examining its rhetoric, its polemical strategies, its purposeful use of the print medium, and the heroism and vehemence of its world vision.

Patterns of Quaker Authorship, 1652–1656¹

KATE PETERS

The relationship between Quakers and the written word forms a crucial dynamic for historians of the Quaker movement. That the early Quakers produced such a vast array of written records has in itself afforded them an unrivalled status among the radical religious groups of the 1650s; and their subsequent longevity as the Society of Friends has in turn conferred an even greater authority on the Quakers’ early records as a prelude in the developing denominational tradition. This is notably the case in the study of one category of Quaker records: their published writings. The tracts published by Quakers in the 1650s have been presented as “early Quaker writings” which in turn are seen as part of the development of a peculiar “Quaker style.”² Furthermore, because early published Quaker tracts are easily accessible and identifiable, other areas of scholarship have also attended to the phenomenon of “Quaker” writings. Quaker tracts have recently been used as case studies for broader discussions of radical religious writing; or of the history of women’s writing.³ Richard Bauman made use of Quaker tracts to demonstrate that the study of the ethnography of speaking need not be limited to present-day societies, but could be applied to a study of the importance of speaking and silence among the early Quakers.⁴

Among historians of the Quakers, the abundance of published Quaker writings, and indeed of written records, has not always rested easily with their own analyses of the early Quaker movement. Richard Vann argued that the study of Quaker history is in itself paradoxical because Quaker beliefs “are almost uniquely hostile to history”; and yet the ahistorical Quaker emphasis on immediate personal experience caused the abundance of written spiritual autobiography on which much early Quaker history is based.⁵ Hugh Barbour, in his study of early Quaker writings, felt obliged to comment that the Quaker movement “has always been more powerful than its books”; and indeed that before 1700 Quaker writing represented no “canon” but was a jumble of rather anarchic individual outpourings. “All early Quaker writing,” Barbour claims rather rashly, “reflected personal involvement in a cosmic struggle.”⁶

The identification of Quaker writings with an individual’s spiritual experience is a common assumption which pervades most discussion of the early Quaker tracts. Richard Vann wrongly equated early Quaker writing with spiritual autobiography. Phyllis Mack’s more subtle account of Quaker women similarly concluded their writings were primarily spiritual outpourings: the only way, Mack suggests, that Quaker women were able to enter into the public sphere of publishing was through an intense spiritual experience which allowed them to transcend boundaries of gender, and to write and prophesy uninhibited.⁷

Yet although it is undoubtedly true that individual religious experiences informed much early Quaker writing, as it informed all aspects of Quaker belief and practice, it is unsatisfactory to suggest that Quakers wrote purely in order to express an intense personal religious experience. One of the problems is that of the categorization of Quaker writing. “Early Quaker writing” is often assumed to cover the first two generations of Quakers, from the 1650s to the end of the seventeenth century. This inevitably includes the autobiographies and testimonies written in the later seventeenth century with the intention of documenting and celebrating the lives of the first Quaker pioneers. The hazards of such retrospective accounts are well rehearsed by political historians of the English Revolution: nevertheless, the proliferation of testimonial writing, with its sometimes explicit intention of modifying early Quaker history, has certainly emphasized the role of religious testimony in Quaker writing.⁸ This is even more true when we add the fact that most of the so-called political writings of the early Quaker leaders of the 1650s are often studied in the form of their collected works, often highly selected and edited, and with testimonial accounts written by their colleagues. Thus chronological categorization of Quaker writing tends to conflate periods of Quaker history which more usually are seen as distinct by political or religious historians of the Quaker movement.

A different attempt at the categorization of Quaker writing is provided in the work of Hugh Barbour and David Runyon in the appendix to Barbour and Roberts’ Early Quaker Writings. In their classification of Quaker writings for each year between 1650 (sic) and 1699, Barbour and Runyon identified nineteen different “types” of Quaker writings, ranging from proclamations or prophecy, to autobiographical tracts, religious disputes and accounts of sufferings. Although this may have been a useful exercise, the sheer number of categories is sometimes unnecessarily baffling.⁹ More serious than this, however, is the fact that in their categorization, Runyon and Barbour apparently attribute only one category to each work, assuming that each Quaker work could only fulfil one specific religious or literary purpose. Yet what is clear from a study of the first years of Quaker tracts is that many of them served a whole range of purposes, eliding accounts of sufferings with accounts of intense spiritual experience and crushing political denunciation of the English governments and legal system.¹⁰ Rather than categorizing Quaker writing on the basis of a reading of the content of any one particular tract, this paper will argue that a better understanding of the nature of the Quaker writings of the 1650s will be gained if we look at who were the authors, and what were the patterns of their publications.

Between the years 1652 and 1656, a little over one hundred Quaker authors contributed to the publication of about 300 tracts.¹¹ More than three-quarters of these authors wrote fewer than three works: the bulk of Quaker publishing was undertaken by a handful of men (and two women).¹² Although the proliferation of Quaker publications in the mid-seventeenth century is certainly remarkable, it should be remembered that there were by 1660 an estimated 40,000 Quakers nation-wide; and that they continued to grow in number until the 1680s.¹³ Individual religious experience did not move all of them to leave a written record of it. Writing was not an inherent part of being a Quaker.

This paper will argue that any study of the “emergence of Quaker writing” should take into account the historical circumstances which gave rise to the phenomenon of Quaker publishing. The body of Quaker tracts, which are so easily identified as a category for discussion by scholars, are often taken to represent generically the significance and development of Quaker ideas. Little attention is paid to the role which Quaker publications played within the wider movement, and indeed their part in publicizing the incipient movement to the outside world. Patterns of Quaker authorship show that Quaker publications were produced by an effective leadership, intent on consolidating a potentially disparate movement and on establishing a sense of cohesion and unity among its members. That scholars tend to view “Quaker writings” as a straightforward reflection of Quaker ideas is a product of the Quaker movement’s own impulse to establish itself as a recognizable phenomenon. Quaker tracts in the 1650s asserted their “Quaker” identity over the identity of the author, proclaiming that they were written “by one in scorn called a Quaker,” whose author was known merely “to the world” by his or her proper name. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “Quaker” status of these early tracts was compounded by the decision of an increasingly hierarchical and formalized Quaker church to collect and keep copies of all their publications, and to reissue collected editions of the works by the most prolific of the Quaker authors.¹⁴ This collective status is in contrast to the publications of other religious groups of the 1650s. Baptist publications are more frequently discussed as the work of individual authors.¹⁵ In the recent vituperative debate on the Ranters, where so much rested on the authors of a few published tracts, one point which remained unexplored was the status of those publications within the wider context of the Ranter “milieu.”¹⁶ Because of the controversial nature of radical religious writing and printing in the mid-seventeenth century, scholarship focusses very largely on the content and language of the publications. Yet one of most important features which has emerged from recent exchanges between historians, literary scholars and cultural theorists is that establishing the context of historical texts is fundamental to their significance.¹⁷ The unique and fulsome records of their own movement left by the Quakers, in the form of vast collections of manuscript letters, provide ample opportunity to trace the circumstances behind the production of early Quaker publications.¹⁸ This paper will argue that the authors of Quaker tracts were exclusively the “ministers” of the early Quaker movement: men and women with the power to speak, preach, and carry their ideas across the country. Their writing was an integral part of their ministry: as the movement grew in scope and size after 1652, so writing and printing developed as a specific tool of an increasingly mobile and vocal Quaker leadership.

The notion of a “Quaker ministry” runs contrary to many basic conceptions surrounding the early Quaker movement. The Quakers were and are famous for their denunciation of the trained ministers of the Church of England, deriding them as “hireling priests” who made a “trade in other men’s words” and relied on their worldly learning to command religious authority. Religious sociologists identify as a constant characteristic of Quakerism that formal ministry has no part to play in its worship.¹⁹ Despite this, it is clear that there was within the early Quaker movement a body of men and women acting as an effective leadership, and who referred to themselves as the “Ministry.”²⁰ Known within the denominational tradition as the First Publishers of Truth, these “ministers” were itinerant preachers, numbering between seventy and 240, who traveled the country and were initially responsible for the spread of Quaker ideas. It is precisely these “ministers” who are best known within the early history of the Quaker movement: figures like George Fox, James Nayler, Edward Burrough and William Dewsbery. In addition to their more famous proselytising, the Quaker ministers also carried out a number of tasks connected with the discipline and organization of the early movement, taking responsibility for the formal “casting out” of the more out-spoken Quaker preachers, disciplining wayward “lay” Quakers, and raising money to support the growing movement. It was also these men and women who oversaw the writing and publication of the vast majority of early Quaker publications. Early Quaker writing was essentially carried out by the early leadership.

In 1974 the ethnographer Richard Bauman identified the “Quaker minister” as enjoying a “particular communicative role,” and suggested that the act of speaking itself defined the early Quaker ministry.²¹ Since no formal structures existed for electing ministers, Bauman argued, it was the process of public speech at a meeting which signaled that the speaker was divinely inspired. Although as an ethnographer of speaking Bauman was concerned with the spoken authority of Quaker ministers, his argument can be extended to manuscript papers and printed tracts. Indeed the Quaker leaders themselves elided the differences, so often highlighted by historians, between their spoken, written or printed declarations: “The Lord speaks to thee by the mouth of his Servants in word and writing,” Edward Burrough had warned the nation in a tract published in 1654, and continued, “I write not as from man,… but as from the eternal and spiritual light…”:

for who Speaks, Writes, or Declares, from the light of God … Speaks, Writes, and Declares not as from man, … but as from God, whose light is spiritual, … and from this light did the Prophets and Ministers of God,… Speak, Write, and Declare,… and from this light … did all the holy men of God Write, and Declare.²²

In addition to the fact that Quaker ministers claimed authority on the grounds of divine inspiration, it is interesting that they specifically linked their leadership with their ability to communicate. In 1662, Edward Burrough explicitly linked the Quaker ministry to written and spoken declaration, in a paper addressed to the London meeting of “men Friends.”²³ In it, Burrough suggested that the local meeting should maintain local worship and discipline, and oversee provision for the poorer members. These social tasks were clearly distinguished from the role of the ministry, which, Burrough argued, consisted in “preaching ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Emergence of Quaker Writing
• Patterns of Quaker Authorship, 1652–56
• The War of the Lamb: George Fox and the Apocalyptic Discourse of Revolutionary Quakerism
• Margaret Fell Fox and Feminist Literary History: A “Mother in Israel” Calls to the Jews
• Hidden Things Brought to Light: Enthusiasm and Quaker Discourse
• From Seeker to Finder: The Singular Experiences of Mary Penington
• Handmaids of the Lord and Mothers in Israel: Early Vindications of Quaker Women’s Prophecy
• “No Man’s Copy”: The Critical Problem of Fox’s Journal
• The Politic and the Polite in Quaker Prose: The Case of William Penn
• Joseph Besse and the Quaker Culture of Suffering
• Early Quakerism: A Historian’s Afterword
• Notes on Contributors