George Fox and Early Quaker Culture 9781847794598

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George Fox and early Quaker culture

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George Fox and early Quaker culture Hilary Hinds

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Hilary Hinds 2011 The right of Hilary Hinds to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8157 6 hardback First published 2011 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Bembo by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

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In memory of Peter Widdowson (1942–2009), the very best of colleagues

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Contents

Acknowledgements A note on references to Fox’s Journal Introduction: seamless subjects

viii x 1

1

‘As the Light appeared, all appeared’: the Quaker culture of convincement 2 ‘Let your lives preach’: the embodied rhetoric of the early Quakers 3 ‘And the Lord’s power was over all’: anxiety, confidence and masculinity in Fox’s Journal 4 A technology of presence: genre and temporality in Fox’s Journal 5 ‘Moved of the Lord’: the contingent itinerancy of early Friends 6 The limits of the light: silence and slavery in Quaker narratives of journeys to America and Barbados

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Conclusion: singularity and doubleness

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Notes References Index

155 196 211

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13 33 56 82 100

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Acknowledgements

My greatest debt of gratitude is to the previous and present generations of Quaker scholars and scholars of Quakerism whose work has proved so stimulating to my own. Without the careful rigour and analytical perspicacity of their scholarship, my own work would be immeasurably the poorer. I am grateful to Lancaster University for allowing me a period of sabbatical leave in 2008, and to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Research Fellowship in 2009–10. The book would have been still longer in the making without them. Thanks too to the staff of Lancaster University Library, and particularly those in the Interlending and Document Supply section, who have consistently responded to my requests quickly and efficiently. Earlier versions of some of these chapters have previously been published elsewhere, and I am grateful for permission to republish here. Parts of Chapter 2 were published in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007); an earlier draft of Chapter 3 was published in ELH, and versions of Chapters 4 and 6 appeared in Quaker Studies. The article which was revised to become Chapter 4 was originally co-authored with Alison Findlay, and I am very grateful for her agreement that I include it here. The following people have helped me variously by encouraging me to undertake this work, chasing up elusive references, commenting on early drafts of chapters or refereeing applications for research leave, and I am grateful to them all for undertaking this largely invisible labour: Elspeth Graham, Josef Keith, Philip Martin, Lynne Pearce, Althea Stewart, Helen Wilcox and Sue Wiseman. Ellen Ross, at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, gave me an exceptionally warm and generous welcome when I presented a paper there based on aspects of this work in April 2009. Thanks to my anonymous readers at Manchester University Press for their helpful and incisive comments on the book proposal, and to all the staff at the Press who had a hand in seeing the book into print.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Particular thanks go to my colleagues on the Lancaster Quaker Project: Alison Findlay, Meg Twycross and Pamela King. While that project has its own focus, impetus and trajectory, there has also been cross-fertilisation between the two areas of work, and I have benefited enormously from discussions we have had. I am grateful to them all for ideas exchanged, and excursions made, over the years, but thanks go in particular to Alison for reading and commenting so generously, enthusiastically and insightfully on a draft of the book. More generally, I would like to thank the three members of my ‘care of the self ’ team for all their variously restorative contributions to the closing months of the project; they made all the difference. But final and most heartfelt thanks go to Jackie Stacey, who supported and encouraged me in the completion of this book to a greater extent than I could have dared to hope for, and to Anna Stacey, who weathered the ups and downs of the process with cheerful equanimity. I trust they know just how grateful I am.

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A note on references to Fox’s Journal

This book draws extensively for the development of its argument on George Fox’s Journal, a document whose complex history and identity is reflected in the vastly differing character of the editions published over the last century. Deciding which edition to use as the main reference point in the book presented a difficult choice, contingent as it was on a number of different issues: the kinds of readerships I hoped to address; the differing accessibility of the principal editions; and the materials included in or omitted from each of those editions. To clarify the complexity of the choice and explain the decision that I reached, I include the following detailed note on the various available editions. Three new scholarly editions of Fox’s Journal have been published over the past hundred years, each very different from the others. The first was Norman Penney’s two-volume verbatim et literatim edition of the so-called Spence Manuscript, which is the closest we have to a manuscript source for Fox’s Journal.1 Penney’s edition, published in 1911, has the advantage of being the most comprehensive edition, and consequently the one that best represents the textual and compositional complexity of the Journal. It reproduces the spelling and punctuation of the manuscript, and includes all the earlier letters and papers interspersed in the narrative sections. It has the disadvantage, however, of being a rare and relatively inaccessible edition: it is out of print, to be found for the most part only in major libraries, and has the added obstacles of unfamiliar and at times erratic spelling and punctuation that follow conventions radically different from our own. The second candidate was John Nickalls’s 1952 edition, a modern spelling version of Fox’s Journal, and based on the Spence Manuscript as printed in Penney’s edition. It is without question a readable and accessible as well as a scholarly text, and it remains the most frequently cited recent edition in critical and historical studies of Fox. However, it is also a relatively heavily edited text. Not only has the spelling been modernised, so too have the grammar and

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A NOTE ON REFERENCES

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punctuation. It omits or abbreviates many of the documents that intersperse the retrospective narrative section in the Spence Manuscript. Moreover, it incorporates sections from other texts: Fox’s earlier Short Journal of the mid1660s; the first edition of the Journal, edited by Thomas Ellwood and published in 1694, itself a heavily edited version of the manuscript sources, and other notebooks and letters, both by Fox and, on occasion, by others. By conflating these different sources into a single composite account, it presents as comprehensive a first-person picture of the life of Fox as possible. It does so, however, by presenting the Journal in a more regular and coherent form than even a quick glance at Penney’s 1911 edition would show it to be. The third possible version, Nigel Smith’s 1998 edition, takes yet a different course. It is based on the Spence Manuscript, and does not supplement it with sections from other texts. The spelling has been modernised, but the punctuation and grammar of the original have been retained, thereby allowing readers ready access to the cadences and registers of Fox’s prose. This results in an account that retains the pitch, tone and pace of Fox’s retrospective narrative, dictated by Fox to Thomas Lower in the mid-1670s. However, this edition includes only the narrative portions of the journal; all the interpolated documents, which form such a substantial part of the Spence Manuscript (and even of Nickalls’s edition) are omitted. While this has the advantage of emphasising, as the back-cover copy of this edition puts it, ‘the immediacy and excitement of the original’, it none the less results in a tidier and more coherent sense of the Journal than that found in the Spence Manuscript or in Nickalls’s edition, not least in that it loses the crucial temporal mix of retrospection and contemporaneous commentary inherent in the Spence Manuscript’s combination of the narrative portions with earlier letters and papers. This book not only is intended to be a contribution to the scholarship on Fox but also aims to engage readers interested in the history, rhetoric and practices of early modern spirituality. As this argument relies heavily on evidence from Fox’s Journal, I wanted readers to be able to follow up references to that text in a readily available edition, but one that also retained as far as possible the textual character of the documents dictated by Fox. For that reason, I decided to use Smith’s edition as the main source for citations from the Journal, as it is both accessible and readable, but also scholarly and retentive of linguistic and grammatical features of the Spence Manuscript. Where I cite epistles and papers that form part of the journal as assembled by Fox, but all of which are omitted from Smith’s edition, I refer wherever possible to the next most accessible edition, which is Nickalls’s. Where I refer to epistles and papers omitted from Nickalls’s edition, I cite Penney’s edition of the Spence Manuscript. My solution is not a tidy one, and at times results in all three editions being cited in a single chapter. For this I apologise, but hope that it is clear why I concluded that this was the least worst option. I hope readers will bear with it.

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Introduction: seamless subjects

The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are generally known today as an inclusive and tolerant movement, broadly Christian, committed to working for peace and consensus, socially activist, politically radical and culturally liberal. At the time of their inception in the 1650s, however, their reputation was less benign. Early Friends were seen by more orthodox believers as at best misguided and at worst evil. ‘[B]lasphemous heretical seducers . . . tumultuous, factious, impious and barbarous’, wrote the Anglican minister Francis Higginson in 1653, and, as George Fox, James Nayler and other founding Friends made their journeys through the north of England in the early 1650s, gathering followers and settling meetings as they went, their activities, demeanours and beliefs prompted many such vehement denunciations.1 The Independent minister Thomas Weld likened them to ‘grievous Wolves . . . endeavouring to make havocke of the Flocke’, and the Puritan William Prynne called them ‘the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuites, and Franciscan Popish Fryers’.2 The force, number and detail of these passionate rebuttals from so early in the movement’s history suggests something of the speed at which it was coalescing and gaining new adherents, and of the disturbance caused to more orthodox believers already sensitised by the advent of so many new radical religious groups over the course of the previous decade. Critics of the Quakers were enraged by almost every aspect of Friends’ ways of worshipping, behaving and speaking, flouting as they did many of the rituals of social politeness, as well as more familiar and conventional ways of worshipping. Consequently, Quakers were seen by some as uncooperative and socially inflammatory, by others as blasphemous and diabolically inspired. Friends would not participate in the pleasantries and courtesies of daily life, refusing to greet passers-by with the usual ‘good morrow’, or to show the customary deference to social superiors: George Fox recalled that ‘when the Lord sent me forth into the world, he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low. And

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I was required to “thee” and “thou” all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor . . . neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to anyone’.3 The way Quakers dressed also offended; Prynne objected to ‘[t]heir use of vile and course aray and condemning not only all Pride and Luxury, but lawfull decency in apparell’.4 Quakers worshipped in private houses, in barns and on hillsides rather than in consecrated buildings, because ‘that steeplehouse and that ground on which it stood was no more holier than that mountain’.5 Friends sometimes trembled and shook during their meetings. Higginson complained that many ‘fall into quaking fits . . . as it were in a Swoon’; ‘these Quakings’, he believed, were ‘Diabolical Raptures immediately proceeding from the power of Satan’.6 Quakers interrupted church services, inveighing against the priest; they preached in fairs and marketplaces against ‘their deceitful merchandise, and cheating and cozening; warning all to deal justly’; and they sometimes walked naked through the streets as a sign of the spiritual nakedness of those still dwelling in darkness.7 They seemed deliberately and systematically to provoke the civil and religious authorities: when, for example, James Nayler went into a field to preach to a crowd, and was accused by the priests of breaching a parliamentary ordinance by speaking in public, he replied, ‘This is not a publick place’, at which a priest expostulated, perhaps not unreasonably, ‘Is not this a publick place, the Town-field?’8 Nayler’s insistence on the primacy of a spiritual interpretation of the ‘Town-field’ erases its material reality and conventional meanings. While seventeenth-century English people would have been likely to agree with him that life in God was the ultimate reality, most would have seen this as still to come, in the promise of redemption, and to be attained only at the moment the sinful human frame fell away. To assert as Nayler did that he lived in a world already remade by the living presence and currency of his union with God smacked of wilful arrogance and truculence. Such apparently perverse refusals of the conventional understandings of place, action or accoutrement were, however, as far as Friends were concerned, anything but wilful. As they saw it, in worshipping, speaking and behaving as they did, they were following the leadings of the Lord, complying with the immediate call and command they had received from him. They were simply being obedient to the truth as it had been revealed to them, and living in the faith, or, as Fox put it in one of his epistles, ‘spreading the Truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, the covenant of and peace with God’.9 Truth was to be spread by testifying or preaching – Fox records many occasions when he addressed potential converts for several hours at a time – but it was also to be spread by example. How Friends lived every detail of their lives was to be a model for godly living for all whom they encountered: ‘be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come’, wrote Fox, ‘that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and

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to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone’.10 For Fox, lives spoke. ‘Your carriage and life’ were themselves acts of preaching, intervening and advocating in the great ongoing struggle between light and darkness, and speaking just as surely as did words; both were means of bringing people to the light of Christ. Strikingly, Fox suggested that such an approach to living would lead Friends in the ministry ‘to walk cheerfully over the world’; and indeed, Quaker culture was characterised if not exactly by cheerfulness, then certainly by a signal absence of the anxiety and self-doubt that so frequently tormented many of Fox’s Calvinist contemporaries, whether in the more mainstream inflections of reformed Christianity or in other prominent radical religious groups of the time. There is a boldness and lack of compromise in the textual utterances, and a notable self-confidence and stalwart courage in the behaviour of early Friends, apparently secure in the position from which they promulgated the word of the Lord. The early Quaker discourse under scrutiny in this book is therefore understood as a broad and inclusive category, comprising not only Friends’ words but also their deeds. Their written testimonies, warnings and exhortations are examined, but so too are accounts of the ways that they inhabited and moved through the social and material world. Since, as Fox put it, ‘your carriage and life may preach’ – that is, their demeanour and behaviour were explicitly understood as instruments of conversion or ‘convincement’ – these spoken, written and lived practices together comprised a distinctively Quaker rhetorical complex, whose characteristic idioms, modes of address and conduct together served as a means not only of convincement but also of encouragement, a point of identification for those already convinced, and an excoriation of those who wilfully persisted in their sinful lives in darkness. Moreover, these practices contributed to a distinctive Quaker culture, constituted not so much by Friends’ particular inflections of belief but by their interpretation, articulation and enactment of those beliefs in their daily lives – their habits of speech and writing, their ways of talking to Friends and to non-Friends, their manner of worship (most distinctively, in their trembling or quaking), which set them apart from other believers of the time. While Baptists or Independents might be identified by distinct sets of beliefs and ways of worshipping, Quakers were noticed as much for the ways in which their interpretation of the Christian faith was manifested in conspicuous ways of talking (what Hugh OrmsbyLennon calls ‘speechways’), dressing, greeting and travelling as for what they believed.11 It is the words, habits and practices of early Quaker culture which are examined in this book. It analyses a range of early Quaker writings, both in their own terms and also in relation to, and sometimes explicitly in dialogue with, more prevalent patterns of belief as articulated in contemporary writings from other sectarian writers, and in critical responses to the advent of the Quaker

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movement such as that of Francis Higginson. By scrutinising Friends’ modes of self-presentation, their engagement with others, their ways of making a case, of recording events, of encouraging steadfastness or of castigating opponents, the book explores the hypothesis that the dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine brought about by the turn to the inward light set the pattern for a distinctive and broader cultural practice, whereby that initial and fundamental fusion of categories brought others in its wake. I ask what it was about Quaker belief that resulted in such sharply differentiated customs or patterns of thought, speech and behaviour: why so confident, and why so confrontational? What enabled them to gather followers in such number in the early 1650s, in the teeth of such antipathy from the clergy and civil authorities? What sustained early Friends in their itinerant ministry and in their sufferings? For all their own sense of difference and separateness as the only bearers of truth in a world that had strayed from the right apprehension of the word of God, Quakerism none the less emerged from the flux and ferment of the radical religious and political activity of the mid-seventeenth century, and many of their views were on a continuum with those of many other contemporary religious and political groups. So what was it that set Quakers apart, both in their own eyes, and in the eyes of those who observed, judged, joined, opposed or denounced them? This book suggests that answers to these questions lie in the shaping doctrine of the Quaker movement: the belief in the inward light of divinity, or the indwelling Christ.12 It argues that the distinctive culture of the early Friends emanated quite directly from this single core principle, the sine qua non of the movement. The doctrine of the light within, as articulated by Fox, Nayler and other first-generation Friends, integrated the believer into the divine in an absolutely fundamental way, such that the inward light of Christ was understood quite literally as the animating force of the human subject. ‘The Father and Son are one’, wrote Fox, ‘and we are of his flesh and of his bone’; and as a consequence, believers were partakers, at least potentially, of the saviour’s sinlessness and perfection.13 The implications of the light as an immanent force had to be taken seriously. Its inwardness did not leave intact or unchanged the corporeal human host, but utterly transfigured him or her, materially as well as spiritually, so that the believer was remade by acceding to that indwelling light. The act of turning to the light was, in effect, an act of recognition not only of the divine light that dwelt in everyone but also of its incorporation, such that the human subject thereafter was in unity with that divinity, and necessarily transformed by it. That unifying integration with the divine did not render fallen human believers divine, nor did it render them equal with God, but it did deliver up to them what Fox referred to as ‘that of God’ within.14 The doctrine of the light within thus comprised a blended vision of divine omnipresence, literally inhabiting the material as well as the spiritual world,

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and thereby dissolving any straightforward categorical distinction between the human and the divine, as it also dissolved, in consequence, the boundaries between the corporeal and the spiritual, between fallenness and perfection, and between the sacred and the social. These oppositions, through which early modern religious subjectivity was typically constituted, were reformed or recombined by Friends in such a way that, in their understanding, not only the divine and the human but also the spiritual and the social, the past, the present and the future all merged in a seamless field of godly signification. Tracing the idea of the internalisation of Christ, and the consequent conception of Christ’s promised return as already in place in the bodies and lives of those who turned to the inward light, the book explores the place of this foundational abolition of distinctions, and, flowing from it, the subsequent dissolution of a number of conceptual and categorical boundaries. Each chapter examines a particular dimension of early Quaker activity as an element in the constitution of a distinctive culture among the early Friends, tracking its characteristic contours and consequences through its relation to the doctrine of the indwelling Christ and the seamless subjects of early Quakerism. It begins by analysing the Quaker culture of discernment and unity premised on the doctrine of the indwelling Christ; it then examines Quaker practices of preaching and convincement, through a study of the embodied rhetoric of the early movement; Fox’s often-noted sacred self-confidence, through a close reading of his spiritual development as constituted by his Journal; Quaker notions of temporality, through a study of Fox’s Journal as a retrospective daily record; the spatial relations of public ministry, through a study of Quaker itinerancy; and finally an anomalous but indicative instance of a Quaker refusal of boundary dissolution, through a study of Quaker slave-owning in Barbados. Such phenomena, I shall suggest, are habitually and systematically structured through the erasure of the categorical and absolute distinctions between human and divine, corporeal and spiritual, past, present and future, body and place, and all can be traced back to the foundational categorical erasures enacted by the doctrine of the indwelling Christ. The Quaker scholar J. William Frost suggested that ‘Quaker theology began with, was structured by, and concluded with the inward light of Christ. All of these words were essential’.15 The project of this book is, in effect, to explore, elaborate and exemplify Frost’s assertion, pursuing the rhetorical and practised consequences for early Quaker cultures of this central tenet. The book opens with an exposition of early Quaker understandings of the inward light, its properties and its consequences. Chapter 1 asks how it was that the concept of the indwelling Christ, or light within – in many ways a conventional, familiar and uncontentious Christian trope – set the terms and established the structure both for the scathing Quaker condemnations of their opponents and for the discourse of inclusivity and consensus among Friends.

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It finds an answer to this question in the ways in which the Quaker model of that inward light provided conceptual underpinning for both the ‘spirit of discernment’ and the ‘spirit of unity’ by which Friends judged those whom they encountered. The chapter analyses two defining qualities of the light, as perceived by Friends: its universality, and its immanence. The universality of the light introduced a renewed and transformed sense of individual agency into the soteriological equation, as the human subject turned, was turned, or refused to turn, to that light. This agency was intensified by the insistence on its immanence, an indwelling divine presence that transformed the fallen human subject by emphasising his or her access to ‘that of God within’, thereby erasing any absolute boundary between human subject and divine presence. This erasure served to unsettle the Calvinist binary of the elect and the reprobate, producing a third constituency of human subject: those open to being turned to the light through a process of convincement. Together, this introductory chapter argues, the insistence on the presence of the returned Christ within the believer, and the accompanying restoration of a modified sense of agency to that believer, set the terms of a distinctive spiritual, political and social Quaker culture. Chapter 2 widens the focus to examine how the inward light figured in the ministry of the First Publishers of Truth – in the convincement of new Friends, and in the condemnation of those who hardened their hearts towards the light.16 The chapter suggests that the opprobrium levelled at early Friends was not so much owing to the divergence of the forms and strategies of the rhetoric of Quaker ministry, which had much in common with orthodox preaching practice, but much more to do with the Quaker refusal to set limits to the place, time or manner in which that ministry was carried out. The erasure of the boundary between the sacred and the secular entailed the rejection of the notions of consecrated ground, of the ordination of ministers and of formalised acts of worship, so that Quaker preaching could be performed by any Friend experiencing an immediate call to such work, in any place, and at any time. Quaker rhetoric thus occupied an unbounded field of operation, and drew on a wide repertoire of linguistic and symbolic modes of preaching, since, by definition, the inward light rendered out of bounds nothing that it touched. Turning more directly to the pivotal figure of George Fox himself, Chapter 3 suggests that the foundational dissolution of boundaries between human and divine established in the earlier chapters generated access to a quality in Fox and other early Friends characterised by Thomas Carlyle as a ‘sacred Selfconfidence’. Taking his Journal as the focus, this chapter examines Fox’s own account of his affective transformation from an anxious seeker after truth in a predominantly Calvinist religious context to a confident, assured bearer of that truth in a world still torn between the forces of light and darkness. How,

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the chapter asks, did the inward light structure and direct this shift towards an unshakeable assurance in Fox, and how did it maintain it, in the face of a range of contrary pressures? How does the subjectivity constructed by the Journal negotiate not only the forces of opposition in the wider culture but also the forces of ‘anxious masculinity’ so often found in other kinds of seventeenthcentury self-inscription? The chapter locates this transformation in a relationship of ‘heteronomous agency’ predicated on the movement’s conception of the indwelling Christ; this model of dependent potency, it argues, established a mode of confident subjectivity rarely found in other contemporary radical religious groups. Close analysis of Fox’s Journal is developed further over the next two chapters, which together argue that the form this text takes – a form which has long caused critics to debate whether it should more properly be thought of as a spiritual memoir or as a history of the early movement – is profoundly shaped by particular Quaker formulations of temporality and spatiality. Chapter 4 investigates the Journal’s paradoxical commitment to an insistently chronological structure in the service of a faith that found the dissolution of chronological time inherent in the turn to the inward light. It argues that this can be explained through seeing the Journal itself as, in effect, a ‘technology of presence’, a means of ceaselessly demonstrating and performing the continual and multi-temporal irruption of the inward light. Chapter 5 turns to the Journal’s structuring focus on Fox’s journeys, and raises questions about the movement’s commitment to an itinerant ministry, and the ways in which, in Edward Burrough’s words, ‘The worship of God in itself . . . is a walking with God’.17 While an itinerant Christian proselytising ministry was as old as the journeys of St Paul, there was none the less something unusual about the Quaker commitment to such a practice – unusual in that no other radical religious groups at the time made physical travail such a cornerstone of their modus vivendi, but unusual too in that such restlessness sits strangely with a faith premised on the silent stillness of the meeting for worship. This chapter argues, however, that the itinerancy of Fox and other early Friends, as memorialised in the Journal, becomes itself a means of demonstrating the ceaseless presence of the indwelling Christ; as Fox put it, ‘if you love this light, it will teach you, walking up and down and lying in bed’.18 Just as utterance was generative of silence in the meeting, so movement was generative of the stillness required when waiting on the Lord. And just as Chapter 4 demonstrates how temporal boundaries are erased through the narrative form taken by the Journal, so Chapter 5 suggests that the journeys recorded there erase the boundaries between different early modern conceptions of space. Chapter 6 continues the examination of spatiality in the early movement, but broadens the focus to look at the seventeenth-century Quaker presence in transatlantic English colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Its starting

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point is a puzzling discrepancy between Quaker accounts of visits to Barbados and those to the American mainland: while the latter are detailed, complex and recognisably constructed around the same kinds of oppositions and alliances as are to be found in the accounts of English journeys, the former are short, general and often bland. Why, when the terrain, the social structures and the cultures must have been equally strange to visiting Friends, was there such a disparity of textual engagement? An answer is found in the ambivalent Quaker response to the Barbadian slave-owning economy, in which Friends themselves actively participated. While the commitment to spiritual equality was advocated as strongly as ever, there was, equally, a commitment to the status quo of the social order. Rather than the inward light dissolving the boundary between the social and the spiritual, such that the one is read as a dimension of the other, linked through the frequently reiterated assertion that God is no ‘respecter of persons’ (see Acts 10.34; Romans 2.11; Ephesians 6.9), as was more typically the case, here instead the assertion of spiritual equality is maintained separately from the upholding of a system manifestly dependent on an absolute ‘respect of ’ or distinction between persons. It is argued, therefore, that the capacity of the early Quaker conception of the inward light to dissolve boundaries and fuse categories here met an unusual and unwonted limit, with the result that the seamlessly continuous culture of the early Friends faltered in its unerringly inclusive remit. The book is united not only by its consistent interest in the cultural consequences for early Friends of their commitment to the inward light but also by its crosscutting by a number of recurrent questions. It asks, for example, how our understandings of concepts such as agency, dependency and contingency might need to be reframed in a Quaker context. If, as for the early Friends, the difference between the elect and the reprobate is determined by who has or has not turned to that light, yet that turn cannot be made through the exercise of the will of the fallen subject, what kind of responsibility can be attributed to individuals for their own salvation? Are they agents and authors of their own spiritual progress, or helpless instruments in the hand of the omnipotent divine? The book also traces the implications of these questions with regard to seventeenth-century discourses of subjectivity and gender: if Quakerism merged the categories of the spiritual and the secular, what are the implications of this for the avowedly social meanings of masculinity and femininity, themselves also structured through understandings of agency and dependence? And how are these reconciled, or not, through the models of spiritual subjectivity constructed by the movement’s self-inscriptive texts, and in particular by Fox’s magisterial Journal? Questions of temporality and spatiality are also pursued in a number of places in the book: what are the implications of the indwelling divine presence – a word with both temporal and spatial connotations – not only for how Quakers talked about past, present and future but also for how

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they dwelt in the present moment, and in the social and material world of seventeenth-century England and beyond? Questions of narrative and generic form are also present across the book, explored most fully through a focus on the Journal of George Fox. In a book whose title announces its interest to be in the early Quaker movement, it is worth commenting on this degree of attention being given to a text which might seem more properly to be considered as a product of the so-called ‘second period of Quakerism’, a time quite different from the one defined by the political, social and religious volatility and sense of possibility found in the early 1650s.19 Fox dictated the Journal in the mid-1670s, more than twenty years after the first burgeoning of the movement, some fifteen years after the Restoration of the monarchy and the end of radical hopes for a political dispensation more commensurate with the spiritual one, and in the wake of the Quaker Act of 1662, which resulted in increased levels of Quaker imprisonment, and the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, which hardened discrimination against and persecution of the radical religious sects.20 Moreover, by the time Fox dictated the Journal to his stepson-in-law, Thomas Lower, the movement had undergone its own internal organisational changes. The Restoration saw the advent of a commitment to non-violence embodied in the Peace Testimony; Quakers had weathered internal dissent in the form of the controversial challenges to the leadership from John Perrot in the 1660s, and from John Story and John Wilkinson in the early 1670s; and Fox had turned a loosely affiliated movement into a more formally constituted sect organised through a hierarchy of meetings and committees.21 Circumstances were therefore profoundly different for Friends in the 1670s compared with those pertaining in the 1650s. And yet, despite the Journal’s status as a document produced in the context of the quietist and more centrally organised movement of the 1670s, Fox’s Journal remains a document of the early as well as the later movement. Certainly, the tone of its retrospective narrative sections is more measured and reflective than documents produced by Fox in the early years, yet this sense of distance from the moment of the movement’s inception is mitigated by a number of other factors. First, the Journal is much more than its retrospective narrative, for interpolated in that narrative are a large number of epistles and papers written at the time whose events the narrative is at that point recounting. So, for example, Fox’s retrospective account of his trial for blasphemy in Lancaster in 1652 includes a transcript of that trial, taken by an eye-witness and providing a fascinating first-hand account of the crucial arguments which succeeded, against all the odds, in saving Fox from a conviction for blasphemy and the judicial punishment that this would have entailed.22 Likewise, in among Fox’s recollections of his disputes with Priest Lampitt and Justice Sawrey in Ulverston in 1652 are letters he wrote to them at the time in prose that

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certainly could not be called measured, calling the hapless Lampitt ‘a deceuer surfeted & druncke with ye earthly spirit . . . a beast smothering & tumblinge in ye earth & lust’, and condemning Sawrey as ‘the Beginner of all the persecution in the north’; and the Journal also includes many contemporary epistles of encouragement and instruction written to Friends, as well as ones admonishing their opponents or written to those in high office such as ‘ye longe parlament & oficers of ye army’ or Oliver Cromwell.23 The Journal is thus constitutionally, and in its essence, a composite document. It is both contemporaneous, written in the midst of events, and with all the urgency of hope, expectation, possibility and anger that such immediacy brings with it; but it is also reflective, looking back on those events with the wisdom – or disappointment – of hindsight. Secondly, even in its retrospective sections composed in the 1670s, Fox’s Journal is an invaluable source of information on the early movement and on how second-generation Friends reflected on, and at times rewrote, that early history. While all the usual caveats apply about the different status of retrospective accounts as against those written contemporaneously, there is a particular reason why, in the case of Fox’s Journal, this retrospective account of the early years is important for the argument made in this book. This concerns the debate amongst historians and critics about the extent to which the Journal (whether at the moment of its dictation, or later, through the intervention of its first editor, Thomas Ellwood) sought to edit out the more contentious elements of the early movement’s formulations of belief and practices, such as the performance of miracles or the literal apprehension of the continuity between the human and the divine.24 Fox’s Journal makes this claim much harder to sustain in any absolute way for, as I discuss in Chapter 1, those elements survive not only in Fox’s dictation but also, for the most part, in the version in 1694 approved for publication by the Second Day Morning Meeting, the Quakers’ own censorship committee. This is to say not that there was no attempt at expurgation but that both the complexity of the material composition of the journal and the historical diversity of the interpolated documents render that expurgation incomplete or imperfect, whether by design or by accident.25 Fox’s Journal is therefore invaluable to those interested in the early years of the movement not only for its accounts of those years, and in particular Fox’s own narrative of his convincement, nor only for the early documents incorporated in the narrative, but also for the light it sheds on the interactions between the agendas of firstand second-generation Friends, with Fox’s text as the linchpin between them. George Fox and Early Quaker Culture moves between a number of early Quaker texts, putting them in dialogue at times with the writings of their opponents, but its discussion of Fox and his Journal is a recurrent reference point among these disparate voices. The book is intended to intervene in debates about the place and importance of radical religious groups in early

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modern culture, about spiritual identities, as well as about broader questions of temporality, spatiality, movement, agency and dependence, all of them read with close attention to the conventions and idioms of early modern textual practice. But it also seeks to take account of the particular modes of perception of early Friends, to elucidate their ways of thinking, understanding and speaking in order to try to see things as they saw them, in an attempt to set forth and make sense of the world as inhabited and interpreted by members of the early movement. Thus the book’s own discursive register moves between a more detached and analytical critical tone and a more ‘identified’ expository voice. It seeks both to examine early Quaker culture through close attention to the texture of language through which it is mediated and to stand back from that culture and scrutinise it in the context of the wider culture of the second half of the seventeenth century. In all it does, however, as it ranges out from the figure of Fox to attend to other figures from the early years, out from the progenitors of the early movement to their opponents, out from the north-west of England in the early 1650s and into the later presence of the movement in the Atlantic colonies, it traces the impact of the shaping presence of the inward light in constituting the expansive and seamless culture of early Quakerism.

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1

‘As the Light appeared, all appeared’: the Quaker culture of convincement

So our Practice will Preach out our Performance of what we Promise, and that performance prove our words. (Samuel Fisher)1

What was the cultural force of the core belief in the inward light for the rhetoric and practice of early Quakerism? In what ways, and to what ends, can the ramifications of this most insistent of theological tenets be tracked in the writings and practices of early Friends? To what extent were the movement’s characteristic forms, customary behaviours and habits of speech predicated on this founding perception of the divine? In other words, in what ways did Quaker practice, in the words of Samuel Fisher quoted above, ‘Preach out’ the ‘Performance’ of what Friends promised? The theological implications of adherence to the light within have been amply explored by historians, theorists and theologians of Quakerism. Amongst others, Geoffrey Nuttall and Hugh Barbour have traced the continuity between the theologies of the Puritans, Quakers and other sectaries in the seventeenth century, Douglas Gwyn has posited an apocalyptic rather than straightforwardly Protestant analysis of the early Quaker phenomenon, Pink Dandelion has read Quakerism through its eschatology and in relation to the Second Coming, and T. E. Underwood had offered a fascinatingly detailed contrastive analysis of Quaker articulations of their faith with those of their Baptist contemporaries.2 My concern here, however, is less with the theological dimensions of the doctrine, and more with its broader cultural and discursive significance: how did Friends’ claims about the presence of the already risen Christ within the believer affect how they thought, spoke and behaved? What did it mean to ‘walk in the light’? What impact did the movement’s insistence on the universality of the light, its presence in and availability to all, and its sufficiency for salvation, have on the work of Quaker ministry and on the perceptions of those to whom they were ministering? Barry Reay has suggested that Quakerism put the accent anew

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on human effort, and ‘provided an answer to the simple question, “How can I be saved?”’, but this reintroduction of a degree of human agency into the soteriological configuration, together with the temporal and spatial presence of the indwelling Christ, also had profound implications for another question: namely, ‘How should I live in this world?’3 It is the distinctive answers to these questions framed by early Quakers that are examined here. The perspectives afforded by Friends’ vantage point from within the light were shaped by the taxonomies, definitions and ramifications made possible in and by this post-convincement world. The proposition I explore is that turning to the light, and thereafter dwelling in that light, effectively remade the world, broadly conceived, for early Quakers. To Friends, all appeared anew in this illumination, different from before, and different from how their contemporaries perceived, analysed and inhabited the world. With its emphasis on the universality of Christ’s redemptive promise, and with the element of human agency this reintroduced into the soteriological landscape (in turning or failing to turn to the light, or in backsliding), combined with the internalisation and integration of the divine, the light within dissolved or remade the categories that informed other radical theologies. Understandings of election and reprobation, the divine and the human, the spiritual and the carnal, male and female, the perfected and the fallen, the present, past and future, the sacred and the profane continued to shape Quaker discourse and religious practice, but in a transformed (their detractors would say distorted) state. The world seen from an early Quaker perspective, from a position produced and illuminated by the light, looked like a very different place from the one perceived, theorised and inhabited by Baptists, Independents or other early religious radicals. Quaker formulations of faith, early attacks on Quakerism and Friends’ defences of their beliefs variously invoke, interrogate, extol or condemn the doctrine of the inward light, or the indwelling Christ; they work out from it, back to it, circle it and probe it; they explore its implications, push it to its limits, strip it back to its biblical origins. Even opponents who focused on the more socially contentious aspects of Quaker social and religious practice (the refusal of hat honour and oath-taking, the insistence on the use of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, the interruption of church services, or the performance of prophetic signs) are most troubled, if less piqued, by the implications of the concept of the light within. ‘They hold that Christ is a light within every man, and that every man must mind that light and teacher within’, averred Francis Higginson in his extensive list ‘Of the Erroneous Opinions of the Quakers’.4 Thomas Weld tackles James Nayler’s affirmation ‘That every man in the world had a light within them sufficient to guide them to salvation, &c. and this he extended even to Indians, that never heard the Gospel’, begging his readers ‘to consider what sad and lamentable effects will flow from this Doctrine, to the utter undoing of the

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soule’.5 Friends themselves mounted their defences of their faith and practices through reference to this doctrine. Nayler answered Weld with these words: ‘That Iesus Christ is the onely light, and there is none besides him to guide to salvation, and that he is the light of the whole world . . . is plaine in the whole Scriptures’.6 In his Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded of 1659, Fox was still answering the charge that ‘It is a Scripture of the Devills making to apprehend this crucified Christ within’.7 Indeed, early Friends first referred to themselves as ‘Children of Light’ – ‘The Children of Light which are in the Light, that comes from Christ, by whom the world was made’ – a phrase which succinctly frames Quakers genealogically in relation to the doctrine of light, naming it as that which formed them, defined them and gave them their being.8 What was it about the doctrine of Christ as an inward light that troubled Quakers’ predominantly Calvinist opponents and disputants? It was, after all, an idea readily traced to the Scriptures; most significant for Quakers was John 1: ‘In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. . . . That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ (John 1.4–5, 9).9 The image had been adopted and deployed by many Christian theologians thereafter, not least St Augustine, who, having been reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, wrote that ‘No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away’.10 In its marking of the limits of the force of the written word, and its emphasis on the primacy and power of its individual and immediate inward apprehension, as well as in its apprehension of truth as a light, the scene is strongly reminiscent of Fox’s own pronouncements, and underscores the familiarity, the longevity and the orthodoxy of many of the concepts which caused such consternation when reanimated by Fox and the early Friends. It was not, therefore, the Quaker recourse to the figure of Christ as light itself that offended but its interpretation, and in particular the stress on its inwardness. Quakers insisted on both the universality and the immanence of Christ’s light. It shone within everyone, and its salvific potential was available to all, though would not be attained by all. This divine immanence became the alpha and omega of belief: ‘none could be a true believer, but who believed in it’.11 Furthermore, the implications of this notion were pressed to their conclusions. Friends agreed that, if Christ indwelt each individual, then the authority of that inward light must supersede even the authority of the Bible. If Christ indwelt, then what were the implications for the human subject’s fallen and sinful postlapsarian condition, or for his or her relation to that divinity, or for Christ’s promised second coming? Critics have traced the ways in which seventeenth-century Friends inflected their answers to these questions slightly differently – Fox from Nayler, and both of them from Penn and Barclay, for

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example – but their critics took little account of these fine discriminations, and unequivocally condemned the blasphemous potential of the questions themselves.12 In his Journal, Fox establishes the sense of Christ as light at the heart of his account of his year of convincement, revelation and personal calling in 1646–47, when it was revealed to him that his mission was ‘to turn people from darkness to the light, that they might receive Christ Jesus’. He makes his understanding of the revelation of Christ as light foundational to this vocation: for to as many as should receive him in his light, I saw, that he would give power to become the sons of God: which I had obtained by receiving Christ. . . . For I saw, that Christ had died for all men, and was a propitiation for all; and had enlightened all men and women with his divine and saving light: and that none could be a true believer, but who believed in it. . . . These things I did not see by the help of man, nor by the letter (though they are written in the letter;) but I saw them in the light of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by his immediate Spirit and power, as did the holy men of God, by whom the Holy Scriptures were written.13

Fox’s revelation concerns the universal reach of Christ’s sacrifice: he died ‘for all men . . . and had enlightened all men and women’. Here was the contentious statement of the universality of Christ’s light, its availability in, and saving power for, everyone, not only for an elect predestined to salvation, as in the Calvinist interpretation. Moreover, Fox indicates that he arrived at this understanding by means of Christ’s ‘immediate Spirit and power’: that is, Christ’s spirit came to him by direct revelation – something most Protestants understood to have come to an end with the apostles – unmediated by any human or scriptural means. In a far-reaching extension of reformed religion’s general rejection of the mediation of the divine by religious structures and sacraments, as glossed in the Lutheran notion of the priesthood of all believers, Fox here adumbrates the Quaker insistence on the primacy of direct revelation of the truth, via a Christ ‘immediate’, unmediated, because within. The doctrine of the light within, or the indwelling Christ, constituted a radical internalisation of the agent of salvation for fallen humanity: Christ, said Fox, ‘revealed himself in me’.14 The risen and already returned saviour was to be found not in the promise of a future moment, in a distanced and externalised form, ‘above the stars’, but here and now, within the believer himself or herself; the light of Christ was, Fox wrote, ‘the unchangeable truth in the inward parts’.15 This perception of Christ’s presence, immediacy and inwardness was uncompromising and explicit, made manifest in direct revelation by the light itself, the authority of which was greater than that of the scriptures but also confirmed by reference to them: ‘the saints are the temples of God’, wrote Fox, ‘and God doth dwell in them, that I witness and the Scripture doth witness, and if God doth

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dwell in them the divinity dwelleth in them’.16 Accession to this apprehension – turning to the light within – was, effectively, what defined the saved and separated them from the damned: ‘If Christ that’s crucified be not within, and Christ that’s risen be not within, I say that you all are Reprobates’.17 For Fox, this indwelling Christ was not to be understood metaphorically. His conception was of a divinity of which the godly partook corporeally and spiritually, in their regenerate flesh as well as in their immortal souls: ‘The Father and Son are one, and we are of his flesh and of his bone’, he wrote.18 ‘[Those] who are of the flesh and bone of Christ are with him, and sits with him in Heavenly places’, but ‘if the Scripture be not within, which was spoken forth from within, you all want the spirit that gave it forth, and Christ the substance of it; and you have not eaten his flesh, neither are you of his bone’.19 In a language of integrated immanence – which Richard Bailey, who has argued most extensively and forcibly for the importance of this dimension of Fox’s Christology, has called ‘Fox’s not distinct language’ – Christ is substantially as well as spiritually present to the believer: ‘Gods Christ is not distinct from his Saints, nor his bodies, for he is within them; nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witnesse him; . . . and he is in the Saints, and they eate his flesh, and sit with him in heavenly places’.20 This linguistic formulation stops short of claiming equality with God (though this is something of which Fox and others were frequently accused), but none the less there was for Fox quite literally – in one of his best-known formulations – ‘that of God in every one’.21 True faith and lived testimony consisted in recognising and answering this inward manifestation of divinity.22 In his repeated references to Christ in the flesh and bone of the believer, Fox vividly articulated the sense of the regenerate body substantively inhabited and transformed by the light within. Other Friends also referred to the corporeal dimension of the changes wrought by accession to the light. Nigel Smith has noted that ‘early Quakers often assumed the body underwent a change when it was inhabited by the inner light, that is, by the substance of Christ’, citing the Quaker Martin Mason’s The Proud Pharisee Reproved (1655) in evidence: ‘Is not he that denyes Jesus to be come in the flesh an Antichrist? . . . Is not Christ Jesus of the Substance of the Deity? Is it not said, Christ in you the Hope of Glory? [Colossians 1.27]’.23 Nayler wrote that ‘Christ is not divided; for if he be, he is no more Christ: but I witness that Christ in me who is God and man in measure’; more succinctly, he said that Christ ‘dwelleth in the bodies of his saints’, an interpretation that found notorious concrete public form in his later messianic entry into Bristol on horseback, in the manner of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.24 Later Quaker spokesmen such as William Penn and Robert Barclay drew back from and redefined the corporeally articulated Christ within so frequently invoked in the 1650s, yet the earlier perception was certainly not reformulated out of existence, as the earlier perception continued to be cited

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into the 1670s and beyond. Particularly telling in this regard is the first edition of Fox’s Journal (1694), published three years after Fox’s death and heavily edited, re-ordered and rewritten by Thomas Ellwood. This volume was commissioned and approved by the Second Day Morning Meeting, the committee which, since 1672, had been charged with responsibility for approving Quaker publications. None the less, despite that committee’s frequent decisions that publication of certain texts was ‘not convenient’, and despite the excision of some of the more theologically contentious episodes from the Journal, such as those concerning prophecies and miracles, the Journal leaves intact many of Fox’s formulations with regard to carnal regeneration and transformation in the light.25 Members of the church of Christ, Ellwood’s edition avers, are ‘of the Seed and Flesh of Christ; as the Apostle saith, Flesh of his Flesh, and Bone of his Bone’; ‘they, that are of his Seed, are of the Generation of Christ; and so are Flesh of his Flesh, and Bone of his Bone’.26 However much the first of these statements might be hedged in by the mediating, authorising and palliating reference to ‘the apostle’, Fox’s formulation claiming ‘the flesh of Christ’ for the members of the true church is none the less permitted to stand. Also allowed to remain in Ellwood’s edition is Fox’s comment that, living in the light, he was ‘very much altered in Countenance and Person, as if my Body had been Newmoulded or changed’.27 Even in the more conservative and cautious climate of the 1690s, Fox’s Journal was still permitted by the chief editorial body of the movement to suggest that renewal through accession to the indwelling Christ remade the subject not only spiritually but also corporeally. Most of these views, however contentious, were not unique to the Quakers. Friends were not alone, for example, in insisting on the universal salvific potential of Christ’s death. Early in the century, Arminians had argued for the possibility of grace for all through Christ, reinstating a modified notion of human agency in the processes of faith and salvation: ‘Although God predestines, and likewise gives grace sufficient for the achieving of faith, the final ground for Arminius was still the human choice. Some avail themselves of grace and some do not, and God’s eternal predestination rests upon a foreseeing of those human acts.’28 Later, under Archbiship Laud, Arminianism had gained ground within the Church of England, challenging the ‘arbitrary grace of predestination with a new-found source of grace freely available in the sacraments’.29 Although most of the radical religious groups which proliferated during the 1640s were Calvinist, and reacting against the Church of England’s loosening of its adherence to the doctrine of predestination, not all were; most notably, the General Baptists preached a doctrine of ‘general’ and universally available grace (unlike the Particular Baptists, who held to salvation only for the predestined elect). Consequently, as Geoffrey Nuttall observed, it comes as no surprise to find that many early converts to Quakerism came from among the General Baptists.30 Similar correspondences and continuities can be traced

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between Quakers and other sectaries with regard to the notion of an ‘inward light’, the possibility of regaining prelapsarian innocence, and the primacy of inward apprehension of the truth over the scriptures. Familists, for example, had believed that prelapsarian innocence could be recaptured on earth, and that ‘only the spirit of God within the believer can properly understand Scripture’.31 Quakers frequently had to defend themselves against charges of Ranterism, and the similarity between the two groups was widely asserted: ‘their principles are but the principles of the old Ranters . . .. The Ranters would have no Christ but within; no Scripture to be a rule; no Ordinances, no Law but their lusts, no Heaven nor glorie but here”’.32 The Digger Gerrard Winstanley, who may ultimately himself have become a Quaker, was in 1649 already conceiving of the divine as an inward illumination, writing of ‘Christ or the spreading power of light’.33 ‘Jesus Christ at a distance from thee, will never save thee; but a Christ within is thy Saviour’; to the question ‘But how shall I know that Christ dwels in me?’, Winstanley answers that ‘It is the testimony of the Spirit it selfe that must give you satisfaction: for that which is a testimony within me, is not yours till the same Spirit make it yours’.34 For Winstanley, this saving power within also superseded the Scriptures as the ultimate arbiter of divine truth: ‘And I shall demand of you how you know that these Scriptures are the word of God, in the sense you call them, but [by] the testimony of the spirit within your selves; I say, there is no way to know but by the spirit himself ’.35 Theologically, therefore, Quakerism stood on ground already well-trodden by both earlier and other contemporary radical religious groups. While a doctrine of universal grace was a theologically erroneous position for Calvinists, it was the implications of the light within that caused most consternation. The thoroughgoing literalism of the Quaker insistence on the material internalisation of the divine in the doctrine of the inward light, and the ramifications of this literalism for other aspects of their theology, proved profoundly troubling and led to accusations of blasphemy. For many, the notion of an inward light, and thus an immanent Christ, seemed a denial of the historical Christ, and of the temporal as well as spiritual distance that set the divine nature of the saviour apart from that of still fallen humanity.36 Fox was questioned on this aspect of his testimony at his trial in Lancaster in 1652, and charged with affirming ‘that he had the divinity essentially in him’, ‘that he was equal with God’, and ‘that he was as upright as Christ’.37 The following year, the anxious impetus behind such questions was made explicit, when Francis Higginson accused Fox of claiming to be Christ: ‘The said Fox hath also avowed himselfe to be the Christ, yea, to be the way, the Truth, & the life’; moreover, Higginson thought that, still more preposterously, Fox opened the way for others, including women, to do the same: ‘One Williamsons Wife . . . said . . . that she was the Eternall Son of God’.38 This anxiety continued

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to inform opposition to Quakers. In 1656 the Baptist William Jeffery asked Thomas Lawson, a Quaker, ‘If the spirit in some man be the Christ, what hindreth him to say hee is Christ[?]’39 As Underwood implies, the timing of Jeffery’s question is poignant and telling: later that same year, enacting a sign of saints’ oneness with the indwelling and already returned Christ, and thereby of the saviour’s presence in the body as well as the spirit, James Nayler made his infamous entry into Bristol on horseback, accompanied by a small group of Friends singing ‘Holy, holy, holy’ – a prophetic act which earned Nayler the judicial punishment of being whipped and pilloried, his tongue bored and his forehead branded for blasphemy.40 ‘For Quakers’, concludes Leo Damrosch in his discussion of this incident, ‘the indwelling was indeed “essential” and “personal,” no metonym but a literal fact’.41 The doctrine of the light within was itself challenging enough to orthodox reformed theology, but its performance via the manifestly material body of James Nayler, taking the sign beyond analogy and into the assertion of a literal truth, proved to be a step too far. What disturbed their opponents was not only the substantive dimension of the indwelling Christ but also that it gave the human subject access, potentially at least, to a prelapsarian perfection.42 To be ‘renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus’ was to re-attain the possibility of perfection seen in the newly created, unfallen first parents: I was come up to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me . . .. But I was immediately taken up in spirit, to see into another or more steadfast state, than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall. And the Lord showed me, that such as were faithful to him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state, in which Adam was before he fell.43

The nature of the promise of perfection is somewhat ambiguous here. Fox hovers on the brink of promising the faithful access ‘even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall’, but then – importantly – draws back from this (no Quaker would claim that humanity could attain a state of stable perfection from which they ‘should never fall’). Instead, and still contentiously enough, Fox contents himself with reiterating his claim that the faithful shall, like him, ‘come up into that state, in which Adam was before he fell’. Falling from that state was, and is, possible, but not inevitable; consequently, the state of sinless perfection enjoyed by the prelapsarian Adam and Eve is also possible, in this life and this world. Fox continued to make the point in other writings. ‘He that believeth, is born of God; and he that is born of God sins not, neither can he sin, because his seed remaineth in him; as he is, so are we, in this present evil world’.44 Burrough made much the same point: ‘the Saints upon Earth . . . may be perfectly freed from the Body of sin and death, and in Christ may be perfect and without sin . . . Every Saint, that is called of God, ought to press after Perfection’; and, as

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Rosemary Moore notes, even the careful Nayler acknowledged that perfection, while not certain, was possible: ‘God is perfect . . . and who ever receives his gifts receives that which is perfect. And by receiving and joyning to that which is perfect is the creature made perfect’.45 The believer, in answering that of God within, may partake of the perfection of Christ. In radically internalising and integrating the divine into the believing subject, Quakerism erased the absolute distinction between the carnal, fallen state of postlapsarian humanity and the divine, and opened up the possibility of their re-inhabiting and sharing in the divinely originating perfection of prelapsarian creation.46

The spirit of discerning and the spirit of unity The light within was available to all, though not acceded to by all. Turning to that light transformed the human subject, body and soul, by collapsing the absoluteness of the distinction between the divine and the human; and, in so doing, it returned the possibility of perfection to fallen human subjects. How did these perspectives give shape to early Quaker discourse? One has only to read Fox’s Journal to see that the doctrine of the light within produced a language at once bitterly condemnatory and unforgiving, and also seamlessly, inclusively, generously beatific; how, though, does this relate to the centrally definitive doctrine of the light within? By what taxonomy did Friends’ theological positions and interpretations remake the contours of the world, realign relations between its inhabitants and reposition the believing subject in this new context? What were the channels whereby belief became practice, and whereby practice became rhetoric? The transformation of the human subject performed and sustained by turning to the light brought with it a new way of seeing the material world and its human inhabitants. Living in the light required Friends to discern who, and what, was also truly illumined by that light, and who and what remained in darkness, and it endowed them with the means of making these discriminations and categorisations. It meant not only distinguishing between godly and ungodly people but also reading aright the meanings of acts and events in the world around them. Matters of discernment preoccupied many Puritans and sectaries, of course, for this was a providentialist culture. As Blair Worden put it, ‘Seventeenthcentury Englishmen knew that God intervenes continually and continuously in the world He has made’, and signs of those interventions were to be found everywhere: His hand could be seen in every change of the weather or the wind; in every good crop and every bad one, in every sickness and recovery, in every

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misadventure of the traveller and his every safe return. Diaries, commonplacebooks, public speeches, government declarations: all voluminously testify to the pervasiveness of the belief in providence, and to the anxious vigilance which attended the detection and interpretation of divine dispensations.47

God communicated through events in the natural world and in human affairs, as well as via dreams, visions and prophecies, and it was the opacity of such phenomena that gave rise to the anxious vigilance of which Worden writes: for if God intervened in the world directly, so too did Satan, the great deceiver, whose ability to mimic and distort the truth was well known. Fox knew that it was part of the work of the godly to avoid deception by reading the signs correctly and discriminating between them: I came among a people, that relied much on dreams. And I told them; except they could distinguish between dream and dream, they would mash or confound all together for there were three sorts of dreams; for multitude of business sometimes caused dreams: and there were whisperings of Satan in man in the nightseason; and there were speakings of God to man in dreams.48

At the heart of being a reliable reader of signs was the ability to distinguish one kind of phenomenon from another – in this instance, the dream that is purely human and the result of daily business from one arising from the nocturnal whisperings of Satan, and both of these from one of divine origin, by which God himself spoke. Failure to read correctly risked confusion and error, as everything would ‘mash or confound all together’ in a dangerous state of indiscriminate and indistinct formlessness. How was this to be avoided? How was truth to be distinguished from falsehood, the godly from the ungodly, the divinely originating sign from the satanically inspired? For Calvinists, whose status as elect or reprobate must ultimately remain uncertain, contingent as it was on the ultimate unknowability of the mind of God, such signs were always ambiguous, since each could only refer to another of equal uncertainty. For Quakers, however, walking in the light brought with it not only the need to discern one phenomenon from another but the means so to do. For Fox, discrimination was not only made in the light, it was made by the light: As the Light appeared, all appeared, that is out of the Light, darkness, death, temptations, the unrighteous, the ungodly; all was manifest and seen in the Light: then, after this, there did a pure fire appear in me: then I saw, how he sat as a refiner’s fire, and as the fuller’s soap [Malachi 3.2]. And then the spiritual discerning came into me, by which I did discern my own thoughts, groans and sighs . . .. And that which could not abide in the patience, nor endure the fire, in the Light I found to be the groans of the flesh (that could not give up to the will of God) . . .. And by this invisible spirit I discerned all the false hearing, and the false seeing, and the false smelling . . .. The divine light of Christ manifesteth all things, and the spiritual fire trieth all things, and severeth all things.49

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The light, acting as a refiner and cleanser of the material on which it shines, not only illuminates that which is godly but also assays and separates all that is ‘out of the Light’ – ‘darkness, death, temptations, the unrighteous, the ungodly’. The light, therefore, is itself ‘a discerning spirit’ and, through its immanence, also endows a power of discriminatory perspicacity. It clarifies by illumination: ‘As the Light appeared, all appeared’.50 For their critics, the self-referentiality of the doctrine of the light within rendered Friends dangerously solipsistic, as they seemed to acknowledge no authority, however conceived, external to and above their own enlightened powers of discerning, ‘setting up their Conceits and Experiences, as being of equal authority with the Scriptures; and that the Scripture bindes not them, if not set on their hearts by a present impulse’.51 Friends themselves, however, walking in the light, experienced the empowerment of the internalisation and individualisation of divine authority. They felt themselves to be spiritual litmus papers, testing and analysing the environment in which they were moving, but also lightning rods, drawing to themselves and diagnosing the forces of energy, satanic or divine, that animated and threatened the world. Herein, in part, arose early Friends’ certainty and lack of anxiety; moving and acting in the light, they became to themselves the most reliable and least opaque means of making these discriminations. This meant that Friends inhabited a world in which there was a fundamental distinction to be made, and to be made repeatedly, between two basic constituencies of human subject: those who lived in the light, or were sufficiently ‘tender’ to be turned to it, and those dwelling out of the light, who had hardened their hearts against it. It was not only dreams and other prophetic phenomena that had to be sifted and interpreted, but also, prior to this, and more tellingly, everyone encountered by Fox and the other early Publishers of Truth. Friends read people as signs. So, as early as 1646–47, Fox heard tell of a woman in Lancashire ‘that had fasted two and twenty days: and I travelled to see her; but when I came to her, I saw that she was under a temptation. And when I had spoken to her what I had from the Lord, I left her’.52 In 1654, in Cumberland, he writes, ‘we had a general meeting of many thousands of people atop of a hill, heavenly and glorious it was: and the glory of the Lord did shine over all’, while ‘the priests and professors they prophesied mightily against us about this time’.53 Those at the meeting dwelt in the light, the priests and professors in darkness: the difference between the two constituencies could not be starker or more absolute. This founding binary categorisation was replicated in another, also of definitive importance to the discourse of early Friends: the seed of the woman (that is, variously, Christ, the Seed, the saints, the regenerate, those that dwell in the light) and the seed of the serpent (the reprobate, dwelling in darkness), in allusion to Genesis 3.15, in which God tells the serpent, ‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed’.54 As with the perception of light and darkness,

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the categories are starkly absolute: ‘For know,’ wrote Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole from Exeter gaol, in 1655, ‘there is the seed of the woman, and the seed of the serpent in the world, there is the generation of Cain and righteous Abel’.55 For Nayler, this power of discernment was also one of separation: ‘we are seperated by the light of Christ, whereby we are called out of the world, and set free from all conceits of our own holinesse; and it is no other holinesse we owne, but the holinesse of God, witnessing against all unholy practices of the world’.56 The light separates those dwelling in it from the world, ends carnal notions of holiness and leads to witness against the world’s unholiness. Despite the proselytising function of Quaker discourse, there is little that is persuasive, seeking to change the minds or hearts of readers or hearers, in this mode of address. Often, it is more intent on classifying its addressees than converting them. At times, indeed, Friends seem resistant to the possible recategorisation of those already identified as living in darkness. In an intriguing aside early in his Journal, Fox’s bête noire, William Lampitt, Independent minister of Ulverston, near Swarthmoor, apparently sought a rapprochement with Fox, a possibility which Fox swiftly nips in the bud: Lampitt ‘would have owned me but I could not own him nor join with him he was so full of filth’. For Fox, Lampitt was ‘still a Ranter in his mind’, a discernment which allowed him no room for compromise or manoeuvre.57 Beyond the starkly absolute foundational binary of the light and the dark, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, however, the discourse of early Quakers, and the world it produced, was shaped by a strikingly different taxonomy from that of other seventeenth-century believers. Early Quaker classification relied on this one basic, almost Manichean distinction, between light and darkness, and the boundary between these two categories was marked as absolute. Within its own compass, however, the light collapsed all further distinctions into a perception of the immanently redeemed world as touched throughout by the divine. For those dwelling in the light, the discourse of discernment was paired with its equally powerful counterpart, a discourse of unity. The former, structuring a carnal world still swathed in darkness, was offset by the expansive and inclusive presence of the latter – a presence immanent though latent within the still fallen world of darkness. Darkness was perceived as constitutionally distinct from the light, but also as a condition in which the light inhering within the darkness was as yet unacknowledged. This understanding informed Quaker approaches to those they saw as dwelling in darkness, and helps explain the sense in their texts of a simultaneity of spiritual planes within a single place, person or circumstance. In the light, itself bounded from darkness, the faithful inhabited an unbounded, seamless field of godly signification, as the light brought with it the dissolution of distinction, and hence of conflict, among God’s people. In the light, Fox wrote, Friends have ‘unity with [God], with the Scriptures and

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one with another’.58 The implications of this declaration of unity were profound and far-reaching – indeed, by definition they were limitless.59 To find unity was to find and meld with the divine, wherever that might be. Not only was there a continuity asserted between the regenerate human subject and the divine – what Fox calls ‘the hidden unity in the Eternal Being’ – but this harmonious unity was also to be found between the witness of Friends and the testimony of the Scriptures; personal revelation by the spirit would of necessity confirm, and never run counter to, the Bible.60 Between biblical texts, however apparently diverse, unity would be found: ‘And here Moses and John meet in unity, and their Testimony agrees in one’, wrote William Smith.61 This seamless continuity was, furthermore, to be found in relations among the regenerate, living ‘in unity one with another’.62 Differences could have no place among the regenerate, dissolving as part of the general, seamless dissolution of distinctions and boundaries in the light, leaving in their place harmony and consensus. Paradoxically, therefore, the most apparently individualistic of inflections of Christianity, with its absolute embrace of the primacy of individual revelation by the internalised divine, did not result in an atomised or disaggregated movement, but was productive of an unusually strong and cohesive sense of, and investment in, commonality and community. Friends, William Penn wrote, ‘are naturally led into’ spiritual unity: ‘So that what was evil to one, is so to all, and what is virtuous, honest and of good report to one, is so to all’.63 Discrimination and division, obviated by the discourse of the light within, could find no ideological place among communities of Friends, for disagreement could only be indicative of an absence of the light of divine unity; hence the Quaker reluctance to dispute among themselves: ‘above all things take heed of judging, ever, any one openly in your meetings, except they be openly profane, rebellious, such as be out of the Truth’, wrote Fox.64 Discrimination was appropriate only as a means to separate out the sacred from the profane; in the ambit of the light, it had no place.65 Turning to the light, therefore, initiated a mystical and spiritual, but also literal and lived, unity with the divine, manifest most tangibly in the believer’s substantive and spiritual union with the immanent Christ, which in turn remade the world inhabited by the faithful as similarly, seamlessly, unified.

Unity, agency and will in the inward light Early Quaker cultural practice was itself produced in seamless continuity with this thoroughgoing espousal and advocacy of unity, as the mystical and actual unity of the believer with the divine redounded through all aspects of Friends’ ways of thinking, seeing and behaving. The notion of consecrated ground espoused by the Church of England, for example, was rejected. For

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Friends, there was no boundary between holy ground and the rest of God’s creation, for all was touched by God and therefore holy, and consequently meetings for worship could take place anywhere – in a house, on a hillside, in a barn. Living in the light was living in and with the truth; consequently, oaths were to be refused, as they required a distinction to be made between the truthfulness of utterances made under oath and those made more generally, and this was a distinction Friends did not recognise. Living in the light meant that Christ was already returned, in the body and soul of the believer, so the perfection promised in the redemptive union with the divine was already present. For those still dwelling in darkness, Christ’s return was still in the future; for Quakers, however, temporal planes merged, as past and future met in the present generation dwelling in the eternal and timeless light of the immanent Christ. Since the light indwelt all, and the only godly distinction was between those who turned to it and those who didn’t, then the deferential use of the second-person plural ‘you’ to social superiors, in place of the singular ‘thou’, served only to reproduce a fallen and ungodly distinction; since God was no respecter of persons, neither would Friends be. Unity with the divine meant, as a consequence, unity with all others dwelling in the light. If the light brought unity with God, it also brought unity with others who answered to ‘that of God’ within them, and with the creation on which his light shone. Conceptual distinctions, separations and divisions had no place in the seamless world inhabited by the early Quakers, although that same world, subsisting as it did simultaneously on different historical and spiritual planes, was also sharply demarcated between light and dark. This dualistic mode of perception led to a characteristically doubled mode of address in Quaker discourse: a vehement and unforgiving excoriation of darkness, and a rapturous accession to the light. The following address to Friends concerning life in the light, for instance, is taken from a short text by Richard Farnworth entitled ‘Nakednesse a signe or figure’, which is appended to his The Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth (1655). It is a brief and in many ways unexceptional text, but one whose tone and mode of address are characteristic of early Quaker writing: Dwell in the light, which is the condemnation of the ungodly, for all they that are contrary to the light, are without the cloathing of God, among such doth the Lord send some of his Children, to go naked and put off their cloaths; a figure and a signe of their nakednesse, who are naked from god, and cloathed with the filthy garments, so ye all dwelling in the light, which never changeth, ye stumble not but are led out of darknesse, and from among the unbeleivers, where the signes are sent, and such as are from God, which light leads up to God, in which is the unity, so in the light all dwell.66

Farnworth’s is a rhetoric that is remarkably expansive and generous to those dwelling in the light, but simultaneously uncompromising to those contrary to

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that light, and it draws a sharp distinction between the two categories. There is, however, a third constituency informing this piece of writing, one not already fixed in its association with one or the other of these two categories, but to be constituted by the address and operation of this text. This third constituency does not call into question the binary operation of those two foundational categories, but opens the possibility of traffic between the two. This is most clearly identifiable in the ringing imperative of the opening injunction, ‘Dwell in the light’, but also in the ambiguity of the final phrase, ‘in the light all dwell’: is this a declarative sentence, suggesting that all do in fact dwell in the light, or is it too an imperative, enjoining all to dwell in the light? The former is unlikely: while the light itself dwelt in all, and while, according to Quaker belief, all might dwell in the light, no Quaker would have deemed it that all dwelt, or would ever dwell, there. Indeed, despite this potential for universal salvation, the thrust of the passage is towards discriminating between two familiarly polarised constituencies. On the one hand are God’s ‘Children’, ‘ye all dwelling in the light’, who ‘stumble not but are led out of darknesse’; on the other are those ‘contrary to the light, ‘without the cloathing of God’, ‘naked from god’, ‘cloathed with the filthy garments’, ‘the unbelievers’, and those distant ‘from God’. None the less, it is between the co-ordinates of, on the one hand, the universality of the light, and, on the other, the failure of all to be redeemed by that light, that the singularity of the Quaker message in the context of seventeenth-century religion can be located, for it is here that the question of agency – who acts, to what ends and by what means – can be addressed most directly. It is this issue of agency that returns us to, and begins to account for, the potency of the doctrine of the light within. In Farnworth’s text, as in the movement more generally, it is the light that constitutes these categories, by its presence or absence, its recognition or its rejection, but it is also the light that calls their apparently absolute character into question. For the success of the movement, its ability to attract followers in significant numbers, lay not so much in the confirmation and exploration of fixed and already predetermined categories, namely, the elect and the reprobate (Calvinism had effectively secured this ground), but in constituting, through the affirmative capacity of their rhetoric and practice, a third body of addressees, a mutable and transformable constituency comprising those open to the light and its leadings. It was here, in the possibility of movement between the categories of light and dark and secured in the terms of the indwelling light, that the specificity of the Quaker movement established itself and its potency. It did so by means of a process which, in its anti-predestinarian soteriology, returned a degree of agency – though by no means a straightforwardly human one – to the enlightened subject. The ascendancy of Calvinism, its underpinning by faith alone as the source of salvation, untouched by human works, will or merit,

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had thoroughly discredited the place of any notion of human agency within the soteriological landscape, assigning it to a position either within the litany of popish errors or else in the Laudian undoing of the work of religious reformation. Quakers, however, were careful to distance their apprehension of agency from the taint of these errors (though they were from the outset accused of being the ‘spawn of Romish frogs’).67 For them, the light dwelt in all, but would not save all: as the Quaker controversialist Samuel Fisher wrote, ‘we talk of an universal Redemption by Christ’s coming intentionally to save All men, though (through their own default) All are not, but few only actually saved’.68 The means to salvation inheres within the human subject; reprobation is ‘through their own default’; and the route to salvation is followed by a turn to the light within: we call All men to look to the Light within their own consciences, and to take heed to that, as ever they intend to enter into Life, assuring them, that by the leadings of that Light, if they will, they may come to God, and work out their Salvation.69

Agency is here located principally with the wavering human subject, who is enjoined to ‘look to the light’, ‘to take a heed’, in order that they may – ‘if they will’ – ‘come to God, and work out their Salvation’. Turning to the light comprises looking, heeding, intending, willing, coming, and working out, and thus articulated is indicative of the restoration of willed agency to the human subject. Sarah Jones’s understanding of agency was similarly premised on a sense of the power conferred by the gaze directed aright – ‘look not at your own weakness, but look at him who is calling you’ – as too was Fox’s: ‘do not look at the temptations, confusions, distractions, distempers, but at the light that discovers them, . . . That will give victory; and you will find grace and strength; and there is the first step of peace’.70 To look was to act, to effect a material change on he or she who looked. Yet Samuel Fisher, immediately following the previous passage, also suggests an apparently conflicting evaluation of agency: we ascribe all the glory of our own, and every mans Salvation to God alone . . . and not to any man, nor any thing at all in man, that is of man, and not rather the free gift of God to him, saying that ’tis not in man, without the gift and grace of God, either to guide, or to bring himselfe to Salvation, nor in him that wills, nor in him that runs, but in God only, that shewes the mercy.71

Reading at first more like a Calvinist statement about the utter impotence of the human subject in matters of salvation, it is difficult to reconcile this with the previous passage regarding the looking, heeding, willing subject. Closer scrutiny, however, shows Fisher rewriting the meanings of agency within a fully Quaker paradigm. The subject might will his own turning, or ‘intend to enter into Life’ but turning to the light is not achieved through the exercise of

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that will, desire or intention. It is achieved only through the ‘gift and grace of God’, so that will or intention has effect, or attains its object, only through its own self-relinquishment or dissolution, and through the subject’s accession or submission to the potency of the light, in which that human subject thereafter partakes. As Edward Burrough succinctly put it, discriminating between one kind of agency and another, ‘destruction is of a mans self, but Salvation is of God, through believing in his Son’.72 The only true act of human agency within this scenario is the act of hardening the heart towards the seed or the light; as Fisher wrote, ‘most resist it [the light] in their stiff necks, and uncircumcised hearts’.73 Acts of resistance to the light proceed from the carnal will of the fallen human, acts of turning to it from submission to the indwelling light. Sarah Jones conveys most clearly the Quaker apprehension of this process of accession to the light: whatsoever is manifested or revealed to the Creature, it is to lead it to the substance, and so that soul and spirit that sinks down into it, it works and levens into its own creature, and it will work out the nature which is contrary to divine nature; what proceeds from it is holy and pure, so let not your eyes nor minds be gathered into the manifestations, but sink down into that measure of life that ye have received, and go not out with your in-looking at what is contrary in you, for if you do you will miss of the power that should destroy it.74

While to ‘look at him who is calling you’ is to act in such a way as to participate as an agent in the processes of one’s own sanctification, here to ‘sink down’ (the phrase is used twice in this passage) ‘into that measure of life that ye have received’ suggests a more passive – though no less spiritually productive – process of relinquishment. The process is described as an act of leavening, transformative in two senses: first, it ‘works and levens’ a new ‘creature’ into being; and, secondly, it purges fallen human nature, working out the ‘nature’ contrary to ‘divine nature’. Submission, or ‘sinking down’, is as effectively agential as is the ‘looking’ that Jones also recommends, as it produces the unity with the divine inherent in the notion of the inward light.75 Fox’s writing, like Fisher’s and Jones’s, also suggests this confluence of human and divine agency in the process of ‘turning to the light’, a meeting of will and will-lessness, human and divine, as evinced in his variously active and passive articulations of the process: sometimes Fox turns people; sometimes they turn themselves; sometimes, passively, they are turned. In Crowland in Lincolnshire, for example, Fox is agent, as he ‘was turning them to the Lord Jesus Christ’, while later, in Wales, people both make the turn and are turned: ‘every one of them turned to the light of Christ . . . and many was turned that day to the Lord Jesus Christ’.76 The First Publishers of Truth clarifies the process, remarking that Fox, ‘in ye Revellation of his son Jesus Christ, that true light . . . by beleiveing in ye same & walkeing in it, became A Child thereof,

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qualified to turne people from darkness to light & from Satans power to Christ the Savior and great power of God’.77 Fox’s power to turn others is a ‘qualification’ achieved by his becoming a child of light. While Quakers carefully avoided any sense that to ‘turn to the light’ was to undertake an action initiated and carried through by human agency, it was none the less understood, as Fisher’s, Jones’s and Fox’s accounts make clear, both as an event that conformed to the will of the one turning, and as one facilitated by an agency transmitted by a human subject, whether Fox, one of the other First Publishers of Truth, or the author of an exhortatory tract. People turned (or, in Jones’s terms, ‘sank down’), not of themselves, but rather through a relinquishment of the sense of the potency of their own will and agency, and their absorption into the potent and agential will of the divine. This might be understood as a referred agency, therefore: the capacity to act and to have effect in and on the world, where that capacity originates elsewhere; it is within and enables but is not of the human subject, a newly animating force which restores to the fallen human a prelapsarian connectedness to the beyond-the-human. It is in these terms that Farnworth’s text keeps open the possibility of passage from the condition of darkness to the light, and thereby calls up a third constituency – those turning to the light. It does so by invoking the offices, though not the human agency, of the godly: ‘the Lord send[s] some of his Children’ among the dwellers in darkness to turn them to the light, sometimes by means of ‘signes’ such as nakedness. True agency is the prerogative of the light alone. It is the light which condemns the ungodly, and it is by the light that people are ‘led out of the darknesse’; the light ‘leads up to God, in which is the unity’; and in the light, none stumble, as faltering uncertainty is banished. Friends might enact signs of divine condemnation of the ungodly, and they might be instrumental in the turning of the tender-hearted to the light within them, but they are empowered in these acts only in so far as they dwell in that light. Consequently, given the possibility of transformation in and by the light, and given the continuing struggle with the forces of darkness in the world, Farnworth’s concluding phrase – ‘so in the light all dwell’ – must indeed be read as urging readers to dwell in the light, and so as exhortatory rather than declarative or descriptive. In this exhortation, in the commanding urgency and the promise of change inherent in the imperative, a way is opened up from the place of darkness to one of light. Without it, the two domains remain separated and unbridged. With the agency it confers – an agency that is divine rather than human, and all the more potent for that – the stasis of the two constituencies of light and darkness is breached, and movement urged and assured from the latter to the former. The cultural force of early Quakerism is to be found in this third constituency and the promise of referred agency the movement offered to them. In

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the many convincements of the early years, in the itinerancy that gathered the movement and turned thousands to their own accession to the light, in the courage that sustained those whose goods were expropriated for refusing to take oaths, who were abused and attacked by the hostile crowds they encountered in town and countryside, who were imprisoned for their testimony and who endured the brutal privations of early modern incarceration, in the confidence that drove them to interrupt church services or go naked in the streets as a sign, there is evidence of a new, vital and pressing sense of agency. Clearly identified, by Fox, Fisher and Jones as by others, as manifestly not human in origin, but the result of the grace and will of God, this sense of agency too partakes of and contributes to the culture of seamless continuity in which early Friends lived, for that agency indwelt, just as the light did. And if the saving light of the indwelling Christ was of the ‘flesh and bone’ of the believer, so we might extrapolate and say that this divinely originating agency inhered in the muscle and breath of the believer: it was this which animated their journeying, preaching and prophesying. When Farnworth exhorts his readers to ‘Dwell in the light’, his use of the imperative assumes and accords a latent potency and referred agency, the capacity to turn to the light, to his hearers, without specifying its nature or origin. This restoration of a powerfully modified agency to the spiritual field extended the seamlessness of early Quaker culture into its practice. Seamless continuities between the human and the divine informed not only the movement’s understanding of seeing (its perception of the divided world of light and darkness) and of being (its perception of what it meant to dwell in the light) but also its understanding of doing – what it meant to live a godly life actively in the world. In acting as a referred agent of the light within, individual agency was restored to a position of efficacy within the Quaker spiritual paradigm in a way that had become conceptually impossible within the Calvinist interpretation. Referred agency, rooted in and extending from the light within, was at the heart of Fox’s exhortation to Friends to make their ‘carriage and life’ preach. The underlying assumption in Fox’s words of a rhetoric of practice indistinct from one of words is elaborated in an appropriately circular form in the words of Samuel Fisher which form the epigraph to this chapter: ‘our Practice will Preach out our Performance of what we Promise, and that performance prove our words’.78 In the alliterative circularity of preaching, practice, performance and promise, Fisher posits a seamless continuity between words and action, promise and fulfilment. In the light, no distinction may interrupt unity with the divine. As agents of and for that light, Friends must preach and practise that seamless continuity; and, in the promise of effective change made to those turning to the light, the fixed stranglehold of carnal darkness was broken. It was from this position of enlightened agency that the movement addressed not only the dwellers in light and in darkness but also those

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who might themselves be stirred to turn to the light. To those opposed to this Quaker message, this agency, rooted in the immanence of the inward light, posed a threat to the current religious and social dispensation; to those convinced by it, it promised a different way of seeing, being and doing. In the capacity of the doctrine of the light within to constitute both threat and promise, in its rhetoric of radical division as well of seamless unity, and in its conferral of divinely infused agency and its relinquishment of human will, early Quakerism found the distinctive voice – spoken and written, lived and practised – with which it moved to address the world.

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2

‘Let your lives preach’: the embodied rhetoric of the early Quakers

In 1653, as George Fox and other early Friends continued their itinerant mission through northern England, transforming the nascent Quaker movement into an increasingly sizeable and potent force, Francis Higginson published The Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, condemning this latest radical religious grouping. Higginson, a minister from Kirkby Stephen in Westmorland with first-hand knowledge of early Friends, was troubled by many aspects of Quaker doctrine and practice, and not least by the manner and circumstances of their public speaking.1 They have onely their own mode of speaking . . . which they do not call, but deny to be preaching; nor indeed doth it deserve that more honourable Name. . . . Their Speaker for the most part uses the posture of standing, or sitting with his hat on; his countenance severe, his face downward, his eyes fixed mostly towards the Earth, his hands and fingers expanded, continually striking gently on his breast; his beginning is without a Text, abrupt and sudden to his hearers, his Voice for the most part low, his Sentences incohærent, hanging together like Ropes of Sand, very frequently full of Impiety . . .. His admiring Auditors that are of his way, stand the while like men astonished, listening to every word, as though every word were oraculous; and so they believe them to be the very words and dictates of Christ speaking in him. Sometimes some of them, men, or women, will more like Phrantick people, then modest Teachers of the Gospell; or like the Prophets of Munster, or John of Leydens Apostles, run through, or stand in the streets, or Market-place, or get upon a stone, and cry Repent, Repent, woe, woe, the Judge of the World is come, Christ is in you all.2

The Quaker mode of preaching contravened so many of the conventions of orthodox sermonising that Higginson, in a rare moment of concord with Friends’ views, agreed with them that it ought not to go by that name. It was not only the words themselves to which he objected, though he certainly

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found these incoherent and impious, but also the mode of delivery: the speakers’ garb, posture and gesture, their vocal register, modulation and inflection were for him indicative of the words’ impiety and incoherence. His opposition was as much to do with the perceived inappropriateness and unorthodoxy of Quaker ‘preaching’ style as it was to do with doctrinal error: there was no biblical text on which the speaker expatiated; he might be sitting, or wearing his hat; ‘he’ might even be female, for ‘sometimes Girles are vocall in their Convents’.3 Despite the Quaker claim that these utterances were ‘the very words and dictates of Christ speaking in him’, Higginson suspected the speaker of garnering the words from a much more dubious, because carnal, source, as he looked ‘downward, his eyes fixed mostly towards the Earth’, his hand ‘continually striking gently on his breast’, as if to release the words lodged there. Although explicitly challenging Quaker preaching on the grounds of its doctrinal errors, Higginson also implicitly criticises the preaching as a performance enacted to beguile listeners into an erroneous acceptance of the Quaker message. He notes the manifest and (to his mind) unwarranted effect the speaker has on ‘his admiring Auditors’, and is in particular disturbed by the quaking and other bodily manifestations which characterised early meetings, when ‘many of them, sometimes men, but more frequently Women and Children fall into quaking fits. . . . [They] fall suddenly down, as it were in a Swoon . . ., and lye groveling on the Earth, and strugling as it were for life’.4 What, Higginson wonders, is the cause of such behaviour? Is it genuine, or – as the phrase ‘as it were’ suggests – pretended? It is an utter impossibility for any man, especially women, that never knew what belonged to Stage-playing, and young Children to feign such swounings, tremblings, palsie-motions, swelling, foaming, purging, such great and horrid screechings, and roarings; yea common Modesty would restrain any man, or woman that are themselves, from such uncleanly Excretions as do often accompany these sordid Trances. Surely it must needs bee some black Art that works so turbulently on mens Spirits or bodies, and conjures them into such Surprizes.5

Higginson raises the possibility of the quaking being a deceit, a performance produced in imitation of the kinds of extravagences to be found on the stage, but simultaneously rejects it, on two grounds: first, because people in remote parts of northern England would not have the knowledge of the conventions of stage-playing that would allow an imitation of them; and, secondly, because the corporeal excesses that accompany the quaking are such that ‘common Modesty’ would restrain the voluntary execution of such acts; no one, he concludes, would wilfully choose to behave in this way. The authenticity of this reaction to Quaker speakers thus established by dint of its being neither a pretended nor a willed state, he concludes that ‘some black Art’ has worked on these auditors, an art wrought by the speaker’s words. Just as the speakers

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are ‘more like Phrantick people, then modest Teachers of the Gospell’, so, in a self-confirming cycle of cause and effect, the madness of the speakers engenders similar frantic behaviour in their hearers. Reinforcing this reading of Quaker preaching style as a kind of madness is an unease concerning the prominence of women, conventionally understood as the irrational sex, in the movement, whether as preachers or prophets, or as converts. ‘Sometimes Girles are vocall in their Convents’, he writes, ‘convents’ evoking associations with witches’ covens as well as Catholic sororities; early Quakers were often accused of both witchcraft and papism.6 Furthermore, he notes the susceptibility of ‘Women and Children [to] fall into quaking fits’. Higginson’s unease is formed in significant part through his reading of the gendered politics and practices of the movement. For him, the problematics of Quaker preaching are articulated both through reference to its accommodation of female public speakers and for the way in which its rhetoric appeals to, and calls forth, the irrationalities of women and children. This chapter addresses the profound unease expressed by Higginson and other critics in the face of the early Quaker phenomenon. Disturbed by Fox, Nayler and Farnworth’s extraordinary success in recruiting large numbers of Friends to the movement in a few short months from 1652, it seeks to understand what it was about Quaker modes of speaking that proved so unsettling – for, as I shall argue, Quaker discourse was not as radically distinct from modes of orthodox preaching as we might expect. If Quaker modes of rhetorical address overlap substantially with mainstream reformed preaching practice, how might we account for the many reiterations of concern from Higginson, Prynne, Weld and others? If the deep structures of Quaker preaching rhetoric are familiar and unexceptional, what is it that makes them so objectionable to Puritans such as these? In this chapter, I begin by identifying the particular problematic of preaching for the Quaker inflection of belief; I then compare Quaker modes of ‘preaching’ with more orthodox reformed discussions of its character and purpose; and finally I locate the distinctive and disturbing contours of their practice in their refusal to set a limit, whether geographical or corporeal, to the operation of the inward light.7

Persuasion and preaching The persuasive power of Quakerism was clearly recognised by Higginson, and was a matter of significant concern to him. Friends were proving all too successful in their bid to turn their auditors to the doctrine of the indwelling Christ.8 ‘Where their places of meeting are, many resort, some out of curiosity to see their persons that are so famous, or infamous rather in these parts for their Seductions; some itching to heare how and what manner of Doctrine

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they speak’, he wrote.9 The upshot of such interest, he noted anxiously, is that ‘So fast did their insolencies grow, and their Numbers increase for a while, that had they not been a little curbed . . ., it is verily believed by many sober understanding men among us, there would have been in a short time no peace or almost safety for any real Christian in Westmerland’.10 Such was the impact of Fox and other public Friends that Higginson feared for the peace and safety of ‘any real Christian’ in the area. If such levels of convincement required that Higginson acknowledge the persuasive power of Quaker discourse, it is unsurprising that his counter-move was to seek to establish its source as satanic rather than divine. Its impact was self-evident; what remained in question was its origin and nature. How, though, did Friends understand the process of convincement, which might result in quaking or the other physical manifestations described by Higginson and others?11 While convincement is generally glossed as the Quaker word for conversion, the term suggests not only the subject’s accession or submission to the truth, grace, salvation and the light, but also his or her conviction (as in ‘the pronouncement of guilt’) of their own sinfulness.12 Thus Elloughton Monthly Meeting recalled how William Dewsbury ‘Came also amongst us, Exhorting to Repentance & to believe in ye Light, wch did shine in our hearts & convinced us of sin’; Christopher Knapton, ‘being made a Witness of this blessed Light, . . . was made Sencible of what offended the Lord, & was troubled & brought under Condemnation by it’; and John Story affirmed that the light was ‘sufficient to convince of sin, and lead to repentance’.13 One response to such convictions, or convincements, among Friends was to tremble, or quake, and, while opponents sought to establish this as evidence of Satan’s work, Friends were insistent that its source was divine, a result of the immediate experience of the power of the Lord. ‘The meetings of the people of God, were ever strange to the world’, acknowledges Fox, and then cites a number of passages from the Bible in which Paul, Daniel, Habakkuk, David and Isaiah quake or tremble when confronted with the power of the Lord; he concludes that ‘[t]he Prophets and Ministers of God have all one Spirit . . . and did encourage those that did tremble’.14 For Friends, quaking itself was not a willed or chosen act, but testified to the capacity of the human subject to be moved by the truth. This might happen as it did for John Grave, in ‘a sylent meet, in wch gods Heavenly power broke in upon him, whereby he was wonderfully shaken, insoemuch yt he was constrain’d to Cry out agst the many gods in Egypt’.15 More commonly, however, truth was first manifested in a public gathering, rather than a meeting for worship, via the divinely inspired words of a preaching Friend; as Richard Bauman put it, ‘the minister’s speaking moved the non-Quaker . . . subject into this . . . stage of the conversion process’.16 George Canby gives a compelling account of his experience of convincement, and of the part played in it by Dewsbury:

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And William Dewsbery was then a Blessed Instrument in the Lords hand, of my Convincement, . . . and the Power of God was mightily upon William, & fixing his Eyes upon me, Declared what the Lord putt into his mouth to me in particular, and J did truly Witness the Word of the Lord to be Quick and Powerfull, which cut me to the heart, that J fell Down in the House ffloor as Dead to all Appearance as any Clogg or Stone. When J came to sence again, he had got me up in his Armes (it was about the year 1652); so that J can truly say J was smitten down to the Ground by the Liveing Power of the Lord, as sure as ever Saul was, in his way to Damascus, and my Beastiall Will at that time got a deadly wound that through the Loveing Kindness of the Lord was never healed to this Day.17

In Canby’s damascene encounter, his ‘Beastiall Will’ is dealt a mortal blow by the ‘Living Power of the Lord’, to be replaced by the divine will. As Fox concisely put it, convincement required the believer to ‘give up to the will of God’ – relinquish the human will and accede to the divine.18 The power so to move and to convince was not the speaker’s, but God’s: Dewsbery speaks only ‘what the Lord putt into his mouth’; he was ‘an Jnstrument by which many others also believed’.19 As Douglas Gwyn puts it, people ‘were convinced not by the preached Word, but by the inward Word, to which Quaker preaching turned them’.20 Exchanges such as this one between Dewsbury and Canby clearly comprise a powerful and transformative discursive complex. However, this process is complicated by the peculiarly fraught status of the concepts of will and persuasion in a Quaker context. The will, as discussed in Chapter 1, is a marker of carnality, and thus redundant in the process of convincement; moreover, the auditor’s ‘turn’ is attributed to the operation of the inward word rather than the preached word, and the power thereby witnessed and released is understood as divine rather than carnal. None the less, the words of the Quaker speaker, his or her demeanour (Dewsbury fixes his eyes on Canby) and manner of address (he speaks to Canby ‘in particular’) are implicated in the elicitation (however that might be conceived) of an affective response in the auditor: Canby ‘fell Down in the House ffloor as Dead to all Appearance as any Clogg or Stone’. This affective response is understood, needless to say, as indicative of a spiritual one, as the auditor witnesses the truth of the indwelling light. With dialogic acts such as these lodged at the heart of Quaker practice, such discourse could be said to constitute a distinctive and powerful Quaker rhetoric – and, indeed, many critics have used the term to characterise the formal patterns and powerful impact of Quaker public speaking.21 But the notion of rhetoric, however apt it might be in helping us analyse the particularities of convincements, brings with it its own problems in a Quaker context. For the baseline purpose of rhetoric, of course, is persuasion: it is the ‘art of using language so as to persuade or influence others’.22 In 1656, in The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d, John Smith described rhetoric as ‘a faculty by which we

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understand what will serve our turn concerning any subject to win belief in the hearer: hereby likewise the end of discourse is set forward, to wit, the affecting of the heart with the sense of the matter in hand’, and John Prideaux, in Sacred Eloquence, wrote that, ‘To teach, to delight, and throughly to perswade, are the scopes of Oratory. After teaching-Tropes therefore, and delightingFigures, convincing and perswading-Schemes may be well enquired after’.23 To persuade is to win belief; this is effected through ‘the affecting of the heart’, which is to be achieved through the artful deployment of language. Such definitions of rhetoric as an art of persuasion, however, sit uncomfortably within a Quaker formulation of the process of convincement. How can a speaker’s words participate in the auditor’s turn to the light within if, as Richard T. Vann noted, ‘[o]ne consistent note in the accounts that the early Friends themselves gave of their conversions is that no man had made them a Quaker’? In one sense, there was no real effort at evangelism: as Emilia Fogelklou rightly comments, ‘The first publishers of truth did not go out to make adherents. They went out “to discover in all lands those who were true fellow-members with them”’.24

Quaker rhetoric thus contributed to a process of convincement that was understood in part as transformative of the human subject, but only through a new connection to that which was already present. As the carnal and fallen will gave way before the truth, the subject’s relationship to the already present light within, the agent of transformation, was kindled. The preacher’s words were therefore not instrumental in the transmutation of one human entity into another through the persuasive art of his rhetoric, but in enabling the subject’s accession, and submission, to a transformative element which was already present – hence Elloughton Monthly Meeting’s record of how William Dewsbury exhorted them ‘to believe in ye Light, wch did shine in our hearts’.25 Dewsbury’s role was not to introduce anything new, but to exhort his hearers to believe in a light that was already indwelling. However, given the Quaker understanding of ‘convincement’ as the work of the inner word, and a process in which the will and wit of the auditor is at first irrelevant and then ultimately dissolved, the place of art, persuasion and influence in this needs re-examination, for these – in that they involve an active, crafted and calculated ingenuity on the part of the speaker, and the mental engagement and cognitive assent of the auditor – reside wholly within the realm of fallen human capacity. Nor is this perspective on rhetoric to be found only among seventeenth-century sectaries: the twentieth-century theorist of rhetoric Kenneth Burke concluded that ‘Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall’, for it involves the manipulation of an avowedly corrupted medium.26 For Quakers, however, the process of convincement, of

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which the address of the ‘preacher’ was a part, was understood precisely as a means to, and a part of, the supersession of the fall through the relinquishment of the carnal will to a witness of the truth, a process originating and terminating in divine will. How, then, can fallen language participate in a process that promises the possibility of undoing the fall? How can persuasion play a part in a process that is beyond the reach of the fallen will and cognisance of the auditor? One answer to this would require a reconceptualisation of rhetoric in the manner that Burke himself proposes: rhetoric, he suggests, is not only persuasive but also identificatory. It works not only through a model of change but also, and as much, through the location and assertion of common ground. In this reframing of rhetoric’s modus operandi, it is possible to retain a sense of Quaker public discourse as a transformative rhetoric while also accommodating Quaker conceptualisations of convincement as the workings of the inner word. Burke proposes a conception of rhetoric that as well as being persuasive (or as a way of being persuasive) also seeks to establish modes of identification between speaker and auditor: insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. . . . In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, a distinct substance and consubstantial with both.27

By this account, identification, or consubstantiality, is a fundamental element of the rhetorical process, whereby two constituencies become ‘substantially one’, while at the same time also remaining distinct from each other. In its reliance on the paradox of being at once ‘joined and separate’, this characterisation asserts a dynamic of simultaneous unity and discrimination remarkably similar to the Quaker model of communication between and among those living in the light and those dwelling in darkness. This reframing of rhetoric also emphasises the inherently dialogic, and thus mutually dependent, nature of the exchange: that is, rather than its premise being the transformation of the opinion of one party by the intervention of another, it is understood instead as transformation via the identification, assertion or invocation of commonality or unity between the two parties. A rhetorical exchange thus proceeds through finding what is already present in another, and identifying this as a prior commonality between speaker and addressee, rather than relying on the introduction of something new to the auditor. As Burke concludes, ‘there is no chance of our keeping apart the meanings of persuasion, identification (“consubstantiality”) and communication (the nature of rhetoric as “addressed”)’.28 And such processes are persuasive not only on the level of their invocation of a commonality of idea, value, expectation, wish or fear, for instance, between speaker and auditor, but also through their formal operation:

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many purely formal patterns can readily awaken an attitude to collaborative expectancy in us. . . . Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites participation regardless of the subject matter. . . . [A] yielding to the form prepares for assent to the matter identified with it. . . . And this attitude of assent may then be transferred to the matter which happens to be associated with the form.29

Assent, Burke suggests, not only is in some sense formally elicited (through the deployment of particular rhetorical tropes or figures), but is itself also formal, produced in the accession to and repetition of those rhetorical forms; one outcome of this is that ‘the audience is exalted by the assertion because it has the feel of collaborating in the assertion’.30 ‘Collaborative expectancy’ is succeeded by a sense of ‘exaltation’ in the fulfilment of that collaboration. If we take from this the notion that persuasion can be premised on identification, and hence on unity between speaker and addressee, as much as by transmutation, and that identification is as much about form as it is about ‘content’ in that it partakes of a number of distinctive formal characteristics, then we arrive at a definition of rhetoric congruent with Quaker conceptions and practices of ‘speaking in the light’. Analysts of Quaker prose style have identified distinctive and characteristic forms and structures of Quaker discourse in both written texts and the records of Quaker preaching which are associated with convincement.31 Furthermore, the desire to ‘awaken an attitude of collaborative expectancy’ is conceptually accommodating of the sense of the light as already indwelling, the recognition of which needs to be ‘awakened’ rather than generated or inaugurated. It suggests the constitution or consolidation of a group based on a pre-existing shared (or collaborative) perception rather than through the ‘persuasion’ or transformation of the human subject from one state to another. As Burke suggests, ‘when considering the identifications whereby a specialized activity makes one a participant in some social or economic class’, ‘belonging’ must be understood as itself rhetorical.32 If this understanding of rhetoric as a discursive intervention participating in the realising of an anticipated state which thereby constitutes a collaboration or common ground between speaker and auditor is accepted, then we can – despite overt Quaker hostility to and refusal of the notion of rhetoric but also without doing violence to their understanding of the processes of convincement – consider Quaker discursive interventions alongside other instances of seventeenth-century sacred rhetoric.33 Despite the insistence of opponents of Quakerism such as Higginson, and of Friends themselves, that there was a gulf between Friends’ speaking practices and those of orthodox ministers, might the common ground of rhetoric illuminate a set of common discursive concerns? Moreover, to what extent might the particularities of Quaker rhetorical practice, rather than theological difference, help explain the vehement hostility encountered by early Friends? Higginson might not have liked what he saw in the early Quaker

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movement, but even a brief examination of the writings of early Friends suggests that he did not radically misrepresent their preferred modes and locations of speaking. Quaker Publishers of Truth took their message to places of maximum concourse of people: William Dewsbury bore his testimony ‘though several Marketts, & in Steeple Houses, & in other Places, where People were together’, and Fox’s Journal records that he not only spoke in meetings of Friends but proselytised on hilltops, in churchyards, private houses, streets, marketplaces, courtrooms and gaols.34 In 1653, for instance, he went into the steeplehouse in Carlisle: and after the priest had done I spoke the truth to them and declared the word of life amongst the people: and the magistrates desired me to go out of the steeplehouse but the priest got away: but I still declared: . . .. [A] dreadful power of the Lord there was amongst them in the steeplehouse that the people trembled and shook: and they thought the steeplehouse shook and thought it would have fallen down that the magistrates’ wives was in a rage and tore and rent to have been at me but the soldiers and friendly people stood thick about me.35

Many of those who turned to the light also put their convictions into action by taking the Quaker message into public places. Dorothy Waugh, a young servant and one of Fox’s earliest converts, records that she spoke ‘against all deceit and ungodly practices’ in Carlisle marketplace; the mayor’s officer then ‘haled me off the cross, and put me in prison’.36 There, a scold’s bridle was placed on her head for three hours: so I stood their time with my hands bound behind me with the stone weight of iron upon my head, and the bit in my mouth to keep me from speaking. And the mayor said he would make me an example to all that should ever come in that name. And the people to see me so violently abused were broken into tears . . .. And the man that kept the prison-door demanded twopence of every one that came to see me while their bridle remained upon me; Afterwards it was taken off and they kept me in prison for a little season, and after a while the mayor came up again and caused it to be put on again, and sent me out of the city with it on . . . and charged the officer to whip me out of the town, from constable to constable to send me, till I came to my own home.37

Fox’s and Waugh’s accounts represent important elements within Quaker writing from the outset of the movement: narratives recorded to register specific instances of the ‘sounding of the day of the Lord’, and of the persecutions suffered as a result. Following his death, the publication of Fox’s Journal helped it to become the iconic register and touchstone of early Quakerism, whilst Waugh’s account was just one of many such early Quaker narratives of their ‘sufferings’. Neither account is atypical; both are unapologetic, combative, partisan and dramatic, detailing events that were contrary to orthodox modes of preacherly behaviour: Fox interrupted a church service and harangued the

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priest, Waugh spoke her message in a marketplace; both were lay people who assumed for themselves the authority of spiritual and religious rectitude, an audacity clearly exacerbated in Waugh’s case by her sex and social rank, as is attested by the imposition of the quintessentially gendered and classed punishment of the scold’s bridle, a punishment reserved for women of low social rank.38 Both occasions were explicitly and confrontationally dialogic, drawing the priest, magistrate, congregation, mayor and people into their polemical and rhetorical ambit. As Higginson suggested, Quaker preaching was a mode of speaking that, in the enactment and expression of its theology and doctrine, apparently refused the conventions of Protestant preaching practice at every level. Such a proposition supposes a uniformity and common purpose to orthodox Protestant preaching theory and practice against which Quaker practice can be set. However, recent scholarship has shown how what N. H. Keeble has called ‘Protestantism’s substitution of an homiletic for a sacerdotal ideal of Christian ministry’ – that is, a ministry premised on the holiness of the word rather than on the figure of the priest, and as such a characterisation as apt for Quakerism as for many other configurations of reformed religion – brought with it a complex, changing and diverse elaboration of understandings of the aims, theory and appropriate manner of preaching.39 These accommodated a range of positions regarding homiletic style and purpose, from Bishop Hugh Latimer’s sense of the need for a preacher to deliver a ‘nipping sermon, a pinching sermon, a rough sermon . . . to disturb Satanic quietude’, through to the styles of preachers such as Donne, Andrewes and Hooker, variously characterised as metaphysical, ornate, elaborate, copious, mannered and erudite.40 The Renaissance humanist rediscovery of rhetoric made its impact here too, to be seen not only in the printed sermons of these preachers but also in the numerous handbooks on rhetoric (such as John Smith’s The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (1657) or John Prideaux’s Sacred Eloquence (1659)) which set out and defined the standard repertoire of tropes and figures, exemplifying them from classical, vernacular and sacred writing, and in the manuals (such as William Perkins’s The Arte of Prophecying (1607) or William Chappell’s The Preacher, Or The Art and Method of Preaching (1656)) which advised preachers on proper homiletic aims and forms. Proponents of reformed religion, where ‘the word had superseded all sacramental representations of the divine presence’, might indeed have had in common a sense of the new centrality of the preacher, but beyond that initial agreement Protestant conceptions of the purpose, scope and form of preaching proved to be as subject to dispute as any other dimension of reformed practice.41 It is, moreover, these early modern debates about and various understandings of preaching that offer a way to reconsider the rhetorical power of Quaker public discourse. Francis Higginson might have refused Quaker modes of

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speech the dignity of ‘that more honourable Name’ of preaching, but in fact in the light of these debates about sacred eloquence Quaker practice starts to look less exceptional and more congruent with mainstream conceptualisations of preaching. In her invaluable overview of these debates, Debora Shuger sets out two broad counter-traditions regarding theories of sacred rhetoric, identifying first a conservative tradition, seeking to sever the link between language and affect, and locating the power of the discourse in ‘extra-linguistic factors, primarily the holiness, sincerity, and passion of the preacher himself ’.42 This tradition, Shuger suggests, dominated English vernacular rhetorics, and mutated after the Civil War to a rationalist variant, emphasising argumentative, rather than passionate, plainness. Secondly, she identifies a liberal tradition reconnecting the theological and artistic aspects of sacred eloquence and reintroducing a concern with style to sacred discourse through its interest in how language created specific emotional and aesthetic effects.43 Within Protestant liberal sacred rhetoric, the preacher was concerned to try to move the emotions not by rational analysis but by amplification (‘the extension of simple statement by all such devices as tend to increase its rhetorical effect’) and hypotyposis (‘Vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bringing it, as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader’), since the understanding was that the will is ‘moved more by sense than intellect’.44 John Smith confirms the point succinctly: ‘Hypotyposis is a representing of a thing unto the eye of the understanding, so that it may seem rather to be felt or enjoyed then spoken of and expressed’.45 Shuger exemplifies the practical application of this position by quoting the recommendations of the influential German Calvinist scholar Bartholomew Keckermann: the preacher, he suggested, should dramatise biblical scenes, and place the subject before people’s eyes ‘surrounded with various striking details and circumstances . . . so that the listener, carried outside himself, seems to behold the event as if placed in its midst’.46 Examined within this framework, Quaker preaching strategy no longer seems to exist wholly beyond, or in opposition to, the rhetorical practice of orthodox Protestant preaching, but becomes legible as a dimension of the so-called ‘liberal’ tradition, not because of any express interest in questions of style (on the contrary, Quakers were contemptuous of a concern with style as a dimension of the deceitful and manipulative practices of hireling priests) but because of its ‘aesthetic of vividness, drama and expressivity’.47 Those addressed by Fox and Waugh were, indeed, placed in the midst of an ‘event’, and listeners were, to the dismay of Higginson and other critics, all too frequently ‘carried outside’ themselves. There is no record of the precise words spoken by Fox or Waugh on the occasions of their public speaking in Carlisle, and indeed there are remarkably few records or accounts of Quaker preaching: since ‘all religious speaking was spontaneous, we have no prepared texts of Quaker preaching or praying’,

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and there was little impetus towards recording the words that were uttered.48 Even Fox’s account of his declaration to the people gathered on Firbank Fell in 1652, which is unusually detailed, is a rather sober and measured recollection of words spoken some twenty-five years earlier. While it gives a summary of Fox’s message – one which he tells us kept the attention of more than a thousand people for three hours – it is in the form of reported speech, and suggests little of the words’ tone or register.49 More indicative of these, and in accord with the critiques of Quaker speaking practices from opponents such as Higginson, are the early letters and pamphlets of Friends. Whether in the form of vituperations of sinners, exhortations to potential Quakers or encouragements to Friends themselves, these exhibit a marked affective passion, and sometimes the vividness and immediacy of hypotyposis. For example, Fox’s epistle ‘To Friends in the Ministry’ is an early letter of encouragement to Friends to continue in the light: therefore walke in the light that you may have fellowshipp with the son & with the father & come all to wittnes his image his power and his law which is his light, which hath converted your soules & brought them to submitt to the higher power, above that which is out of ye truth, that you may knowe here the mercy & truth & the faith that workes by love, which Christ the Authour of is, who lighteth every one of you which is perfect & that which the ministers of god received from god is that which is perfect & that which they are to minister is for the perfecting of the saints till they all come into the unity of the faith, unto A perfect man soe this is the word of the lord god to you every one in the measure of life wayte that with it all your mindes may bee guided up to the father of life, the father of spirits, [with your hearts Joyned together up to god the father of spirits] . . ..50

Structured through repeated references to ‘light’ and ‘the father’ and a paratactic accumulation of subordinated clauses, the epistle has a mesmeric and incantatory quality, culminating in a reiterated promise of perfection and unity with God, and a hypotactic confirmation of the godliness of the message: ‘soe this is the word of the lord god to you every one’.51 Addresses to fellow Friends are, according to Jackson Cope, typically framed in such mystical and abstract terms, certainly passionate, but distinct from the vivid and concrete hypotyposis that is more characteristic of Quaker excoriations of adversaries.52 Fox, for example berates an opponent, Justice John Sawrey, by identifying his carnality with a literal earthiness, telling him that ‘thou was mounted up, and set thy nest on high but never got higher than the ffowles, & now art runn with the ffoxes & ffallen into the earth, that earthlynesse and Covetousnesse hath swallowed thee up’.53 Similarly graphic and blistering is Margret Killin (or Killam) and Barbara Patison’s A Warning from the Lord to the Teachers and People of Plimouth (1655): they address their audience thus:

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Howle ye Rich men, for the misery which is coming upon you, for the rust of your Silver and Gold shall eat you thorow as a Canker, and shal rise up in judgement against you. Howle ye proud Priests, for the misery that is coming upon you, for ye shall run to and fro, as drunken men, and none shall be to pitie you . . . ye run and I never sent you, saith the Lord.54

In this striking instance of hypotyposis, Killin and Patison apostrophise rich men and priests, prophesying retributions appropriate to their social and spiritual misdemeanours – priests are to be reduced to undignified disorder, and the rich consumed by the ‘the rust of your Silver and Gold’. By setting forth the details of these punishments so graphically, the authors generate an intensely vivid and emotional address, aiming to move not by rational argument but by passionate oratory. If Bishop Latimer were looking for a ‘nipping sermon, a pinching sermon, a rough sermon . . . to disturb Satanic quietude’, then this would certainly fit those criteria.55 As well as sharing with the liberal preaching tradition a concern with an ‘aesthetic of vividness, drama and expressivity’, Quakerism also shared with both the conservative and liberal traditions a broader concern to engage auditors’ emotions: far from severing emotion from cognition, Renaissance sacred rhetorics (unlike classical rhetoric) recognise the necessary relation between the two, relocating ‘the theological virtues in the emotions’.56 Authors of preaching handbooks made this address explicit: John Prideaux called ‘such things as move the mind to love, hatred, &c . . . the heighth of Rhetorick’, and added that the ‘Affections to be wrought upon may be conveniently reduced to 1. Love 2. Hatred 3. Hope 4. Fear 5. Joy 6. Sorrow 7. Zeal’.57 Even advocates of plainness and opponents of rhetorical excess such as Joseph Glanvill recognised that preaching could not comprise an appeal purely to the intellect, but the ‘affections’ must be engaged; otherwise, he said, religion ‘hath no considerable hold’ upon those that hear it.58 If the debate is framed between the co-ordinates of ornament and passion, as Shuger advocates, rather than between plainness and eloquence as is more commonly the case, this goes some way towards explaining an apparent inconsistency in Quaker aesthetic and discursive practice.59 The rhetorical extravagance, even excesses, of writers like Fox in his epistles, or Killin and Patison in their pamphlet – and the instances of hyperbole discussed above are by no means untypical – initially seem to be at odds with the famous Quaker plain style, whether in dress (the simplicity of the ordinary clothing of the time, which later developed to the characteristic costume of ‘Quaker grey’) or pronominal usage (the insistence on using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ for the second-person singular).60 Yet, if the opposition is understood to be between ornament and passion, then the apparent disparity dissolves, as their rhetorical style can be said to eschew ornament – elegance of style for its own sake, an appeal only to the carnal senses, rather

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than in the service of truth – in favour of discursive practices congruent with truth. And if ‘plain style’ in dress and speech was perceived as one route to that truth, another was the passionate rhetorical exposition of the forms and consequences of ungodliness, or the fulfilments inherent in a life in the light, in order to engage the emotions and render the heart of the auditor ‘tender’, or receptive, to that truth, and thereby turn them to the indwelling Christ. The emotions were thus a way to bridge the chasm between fallen humanity and divine perfection, ‘a way to bring that which is remote and yet most worth knowing into some kind of relationship with what we can more accurately grasp’.61 Preaching attempts to quicken the emotions so that the mysteries of faith and the remoteness of God are brought nearer to the believer. Shuger discusses how, in Donne’s sermons, ‘the visible body’ of Christ is itself represented as a way of making the magnificence of God (which is remote) nearer to us, by putting it in our own, human, form; she concludes that: praesentia, or spatial proximity (nearness), is thus convertible with ‘bodiliness’, or the ability to be seen. The equivalent to the Incarnation and sacrament in rhetorical theory is the verbal representation of this visible body, i.e., hypotyposis, imagery, metaphor, and the related techniques for making things seem close/ visible generally grouped under enargia or vividness.62

An equation is made here between ‘“bodiliness”, or the ability to be seen’ (that is, the way in which Christ’s incarnation makes visible the divine), and ‘the verbal representation of this visible body, i.e. hypotyposis, imagery, metaphor, and the related techniques’. A rhetorical strategy is thus not simply a strategy – an effective but ultimately arbitrary means by which to communicate a theological point. It is rather the rhetorical equivalent, or bodying forth in language, of that theology. The aptness of the relation is thus not only to be determined by its impact on hearers but instead resides within a closer formal correspondence or equivalence – as homologue, rather than analogue – between medium and message, rhetoric and theology. Just as the incarnation and the sacrament make the divine present by making vivid that which is invisible or remote, so these rhetorical figures do likewise, and they do so by generating and appealing to emotion as well as to knowledge. That which is absent is made present in language, as it is by Christ, the two combining in the figure of the word made flesh. The vividness recommended for sacred rhetoric was understood, therefore, as an embodiment, or bodying forth, of a theology, and was thus understood as having common ground with the theatre.63 Keckermann advised the preacher to dramatise biblical scenes ‘as in a theater’, whilst others describe how the Bible brings a character ‘in upon the stage speaking as if he were present’, or compare the Bible with ‘a comic drama beheld by the theater of the universe’.64 Sacred oratory was quite explicitly, therefore, a performance. William

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Perkins gave precise instructions for the assumption of a godly demeanour in the aid of effective preaching: Let there be that gravitie in the gesture of the body, which may grace the Messenger of God. It is fit therefore, that the trunke or stalke of the bodie being erect and quiet, all the other parts, as the arme, the hand, the face and eyes have such motions, as may expresse and (as it were) utter the godly affections of the heart. The lifting up of the eye and the hand signifieth confidence. .  .  . The casting downe of the eyes signifieth sorrow and heavines.65

It is perhaps this ‘theatrical’ dimension, and the possibilities afforded by the embodied dimensions of the performance of the preacher – the modulation of register, pitch and pace as well as of posture and gesture, as suggested here by Perkins – that lay behind the contemporary valuation of the sermon over the written text. As the Independent minister William Greenhill put it in the preface to a printed edition of his sermons: Reader, although these Sermons were taken by the Pen of a ready Writer, and printed as they were taken, yet look not for that Spirit, Power, and Life, was in them when Preached. The Press is a dead thing to the Pulpit. A Sermon from thence is like Meat from the Fire, and Milk from the Brest; but when it is in Ink and Paper, it’s only cold Meat and Milk, it hath lost its lively taste, though it may nourish and become a standing Dish, to feed upon daily.66

The power inherent within the performance of the sermon, here commended by Greenhill, was precisely the element of Quaker preaching practice to which Higginson objected, and which Fox deployed with such effect: ‘and I set my eyes upon [one of the Baptists’ deacons] and spake sharply to him in the power of the Lord and he cried, “Don’t pierce me so with thy eyes! Keep thy eyes off me!”’.67 The rhetorical impact of the speaker results in part from the words and the manner of their delivery, but as importantly from the emotion generated by the embodied presence of the speaker. This composite and embodied rhetorical power was understood by Quakers and non-Quakers alike as a potent force that needed to be directed aright.

Living Quaker rhetoric An excursion into the theory of Renaissance sacred rhetorics provides the means to begin to unravel the source of the disturbance felt by Higginson and others concerning Quaker rhetorical practice. Three elements are of particular significance here: first, the making present of that which is absent; second, the need to harness emotion in order that this approximation might be achieved; and, third, a formal continuity between theological doctrine and rhetorical tropes and figures. All three of these dimensions are key to understanding early

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Quaker discourse; all three, in Quaker hands, pose a challenge that is rooted in embodied performance; and all three lie at the heart of the profound unease caused by Quaker public speaking. The Quaker doctrine of the indwelling, already returned Christ depended on a literal making present, or incorporation, of that which had hitherto been understood as absent or at least distant; the emotion exemplified in and generated by Quaker preaching is manifested in the disturbingly embodied responses of the hearers; and Quaker practices of public speaking, and their enactment of ‘signs and wonders’, in a range of situations which refused to recognise any absolute distinction between the sacred and non-sacred, constituted a form of embodied rhetoric. All of these are pushed to new and troubling limits by Quaker preachers and prophets, exceeding the bounds of ‘vividness’ endorsed by more orthodox theories of preaching. To some extent, indeed, these Quaker enactments call into question the very terms through which rhetoric is framed. At the heart of these Quaker challenges was their rewriting of the terms of what has come to be seen, in most analysis of rhetoric, as the core trope: that is, the metaphor. Prideaux claimed metaphor as a kind of Ur-trope, noting how ‘the Greek Rhetoricians under this notion did comprehend all the Tropes’.68 This perception is underlined by the interchangeability of John Smith’s definition of a trope (‘when words are used for elegancy in a changed signification; or when a word is drawn from its proper and genuine signification to another’) with that of a metaphor: ‘It is the artificial Translation of a word, from the proper signification, to another not proper, but yet nigh and alike’.69 Etymologically signifying the substitution, transfer or carrying over of meaning from one thing to another, and widely theorised within linguistics and beyond as the most pervasive linguistic trope and the omnipresent principle of all languages, it is, in the context of this discussion of sacred rhetoric, perhaps the paradigmatic linguistic instance of the making present of that which is absent. If it is therefore unsurprising to find metaphor at the centre of Quaker rhetorical strategy, it is perhaps more striking to see the way in which it is persistently deployed so as to both draw attention to and call into question the boundary between the metaphorical and the literal. One example of early Quakers’ play with this distinction in their public self-presentations and circumstantial interpretation can be seen in Dorothy Waugh’s account: when the mayor of Carlisle asked from whence she came, she replied, ‘out of Egypt, where thou lodgest’.70 Similarly, Besse records the following exchange in William Dewsbury’s examination by Judge Hales in Northampton in 1655: judge hales: Art thou Dewsberry? w. dewsberry: Yea, I am so call’d. judge hales: Where dost thou live? w.d: I live in the Lord, and I have a Wife and three Children at Wakefield in Yorkshire.71

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Waugh and Dewsbury both offer strikingly metaphorical responses to their examiners’ questions about where they come from: ‘out of Egypt, where thou lodgest’; ‘I live in the Lord, and I have a Wife and three Children at Wakefield in Yorkshire’. Both indicate a refusal to recognise a distinction between, on the one hand, different discursive registers – the spiritual/biblical and the legal – and, on the other, between the metaphorical and the literal. Indeed, in that these questions allow only for a ‘literal’ answer (that is, an answer consonant with the social or civic domain over which their questioners hold jurisdiction), the speakers are in effect offering these metaphorical responses (as the carnal world would see them) as ‘literally’ true. Similarly, when Fox wrote that he ‘obeyed the Lord God and went upon the cross: and there declared unto them that the day of the Lord was coming’, and Waugh notes that she was ‘haled . . . off the cross’, there is little doubt that they are both invoking a metaphorical equivalence between Christ’s cross and the market cross, an equivalence underwritten by the Quaker insistence that Christ dwelt within each believer.72 This equivalence is in turn endorsed by the closing editorial comment to Waugh’s text, which suggests that ‘all these things are but a taste of the whole, inflicted upon the body of Christ in this nation’.73 From a Quaker perspective, any event, any circumstance or location, can be read as a metaphor of spiritual wayfaring and warfaring. There were of course strategically desirable outcomes to be achieved by such responses: Waugh and Dewsbury effectively withheld information about their places of habitation that would have left them open to charges of vagrancy, to which itinerant Friends were particularly vulnerable, while the analogy between the market cross and Christ’s crucifixion served the purpose of suggesting innocent suffering and the godliness of the persecuted. More importantly, in terms of Quaker rhetoric and theology, however, this play with the proximity or overlap of the literal and metaphorical, this insistence on the continuity between the one and the other, enacts the erasure of boundaries between the spiritual and the material that lay at the heart of Quaker doctrine and which has its primary expression in the notion of the indwelling Christ, such that the believer, whilst not himself or herself Christ, had that of Christ in him. The consequences of this are apparent in, for instance, the account of Fox’s trial at Lancaster Assizes in 1652, which concentrated on testing the blasphemy of this doctrine and was articulated through interrogating him on his breaches of the boundary between the spiritual and the carnal. He was charged with having affirmed ‘that he had the divinity essentially in him’, that ‘he was equal with God’ and ‘as upright as Christ’. In each case, rather than simply confessing or denying it, he reframed the matter such that its terms of reference no longer applied. ‘[T]he saints’, he said, ‘are the temples of God and God doth dwell in them’; ‘he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one in the Father and the Son’; ‘all teaching which is given forth by Christ

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is to bring the saints to perfection, even to the measure, stature, and fullness of Christ’.74 In each case, the answer suggests that to interpret Fox’s words literally, as the Justices were doing, was a distortion of Quaker belief; but to take his words as metaphorical was also to misunderstand the literal truth of the presence of the indwelling Christ. Friends inhabited a world where to draw a distinction between the metaphorical and the literal no longer made sense, precisely because of the fusion of spiritual and material exemplified in this foundational belief in the indwelling Christ. Dewsbury, Waugh and Fox are not simply engaged in language play for strategic ends. Rather, they are demonstrating how, having turned to the inward light, there is a continuity, even a congruence, between their selves and lives, and those of Christ, such that the turn to the light within brings with it the dissolution of prior and still continuing difference on which metaphor’s assertion of identification depends: as Fox put it, ‘Christ in his people, is the substance of all figures, types, and shadows, fulfilling them in them, and setting them free from them’.75 Quaker discourse’s apparent reliance on metaphor as a rhetorical comparison between separate domains in fact refuses to maintain a distinction which is merely carnal, and which dissolves in the recognition of the truth of the indwelling Christ. Metaphor is remade as no less than the literal truth. However, the dissolution of the distinction between the metaphorical and the literal in Quaker rhetoric occurred not only in speech acts but also in other, often dramatic, embodied acts – the Quakers’ performance of ‘signs’ as a critique of current political or religious malaise, which suggests the necessity of thinking about the significance of a rhetoric beyond language, or what Norman Penney called ‘sermons-in-action’.76 Quakers spoke not only with their voices but with their bodies. Fox’s interruption of the church service in Carlisle, or his speaking in Kendal market, where he threw silver from his pocket out amongst the people, and spoke against ‘all deceitful merchandise and ways’, involved not only the denunciation of wrongdoing but its enactment in locations, and sometimes (as on this occasion in Kendal) with the use of material objects as props, that figured directly as part of the truth to be communicated.77 Fox’s message was consonant with the sign and scene by which it was enacted. Waugh’s text, too, turns on a vivid instance of hypotyposis, in the performance of what almost constitutes a piece of participatory street theatre, though one that is presented as the performative enactment, or bodying forth, of a truth, rather than as an act or the performance of a fiction. Waugh speaks her message in Carlisle marketplace; she is haled off the cross, and relocated to Carlisle gaol, where she is remade, by the mayor, as a different kind of public spectacle, by placing the bridle on her. Consistent with Quakerism’s refusal of the notion of consecrated ground, and Fox’s assertion that a steeplehouse was ‘no more holier than another place’, the disorderly woman appropriates

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the commercial space of the market and remakes it as a sacred space in which people might turn to recognise the divine light within.78 The mayor refuses this appropriation, and forcibly transforms her into the figure of the silent (because silenced) woman, the bridle instating and enacting his triumph over the unruly woman. The bridled figure, furthermore, requires an audience as much as did the prophet in the marketplace – hence, in a further echo of the theatre, the charging of twopence for people to come in and see her. Quakers challenged and confused the categories of the metaphorical and literal in their enactments as much as in their utterances: Fox threw his silver into the streets as both a symbolic and a literal offering to the people. We see this fusion most sharply in the early Quaker practice of ‘going naked as a sign’. Many Friends were moved to this particular form of symbolic enactment; Elizabeth Fletcher from Kendal, for example, was sixteen years old at the time of her mission to Oxford in 1654: Elizebeth ffletcher was a very modest, grave, yong woman, yet Contrary to her owne will or Jnclination, in obedience to ye Lord, went naked through ye Streets of that Citty, as a signe against that Hippocreticall profession they then made there, being then Presbeterians & Jndependants, wch profession she told them the Lord would strip them of, so that theire Nakedness should Appear.79

In an early letter, Fox offers a similar interpretation of the ‘figure of nakedness’ enacted by a Friend who went among them, telling his critics Burton and Lampitt that ‘ye Lord mad one to goe naked amongst you a figure of thy nakednese & your nakednese before your destruction cometh as a figure amongst you yt you might see yt your naked from truth’.80 In 1654, William Simpson appeared naked in Oxford ‘as a Sign to yt generatio¯ then in being . . . yt the day was neare att hand, euen att ye Dore, in wch ye Lord would stripp ym naked & bare, both from ye Rule & authority they then were vnder in this Nation, & allso from yt Couering of Religion wth wch they seemed to be couered with’.81 While these three instances all figure nakedness as a sign of the spiritual bankruptcy and absence of genuine religious authority of non-Friends, not all such performances of nakedness were intended to signify this: William Simpson glossed his own nakedness as not only the more familiar ‘figure of all your nakedness’ but also as indicating that he himself was ‘clothed on with immortality’.82 Furthermore, there was no guarantee as to how these acts would be read: Francis Higginson suggested that the practice was ‘accounted a decency [by Friends,] becoming their imagined state of innocency better then apparel’.83 There was, therefore, an unusually high degree of instability to the sign of nakedness and its intended and perceived meaning.84 Analysing this practice, Bauman suggests that it ultimately failed as a rhetorical strategy because the public display of the naked (or near naked) body ‘was so striking and shocking

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in its own right that it tended to engage the onlookers’ attention so wholly at that level that they were prevented from looking beyond the literal fact for a metaphorical meaning. . . . [T]hey were not prepared to grant special power to going naked as a means of expressing verbal metaphor’.85 The metaphorical potential of the naked body as a spiritual signifier collapsed under the weight of its pre-existing social-metaphorical meanings of sexuality, madness, shamelessness, immodesty and indecency. More shocking still than public nakedness was James Nayler’s infamous entry into Bristol on horseback, preceded by a small group of Friends singing ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel’ and spreading garments before him. The interpretation offered by Nayler was that ‘it pleased the Lord to set me up as a sign of the coming of the righteous One’; it was, however, read by the authorities on a literal level as blasphemy rather than as a sign, or embodied metaphor.86 Whatever their relative success or failure as rhetorical strategies, the examples of going naked as a sign and Nayler’s entry into Bristol both demonstrate a Quaker reliance on metaphor, and on the enactment of metaphor in such a way as to deny its metaphoricity, whether on the level of telling the mayor that he dwelt in Egypt, or going naked as a sign, or Nayler’s entry into Bristol. Waugh, Nayler and many others literally embodied the sign of their theology. Such acts constituted the literal enfleshment of Quaker doctrine. Rhetoric, for early Quakers, extended beyond the linguistic, and beyond even the theatrical, understood as concerning the vivid description of a scene, the dramatic delivery of a sermon, the analysis and representation of a biblical text. However much handbooks of preaching understood tone, gesture and posture to be a dimension of sacred oratory, in no instance is there a suggestion that this ‘theatricality’ should extend in a concrete form into religious practice, or the metaphorical into the mode of engagement with a congregation or audience, or extend beyond the consecrated scene of preaching. In Quaker hands, however, the rhetorical ambition to bring the remoteness of the divine mystery into closer approximation with that which is known is brought squarely into the realm of practice. Rather than the visible body of the historical Christ acting as a sign of a remote divinity, it is the visible bodies of Friends themselves that take on this function, as the doctrine of the indwelling Christ abolishes the remoteness of divinity, and moves its sign into the present time and place. The excellence of God was indeed that which was most worth knowing, but, far from it being remote, it was revealed, on the contrary, to be as close as the believing subject who dwelt in the light. Thus for Friends, the theatricality recommended by theorists of sacred rhetoric is extended not only to the domain of bodily, as well as linguistic, performance but also beyond the notion of performance as imitation or invocation of something other, something that literally is not, to become the enactment or embodiment of something that more truly is. This enfleshment of Quaker rhetoric can be understood, in part, as relating

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to the broader Quaker analysis of language and silence. For Friends, human language was hopelessly flawed, a dimension of our postlapsarian state, and as such it was both an imperfect medium for the revelation of divine truths and a carnal distraction from the still, small voice within which all believers strove to hear. ‘All Languages are to me no more than dust,’ wrote Fox, ‘who was before Languages were, and am come’d before Languages were, and am redeemed out of Languages into the power where men shall agree: . . . For in the beginning was the word, which was before Natural Languages were’.87 Quaker meetings for worship enacted this distrust of human discourse – and in particular of priests with their ‘trade of words’ – in their rejection of formalised or ritualised speaking. Instead, they were structured around a condition of attentive silence, broken only when a Friend was confident of being spiritually moved to speak, and whose speech led back to an enhanced state of silence. Quakerism is thus premised on a sense of the inadequacy, fallenness and carnality of language.88 This in turn relates to Friends seeking lived modes of signification, beyond the linguistic, a desire articulated most succinctly in the famous phrase associated with George Fox, ‘Let your lives speak’, which is traceable in essence to his Journal (‘their lives and conversations did preach and reach to the witness of God in all people’) and Epistles (‘let your lives preach’).89 Speaking and preaching are seen as functions of action as well as, or rather than, of language: as Alice Cobb noted of her mother, Alice Curwen, ‘she did in her wise Walking and her harmless Conversation preach to us daily’.90 Thus we see Quakers ‘speaking’ through their ceaseless itinerant missions, their appropriation of public spaces, their embracing of opposition, hostility and abuse. Quaker rhetoric extended the conventional preacherly reliance on metaphor and theatricality into the literal and concrete circumstances of their lives, performing the drama of their theology in the streets, gaols, marketplaces and steeplehouses, and reading these dramas as divinely charged signs (rather than simply as metaphors) of the state of godliness in the nation, the corruption of carnal powers, and of the progress of the Lamb’s War. It is this insistence on the physical and spatial, as well as linguistic, dimension of rhetorical practice that inescapably enmeshed Friends in the realm of the social, where so many conflicts with the civic and legal authorities arose. In the case of Dorothy Waugh’s detention in Carlisle gaol, for example, the contested nature of the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical was played out and marked out through the contested meanings of social spaces in which both gender propriety and class privilege raised the legal stakes. If Waugh had not been a woman of low social rank, her treatment in the marketplace would doubtless have taken a different course. The occupation of the marketplace for the purposes of Quaker preaching was deemed a transgression of propriety in part because of the social identity of the speaker (female, a servant), in part because of her annexation of this civic space to her spiritual and political purposes, but

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also because of the way that these rhetorical challenges were fought out through the power to determine the meanings of her performance. It is this contest in which the mayor was engaging when he had Waugh haled off the market cross, imprisoned, bridled and whipped out of town. He was refusing Waugh’s own interpretation of the circumstances in which she had placed herself, and instead sought to impose his own metaphorisation of her unruly body by relocating it from marketplace to gaol, from oppositional speech to imposed silence, in order to make it serve as a warning to those who paid their money to see her. By extending their sacred rhetorics into spatial and social dimensions, rather than limiting them to the linguistic, Quakers found themselves confronting head-on the dominant civic and political interpretations of those dimensions, made sharply evident here by the mayor’s remaking of the public spectacle of the unruly woman speaking into the equally public spectacle of the woman restrained and silenced by the bridle. Characteristically, however, the mayor’s apparent triumph is in turn ‘remade’ by Waugh in her published account. There, she seeks to resecure this sequence of events to her own rhetorical ends, such that the spectacle of the silenced woman becomes yet another means to ‘tender’ the hearts of the potentially regenerate, for, Waugh writes, ‘the people to see me so violently abused were broken into tears’.91 Waugh and the mayor struggle over the interpretation of these events, both seeking to fix their meanings to serve their own ends. In publishing her account, she demonstrates the inadequacy of the power of the bridle to silence her; she thereby shows too that the mayor’s victory had been a hollow one, his attempt to harness the power of the spectacle in fact serving only to further Friends’ progress. Her published account ensures that she has the last, rather triumphalist, word.92 The embodied rhetoric of a practised theology as exemplified in Waugh’s encounter with the hostile Mayor of Carlisle returns us to where this chapter began: namely, the vehement and anxious opposition of opponents of the new movement such as Francis Higginson. On the one hand, the aggravation expressed by Higginson and others might be said to result from the audacious scope of Friends’ rhetorical resources and devices, reversing previous significations and refusing conventional linguistic and social boundaries and conventions. On the other hand, their ambitious refusals of spiritual and social convention also demonstrated the limits to what might be achieved by these rhetorical acts through sheer force of spiritual conviction, no matter how strongly those acts might be endorsed by a congruency with their theological underpinnings. Indeed, the moments of encounter with legal, civic or religious sanction demonstrated precisely the limits on the Quakers of transforming social meanings with the urgency and rapidity they desired. Perhaps in their insistence on taking their rhetoric into an embodied domain beyond language, and into practices whereby the comparative security of metaphor was called into question through the assertion of a literal truth-value, they

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demonstrated the sociality of language and its resistance to the immediacy of willed transformation. Friends’ rhetorical practices are not only indicative of audacity, ambition and conviction but also, and more importantly, are a discursive embodiment of the beliefs of the early movement. In other words, the rhetorical disturbance caused by the early movement was also, and inseparably, a doctrinal disturbance, and a proper recognition of the challenge posed to more orthodox theological positions. If ‘bodiliness’, or the making visible of that which was absent, is, as Shuger argued, the key rhetorical strategy for the closing of the gap between the divine and the human, then early Quaker practice encapsulates all the possibilities and all the pitfalls of that position taken to its limit, where a simultaneous figural recognition and closing of that gap is replaced by an insistence on the fusion of the two categories. It is for this reason that Quaker public discourse is legible both as operating within the same rhetorical framework as more orthodox preaching practice but also as profoundly challenging to it. Quaker rhetoric shares with the more conventional sacred rhetoric of Protestantism an understanding of the need to ‘convince’ through engaging the emotions of the listener with the vivid bodying forth of the mysteries of the gospel, but it does so not primarily through linguistic means, but by enacting those mysteries in and through Friends’ own ‘celestial flesh’.93 As a rhetorical practice this is distinctive by virtue of its negotiation of, play with, and refusal of, ideas of proximity and distance, between the literal and the metaphorical as between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the social. Friends thereby went beyond a rhetorical equivalence of the doctrine they preached – for equivalence leaves intact the distinction between the two entities – and moved instead into its rhetorical embodiment. For Quakers, this embodiment and inhabiting of their doctrine extended the domain of preaching into the rhetorical performance of their theology in the cities, streets, churches, gaols and fields in which they lived and moved. By embodying, making both visible and present, the foundational doctrine of the indwelling Christ in this way, and thereby living in a world not only reinterpreted but also remade by their doctrine, they provoked the ire of the civic, religious and political authorities they confronted. Living and enacting their theology in the social spaces of the towns and villages to which its preachers and prophets travelled was, by their own lights, only to act on the belief that ‘the steeplehouse and that ground on which it stood was no more holier than that mountain’.94 It was also, however, to make claims for the jurisdiction of their theology that proved intolerable to those whose positions, authorities and beliefs were challenged by such a lived rhetoric. Quakers did not so much let their lives preach as make them preach, in a rhetoric whose unbounded reach refused to give ground to, or leave space for, any claims that countered their own.

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‘And the Lord’s power was over all’: anxiety, confidence and masculinity in Fox’s Journal

Masculinity is inherently anxious. (Mark Breitenberg)1 The doubleness of predestination produced a doubleness of vision: the paradigm of reprobation (as explicit as that of election, and statistically much more probable) was always an influential possibility. . . . In the end, only one of the paradigms could discover itself to be true for any one life. So there was a constant pressure to nag at the contradictory evidence, to keep experience under daily review; to try to argue anxiety away, certainly, but without evading the apparent grounds of anxiety. (John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco)2

Anxiety, it seems, was a pervasive early modern affective state. For Mark Breitenberg, it inheres within early modern masculinity to the extent that it forms, drives and defines it. Equally, in John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco’s analysis, it sits at the heart of the dominant Calvinist-derived religious discourse of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If anxiety is so fundamental to, so enmeshed within, and so structurally constitutive of, early modern discourses of both masculinity and religion, it comes as something of a surprise to find John Knott glossing George Fox’s Journal as defined by ‘an overwhelming confidence’.3 Knott is not alone in his characterisation: Thomas Carlyle noted Fox’s ‘enormous sacred Self-confidence’, while his most recent biographer, H. Larry Ingle, describes him more bluntly as ‘cocksure’, and ‘a prig who took himself seriously, very seriously indeed’.4 Braithwaite noted the ‘air of authority which habitually accompanied his words and actions’, and called him ‘sure and dauntless’, with an ‘overweening confidence in Truth’.5 T. Edmund Harvey found him ‘too sincere to hide what he saw and did in any cloak of mock humility, and there is no trace of this in his Journal’.6 Certainly, the evidence of the Journal gives ready support to these evaluations of Fox. Its focus is overwhelmingly on external event, rather than on

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the interior world of Calvinist spiritual self-scrutinising texts, and this combines with the narrative style – manifested in such habitual formulations as ‘the power of the Lord came over all’ – to produce Fox as a figure defined by certainty and confidence rather than self-doubt and anxiety.7 It is with this striking, and perhaps anomalous, confidence that this chapter is concerned. How did Fox, as constituted by his Journal (the closest he came to a spiritual autobiography), evade the grip of such pervasive cultural anxieties, whether associated with his gender or with the religious context which formed him? How, in the light of broader critical analyses of ‘anxious masculinity’ and more specifically of the widespread, potent and palpable Puritan manifestations of the same phenomenon (what Stachniewski so aptly termed ‘the persecutory imagination’), might we begin to account for Fox’s ‘enormous sacred Selfconfidence’?8 Through an analysis of his Journal, the text on which above all such characterisations depend, I shall examine the tension, but also the interrelation, between the Journal’s formation and staging of Fox’s authorial confidence, and the anxieties which have been argued to characterise both masculinity and spiritual identities in the early modern period. To what extent does the Journal establish this sense of authorial confidence through the invocation, negotiation or repudiation of these broader cultural discourses of anxiety? Furthermore, in what ways do the specifics of early Quaker theology and practice, and in particular the emphasis on the light within and the authority of the individual conscience, give access and shape to this defining confidence? Is Fox’s ‘confident masculinity’ best understood through reference to what it left behind – the tormenting uncertainties of a Calvinist youth – or to what it helped to form – a religious grouping premised on the authority of the individually apprehended light within? However we approach the question of Fox’s confidence, it cannot simply be attributed to his dissociation from contemporary paradigms of masculinity. As Naomi Winter has argued, while Fox might be alienated from certain ‘contemporary performances of masculinity’, he none the less aligns himself with other, biblically originating, models, from Adam and the Old Testament prophets to St Paul and Christ, identification with whom undoubtedly bestows on him a certain power and gravitas.9 Fox also inhabits certain social identities culturally associated with masculine authority: he is, for example, for the majority of the Journal a compelling public figure, the founder and leader of an international movement, loved, even lionised, by his fellow adherents. He is also a ceaseless traveller, solitary, resilient, purposeful, outspoken, refusing to conform, rejecting on principle the niceties of conventional forms of social interaction. As Knott comments, At times he seems a picaresque hero, eluding pursuers, outwitting examiners, and enduring imprisonment only to win his release and resume his mission. . . . Unlike the Paul we encounter in Acts, he could record his own version of the

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drama in which he played a leading part, even portray himself as folk hero if he chose.10

From such character sketches, which draw equally on spiritual and literary models, a hybrid image of Fox emerges, a cross between the evangelising St Paul, Jack Wilton (Thomas Nashe’s rootless ‘unfortunate traveller’) and one of Jack Kerouac’s restless, questing itinerants, a composite figure for whom being on the road was not a means to an end, but was the end, enacting a process which accrued its own numinous aura. Absent, however, from this account of Fox as inspired and evangelising picaresque wanderer, and indeed from most critical discussions of him, is the anxiety which, for Mark Breitenberg and others, constitutes, sustains and defines early modern masculinity.11 Breitenberg makes his case for a fundamental relation between masculinity and anxiety by drawing on a range of early modern texts, from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) to Shakespeare’s Othello (1604). These writings demonstrate, he suggests, that masculine anxiety works on two levels: ‘it reveals the fissures and contradictions of patriarchal systems’, and ‘it paradoxically enables and drives patriarchy’s reproduction and continuation of itself ’.12 By this account, masculine anxiety is at once symptomatic of a malaise, constitutive of a gendered subjectivity, and a dynamic agent in the production and perpetuation of social and cultural norms. His analysis, psychoanalytically framed, finds masculine anxieties to be fundamentally based in fears relating to gender and sexuality, and in particular ‘toward female chastity and women’s sexuality in general’.13 His view of the continuity between masculine subjectivity, anxiety and sexuality broadly confirms that of Stephen Greenblatt, who reads Wyatt’s poetic self-fashioning in lines such as ‘I love an other and thus I hate myself ’ as an indicative cultural instance of an unsustainable desire for masculine self-sufficiency: Any expression of need or dependence or longing is . . . perceived as a significant defeat; the characteristic male as well as national dream is for an unshakable selfsufficiency that would render all relations with others superfluous: ‘I am as I am and so will I be.’ But such a hard, indifferent identity – in conflict, after all, with the Protestant conviction of man’s utter helplessness – cannot be sustained; even its few expressions are tinged with anxious defiance or calculating regard for those opinions that are supposedly being scorned. The single self . . . is a rhetorical construct designed to enhance the speaker’s power, allay his fear, disguise his need.14

The ‘characteristic male . . . dream’ of self-sufficiency is a dream predicated on the anxieties and insecurities of desire, and inadequate to its task of banishing them. Moreover, the terms of this dream, in which agency is premised on autonomy, is in conflict, Greenblatt suggests, with Protestant, and in particular Calvinist, models of the helplessly dependent subject. This brings into the same

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frame the structuring anxieties produced by desire, dependence and belief, and suggests some parallels, as well as some tensions, between them. Breitenberg elaborates a similar interrelation: Anxiety thus describes a state of suspicion without trust, doubt that is incapable of faith, perpetual uncertainty . . .. Indeed, it is possible to say that anxiety is the negative condition against which an age of faith defines itself: in both cases, one responds to an origin or cause that cannot be fully apprehended, and in both cases the response is a copious discourse seeking to discover and affirm the elusive source. . . . anxiety is a restless, agitated, never-consummated search for something that may not exist, a state in which certainty is always suspended.15

Sexual anxiety, for Breitenberg, is structurally akin to religious anxiety: both seek certainty, or confidence, through a repudiation of uncertainty which can never be definitively achieved. Both are endlessly rehearsed, and in the rehearsal both are sustained as well as held in check. However, reference to a body of writing minutely concerned with the interrelation of subjectivity and belief – the seventeenth-century outpouring of conversion narratives and other spiritual self-writings – suggests that there is more to be said about the place of anxiety in the early modern religious dynamic than Breitenberg allows, for these texts suggest that it is not so much that ‘anxiety is the negative condition against which an age of faith defines itself ’ but more that anxiety is a dynamic element in the production, articulation and maintenance of faith itself. It is not the Other of faith, but an inherent and constitutive part of its identity. This, in turn, raises further questions about Fox’s certainty and the constitution of his faith: if the repudiation of anxiety is a structuring dynamic within early modern Protestantism, what becomes of this in Fox’s post-Calvinist spiritual subjectivity? Fear, doubt, uncertainty and anxiety are well-documented characteristics of early modern spiritual identities, usually understood as a direct consequence of the Calvinist-inflected Protestantism which predominated in England from the later sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. As Roger Smith says, ‘Protestant values heightened awareness of a direct relationship between each individual fallen soul and God’s omnipotent will’, and individuals were increasingly enjoined to monitor the condition of that relationship and their progress towards salvation.16 The outcome of such a heightened awareness, Gary Waller argues, is: not a replete but an anxious self, one that is never sure that the next moment will in fact be given. Protestantism is a religion of discontinuous grace, where each moment is created by the arbitrary and unquestioned frait [sic] of God . . .. The result is that what Protestantism gave sixteenth-century England was a radically insecure, anxious, discontinuous self.17

The self-scrutiny required by such a dynamic was one impetus behind the increase in spiritual autobiographical writings in the seventeenth century, but

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that these writings are so often records of fear, doubt and anxiety is understood as a corollary of the Calvinist doctrine of predestined election and reprobation – an anxiety, that is, resulting from the combination of the ultimate uncertainty of one’s soteriological status (am I of the elect or of the reprobate?) and the impossibility of the individual having any impact on that status because it was predestined ‘before the foundations of the world were laid’.18 At the heart of Calvinist Protestantism was a high degree of individual responsibility combined with a severely arrested sense of individual spiritual agency, an impossible combination emanating from an emphasis on individual fallenness and divine omnipotence which begins to account for the widespread manifestations of spiritual anxiety. Many spiritual autobiographies inscribe just such a subjectivity, borne of the acute pains of self-scrutiny and unassuageable fears regarding the subject’s elect or reprobate status. John Stachniewski’s magisterial study of these texts, The Persecutory Imagination, offers a compelling analysis of the reach and purchase of the anguish generated by Calvinism in the lives of believers, and leaves little doubt of the peculiarly torturous power of this framing of Christian belief. The Baptist John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding is the best-known example of such a text, continually vacillating between intimations of assurance and torments of doubt, neither state, finally, reliable or permanent. Early in the text, Bunyan asks himself, ‘How can you tell you are Elected? and what if you should not? how then?’: O Lord, thought I, what if I should not indeed? it may be you are not, said the Tempter: it may be so indeed, thought I. Why then, said Satan, you had as good leave off, and strive no further; for if indeed you should not be Elected and chosen of God, there is no talke of your being saved: For it is neither in him that willeth, nor in him that runneth, but in God that sheweth mercy. By these things I was driven to my wits end, not knowing what to say, or how to answer these temptations, (indeed I little thought that Satan had thus assaulted me, but that rather it was my own prudence thus to start the question) for that the Elect only attained eternal life, that I without scruple did heartily close withall; but that my self was one of them, there lay all the question.19

‘There lay all the question’: the question of election, and its ultimate unanswerability, is the issue that animates and sustains Bunyan’s text from start to finish. Just as in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella the persona of Astrophil is the eloquent outcome of his beloved Stella’s repeated refusal to grant his desires, produced by and dependent on precisely the situation which torments him, so the voice and persona of Bunyan are co-extensive with the tension between longed-for election and a dread of reprobation.20 This tension is dramatised by the attribution of certain thoughts to the narrator, others to Satan; but the soteriological issue at stake is highlighted by the narrator’s inability authoritatively to decide whether ‘these temptations’ are indeed the assaults of Satan or the proper

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self-scrutiny required by spiritual ‘prudence’. If in Fox’s Journal the journey itself becomes the destination in which Fox finds demonstrated the grace of God, so in Bunyan’s text the ceaseless struggle with the uncertainty of election enacts the truth of the condition necessarily confronted by the (Calvinist) Christian subject. So it is that Grace Abounding ends as indeterminately as it began, with the narrator as fully defined by his radical uncertainty as he was at the outset: ‘These things I continuallie see and feel, and am afflicted and oppressed with; yet the Wisdom of God doth order them for my good: 1. They make me abhor myself; 2. They keep me from trusting my heart’.21 Self-doubt is essential to the maintenance of the fine balance between temptation to despair and the apprehension of grace, between spiritual complacency and spiritual assurance. Anxiety itself for Bunyan has become an indicator of good faith.22 Bunyan’s spiritual torment seems, in his account, to be the over-determined outcome of the Calvinist doctrine of election and reprobation, and certainly his catalogue of doubts, fears and temptations is to be found in many other seventeenth-century accounts. Richard Norwood, in an earlier example of English Calvinist self-writing, confirms both the longevity of certain patterns of spiritual torment and the importance of the uncertainty of their status in his self-apprehension: This temptation hath doubtless had a strong influence in me in the whole course of my life since that time, being now 24 years past. But whether be more the benefit or the prejudice that hath come unto me by it, hath bene always doubtful. But surely upon due consideration I may say, and that from experience, that even these things have wrought together for the best, and that it is good for me that I have bene afflicted.23

As in Bunyan’s account, a radical doubt, occasioned by the indeterminacy of the meanings of his temptations, constitutes the core of his self-apprehension, such that he can conclude ‘it is good for me that I have bene afflicted’ – ‘good’ in that the assailing of the self proves to be the means by which that self can be discerned and grasped even as it is tormented and undone. The question of the extent to which this process of anxious Calvinist subjectification relates to the broader anxieties generated by discourses of masculinity, or is attributable to Calvinism alone, is posed when we turn to texts produced within this doctrinal framework by women.24 These suggest that not all Calvinist-inflected self-writings are defined to the same extent as Bunyan’s and Norwood’s by persistent and constitutive doubt and suffering. Hannah Allen, for example, a Presbyterian, was beset by a range of temptations; she links these to a propensity to melancholy which coincided with ‘the oft absence of my dear and affectionate Husband’, and his subsequent death at sea.25 Melancholy and temptation to despair continue to go hand in hand, but they are not synonymous:

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I know not well what to say, for as yet I am under sad Melancholy, and sometimes dreadful Temptations, to have hard thoughts of my dearest Lord . . .: These Temptations were with dreadful violence. Besides, my Melancholy hath bad effects upon my body, greatly impairing my Health: Truly there is sometimes such a woful confusion and combating in my Soul, that I know not what to do.26

Spiritual, bodily and mental well-being for Allen interrelate but do not, finally, merge; unusually, her melancholy is not read principally as a sign of spiritual malaise or as a facet of satanic temptation, though it is certainly in correspondence with these. Accordingly, at the close of the text, the melancholy is afforded its own resolution, distinct from, and prior to, the abatement of her spiritual turmoil: As my Melancholy came by degrees, so it wore off by degrees, and as my dark Melancholy bodily distempers abated, so did my spiritual Maladies also, and God convinced me by degrees; that all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations, working in those dark and black humors, and not from my self, and this God cleared up to me more and more; and accordingly my love to, and delight in Religion, increased.27

Whilst Allen’s anatomy of temptation, doubt and fear is legible within the framework established in Bunyan’s or Norwood’s texts, it is strikingly different in that her corporeal health is not represented as fully dependent on her spiritual wellbeing – on the contrary, as Elspeth Graham puts it, ‘Her suffering takes the form of spiritual despair, yet change is not explicitly linked to religious growth’.28 Indeed, Allen makes clear that her recovery from melancholy coincided with her second marriage, to ‘Mr. Charles Hatt . . . with whom I live very comfortably, both as to my inward and outward man’.29 Her spiritual recovery and comfort are linked to her social circumstances in a manner entirely alien to the largely internal and asocial landscape of Bunyan’s text. The marriage reconciles her ‘inward and outward man’, her spiritual and bodily selves, through recognition of a clear distinction between the two. Anna Trapnel, like Bunyan a Baptist, certainly records satanic temptations, but also – textually, at least – moves beyond these to delineate the place of rapture that she inhabits following the assurance she attains concerning her elect status.30 It is not that Satan ceases to assail her but that these attacks and temptations become occasions for the further demonstration of God’s grace: For still when the tempter would tell me, when I laid my eyes together, I should be struck dead, and when I said I should recover, the Devil told me I should not, but death should deprive me of my confidence; yet no attempts startled me, or weakned my faith in the least measure, for God was still at hand to deliver; Many times Sathan strove to shatter my confidence, but as my Saviour prayed for me when he was here upon the earth in praying for all that should believe, so he was

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ready to rescue me upon all occasions, both night and day, praised be his holy name, which told me he would not fail my expectations.31

At stake in this incident, Trapnel tells us twice, is her ‘confidence’; and yet this is merely confirmed and strengthened by satanic assault. The contrast to the subject positions of Bunyan and Norwood could hardly be greater. While the figures of Satan, God and Christ are externalised, rather than appearing as dimensions of inner spiritual turmoil, they are also fully present, intimately involved in Trapnel’s spiritual drama: God is at hand to deliver, the saviour is ‘ready to rescue me upon all occasions’. For Trapnel, temptations elicit and demonstrate the unmerited beneficence of the divine towards her, while for Bunyan they fundamentally call into question the foundations of his being in this life and the next. For Trapnel, a position of confidence (or assurance) is fully achievable within a Baptist/Calvinist framework. The anxiety of Bunyan and Norwood is not an inevitable consequence of the double doctrine of election and reprobation or the uncertainty of signs of assurance. If a Calvinist stance regarding predestination was not in itself sufficient to generate in all Calvinist spiritual autobiographers the anxiety which characterises Bunyan and Norwood’s texts, then the question remains of the extent to which the gendering of anxiety itself might cross-cut these processes. Perhaps there is something peculiarly masculine in the interminable anxieties rehearsed by Bunyan and Norwood and, conversely, something peculiarly feminine in the possibilities of assurance achieved by Allen and Trapnel. Perhaps early modern femininities (if femininity can for the moment be aligned with women) tolerate more readily the uncertainty, the lack of agency, the pressures not so much of subjectification but of objectification (in relation to the divine Subject), while what Greenblatt called the ‘characteristic male dream’ of ‘an unshakable self-sufficiency’ is too much at odds with the manifest heteronomy and uncertainty of Calvinist predestinarianism ever to be accommodated. In other words, perhaps Calvinism itself required a feminised subject, and perhaps this begins to account for the differing patterns of response to be found in these male- and female-authored texts. Such a proposition, however, presents as many problems as it resolves. One objection is that such a formulation accords a prior and definitive status to ‘masculinity’ which cannot then accommodate the incoming Calvinist pressures, whereas, in the culture of early modern Puritanism, belief would have as great a claim (if not greater) to an originary status as gender. Moreover, as recent critics have amply demonstrated, the processes of subjectification entailed in early modern spirituality thoroughly complicate such monolithic alignments of women and men with femininity and masculinity respectively, particularly where the latter terms are assumed to signify much as they do today. So for example Debora Kuller Shuger has demonstrated that, in the

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Renaissance, ‘father’, the ultimate patriarchal signifier, had a range of significations quite different from those attributed to it by current critical discourse: ‘father’ usually does not connote authority, discipline, rationality, law, and so on, but rather forgiveness, nurturing, and tenderness. This is almost always the case in discussions of God the Father. In fact, in reference to God the import of paternal images seems virtually identical to that of maternal ones.32

From this, Shuger draws a conclusion that serves as a more general caveat. The assumption in the Renaissance texts she is considering (principally by Tyndale, Hooker, Vives, Andrewes and Milton) is that: fathers are and should be tender, nurturing, affectionate, and emotional – qualities that recent scholarship, including some feminist scholarship, classifies as female. Conversely, the common nineteenth-century assumption that women are more compassionate, pious, and loving than men does not seem to have been an important part of Renaissance ideology. And this leads to the suspicion that modern gender differentiation is not a historical constant. The Renaissance obviously also specifies gender distinctions, but different ones: women are weaker, more sensual than men, and therefore less suited to govern.33

The Renaissance connotations of the term ‘father’, Shuger argues, were less to do with the wrathful and judgemental exercise of power, and more with the tender and affectionate governance associated with processes of nurturance. This suggests that, however much we might find Greenblatt’s ‘unshakable self-sufficiency’ figuring as a powerful masculine ideal, it was not the only one. There were others, equally potent and far-reaching, premised on precisely the intrasubjective and affective dynamics that the dream of self-sufficiency sought to repudiate. In the light of this, it is worth reflecting again on the often-noted ‘feminisation’ of the early Quaker movement.34 As Michele Lise Tarter has recently argued, the longstanding gendered dualisms of body and soul, reason and passion, intellect and emotion, meant that ‘the very corporeality of earliest Quaker prophesying [such as quaking or going naked as a sign] instantly slated this sect as a “feminized” and deviant band of worshippers’.35 This identification of the feminine with the body, as well as with irrationality, resulted, as Phyllis Mack argued, in many of the contemporary justifications made of women’s prophetic activity.36 Moreover, the dissolution of self enjoined on believers and embraced so ardently by many spiritual autobiographers is closer to the social and cultural position required of the feminine subject.37 If early Quakerism’s practice can be broadly characterised as endorsing traits usually viewed as feminine – the irrational, the emotional, the corporeal and the self-abnegating – how do we reconcile this with the fundamental theological distinction between Calvinism and Quakerism: namely, the reinstatement of the power of the subject to affect their own progress towards salvation

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or reprobation, in their ability to submit to, or to resist, the light within? In other words, if Quaker doctrine is premised on a recognition of the subject as agent, through the necessity of turning to the inward light, albeit through a process requiring the dissolution of the obstructive operation of the fallen human will, then how does such agency mesh with the movement’s prevailing feminising ethos of will-lessness and selflessness? Furthermore, how might these ambiguously gendered categories relate to the textual subjectivity of Fox, as inscribed in the Journal, and to the extraordinary access to confidence to be found there, so at odds with the paradigms of both anxious masculinity and anxious Calvinism? Is there, in other words, a need to add into the mix, alongside anxiety and confidence, a consideration of a peculiarly Quaker relation to autonomy and dependence? Through what textual processes might we identify the varying and intersecting operations of gender, power and agency in the production and maintenance of the ‘enormous sacred Self-confidence’ of its first-person narrator, and how might that Quaker version of sacredness itself remake the paradigms of gender as well as of spirituality?

Overcoming anxiety If the agency introduced into the repertoire of spiritual subjectivity by Quakerism, as by Arminianism more generally, is significant with regard to Fox’s confidence, equally important is the fact that this is a hard-won position, and one that is by no means in place from the outset of the Journal’s narrative. Indeed, the opening section of the Journal (a retrospective account, not one written to the moment), in contrast to the greater part of the text, conforms closely to the pattern found in other conversion narratives and spiritual selfwritings.38 While Bunyan was troubled by his own youthful misdemeanours, Fox was disturbed from an early age by the wantonness of others, and set himself apart from their ‘filthiness’ and ‘foul ways’.39 An early reputation for ‘innocency and honesty’, however, proved insufficient as a ground for faith, and, like Trapnel and many others, he experienced a ‘strong temptation to despair’: ‘And when Satan could not effect his design upon me that way, then he laid snares for me, and baits to draw me to commit some sin, whereby he might take advantage to bring me to despair’.40 These early pages delineate a familiar territory of doubt, temptation, and a desire for spiritual assurance. Again, not unusually, these lead to a period of solitary seeking, when Fox, ‘in great sorrows and troubles, . . . walked many nights by myself ’.41 Like Bunyan, he initially sought respite through consulting ministers and others who might counsel him, all of whom failed to ‘reach my condition’.42 The uncertainty and dislocation Fox experiences regarding his spiritual condition is matched by discontent with the religious doctrines and ministers available to him: inner

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and outer, as in Hannah Allen’s text, are out of joint. He increasingly dissociates himself from his family, despite their godly credentials, from those around him, from drink and tobacco, from idle chatter, this process of separation culminating in ‘the command of God’ that ‘I left my relations, and brake off all familiarity or fellowship with young or old’. Shedding his attachments one by one, he eventually finds himself ‘as a stranger in the earth’.43 This period of solitude and spiritual seeking was accompanied by a strong sense of social anxiety. Fox recounts an anecdote concerning his discussion with a priest about ‘the ground of temptations and despair and how troubles came to be wrought in man’: Now as we were talking together in his garden, the alley being narrow, I chanced, in turning, to set my foot on the side of a bed; at which the man was in such a rage, as if his house had been on fire. And thus all our discourse was lost, and I went away in sorrow, worse than I was, when I came. I thought them miserable comforters: and I saw, they were all as nothing to me; for they could not reach my condition.44

The priest’s reaction to Fox’s social infelicity – stepping on the side of the flower bed – seems to Fox disproportionate, ‘as if his house had been on fire’. Fox’s own reaction to the event seems similarly disproportionate: all their ‘discourse was lost’, he writes, and he left ‘in sorrow’, rejecting all ministers as ‘miserable comforters’. It is tempting to read this as an early indicator of later ministerial fury at Quaker social misdemeanours, but the incident is even more striking for its representation of Fox as a figure riven by the generalised vulnerability and indeterminate anxiety that are so markedly absent from the greater part of the Journal: after all, this is the same Fox who later thinks nothing of provoking rage in the clergy. For all the latter part of the Journal’s differences from other contemporary spiritual self-writings – its lack of inwardness, its immunity to self-doubt, its focus on the apparently mundane details of journeys made, Friends convinced, opponents encountered, sufferings endured – these early pages are entirely consonant with these other anxious inwardlooking spiritual self-inscriptions. As Ingle put it, at this time of his life, ‘Fox had gone beyond despair: he was suffering from angst’.45 The confidence which characterises the greater part of the Journal is thus not a constant, in place from the outset, but is achieved by means of Fox’s convincement and accession to the inward light. This takes place early in the Journal, each period of revelation establishing a number of what would become key Quaker tenets or practices. So we find it being ‘opened’ in Fox that university education did not fit men to be ministers of Christ, and that God ‘did not dwell in temples made with hands . . . but in people’s hearts’.46 The emphasis throughout is on the transformation and re-creation of the believer in a state of prelapsarian perfection:

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I knew nothing, but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I say, I was come up to the state of Adam, which he was in, before he fell. . . . But I was immediately taken up in spirit, to see into another or more steadfast state, than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall.47

The transformational heart of this doctrine was the notion of the inward light or indwelling Christ who brought universal enlightenment: ‘Christ hath enlightened every man, that cometh into the world withal’.48 This returned a decisive degree of agency to the believer, in that one could turn (or be turned) to the light within, or not – an agency manifestly lacking in Fox’s Calvinist spiritual formation. In turn, this position required a redefinition of the doctrine of election and reprobation: ‘I saw it shine through all: and that they, that believed in it, came out of condemnation, and came to the light of life, and became the children of it; but they that hated it, and did not believe in it, were condemned by it; though they made a profession of Christ’.49 Finally, and as a consequence of these revelations, Fox is called to his mission: the Lord commanded me to go abroad into the world, which was like a briary, thorny wilderness . . .. Now was I sent to turn people from darkness to the light, that they might receive Christ Jesus: for to as many as should receive him in his light, I saw, that he would give power to become the sons of God: which I had obtained by receiving Christ.50

It is this mission – the decades-long consequence of this series of revelations – with which the rest of the Journal is concerned. The narrative climax and resolution to the problem of Fox’s spiritual and social anxiety and dislocation are reached early; the rest of the text, narratively speaking, simply confirms and re-enacts the rectitude of that resolution. These early sections are uncharacteristic of the Journal in that they delineate a principally internal drama of torment, struggle, revelation, joy and resolution. They set out a process much closer to the conventional ordo salutis whereby the believer progresses through a series of stages towards sanctification, a process which allows of an end point (however multiply constituted), a point of resolution or at least resolve, rather than the perpetual and irresolvable dynamic of fear, doubt and hope inhabited by Bunyan.51 Fox’s itinerant mission was launched at the moment of his recognition that believers will attain ‘power to become the sons of God: which I had obtained by receiving Christ’: ‘For I saw, that Christ had died for all men, and was a propitiation for all; and had enlightened all men and women with his divine and saving light’.52 With this claim to divine potency, combined with the unCalvinist sense of individual spiritual agency and inclusiveness, ‘the Lord God and his son Jesus Christ did send me forth into the world’.53 From this position, as a son of God, the rest

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of Fox’s Journal – an almost entirely distinct document in its narrative focus, mood and trajectory – is inaugurated. The accession to the doctrine of the inward light thus constitutes a fundamental point of transition in the Journal, and in the subject positions taken up by Fox; it was these experiences that ‘gave him an assurance he had never known before and enabled him to defend his newly discovered and radical faith’.54 The impact of this on the narrative of the Journal, Knott suggests, is profound: After the first part of the Journal, which shows the young Fox searching for spiritual truth and ultimately becoming convinced that he possesses the inner light, we see little spiritual growth and little or no self-analysis. . . . Fox traces the triumphant progress of truth in England and abroad. His struggles are real enough, but they are largely with external forces.55

The change of tenor in the Journal is striking. The transition is from an internal psycho-spiritual drama of anxiety and longing to an externally focused and situated historical drama of travel, encounter and performance. It is also a transition from doubt to certainty, from anxiety to confidence, from seeking to leading, from solitude to community. From walking as ‘a stranger in the earth’, increasingly separating himself from ties to his family, his master and his community, he builds a movement that, while having a core of itinerant ministers or Public Friends, was also strongly rooted in place, through household, meeting, community and network. Strikingly, therefore, a theology which prioritised inwardness – the indwelling Christ, the inward light, the silence and stillness of the meeting, the primacy of the divinely illuminated conscience, the refusal of outward forms and conventions – resulted in a document, the movement’s principal text, whose narrative focus was far removed from the theological inwardness it commended. It asserts and records the pre-eminence of the inward through minute attention to the external. What, though, are the implications of this narrative trajectory for the constitution of the figure of Fox himself? What happens to the anxiety and uncertainty that characterise his self-presentation in the early pages of the Journal? Are they entirely banished, or redeployed in the service of his reshaped subjectivity? How is he figured within this narrative repetition and exemplification of the indwelling Christ? Fox’s initial thirty-five pages of youthful spiritual doubt and his accession to the doctrine of the inward light are followed by several hundred pages of almost unwavering spiritual certainty. Since these form the vast majority of the text, it is unsurprising that they have tended to eclipse the earlier sections in discussions of the characteristic presence and impact of Fox within the narrative trajectory. It is indeed striking that, following the intense anguish of these opening sections, the account of the next thirty years rarely admits the equanimity of this achieved position to be shakeable. Whilst the mechanism whereby his spiritual anxiety is expelled is the revelation of the doctrine of the

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indwelling Christ, this leaves the question of how that expulsion is maintained: what are the textual means whereby the position of spiritual assurance remains – to the extent that it does – unshaken? The answer to this question lies, I suggest, in Fox’s positioning in this text with regard to power, agency and autonomy, both spiritual and temporal. Fox’s Journal is a text preoccupied, even obsessed, with power, its various origins and formations, and the differing scope and remit of these. The power with which Fox most habitually aligns himself is, unsurprisingly, divine power. It forms the touchstone for the proper interpretation of an event: once, Fox writes, one of a group of men with whom he had refused to drink in an alehouse came after him ‘with a batch of knives by his side’, but ‘the Lord preserved me by his power from him’; similarly, a ‘priest had threatened friends: but when I came there he would not stand, but fled: the Lord’s power so came over him and them’.56 In both cases, the Lord’s power serves as a guarantee of the providential propriety of the events in the midst of which its invocation is embedded, whether a man’s preservation or a priest’s flight. Indeed, the phrase ‘And the Lord’s power was over all’ (or close variations of it) recurs so frequently, and is so fundamental to the texture of the prose, that Nigel Smith suggests that it functions as the punctuation of this extemporary dictated text, marking the end of a sense unit, and underlining the purpose of the account to ‘demonstrate the workings of divine power’.57 Notably, the refrain bears witness not only to divine omnipresence but to the omnipresence of his power; this is the attribute of the Lord which Fox invokes most frequently. Whilst he writes too of the Lord’s glory, for example, and of his ‘everlasting life and truth’, these do not function structurally, as a repeated point of closure or resolution, to the extent that the references to power do.58 Nor does the nature of that power remain unspecified; it is, above all, a power that ‘subdues all the contrary’.59 So, the Lord ‘confounded’ a Baptist priest ‘with his power’; when people ‘intended to have done mischief . . . God prevented them’. Similarly, when two ‘priests were in such a fret and rage that they foamed at the mouth for anger against me . . . the Lord’s power came over them all: . . . and the next day there was a rude wicked man would have done violence to a friend but the Lord’s power stopped him’.60 On other occasions, opponents are ‘blasted’, ‘bound’, ‘chained’, ‘stopped’ and ‘crossed’ by the Lord’s power.61 ‘God’s vengeance from heaven came upon the bloodthirsty who sought after blood, for all such spirits I laid before the Lord and left them to him to deal with them who is stronger than them all’.62 The Lord’s power is above all a constraining force, distinct from the power which turns people to the light within; it is the power that punishes those who refuse to turn, or that clears the way of obstacles facing those open to turning. The ubiquity and form of this power is conceived in strikingly material terms: ‘the Lord’s power had surrounded this nation round about as with a wall and bulwark and his seed

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reached from sea unto sea’.63 The power to constrain (like a wall or bulwark) is also the power to protect and shelter that which dwells within (his seed). Just as the divine is omnipresent, so too, according to Fox, is the seed. In this, divine power becomes almost continuous with Friends – they act because of it, but also in it: Fox reports that ‘the Lord’s power bore me up over them that they could not strike me down’.64 Just as ‘the power of the Lord . . . subdues all the contrary’, so Friends are to ‘tread and trample all that is contrary under’.65 Friends attain the power to counter and constrain ungodliness, and the nature and source of their capacity is clear: ‘Friends everywhere abroad scattered, know the power of God in one another’.66 That which is to be constrained is as clearly focused as is the constraining power: divine power is pitted, above all, against the carnal powers of priests and magistrates. Fox’s journey enacts not only a repeated demonstration of the Lord’s dominion over all but also its reverse: that is, the paucity and inadequacy of the temporal powers of the church and the law: ‘the Lord’s power came over all: and stopped the envy both in priests and justices’.67 Opposition comes not only from these sources; Fox also notes many occasions when companies of ‘rude people’ attack and abuse him. However, it is the exchanges with priests and magistrates, the local representatives of the national church and judiciary, which are afforded the longest and most detailed accounts, the greatest narrative engagement. Whether in the repeated run-ins with ‘priest Lampitt’, or the meetings of priests at Ulverston and Swarthmoor, the condemnation of ‘wicked Independent priests’, the dispute with a Jesuit, or the accounts, each lasting several pages, of the trials at Lancaster, Carlisle and Launceston, Fox repeatedly narrates the struggle between temporal and divine power.68 The outcome is not in doubt; in each case, the Lord’s power ‘is stronger than them all: in whose power I was preserved and carried on to do his work’.69 Even when Fox takes advantage of the sheltering power of temporal officers, such as when the presence of ‘Justice Benson . . . and many considerable people’ prevented mischief from being done to Fox, the usual refrain then clarifies: ‘the Lord’s power stopped them so that they went away and did no hurt but raged much’.70 Similar protection is given by the civil positions of Judge Fell and JPs Anthony Pearson and William West, and on one occasion Fox uses a constable for protection against the violence of a ‘rude multitude’.71 The agents of carnal power may be impotent in the face of divine power, but the godly amongst them still have their uses in the negotiation of temporal nets and snares. The other chief locus and formation of divine power in the Journal is that of the Son, figured here principally as ‘Christ Jesus, their free teacher that bought them’, the emphasis thereby being on the fulfilment of the new covenant, on Christ as saviour and, as teacher, as agent of transformation in others: ‘so [I] left the north fresh and green under Christ their teacher’.72 Whilst Christ

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is a dimension of the Lord, and at times the two are indistinct, none the less more usually Christ is figured as an adjunct and successor to the power of the Lord. Through Christ, Fox rewrote the meanings of election and reprobation: ‘every man was enlightened by the divine light of Christ’; they that believed in it ‘came out of condemnation’, and they that did not ‘were condemned by it’; ‘Christ was in them except they were reprobates’.73 The power of the Lord constrains the ungodly, and clears the way for the teachings of the Son, the agent of spiritual transformation. The two powers work in conjunction: I passed to a market town where I had a meeting at the cross: and all was pretty quiet: and when I had declared the truth unto them and turned them to Christ their teacher: we passed away and had another meeting . . . where many professors and contenders came but the Lord’s power was over all.74

When all is ‘pretty quiet’, he turns people to ‘Christ their teacher’, but when ‘contenders’ are present, the Lord’s power is invoked. Fox’s text suggests a triage of circumstances, whereby opposition requires the constraining power of the Lord, while quiescence can be met with the free teachings of Christ. Fox himself is both the catalyst and the diagnostic instrument for such distinctions, since it is his presence which prompts one or another (or one then another) divine operation.75 In this, Fox differs little from the many contemporary sectaries who saw themselves as passive instruments in the hand of God, intervening in the world not in their own voice or on their own behalf, but as nothing more than passive conduits for the divine will. Such a formulation, however, is inadequate to the position occupied by the Fox of the Journal. The more usual Calvinist sectarian troping of the subject as instrument, or as conduit, requires that the wielder of the instrument, the voice channelled by the conduit, be understood as elsewhere, distanced from the articulating believer. Agency is fully externalised, located with the divine Subject. The Quaker notion of the inward light, however, abolished this distance, and located the already risen Christ fully within the believer, not metaphorically but literally, so that Christ dwelt in the body of the believer: ‘we [are] of his flesh and of his bone’.76 It is not only that Quakerism included a broadly Arminian notion of individual agency within the ordo salutis, thereby abolishing the sense of utter helplessness and impotence so often found in Calvinist self-writings. Its insistence on the inward and material presence of Christ, rather than locating his return in the future and beyond the human, reconceives the power relations between the Lord, Christ and the human subject. While this reconfiguration is not so systematic for it to be possible to conclude that, while God remains an external force, Christ is internalised, or that God constrains the ungodly so that the seed of Christ’s light can flourish, this is none the less generally the manner in which these notions and loci of the divine are represented. So while a Calvinist such as Trapnel might see herself as

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a channel for the divinely originating voice, Fox himself comes to speak with the authority of what Richard Bailey calls ‘celestial flesh’: that is, a fully human corporeal being materially as well as spiritually transformed by his recognition of the indwelling Christ: ‘who are of faith . . . comes to be flesh of Christ’s flesh and bone of his bone’.77 As for all believing subjects, such a recognition requires and enables the dissolution of the ‘self ’, a necessarily fallen construct, so that the believer can be remade in Christ, as prescribed by St Paul in Colossians 3.10: ‘put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him’. Tom Webster points out that this dissolution of the self was not an end in itself, but ‘was intended to create a vacuum that might be filled by divine plenitude’; for Calvinist autobiographers, however, he suggests that this process of self-dissolution and reconstruction was fraught with contradictions:78 the state of selflessness, even with the aid of the Holy Spirit, is an unattainable goal: even a preoccupation with righteousness is a way of life with Self as the end . . .. The disciplines of self-denial and self-examination are designed to turn the necessary condition of selfishness to the creation of a self-abnegating selfhood.79

The Quaker doctrine of the indwelling Christ, however, dissolved this tortuously paradoxical Calvinist state of self-focus in the service of an impossible ideal of selflessness. For the Quaker dissolution of the carnal self seemed genuinely to allow for that access of ‘divine plenitude’ in the indwelling Christ, who could remake the believing subject, erase the fallen self and institute a state of prelapsarian perfection in that subject – a condition that was both fully human (as were Adam and Eve before the fall) but also perfected in their relation with the divine: I declared unto them that Adam and Eve was perfect before they fell and all that God made was perfect and the imperfection came by the Devil and the Fall: and Christ that came to destroy the Devil said, ‘Be ye perfect.’ . . . I let them see their mistakes and how that Adam and Eve had a body before the body of death and sin got into them. And man and woman would have a body when the body of sin and death was put off again: when they were renewed up into the image of God again by Christ Jesus as they was in before they fell.80

Through an invocation of the prelapsarian state, the Quaker position allows a resolution to be found between carnality and divinity without ever erasing all distinction between the human and the godly. Moreover, this is effected by emphasising the bodily dimension of Adam and Eve’s state of unfallen perfection, and it is specifically this which is promised – and embodied – in the believer’s renewal in Christ. A model of godly perfection in human and embodied form is endorsed, and with it a subject position that is incontrovertibly human and assuredly godly.

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It is this doctrine that allows Fox to define himself as the son of God without ever claiming to be Christ. At his examination at the town hall in Carlisle, when asked if he was the son of God, he replied ‘Yes’, with the result that ‘they sent me to prison, as a blasphemer, a heretic, and a seducer’.81 In the previous year, his examiners at the Lancaster sessions expressed similar concerns. Charged with affirming that ‘he was equal with God’, he responded: That was not so spoken, but he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one in the Father and the Son, and that ye are the sons of God. The Father and the Son are one, and we of his flesh and of his bone; this the Scripture doth witness. (Heb. ii. 11; Eph. v. 31)82

Fox disavows, rewrites and thereby accedes to the spirit of the charge, if not its letter, in terms as likely to infuriate the justices as did the original. He speaks not as a conduit for God’s word, but from a position of integration with Christ, ‘of his flesh and of his bone’. His subjectivity, site of such torment and despair in his early years, has been resolved and remade as one of the saints in whom ‘the divinity dwelleth’, a partaker ‘of the divine nature’.83 This continuity between Fox and the Lord permits him to act through the ‘immediate’ (that is, unmediated) ‘Spirit and power’ of God, rather than through ‘the help of man, [or] by the letter’.84 It is this which facilitates that confident assertion that ‘the power of the Lord was over all’, a confidence premised not only on the discernment of the Lord’s power but on a sense of participation in it. That Fox’s contemporaries recognised this assumption on Fox’s part is suggested by a comment made by the recently convinced Elizabeth Trelawney during his travels in Cornwall in 1655. Fox reports a meeting disrupted by ‘some jangling Baptists: but the Lord’s power came over them and this Elizabeth Trelawney came and said: “George is over all” with a loud voice’.85 In the reiteration of this refrain but with the substitution of ‘George’ for the more usual ‘the power of the Lord’, the ubiquity of the one merges with the omnipotence of the other.

Heteronomous agency The claiming of a position of unity with divine power, however, is not the same as claiming a position of equality with it. Despite Fox representing himself as on a continuum with divine power – as in the hearings at Carlisle and Lancaster – this does not necessarily result in an aggrandisement of the self, or its investment with an incommensurate power.86 As such, Fox’s text produces a ‘dream’ or ideal masculine subjectivity far removed from the desire for an ‘unshakable self-sufficiency’ extrapolated by Greenblatt from Wyatt’s poetry. The confidence of Fox’s perfected textual self might be unshakable,

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but it is so precisely because of his dependence, not his self-sufficiency. His agency is always heteronomous, subject to and on behalf of another (he is Christ’s agent); it is never autonomous, as the agent of his own progress and destiny.87 His journeys are contingent, as he is ‘moved of the Lord’ to go where he does. His words might be ‘a hammer and a fire’, but his body is subjected to repeated beatings, stonings and bruisings: they punched me and thrust me out and beat me sore with books, fists and sticks, and threw me over a hedge into a close and there beat me and then threw me over again . . . and after dragged me into the street, stoning and beating me along, sorely blooded and bruised. .  .  . [T]hrough their bruising, beating, blooding, stoning, and throwing me down, I was almost mazed and my body sore bruised, but by the power of the Lord I was refreshed again, to him be the glory.88

The incident undoes further the ideal of the autonomous subject in the way that it rewrites, and revalues, different understandings of power. Fox’s body – conceived of as flesh of Christ’s flesh – becomes a site of contest. The violence intended by its perpetrators to demonstrate their power over him instead provides a means for the exercise of God’s power to ‘refresh’, a power of which Fox partakes and from which he benefits but which is manifestly not his own, and which only demonstrates the failure of his opponents’ power. Moreover, as well as providing the site for the exercise of divine power, the violence also demonstrates Fox’s human vulnerability and weakness, thereby intensifying his self-inscription as dependent and subject to others. Following a beating in Walney Island in 1652, Fox writes that ‘when I was in bed I could turn me no more than a sucking child, I was so bruised’.89 Later, Fox explicitly recalls the words of Psalm 8.2, when he writes, regarding the great convincements of the north of England, that ‘to babes and sucklings he ordained strength’.90 By inscribing himself as a child, he invokes an image of asexual, helplessly dependent human blamelessness, one traditionally deployed within the Christian repertoire to close the gap between the human and the godly, and to produce the childlike body as saintly.91 Yet the reference is also an invocation of biblically endorsed reversals of fortune, exemplified most sharply in a biblical text frequently cited by sectaries: ‘And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are’ (1 Corinthians 1.28). The terms of reference are hereby rewritten, so that the opposition between weakness and power is reframed such that weakness now brings access to power. The dependency inscribed in the position of the child becomes, therefore, a source of the heteronomous power on which Fox’s sense of confidence depends, a position itself underwritten by the ideology of triumphant reversal articulated in 1 Corinthians 1.28. However, this embrace of a position of relationality, and thereby of necessity one also of contingency and incompleteness,

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does not extend to Fox’s alliances with others in the early movement. While Fox relishes his insufficiency and dependence within the human–divine dyad, he is much more equivocal in his representation of other partnerships made in the service of the light. It is a commonplace to note that Nayler’s coleadership of the movement in the early years is radically underplayed in Fox’s Journal, such that Fox’s sole occupation of the position as founder and leader is (contrary to contemporary and historical accounts) inscribed from the outset. Nayler’s disastrous messianic entry into Bristol in the manner of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem served only to encourage Fox to increase his control of the movement through the consolidation of his position as sole leader and the instigation of tighter administrative structures. The interdependency of such an alliance had, in this instance, left too much to chance; Nayler’s spirit was moved in ways contrary to Fox’s perception of the best interests of the movement. If Fox’s co-leadership of the movement with Nayler proved unsustainable, the other key partnership of the early movement, that with Margaret Fell, was, on the contrary, remarkable for its longevity. Here too, as in the relationship with Nayler, power, autonomy and dependence are at stake, but this time they are cross-cut and complicated by the exigencies of gender and sexuality. While Fox’s reliance on and love for Fell as a fellow Friend, and one whose contribution to the establishment and maintenance of the movement was pivotal, is clear, when it comes to his marriage to her in 1669, some eleven years after the death of her first husband, Judge Thomas Fell, Fox’s record in the Journal equivocates, both in what it does not say and in what it does. Its brief account of the marriage is passed over with striking, and perhaps unflattering, rapidity, according it no more importance than other events of the time. As Naomi Winter notes, ‘supposedly significant happenings such as marriage fail to register as any more, or less, important than the most apparently mundane leadings of the Spirit’.92 While this refusal to hierarchise events is typical of the Quaker theological understanding of the power of the light within to transform ‘the significance of all of the believer’s actions’, it is none the less the case that the Journal accords other events – Fox’s trials at Lancaster or in Cornwall, for example, or his debate with a Jesuit, or even the beating he received on the common moss outside Ulverston – considerably more space than is given to his marriage.93 In what Fox does say about the marriage, moreover, he seems principally interested in conducting a rearguard action against misinterpretation. He describes the impetus behind the union in two ways that suggest a degree of anxiety that it might be read as an expression of desires that relate all too clearly to the here-and-now. First, Fox distances himself from the possibility that it will be seen as based on a desire for material betterment – he has, he assures Fell’s children, no designs on their mother’s wealth, to which, as her

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second husband, he would have legally had claim.94 Second, he seeks to scotch an attempt to render the marriage legible through reference to sexuality and procreation. When asked by Walter Newton, ‘an ancient puritan’, the reason for his marriage, Fox replies: ‘I told him as a testimony that all might come up into the marriage as was in the beginning: and as a testimony that all might come up out of the wilderness to the marriage of the lamb.’95 Fox insists on a purely symbolic spiritual interpretation: the marriage testifies to the possibility of regaining prelapsarian perfection, this time as embodied in the perfect marital state enjoyed by Adam and Eve, though it is also a sign of union with Christ, in ‘the marriage of the lamb’.96 Newton refuses to take this answer as the last word, saying that he thought that ‘marriage was only for the procreation of children’. To this, Fox offers a series of ardent disavowals: I told him I never thought of any such thing but only in obedience to the power of the Lord: and I judged such things as below me: though I saw such things and established marriages but I looked on it as below me: and though I saw such a thing in the seed: yet I had no command to such a thing till a half year before though people had long talked of it: and there was some jumble in some minds about it but the Lord’s power came over all and laid all their spirits and some after confessed it.97

Such insistent refusals of a thoroughly conventional understanding of marriage suggest a certain anxiety about being positioned in line with the usual meanings of adult masculinity, whose desires vis-à-vis marriage might uncontroversially be anticipated to be both sexual and procreative. In Fox’s case, this supposition prompts a repudiation afforded more space than his preceding account of what his marriage signified. The Journal might not have positioned the marriage within a hierarchy of events, but Fox here insists on a hierarchy of kinds of marriage: his marriage is not like others, he says, twice designating ‘such things’ – the procreation of children – to be below him. His own marriage is not to do with his own desires – ‘I never thought of any such thing’, he writes, and indeed the account gives no indication of what those desires might have been. Instead, the desire for him to marry is the Lord’s, and Fox undertakes it only in obedience to him. He concludes by noting that while he may not have thought of marrying Fell, others had: ‘people had long talked of it: and there was some jumble in some minds about it’. Such talk was not only hostile or scandalous – many Friends, including Fell’s children, had looked favourably on it – but Fox’s use of the word ‘jumble’ suggests that it was also a source of gossip, the subject of disorderly or disturbing talk.98 Fox’s account seeks quite explicitly to steer people towards a spiritual interpretation and away from a social, and particularly sexual, one. While the spiritual is articulated through the familiar invocation of perfectionism and divine union, the repudiation of the social is effected through the repeated assertion of the superiority

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of his own marriage, and through the framing of the account through invocation and denial (‘never . . . but . . . though . . . but . . . though . . . yet . . . and . . . but’) of that which threatens. The effect is one of anxious over-emphasis. Figuring both the perfect prelapsarian marriage of Adam and Eve and mystical union with Christ through marriage to Fell takes Fox on to new ground. Just as going naked as a sign sought to annex for spiritual ends something so indelibly marked with social meanings that its effectiveness as a sign was severely compromised, so with his marriage Fox encountered similar difficulties.99 In both cases, the over-determined social meanings of the human body – its nakedness, its sexuality – overwhelm the interpretative possibilities Friends sought to secure. Fox’s early call from God had been to ‘forsake all . . . and keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all’, and the solitariness enjoined by this is endorsed by the Journal’s frequent omission of reference to Fox’s travelling companions.100 His insistence on his own subsumption in the power of the Lord contrasts with the downplaying of more human affiliations, whether with Nayler or with Fell. In the case of his marriage to Fell, the promulgation of a message of a wholly spiritual union was compromised by the conventional associations of marriage which circulated in the gossip of others, but perhaps also by the figure of Fell herself. While the evidence is insufficient to claim more conventional sexual and procreative desires on her part, the frequently noted ardent and ecstatic language of her early letters to Fox, and the possibility that she thought herself pregnant following the marriage, suggest that this might have been the case.101 It is too large a step from here to conclude that Fell’s desire for Fox was always (or ever) straightforwardly sexual, but it may have been the case that such phenomena rendered the union more vulnerable to such interpretations. If this is so, then to embrace as Fox did a position of infantile dependence on the omnipotence of a divine father, particularly when the doctrine of the inward light made the believing subject a sharer of that power, gave access to a more uncomplicated, because unilateral, model of symbolic power, in a way impossible when two human subjects, however securely dwelling in the light, together constituted a sign of divine beneficence. Union with the Lord, albeit framed through the insufficiency and weakness of the human subject, produced for Fox a more secure and more confident subject position than could ever be achieved through alliance with other Friends. Fox produces a textual self, therefore, by combining a position of human weakness and incapacity with subjective access, through the notion of the indwelling Christ and the corporeal identification with the Son, to a position of divinely originating power. In contrast to the Calvinist position inscribed by such as Bunyan or Norwood, which combined an acute sense of spiritual responsibility with a debilitating absence of spiritual agency, the doctrine of the indwelling Christ presupposes a human, but divinely endowed, agency – the

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power to turn to the inward light, or (at least) not to harden the heart against that light. All subsequent spiritual states are premised on, and consequent to, this act. This agency, however, coincides with, and is coterminous with, the dissolution of the limits of that carnal subject position, and its expansion into that of the divine, in whom all agency is invested. Human agency is recognised, but gives way to divine agency, hence the characteristic Quaker formulations of divine ‘openings’ or revelations (knowledge and understanding flow down from above), and of being ‘moved of the Lord’, where the responsibility for action is again removed from the human subject. And yet, because what is turned to through the initial convincement is that of God within, the human subject is not distanced from the human state, but revalues it as partaking of the divine through a conscious embracing of Christ as incarnate, thereby closing the gap between human and divine, and adjusting the conception – crucially – of divine will and human uncertainty, such that the former utterly subsumes the latter. Human agency gives way to divine agency, human uncertainty to divine certainty, human responsibility to divine responsibility, the latter terms residing within a divinely remade human frame. As such, the subject position occupied by Fox in the Journal represents an internal reconciliation of the tension between agency and submission within a process which abolishes any sense of a necessary relation between agency and autonomy. This might be articulated with reference to Greenblatt’s model of ‘self-fashioning’. This, he argues, is achieved by means of energy produced through submission to an absolute power or authority, repudiation (in the name of the authority) of a threatening Other, alien, hostile, and/or strange, and the interrelation of these two processes: ‘self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, . . . what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss’.102 The Calvinist encounter is between an internalised alien (Paul Delany suggests that one of the defining achievements of Calvinism was the relocation of the devil within man) and an external authority; and the uncertainty of the doctrine of double predestination and the resultant ineffability of divine authority renders that authority fully Other to the subject.103 The Quaker formulation, however, effectively reverses the structure of the encounter, such that the external authority is to a significant degree internalised, understood to inhere within and be transformative of the human subject, whilst the alien – the forces of ungodliness at work in the fallen world – is fully externalised. Hence the shift in the narrative focus in the course of the Journal: the conflict is relocated from within Fox (as we find in the early, Calvinistinflected sections) to beyond him, played out in the external, socially located but spiritually signifying drama of journey and encounter. Just as Christ inheres within the ‘flesh and bone’ of the believing subject, so too the divine is at

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work in the interactions in the material world of those enfleshed believers. The power of the Lord, in but not of the believing subject, bestows the confidence of divinely originating agency without any sense of autonomy or any need for the assumption of responsibility that goes with autonomy. Rarely does this position of confidence – narrated as the outcome of divinely revealed truths, and textually maintained through the internalisation of authority and the externalisation of the alien or opposing forces – show signs of its status as achieved and maintained. The anxiety driving the early years seems to have been banished or, rather, to have evaporated through the revelation of the doctrine of the indwelling Christ. There are a few, rare, occasions, however, when we catch sight of the continuing threat of the internal alien to this achieved position. One of these occurs in a letter Fox wrote to Lady Claypole, one of Cromwell’s daughters, who was ‘sick and troubled in mind, and nothing could comfort her’. He recommends the customary turning from the self and the will to God; ‘the mind’, he writes, ‘may be seasoned and stilled in a right understanding of the Lord, whereby his blessing enters, and is felt over all that is contrary’.104 The inward light will reveal ‘temptations, confusions, distractions, distempers’ to her; however, he counsels her: do not look at the temptations, confusions, corruptions, but at the light that discovers them, that makes them manifest; and with the same light you will feel over them, to receive power to stand against them. . . . For looking down at sin, and corruption, and distraction, you are swallowed up in it; but looking at the light that discovers them, you will see over them. That will give victory; and you will find grace and strength; and there is the first step of peace.105

His prescription is precise and detailed, and makes clear his intimate knowledge of the mental and spiritual labour involved in banishing ‘temptations, confusions, distractions, distempers’, and how a steady and focused gaze on ‘the light that discovers them’ is necessary to keep them from insinuating themselves once more. ‘Turning to the light’ is not something done once and for all time, but is an act to be undertaken repeatedly and persistently. This supports the proposition that Fox’s confidence is a state that, once achieved, needs active maintenance, and that his own turn to the light was not as comprehensive, definitive and effortless as most of the Journal makes it appear. Two episodes in the Journal endorse this conclusion. In 1658–59, Fox was ‘under great sufferings and exercises and in a great travail in my spirit for ten weeks’ time’.106 In a Bunyanesque episode uncharacteristic of the post-convincement Journal, he is assailed by immaterial ‘unclean spirits’, with whom he has to dispute and struggle: ‘in the time of my travail at Reading there came a company of unclean spirits to me: for through my travail and sorrow, I looked poor and thin and they told me the plagues of God was upon me’.107 The alien, usually fully externalised and humanised in Fox’s narrative,

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is recast as a player in a psycho-spiritual drama, thereby threatening and disturbing the calm confidence of the subject. Similarly, in 1670, ‘under great sufferings and groans and travails and sorrows and oppressions I lay for several weeks’; this then continued ‘all that winter warring with the evil spirits’.108 Fox again internalised the assault, experiencing it as a time of bodily weakness and disorder, manifest in dreams, visions and physical symptoms. In a return to the psycho-spiritual arena of the early Journal, which for the most part has been effectively recast as a spiritual struggle in the domain of the social, where assaults on the body leave untouched his spiritual security, soul and body are together afflicted. The forces of divine authority (the Lord’s power) and an alien antagonist (the unclean spirits) are both internalised and immaterialised, with Fox as a battleground for their struggle for precedence. The doctrine of the light within, and the internalisation of the divine that is at the core of Quaker theology, banishes Fox’s early psycho-spiritual anxieties, and instead establishes, sustains and maintains the ‘enormous sacred Selfconfidence’ which critics have noted in Fox’s textual presence. In his Journal, Calvinist predestinarian theology is countered by reversing the location of the powers that govern his life. As divinely originating authority is internalised, so the alien is externalised, projected into the carnal world driven by the ‘envy’ of ‘priests and justices’, in sharp contrast to the dominant pattern of Calvinist subjectification.109 This establishes a quite different relation to those loci of power. No longer governed by a fully external and unknowable deity, instantiated in the fundamental uncertainty of the subject’s own soteriological destiny, Quaker theology offered a mechanism whereby the deity was partially internalised, partially integrated with the subject. This formulation of the relation between subject and deity is still premised on the transcendence and unknowability of the deity, but none the less generates a sense of continuity rather than distance between the two. Moreover, the subjective security guaranteed by the initial act of turning to the indwelling Christ returns a sense of agency to the core of that relationship with the divine. The agency inscribed within the subject position of early Quakerism, however, is not an agency premised on autonomy or self-sufficiency. Fox’s text inscribes him as heteronomous agent for Christ, not as autonomous agent of his own destiny. It is an agency premised on an absence of self and on the witnessing, and inhabiting, of the providential drama of events in the wider world. It is an agency sustained on the one hand by the ascription of power elsewhere, to the Lord and to the Son, and on the other hand to the assertion of a subjective continuity with that power, through the doctrine of the indwelling Christ, and hence to the inhabiting of a divinely originating subject position not by analogy but by identity. Agency is uncoupled from autonomy, and in its place is installed a sense of empowered dependence on a transcendent divinity which is at the same time conceptualised as immanent within the

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materially transformed human subject. Fox is son, but also Son, given up to, and carried over by, the Father’s omnipotence. The Journal presents a clash between differently positioned, and differently signifying, powers, both spiritual and temporal – Father, Son, clergy, judiciary – in a providential drama played out, in part, over the body and soul of Fox himself. In some ways this is a highly gendered struggle for precedence between these highly masculinised manifestations of power and authority. Yet this is also a domain in which the inequalities of gendered access to power dissolve, a movement where, particularly in the early years, women’s access to the inward light led to legitimate public ‘openings’, and to their travel and work as public Friends. Furthermore, as Naomi Winter argues, through reference to the biblically endorsed reversals of carnal power hierarchies, and through the refusal of the limits of earthly significations of gender, ‘Quakerism is . . . dissociated from the entire rationale of gender categorisation’.110 Conventional ascriptions of gender are further complicated by the uncoupling of agency from autonomy and its re-identification as a position premised on a heteronomous relation of dependence on the divine. This installation of a subjectivity premised on dependence might be read as a feminisation of Fox, but equally, with reference to Shuger’s analysis of the figure of the father, it could be read as infantilising him in relation to an omnipotent Father. In neither case, however, could this be seen as fully demasculinising the figure of Fox, for the indwelling Christ also endows him with immediate access to a source of divine authority in the Son. Thereby, passive and selfless dependence is productive of ‘sacred Self-confidence’ in a figure who establishes himself as leader of an international movement of tens of thousands, in active and often combative dialogue with all the repositories of temporal power, from local JPs and ministers up to Cromwell and Charles II. Greenblatt’s ‘male dream’ of ‘unshakable self-sufficiency’ is replaced in Fox’s Journal by another kind of masculine ideal, whereby anxiety is banished and confidence installed not by a self-sufficiency resulting from dissociation from the Other but by a model of dependence on an omnipotent Other whose beneficence is manifested in his co-extensiveness with the helpless subject. Fox’s heteronomous agency figures him both as dependent and as internalising and partaking of the power on which he is dependent. He thereby acquires the immunity to the depredations of the soul, and to the vulnerability to threats and assaults from outside, to which that dream of self-sufficiency also aspires, but he acquires it not through a discourse of self-sufficient separation, but through one of divinely empowered dependence.

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4

A technology of presence: genre and temporality in Fox’s Journal

What kind of a text is Fox’s Journal, in the most literal sense? Is it a journal, as Fox and his editors termed it? Or does its retrospective composition mean that it is better understood, as more recent critics have suggested, either as a spiritual autobiography or else as a history of the first years of the Quaker movement? This chapter re-examines the debates about the proper generic designation of the text, not in order to adjudicate between them but rather to propose that what these diverse designations have in common – namely, an emphasis on temporality – is key not only to the text’s generic identity but also, more importantly, to the work it undertakes. This in turn raises the still more pressing question of why a movement so insistently premised on the end of chronological time inaugurated by the turn to the indwelling Christ would be memorialised in a text whose form so unrelentingly relies on a temporal trajectory. However more recent critics might decide to name the genre of the text in question, Fox himself was quite clear. In 1685, late in his life and some ten years after the dictation of the narrative that would become the core of the printed text, he issued instructions for the publication of his writings: ‘And ye great Jornall of my Life, Sufferings, Travills and Imprisonments they may bee put together that Lye in papers and ye Little Jornall Books they may bee printed together in a Book’.1 Fox called his account a ‘Jornall’, and, seven years later, the Second Day Morning Meeting, the editorial committee charged with seeing the text into print, tacitly approved Fox’s designation, agreeing to entitle the first published edition ‘The History of G. F.’s Journall and Progress in ye Lord’s Work’.2 It finally appeared in 1694, transcribed and edited by Thomas Ellwood, as A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Ancient, Eminent and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, George Fox. Ever since, the resulting account has been known simply as Fox’s Journal.3

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More recently, however, critics have been exercised by the mismatch between the commonly perceived characteristics of a ‘journal’ and the text so designated by Fox and his editors. Geoffrey Nuttall’s introduction to Nickalls’s 1952 edition sets out the issue: ‘It is not a journal at all in the strict sense of an account written, if not daily, at least shortly after each incident described, when the future is still dark. It is, rather, an autobiography or book of memoirs, written in retrospect in order to illustrate the power of the Lord as shown in his servant’s “Sufferings and Passages”’.4 Fox’s recent biographer, H. Larry Ingle, concurs; this is a ‘lengthy memoir, which his literary executors mistitled a Journal’.5 Others are not so confident in their re-ascriptions, finding it easier to say what the Journal is not, generically, than what it is. David Boulton suggests that it ‘was not really a journal, nor even an autobiography’, and John Knott similarly characterises it through dissociation: ‘Any discussion of Fox’s Journal should recognize that it was not conceived as either a contemporaneous record of daily happenings or a spiritual autobiography of the sort that became popular among nonconformists in seventeenth-century England, although it has elements of both’.6 Some critics resolve the problem by reading the Journal in the broad context of the extraordinary upsurge of spiritual selfwriting of the second half of the seventeenth century, whether conversion narrative, spiritual autobiography or spiritual journal. So Nigel Smith, the Journal’s latest editor, simply calls it ‘a classic of spiritual and autobiographical writing’, and, rather than seeking to corral it into an ill-fitting generic location, offers a nuanced analysis of just what gives the Journal its distinctive character and texture.7 John Knott, too, places the Journal within a broad tradition of spiritual writing, reading it as closest to Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and to the Acts of the Apostles.8 Other critics, however, rather than reading the Journal as at least akin to the genres of Puritan spiritual autobiography or memoir, identify it instead as a narrative tracing the genesis and development of the Quaker movement. Ingle concludes that, by the time he was dictating what would become the Journal, Fox was concerned to write history, and history of a particular kind: ‘it is obvious that when Fox worked the archives he wanted to make sure that the earlier enthusiasm and radicalism surrounding the movement was deemphasized and explained . . .. Fox thus set out to put the most moderate face on what had been, in the turbulent days before 1660, a force for fundamental change within English society’.9 For Ingle, Fox becomes the movement’s first revisionary historian, tidying up and toning down the excesses, whether prophetic or political, of the movement’s early years. Thomas Corns dissents from this rather monolithic interpretative standpoint; Fox, he suggests, ‘may have sought to offer a sanitized version of Quakerism more suitable in the puritan winter of the 1660s and early 1670s. But any such tendency is unsustained’.10 Part of the reason for this, Corns concludes, can be found in the composite

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nature of the Journal, its combination of retrospective narrative and interpolated document. Geoffrey Nuttall also expressed exasperation with the kind of argument that sees Fox as a manipulative historian: ‘In some quarters at present it is the fashion to show antipathy to George Fox as self-important, and to play down his Journal as selective and doctored history. This is unfair, as well as illconsidered. Fox’s Journal makes no claim to be a history of early Quakerism. It is a genuine journal, with a journal’s self-centredness. The history was left to William Penn’.11 In refusing to read the Journal as history, Nuttall recuperates the text as a ‘genuine journal’ – a conclusion strikingly at odds, incidentally, with his earlier judgement, quoted above, that ‘[i]t is not a journal at all’. He identifies a ‘self-centredness’ in the text that other readers have found signally lacking, thereby bringing the spotlight back on Fox himself, rather than on the movement. Like Corns, Nuttall finds plenty of evidence of enthusiasm and extravagance in Fox’s words, and ‘none of this is edited out of the Journal either by himself or by Ellwood’.12 Reading the Journal as ‘history’ might resolve one set of critical arguments, but seems at the same time to open up further disagreement as to the emphasis and character of the history thereby produced. Journal, autobiography, memoir or history: no term, it seems, is compendious enough to accommodate the complexity and singularity of Fox’s text. The choice facing readers and critics seems to be either to opt for one of these terms, whilst acknowledging its inadequacy to the task, or to refuse all of them, and to define the Journal by distancing it from all these literary kinds and designating it as sui generis, as Corns does, and then focusing instead on reading it on its own terms, whatever those might be.13 However, instead of choosing between Fox’s text as the memoir of a self or the history of a movement, this discussion begins from the understanding that it is both, and focuses on the textual relationship between the subjectivity at the core of the account, and its equally prominent chronicle of events. The Journal is both memoir and history, and this chapter considers what the relationship might be between the two, and between a self and a movement. In so doing, a rather different solution to the problem of the Journal’s generic elusiveness is proposed: namely, a return to, and careful scrutiny of, the text as ‘journal’. Through paying attention to the etymology and history of the word itself, and taking account of its terms of reference and its scope, the critical debates about the Journal and the dynamic it generates between the ‘self ’ of Fox, the movement of which he became leader and that movement’s core doctrine of the inward light can be navigated and reframed.

Subjectivity and sequence The figure of George Fox provides both the focus and the point of view of the Journal. The narrative proceeds from the circumstances of his birth and

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family to his travels, and restricts itself relatively consistently, though not unremittingly, to recounting events and encounters as witnessed and experienced by Fox himself. It is just such an organisational principle – a narrative whose boundaries, perspectives and perceptions are set through reference to a first-person narrator – that is at the heart of the current conceptualisation of the journal or diary form as a ‘technology of the self ’: that is, a site for the production, maintenance and oversight of the self.14 The diary of Fox’s contemporary, Samuel Pepys, is often taken as the instance par excellence of this kind of self-reckoning and mediated self-production: Claire Tomalin calls the diary Pepys’s ‘rhapsody on himself ’, revolving round ‘that adored, although often uncomfortable’ sense of self.15 Its open-endedness and steady dailiness have made it a touchstone text for investigations of textual self-production in the seventeenth century.16 Fox’s Journal, however, presents nothing approaching the kind of recognisably, and appealingly, modern figuring of selfhood or identity – self-absorbed, perhaps self-deluded, but also self-reflexive – to be found in Pepys’s Diary. Fox’s might be the controlling subjectivity of the Journal, in that the narrative is organised around his life, sufferings, ‘travills’ and imprisonments, but the emphasis falls firmly on the itinerary itself – places visited, people encountered, sufferings endured, deliverances enjoyed – rather than on the self produced through these events. None of the characteristically nuanced, fleeting, often tormented, and always minutely observed shifts in self-perception that we find in, for example, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Trapnel’s A Legacy for Saints (1654) or Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1666) are to be found here. Instead, we find accounts such as this: And from thence I passed with an old man, James Dickinson: that was convinced of the truth that day and died in the truth: to his house and from thence I came to James Taylor’s of Newton in Cartmel in Lancashire: and on the first-day I went to one priest Camelford’s chapel and after he had done I began to speak the word of life to them and Camelford was in such a rage and such a fret and so peevish that he had no patience to hear but stirred up the rude multitude and they rudely haled me out and struck me and punched me and took me and threw me headlong over a stone wall: but blessed be the Lord his power preserved me: the kirk warden was one John Knype whom the Lord after cut off who threw me down headlong over the wall.17

Fox shifts from being the itinerant subject, who passes, comes and goes, to becoming the motionless centre of the flurry of hostility and violence emanating from Camelford and the ‘rude multitude’. It is they, indeed, who become the active subjects of this episode, with Fox the passive object of their hostility. His appearance before them excites their violence, but he is rendered, paradoxically, an absence around which the narrative energy eddies. If the figure of Fox is eclipsed, however, his point of view is not. The description of Camelford and ‘the rude multitude’ is manifestly Fox’s own: partial, absolute

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and judgemental. Rather than clearly originating with himself, his perspective inheres in the words attaching to his opponents (rage, fret, peevish, rudely), thereby attaining an authority and ostensible objectivity. This is underlined and even given a divine sanction by the closing remark noting the subsequent ‘cutting off ’ of John Knype. Far from producing the kinds of interiority associated with the first-person accounts of Pepys or Bunyan, Fox’s narrative is characterised by a thoroughgoing exteriority, produced by a persistent absence of introspection and by the ascription of emotions and activity to others. It is the testimony of a witnessing subject, but it is not an analysis of how the events witnessed impacted on that subject. We learn less about Fox’s spiritual experience than we do about Camelford and his parishioners. The Fox of the Journal does not conform to the narrative model of self as ‘subject’ of spiritual growth, in which, Tom Webster, observes, ‘the authentically godly are, in a sense, always in a state of becoming’.18 There are moments in the text when Fox is more clearly present as narrative agent, but even this does not straightforwardly transform his textual presence from object to subject, but emerges temporarily in addition to it. One such instance occurs in the account of Fox’s 1652 visit to Ulverston, where the authorities did not respond positively to Fox’s declarations. He is taken out on to the ‘common moss’ by the constables and officers, and beaten by them: they then fell upon me as aforesaid with their stakes and clubs and beat me on my head and arms and shoulders till they had mazed me and at last I fell down upon the wet common: and when I recovered myself again and saw myself lying on a watery common and all the people standing about me I lay a little still and the power of the Lord sprang through me and the eternal refreshings refreshed me that I stood up again in the eternal power of God and stretched out my arms amongst them all and said again with a loud voice, ‘Strike again, here is my arms, my head and my cheeks’: and there was a mason, a rude fellow, a professor called, he gave me a blow with all his might just atop of my hand as it was stretched out with his walking rule staff: and my hand and arm was so numbed and bruised that I could not draw it in unto me again: so as the people cried out, ‘He hath spoiled his hand for ever having any use of it more’, and I looked at it in the love of God and I was in the love of God to them all that had persecuted me.19

In this remarkable narrative, the first-person narrator (as in the previous passage) is initially fully integrated with the object of the officers’ violence: they ‘mazed me’, he writes, ‘and at last I fell down’. At this point, a curious splitting of the self occurs, as Fox recovers sufficiently to transcend the bruised body and, separated from it, behold it centre-stage of a scene on the common, with the people all around. He is at this point simultaneously present as omniscient (disembodied) and as first-person (embodied) narrator. Narrative agency then returns to the embodied Fox, newly integrated with his transcendent self

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through the infusion of ‘eternal refreshings’ of the Lord’s power, which enable him to stand up and challenge his persecutors to strike him again. When his hand is beaten numb, a second moment of dissociation or doubling occurs, as the speaker appears to attain a Christ-like perspective on his hand – ‘I looked at it in the love of God and I was in the love of God to them that had persecuted me’. The double eye, or focus, of this account reveals a double ‘I’ or articulation. The account encompasses both the abused Fox (the mortal ‘I’ who expresses suffering) and the triumphant spirit of the truth, which looks over the scene and the text with a view to its impact on readers. Fox as subject is at once the suffering individual, the testifying witness and the omniscient narrator, setting out both the account itself and indications of its divinely endowed significance. The ‘self ’ of Fox’s Journal is in some senses, therefore, as omnipresent and controlling as that to be found in Pepys’s Diary or Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. It is, however, a different kind of self. Rather than being the subject of spiritual or social growth, the figure of Fox as ‘subject’ suggests a sense of the self as socially and spiritually subjected (subject to), whilst also governing the point of view and shape of the narrative itself (subject of). A trigger for the unfolding narrative, Fox as a paradoxical subject creates a range of different temporal and spatial perspectives within the Journal, which are precisely the result of the specific Quaker conception of the selfhood of the godly and its relationship to ‘becoming,’ to time and history. Matters of time and history are at stake in a number of ways in Fox’s Journal, most immediately in the retrospective nature of its composition. The narrative account which formed the basis of what was first published in 1694 as the Journal was dictated by Fox between 1673 and 1675 to his stepson-in-law Thomas Lower. In the case of the Ulverston episode discussed above, therefore, the effect of distance from the scene of suffering when Fox’s hand was beaten may be partly explained by the temporal shift: Fox describes a moment in 1652 from the standpoint of more than twenty years later, and dictates to Lower, a member of the established Quaker movement who records the events. In a very literal sense, the suffering hand is not the hand that writes: Fox, the subjected ‘I’ who suffers, is recalled by a subject who has been, to a greater or lesser extent, shaped by knowledge of the events of the intervening years, and of how the story ended.20 It is principally the fact that Fox’s narrative is not a contemporaneous daily record – what Stuart Sherman calls ‘a rigorously continuous and steady serial narrative’, characterised by ‘simple successiveness’, and produced without the benefit of hindsight – that has led critics to draw back from the designation of the text as journal, and to seek to redefine it as autobiography or memoir.21 Whether or not this retrospective character debars Fox’s text from occupying this category is open to question, since even the undoubted ‘steady serial narrative’ of Pepys’s Diary combines

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its incremental dailiness with regular moments of evaluative retrospection.22 In Fox’s account, retrospection has an impact both on the version of events (the Journal as history) and on the narrative structure of the text thereby produced, since multiple points of regression create a complex layering within the text. It is perhaps not sufficient to say that Fox knew how the story ended, and thus shaped his account accordingly; we need more precisely to ask to what extent, and in what ways, the Journal is, or is not, end-directed.23 The rigorously chronological character of the text’s narrative organisation, beginning with Fox’s early life and proceeding year by year to the moment of composition, is more complex than it first appears. Although the manuscript pages include dates, which seem to be in Lower’s hand, the main indicators of sequence are relational and contingent (‘after’, ‘then’), rather than calibrated against external measures such as calendar or clock. The sequential passing of time is insisted upon, but also non-specific; it is the passage from one moment to the next that is significant, and not the ability to track the date or time at which something occurred. For Friends, the measures of day and month were irrelevant, indicative of mere human or carnal time; instead, the Journal refers above all to the internal structure of the week as it related to the godly calendar (‘ye first day’; ‘a lecture day’), or of the day as it related to natural time (‘in the afternoon’; ‘next morning’; ‘at night’). This narrative mode is, of course, in part the result of the account’s retrospective composition; twenty or thirty years after the events, Fox’s memory would not have allowed him precise recall. This lack of precision is not an impediment to narrative, however; it is the sequence itself, the passage of time, that is emphasised, the succession of events in time and space, and not their duration, nor the precise, measurable, chronological moments of their passing. However we account for the lack of chronological precision, it is clear that this has not been prohibitive of reading the Journal as history. Historians of Quakerism continue to rely on it as an indispensable source for the early years of the movement, and indeed the precedent for reading the Journal as history was set with its first publication, when William Penn, who wrote the Preface to Ellwood’s 1694 edition of the Journal, called on readers thus: To Conclude, Behold the Testimony and Doctrine of the People called Quakers! Behold their Practice and Discipline! And behold the blessed Man and Men that were sent of God in this Excellent Work and Service! All which will be more particularly expressed in the Ensuing Annals of the Man of God; which I do most heartily recommend to my Readers most serious Perusal.24

Penn’s phrase ‘the Ensuing Annals of the Man of God’ gives an important key for reading the Journal as a particular type of history. Penn’s words recognise the centrality of the subjectivity of Fox, but also place centre-stage the sequence of events therein recounted. The term ‘annals’ referred to historical

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records generally, but more specifically to ‘a narrative of events written year by year’.25 Hayden White has analysed more precisely what characterises the annals form, and concludes that what distinguishes it from ‘chronicle’ or ‘history’ is precisely its lack of narrative. It consists, he says, ‘only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence’; these events, set against certain years, are apparently random and unrelated, and there is an ‘absence of a principle for assigning importance or significance to events’.26 The absence of narrativity in this record of events is underscored for White by annals’ insistent relation to chronological time – this, above all, he suggests, is the ordering principle. Annals neither inaugurate nor conclude, they simply begin and terminate, ungoverned by any sense of a coherent or singular structuring narrative.27 The sequence of chronological time drives the record, not the ‘time of eternity or kairotic time’, and ‘[t]his [chronological] time has no high points or low points; it is, we might say, paratactical and endless’.28 It is the contrast between White’s analysis of the annals form and the kind of historical record constituted by Fox’s Journal that is most instructive here. Fox’s text has a clear rationale for the inauguration of the account: in order that readers may ‘be drawn to admire and glorify [God’s] infinite wisdom and goodness, I think fit . . . briefly to mention, how it was with me in my youth’.29 The account is inaugurated by the birth of its human protagonist. As Penn’s words suggest, these might be ‘Annals’, but they are, more particularly, the ‘Annals of the Man of God’, whose life gives shape to the account. Beyond the focalisation through the figure of Fox, Fox’s annals differ from White’s definition through their conception of time. While both are structured through rectilinear sequence and parataxis, it is the relationship of those sequences to temporality and teleology that is significant and, in turn, the consequences of this for the development of a narrative. For White, annals lack a principle for assigning importance to events. Fox’s annals, however, have an absolutely clear principle for the assigning of significance: namely, the godliness or otherwise of those events; and the touchstone whereby this assay is made is the way in which they impact on Fox himself, or on other Friends. It is this process that transforms the Journal’s apparent parataxis (unconnected sequence) into a more fundamental hypotaxis (indicative of cause and effect), that translates the random into the ordered. Moreover, it is this that relates to the contrary temporal point of reference of the Journal as compared with White’s definition of the annals form. For Fox, the temporal frame of relevance is precisely what White calls the ‘time of eternity or kairotic time’, as opposed to chronological or calendar time (chronos). The Oxford English Dictionary defines kairos as ‘Fullness of time; the propitious moment for the performance of an action or the coming into being of a new state’; and Frank Kermode, drawing on the usage of a number of Christian theologians, summarises the distinction between chronos and kairos thus:

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chronos is ‘passing time’ or ‘waiting time’ – that which, according to Revelation, ‘shall be no more’ – and kairos is the season, a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end. . . . The divine plot is the pattern of kairoi in relation to the End. . . . It is the New Testament that lays the foundation for . . . the modern distinction between times: the coming of God’s time (kairos), the fulfilling of the time (kairos – Mark i.15), the signs of the times (Matt. xvi.2,3) as against passing time, chronos. The notion of fulfilment is essential; the kairos transforms the past, validates Old Testament types and prophecies, establishes concord with origins as well as ends.30

Kairotic or godly time thus figures (or prefigures) the end of time, but also represents its fulfilment in Christ: ‘That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth, even in him’ (Ephesians 1.10).31 Kairos justifies, and ends, the waiting time. Kairotic time thus designates a sense of propitious time and ‘timeliness’; it comprises completion in Christ, but also the inauguration of something new; and it brings with it the eradication of boundaries between human and divine, through the ‘gathering’ of all into Christ, and between past and present, in the validation of Old Testament types and prophecies. This point is underlined by Penn’s Preface to the Journal, which comprises a history of the world from the creation up to the advent of Fox. This, the Preface suggests, is the prehistory to the history that will be found in the Journal; it is this that must to be understood if the events represented in Fox’s account are to be properly understood; it is this that clarifies the ‘fulness of times’ revealed in Fox’s account. Penn’s title to his Preface puts it this way: ‘A Summary Account of the Divers Dispensations of God to Men, from The Beginning of the World to That of our present Age, by the Ministry and Testimony of his Faithful Servant George Fox, as an Introduction to the ensuing Journal’.32 Historical sequence on a grand scale lays the foundations for the fulfilment and conclusion of this sequence in the events of Fox’s life. Godly dispensations can be tracked ‘from The Beginning of the World to . . . our present Age’. Unlike for the contemporary Fifth Monarchists or Baptists, who were still awaiting the return of King Jesus and the demise of the ungodliness of the current dispensation, for Quakers ‘a new dispensation of the Spirit’ was already in place.33 King Jesus was already returned, as the inward light dwelling within each believer. This led, potentially and ultimately, to a quite different relationship to kairotic time, because the inward light brought with it the possibility of ‘the regaining of Paradise in the present’, and with it the end of chronos, the meantime or waiting time: as Pink Dandelion put it, ‘The world was captive and time symbolises and represents this captivity. The worldly was begun in time and will end in time, but Fox claims to work from a sense of truth outside of time or from before time (prelapsarian) for the coming of the Kingdom which will be everlasting, that is, without end or

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outside of the constraints of time’.34 At the heart of this Quaker conception of temporality lay the doctrine of the inward light, a doctrine of presence; and this, for Friends, abolished the contrast between chronos and kairos. As Underwood has argued, rectilinear temporality was superseded: ‘the past and future were experienced in the present’.35 For Friends, the present was folded into the past of the primitive church, as they lived the experience of the emerging New Testament church, but they were simultaneously internalising and living the future, through the second coming of Christ within each believer. The belief that the second coming of Christ (still in the historical future for other radicals such as Fifth Monarchists and Baptists) was taking place in the present, as it had done in the time of the primitive church, through Christ dwelling spiritually within individual Christians, led to a ‘fusion of time’ for early Friends. Past and future co-existed in a continuous present.36 Fox himself indicates the centrality of this understanding of time as a mechanism for differentiating Friends from the ungodliness of other sectarian positions. In 1649, he visited some Ranters in gaol in Coventry, only to find them part of a ‘great power of darkness’. To undermine their claims that ‘they were God’, he demonstrated to them how, in contrast to God’s omniscience regarding future as well as present and past, they were defined by ignorance and blasphemy: Then seeing they said, they were God, I asked them, if they knew, whether it would rain tomorrow? They said, they could not tell. I told them, God could tell. Again, I asked them; if they thought, they should be always in that condition, or should change? And they answered, they could not tell. Then said I unto them, ‘God can tell, and God doth not change. You say you are God; and yet you cannot tell, whether you shall change, or no.’ So they were confounded, and quite brought down for the time.37

In spite of the Ranters’ refusal to make the blasphemous claim of predicting the future, Fox shows that they are ungodly because, unlike God, they are trapped by the occlusions of chronological time. They are literally ‘quite brought down for the time’, whereas Fox, although he cannot claim God’s omniscience, can recognise the existence of a kairotic presence that transcends time. In this Quaker theology of presence, successiveness gives way to a kairotic simultaneity of time and of place. What Underwood calls the ‘internalization and spiritualization by Quakers of outward historical events’ was located in moments and sites of heightened awareness of Christ.38 It is therefore unsurprising that time and place are closely linked in the Journal, in, for example, Fox’s account of the words he spoke on Firbank Fell: there was many old people that went into the chapel and looked out of the windows and thought it a strange thing to see a man to preach on a hill or mountain and not in their church as they called it: so that I was made to open to

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the people that the steeplehouse and that ground on which it stood was no more holier than that mountain, . . . but Christ was come who ended the temple and the priests and the tithes and Christ said ‘Learn of me’ and God said ‘This is my beloved Son, hear ye him’, for the Lord had sent me with his everlasting gospel to preach and his word of life to bring them off all those temples, tithes, priests and rudiments of the world that had gotten up since the Apostles’ days.39

‘Christ was come’, to Palestine, in the past, but also to the hearts of those who turned to him, in the present. The end presaged in and by the second coming is enacted and fulfilled in present events and present time, though it abolishes the presence of neither. In the same move, a dissolution is effected of the spatial distinctions between Palestine and Westmorland, and between holy and profane ground, and of the temporal distinction between the first and the second coming, as well as between Christ and Fox himself (‘for ye Lord had sent me with his everlasting gospel to preach’). Ultimately, the boundary between inner and outer is called into question: And I was moved to declare to the people how all people in the Fall were from the image of God and righteousness and holiness: and they was as wells without the water of life: clouds without the heavenly rain: . . . and like the mountains and rocks and crooked and rough ways: so I exhorted them to read these without and within in their nature: and the wandering stars: read them without and look within all that was come to the bright and morning star.40

Fox exhorts his hearers ‘to read these without and within in their nature’: they must dissolve the boundary between self and world, to read the one in the other, and to read both as characters in the text of God’s creation.41 The observing, or reading, subject is a constitutive element of the scrutinised text. The Quaker propensity for seamlessness – for fusion rather than juxtaposition, for metaphor rather than simile – melds subject with object, text with reader, past and future with present, such that meaning ebbs and flows unimpeded across an unbroken field of signification. The grounding of the Quaker doctrine of the inward light in a notion of temporal simultaneity offers a significant perspective from which to begin to analyse the narrative principles of Fox’s Journal. Fox’s narrative differs from truly diurnal forms, written ‘to the moment’ in the midst of the events they record, and narrated successively on a continuous grid.42 His is written retrospectively, from the vantage point of belatedness, though manifestly not from a climactic end-point, for the narrative of the Journal famously ends somewhat abruptly – in White’s formulation, terminates rather than concludes – with the words, ‘So it was and so it is by them that are not in the Holy Ghost against them that are led by it. Which all this is reproved by the Holy Ghost to this day’.43 Fox’s end-point barely constitutes a conclusion, except inasmuch as it offers the most condensed and rudimentary summary of Quaker patterns of

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thought: ‘So it was and so it is’ restates the Quaker ‘fusion of time’, while ‘by them that are not in the Holy Ghost against them that are led by it’ demonstrates habitual Quaker patterns of oppositional thinking; and both of these are confirmed by final recourse to the most ineffable element of the trinity, the holy ghost, as the ultimate and continuing arbiter of truth and justice. Such a minimalist reaffirmation, no matter how apt, hardly confers shape or effects closure with regard to the preceding narrative. However an awareness of the End might be found to shape this text, it is not an End that is to be found at the end of the Journal.

Chronos and kairos If Fox’s Journal does not share the basic quality of diurnal forms of being written in the midst of the time and events with which it is concerned, and, if the Quaker commitment to the ahistorical simultaneity of kairotic time is at odds with the diurnal form’s commitment to the calibration of event with chronological markers, it is at first difficult to conceive of how this text might usefully be recuperated as ‘journal’. This is to lose sight, however, of one of the most immediately striking characteristics of the Journal: namely, the insistent sequentiality of time and journey that constitute the raw material of its temporal scheme and narrative structure. In Fox’s Journal, godly selves are created through the action of travelling. The etymology and history of the word ‘journal’ as a record of travel or as a workbook begins to suggest how its frame of reference is especially appropriate to early Quaker notions of time, history and, indeed, theology. Nigel Smith has offered an account of the Oxford English Dictionary’s record of the disparate meanings of ‘journal’ in the seventeenth century, drawing attention in particular to the following definitions: ‘A book containing notices concerning the daily stages of a route and other information for travellers’, or ‘A record of travel’; ‘A daily record of commercial transactions, entered as they occur, in order to the keeping of accounts’; and ‘A daily record of events or occurrences kept for private or official use’.44 Of these, Smith concludes that ‘It’s hard to see how the Friends who published the Journal weren’t playing on’ the latter two senses.45 Common to these is the sense of dailiness of the journal’s record, but coupled to this are associations with travel and labour. The journal and the journey are linked etymologically, from the Latin diurnus, via the French journée, whose meanings included a day, a day’s travel, and a day’s labour. The notion of ‘work’ links both journal and journey to that prime Quaker touchstone word, ‘travail’. Not only does ‘travel’ derive from ‘travail’, and hence bring us back to the journey, ‘travail’ habitually conflated, or, more accurately, refused to distinguish between, work and journeying, a fusion that

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was particularly telling in the context of early Quaker itinerant preaching and prophesying. Travailing or labouring to deliver others from the darkness of evil into the light of God’s truth could also invoke associations with childbirth. Alice Cobb’s testimony to her mother, for example, proclaimed that Alice Curwen’s ‘Labour hath been great (both in this Nation and Other Nations and Islands) to gather many from Darkness to the Light’, and continued, on a more personal note, ‘she was a tender Mother to us indeed’, constantly ‘breathing to the Lord God for her Off-spring’.46 The fruits of Curwen’s labour are not just her own godly children, but an international progeny of believers in whose lives God’s truth will proliferate. The ‘journal’ is, furthermore, associated more specifically with accounting as a form of work. Sherman observed that the journal as a record of accounts is not strictly diurnal, nor composed in medias res; on the contrary, it is ‘emphatically occasional’, and ‘[i]ts purposes have nothing to do with the figuration of time as continuum’. Journals, he concludes, were true to their accounting roots in being selective and intermittent ‘narratives of discontinuous incidents and instances’.47 The word ‘journal’ thus connotes a dailiness or systematic regularity to record-keeping (‘making an account of ’), to working and to travelling. As Smith says, attention to the semantic field makes evident a historical ‘coalescence of labour and spatial displacement (i.e. travel)’.48 A journal is thus not only a daily record; it is also, and crucially (if variously), plotted between the co-ordinates of work and travel. The term ‘journal’, therefore, has precisely the kind of elasticity and compendiousness that recent critics have found it to lack. Far from being a genre that, from its inception, comprised a self-centred record, it includes within its historical remit a primary set of references to work and to travel; it allows for selectiveness and occasionality, as well as dailiness; in many of its contexts, it includes a notion of stock-taking, account-keeping and, therefore, retrospection. Many of these associations can be seen to inform early Quaker use of the term. As Michael Mascuch notes, early Quaker itinerant ministers sent news or ‘journalls’ of their travels in dictated letters to Swarthmoor Hall, which were then copied and sent out to Friends: One such text, at the Friends’ House Library, London, Swarthmore MS vol. III, 6, is an undated letter from James Naylor [sic] to Margaret Fell c. 1654, describing Naylor’s preaching in the north of England at that time; it was later (c. 1675) identified by George Fox as ‘journall of j. n. 1654 abought,’ who wrote this on the back of the copy. Vols. i–iv of the Swarthmore MS Collections consist almost entirely of copies of early letters of this sort, over 1,400 in all.49

This use of the term seems to relate most directly to the OED’s definition 2b, of ‘journal’ as a ‘record of travel’. But for early itinerant Friends, as for Fox himself, such a record would also, necessarily, be a record of work, for, as public Friends took the message of the inward light to as many individuals and

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and communities as possible, to travel was also to work. If accounts of these ‘travails’ – working journeys, itinerant labours – were termed ‘journalls’, including by Fox himself, then the designation of Fox’s own account as ‘journal’ begins to look less like a careless mistitling by his literary executors, and more like the purposeful positioning of it within an already longstanding tradition of accounts of their travails by early Friends, produced as public documents for dissemination amongst their wider communities. As an account of a life of itinerancy, it is unsurprising that temporal and spatial sequencing should be the narrative’s structuring principles; here, the record of the passage of time is also a record of ceaseless journeying. Characteristically, the Journal articulates its transitions from moment to moment and place to place through the repetition of phrases such as ‘And so we passed on’, ‘And so after’, ‘And from thence’, ‘And in the morning’, ‘And so I went’. The persistent use of the noncommittal connective ‘and’ between sentences endows the work, Nigel Smith suggests, with ‘an impression of [biblical] authority’; but it also produces the Journal as a fundamentally paratactic text, with no sense of temporal, spatial and causal relations between sentences.50 This is countered, however, by a similarly persistent recourse to the hypotactic connectives ‘so’, ‘then’, ‘after’, ‘from thence’, which instate not only a sense of the temporal and spatial sequencing of events, but also assert (paradigmatically in ‘so’) a causal connection between them.51 The apparent randomness of ‘and’ combines with the purposiveness of ‘so’ to produce a narrative account that is at once improvisatory and intentional, in which the direction of text and journey emerges incrementally, but also suggests an underlying, perhaps mysterious, but resolute sense of structure and design. In Fox’s Journal the combination of apparent randomness with an insistent sense of design is informed by a Quaker fusion of time still more complex than that identified by Underwood. The simultaneity of past, present and future in the kairotic notion of the inward light of the indwelling Christ is set alongside the chronos or sequentiality which seems to pull in the opposite direction. How do we make sense of a narrative which progresses through sequence, while simultaneously insisting on the irrelevance of carnal time, of chronos? The answer lies in a further reframing of temporality, of the relation of chronos to kairos as constituted by the Journal. Ultimately, the unremitting sequentiality of Fox’s text suggests not that chronos is dissolved or superseded by kairos; it is not simply that the ‘the waiting time’ gives way to the fulfilment of God’s time. Instead, through its doctrine of the indwelling Christ, Quakerism refuses the distinction between kairos and chronos, revealing the immanence of the former within the latter. In the previously quoted extract in which Fox was beaten by the ‘rude multitude’ on the common moss is an example of how the alltoo-human events of Fox’s journeys revealed a godly dispensation working within them. A similar doubled dynamic can be seen in the temporal and

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spatial unfolding of the journeys themselves. In the passage from moment to moment and from place to place, the apparently chance sequence of trajectory and encounter indicated by the habitual paratactic connective ‘and’ is coupled with, and given shape by, the hypotactic ‘so’. The apparently random is revealed as ordered and purposeful: And so I was moved of the Lord to come up again through them and up into Ulverston market: and there meets me a man with a sword, a soldier: ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I am ashamed that you should be thus abused . . .’. And so I cleared all these things which they charged against me . . .. And so I passed through the countries as I said before into Hampshire and Dorsetshire and Poole and Ringwood visiting friends in the Lord’s power and had great meetings amongst them.52

The initial ‘And so’ reproduces here the sense of random chance and divine order that is also present in the habitual Quaker phrase ‘I was moved of the Lord’. This sense of a divine plan emerging from apparently arbitrary events is not Fox’s alone, but, as is discussed in other chapters, typical of many early Quaker narratives of journeys and sufferings, from Alice Curwen’s and Joan Vokins’s accounts of their travels to New England and Barbados to Dorothy Waugh’s interpretation of her imprisonment in Carlisle. In all these, as in Fox’s Journal, purpose is predicated on, and emerges from, contingency, and reconfigures it. From the notion of the indwelling Christ, and the combination of kairos and chronos, flow simultaneity and sequence, parataxis and hypotaxis, improvisation and design. Just as inner and outer, self and world, are shown to be false differentiations, so, within the Journal, the sequential and the simultaneous, the paratactic and the hypotactic occupy the same field of signification. The paratactic ‘and’, apparently random, productive of no sense of design or order, proceeds incrementally and cumulatively, rather than through a progressive linearity. It is adjoined, however, to the purposeful and hypotactic ‘so’, which imposes sequence, order and linearity, and thereby causation, teleology and significance. The temporality that results from the merging of past, present and future might therefore be termed chrono-kairotic, suggesting neither the supersession of one by the other nor simply the fusion of the two in an undifferentiated temporal plane, but indicative of a hierarchical relation by which, through turning to Christ within, kairos can be revealed to underlie, structure, give form to and bring an end to chronos. Purpose within contingency, hypotaxis consequent to parataxis: time after time, the Journal suggests the playing out – the fulfilment – of the divine plan through the everyday acts and encounters of Fox’s journeys. It is not, however, the attention to the everyday that sets this apart from other contemporary spiritual journals. Spiritual journals too navigate chronos in

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search of kairos, but do so in the service of salvation by means of a process of self-reckoning – it is in this that it is ‘a technology of the self ’. What is different in Fox’s Journal is that this scrutiny is not productive of an emerging and developing self; it is not an aid to ‘becoming’, an element within the believer’s personal spiritual progress towards assurance and salvation. Once he is fully defined by the doctrine of the inward light, Fox is completed; his own rectilinear spiritual development or ‘successiveness’ is fulfilled in the kairos of the present and indwelling Christ. What is in a state of change and progression, as tracked by the Journal’s sequential structure, is the perpetual ‘becoming’ of those around him, and the events that, together, they (Friends and opponents) enact, as the inward light is embraced or rejected. Chronos both dissolves, to reveal the timeless truth of the indwelling Christ, and persists, as fallen will refuses to turn to the light. The same event – such as Fox’s encounter with the soldier with the sword, who is beaten cruelly ‘because he had taken my part’, or the doubled subjectivity of the passage recounting Fox’s beating on the common moss – figures simultaneously in both the chronotic and kairotic temporal frames.53 Time within the Journal is at once rectilinear, progressive and sequential, and eternal, static and immeasurable; or, rather, divine time is to be understood as revealed within the progression of carnal time. As in the Acts of the Apostles, the acts, one after another, of the godly and ungodly alike endlessly reproduce the greater truth of godly time, and show both the beginning and the end in its midst. Hereby both the time of the primitive church and its immediate experience of Christ, and the promised future return of Christ proceed in the present moment, such that any linear notion of time dissolves, producing instead an eternal present in which Christ, indwelling in each believer, is still present, already returned and always returning.54 This understanding of Christ’s return is not, however, a universal or singular event; it is multiple, repeated, incremental, as more and more – though never all, and never at once – embrace the doctrine of the inward light. The chronological organisation of the Journal is thus a structural or formal means whereby is demonstrated the irruption of kairos within chronos. Here, the Journal repeatedly asserts, can Christ be seen – in this place, at this time. It does not matter precisely when, in clock-time or calendar-time, that moment was, but it is nevertheless important that it is registered that this happens repeatedly, on a daily basis, on a first day, or a third day, or a market day; and that it happens anywhere, in Sedbergh and Underbarrow, in Ringwood, Bristol, Barbados and Boston. The chronographic form, despite its retrospective composition, produces a sense of being in the midst of the journey, the events, the encounters, hostilities and convincements. From this emerges, incrementally but repeatedly, in the constantly recreated present of Fox’s Journal, a sense of the perpetual presence of the indwelling Christ. A focus on temporalities thus offers a way to conceptualise the relationship

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between the Journal as a document of self and a history of a movement. There, the self has become what it can become, and that becoming brings with it the dissolution of the self so completed. As Webster suggests, ‘Self-denial was intended to create a vacuum that might be inhabited by divine plenitude’, or, in the words of James Nayler, ‘they know him [Christ] not where Self is standing, . . . who deny themselves, that they may learn the way of the Lord, to such he freely reveals his way’.55 Fox’s repeated formulation ‘And so I passed on’ suggests something of this process: he ‘passes on’ from one place to another, but in so doing his self also ‘passes on’, ceases to exist in the new life in the light. His ceaseless journeying both produces and is produced by the neverending demise of his carnal self. Because of Quaker apprehensions of Christ’s immanence, this process of self-dissolution brought with it a concomitant emphasis on the immanent presence of Christ, in the human subject, in the present moment and present place. The work undertaken by the Journal entailed both the charting and the reproduction of that presence; its successiveness, its attention to the passing of time, and the passing from place to place, reproduces the repeated turn to Christ within, and the revelation of a chrono-kairotic present. And this is tracked with regard not simply to Fox but to its wider presence, as refracted through the focus on Fox: Penn’s ‘Man of God’ figures as the touchstone and register of the steady turn to the inward light among the ‘the People called Quakers’. Just as kairos emerges from within chronos, so the history of the movement is figured in the itinerant and charismatic figure of Fox as represented in the Journal. Cadbury suggests that, by the time of his death, Fox ‘had made himself dispensable’; if so, this is effected not through his redundancy to the movement, but through his multiplication and dispersal amongst it in the soon-to-be published Journal, a copy of which ‘was presented to each Friends’ meeting, and often methodically circulated among its members’.56 History and subjectivity are not two dimensions between which a choice is to be made when analysing the Journal. Rather, each is a dimension of, and bodies forth, the other. The kinds of fusions and correspondences suggested here echo those set out by St Paul: ‘For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ’ (1 Corinthians 12.12). It is the inward light of Christ which, ultimately, is figured in the dynamic between Fox and the movement. In the Journal, the history of the movement emerges through the working itinerancy of Fox, and it is this relation to labour and to travel that, as much as anything, validates the designation of the text as ‘journal’. What, however, of the remaining impediment to thinking of this as a journal, that of retrospection? Given the revelation of kairos in the midst of dailiness, a doctrine fundamental to Quaker conceptions of time, such an opposition between writing ‘in the middest’, as Kermode put it, and writing with hindsight, loses

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all purchase.57 For, once the doctrine of the indwelling Christ was accepted, early Quakers were assured that (unlike the Ranters imprisoned in Coventry) they did already know how the story ended. The inward light illuminated the future before that future was lived, and indeed brought that future into the realm of the present, so that strictly there was no future, no prospective darkness. Rather than retrospection conferring an overall shape, trajectory and end-directedness to the narrative unavailable to those writing in the midst of events, in this context that overall shape is not something conferred by the text’s ending. Instead, the ‘end’ that confers form and meaning is an end that can be discerned from early in Fox’s narrative, an end that reconfigures all other temporal (and thus narrative) framings: the end of time in the fulfilment realised in the repeated turn to Christ within. It is in this that the Journal’s narrative structure constitutes a ‘technology of presence’ – the presence of Christ, in Fox and other Friends, and in their travails, sufferings and imprisonments. The text’s insistent adherence to a chronological structure produces a sense of the renewed importance of the endless unfolding of the present time, because that present time is already the time of the indwelling and returned Christ. Formally and syntactically, it becomes a means by which the present of both the here (this place) and now (this time) plays out of, and into, the eternity of godly time, thereby producing a multi-located ‘here’ and an atemporal ‘now’.

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‘Moved of the Lord’: the contingent itinerancy of early Friends

Calvin, while condemning journeys to holy sites, yet wrote, ‘Christ teaches us to travel as pilgrims in this world.’ Travel where, specifically? (Grace Tiffany)1

The early Quaker ministry was a travelling ministry, a movement set in motion by the endlessly mobile figure at its centre, George Fox. His Journal is as much a travelogue as it is a spiritual memoir, a conversion narrative, a record of sufferings or the history of a dissenting sect. After the opening section sets out the fundamental tenets of the Quaker interpretation of Christianity, the Journal’s narrative is thereafter heavily weighted towards the detailing of Fox’s journeys, initially from the midlands into the north of England, then into London, the south and west, Wales and Scotland, and later to Barbados, America and northern Europe. His ceaseless journeying was matched by that of other early Friends, and particularly of the so-called Valiant Sixty, the Public Friends who left the north-west of England to broadcast the Quaker message in 1654.2 The titles of publications from these early years confirm the defining importance of itinerancy to the movement. Alice Curwen’s A Relation of the Labour, Travail and Suffering of that faithful Servant of the Lord Alice Curwen (1680), Miles Halhead’s A book of some of the sufferings and passages of Myles Halhead . . . concerning his labour and travel in the work of the Lord (1690), Joan Vokins’s God’s mighty power magnified . . .: also some account of her exercises, works of faith, labour of love, and great travels in the work of the ministry, for the good of souls (1691) and Barbara Blaugdone’s An account of the travels, sufferings and persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone (1691), with their characteristic composite emphasis on work, journeying and suffering, are indicative of many more such publications from these years. The prevalence of itinerancy in the early movement suggests a widespread Quaker concurrence with Edward Burrough’s conclusion that ‘The worship of God in itself is this. It is a walking with God’.3

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Yet at the heart of Quaker itinerancy there is a tension between Public Friends’ constant mobility and the implications of the foundational Quaker doctrine of the light within, a doctrine which urges stillness as well as silence on its adherents. If the light within was an expression of the immanence of the already returned Christ, which thereby made available God’s grace in this life as well as the next, one might adapt the question asked by Grace Tiffany in the epigraph to this chapter to ask where the wayfaring Quaker might be travelling, and to what end, for Quakers had, in effect, already arrived at their longed-for destination of union with Christ. Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter 4, in contrast to Calvinism’s distinction between the present time of fallen corruption and the future promise of Christ’s return, the doctrine of the light within rewrote that promise as already fulfilled, thereby dissolving time and bringing grace and the possibility of perfection into a timeless present. This raises questions about what kind of future was being imagined and invested in through the act of travelling: if Christ was already present within each believer, and therefore present in this time and this place, what kind of holy journeys were Friends making? And if silence and stillness were the ideals of Quaker worship, the states closest to the divine towards which everything tended, why travel? This chapter investigates the paradox of the constitutional restlessness of the already arrived Quaker, and the generative significance of the journey within the movement’s early practice and writings. What was the nature and extent of Friends’ itinerancy in the early years, and how did it shape early Quaker rhetoric and narrative? What relation does the Quaker journey have to culturally powerful figurations of the journey, both within Christian iconography (Christ himself as ‘the way’, the metaphorisation of life as a journey, and the figure of the wayfaring Christian travelling towards salvation in the life to come) and within the broader cultural context of literary-spiritual journeys such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress? To address these questions, I shall first establish some of the parameters of Fox’s itinerancy, the journeys which served both to gather the movement and to provide a foundational narrative memorialised in the Journal; for travelling was not only what many early Friends did, it was also at the heart of the stories they told about themselves. Following this, I shall address the conundrum of the travelling Quaker whose destination always lies within and has already been reached.

Walking with God: Fox’s journeys and Journal George Fox’s restlessness is an aspect of his godliness. The first page of his Journal establishes this in two ways. First, Fox specifies that his account of his life is to be a record of ‘my public travels in the service of the truth’; his itinerancy – which, in the lack of early modern differentiation between the

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words ‘travel’ and ‘travail’ is also his work – is announced as an act of service, a demonstration of the truth as inflected through Quakerism.4 Secondly, he notes that ‘while I was a child, I was taught how to walk to be kept pure’; here he draws on biblical instances of walking as a metaphor of godly living from both the Old and New Testaments, found in such verses as ‘Neither have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in his laws’ (Daniel 9.10) and ‘As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him’ (Colossians 2.6).5 These two opening invocations – of his ‘public travels’ as an act of service, and of ‘walking’ as a metaphor for godly living – establish the tone, the agenda, the terms and the structure of the account that is to follow. This relation of his travels is to mesh with, or even comprise, a proposition of what constitutes a life of Quaker ministry: ‘as I went, I preached repentance’, wrote Fox, yoking the activities of ‘going’ and ‘preaching’.6 Early Quaker itinerancy, therefore, whatever its social and religious function in establishing and maintaining the critical mass and the network of converts and sympathisers necessary to the movement, must be analysed beyond its pragmatic dimensions, for it lies at the core of both practice and self-representation in Fox’s Journal and other early autobiographical writings. It has a rhetorical function – it seeks to convince by the unmediated bodying forth of a divine truth – just as surely as does quaking in a meeting, refusing hat honour, speaking in a marketplace or from gaol, or going naked as a sign. Fox’s career as a habitual and long-distance traveller began early and continued throughout his life. He left home in 1643, aged nineteen, ‘at the command of God’, and continued to travel more or less regularly until his final visit to Holland in 1684, as he approached his sixtieth birthday.7 His first journeys were through Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire and London, but a religious movement with a substantial body of followers did not begin to coalesce until his walks took him north, into Yorkshire in 1651 and the following year into his ‘Galilee’, the area of Lancashire and Westmorland between Sedbergh and Swarthmoor now known by Friends as ‘the 1652 Country’, where he gathered his core followers.8 His journeying became more unremitting as it bore fruit: William C. Braithwaite suggests that he covered some 750 miles, on foot and horseback, in a few months from 1651 to 1652.9 Even once the movement had gathered pace in 1652–53, Fox’s momentum did not slow. Instead, he travelled south, still turning people to the inward light and settling meetings. The year 1655, for example, saw an exhausting itinerary which took him from the midlands on a route that criss-crossed most of southern England, visiting on foot and sometimes horseback (and often more than once in the course of the year) Derbyshire, Leicestershire, London, Bedfordshire, Kent, Sussex, Berkshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire,

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Dorset and Devon – a distance, by my calculation, of between 1700 and 1800 miles.10 To be ‘moved of the Lord’ clearly required significant levels of determination and stamina. To plot Fox’s journeys on a map is to produce an uneven network of lines, with some areas more densely covered, others left uncovered, but overall resulting in more and more of the country being touched by his travels. Historians of Quakerism have suggested that what determined his route was an indication of potential converts or sympathisers in a particular place: a sympathetic individual or community of Seekers, or others dissatisfied with the current religious dispensation, and waiting for an indication of the right path to take.11 Consequently, networks of Friends developed, households and meetings that would feed and lodge him and other travelling ministers, and, as Kate Peters has so decisively demonstrated, preparing the ground for their testimony by distributing papers.12 Fox’s own account of what motivated his journeys is that he was ‘moved of the Lord’ – that the decision as to where to go was not his but God’s. The Lord’s will, happily for Fox, was coincident with an increasingly well-developed system of support which served him, and the broader movement, extremely well. When Fox’s journeys are correlated with those of other Friends, the geographical coverage becomes still more impressive in its density and reach. If, for example, Fox’s journeys are put alongside those of some other Public Friends from the north and north-west such as James Nayler, William Dewsbury, Richard Farnworth, Dorothy Waugh, Mary Fisher, Elizabeth Fletcher or William Edmundson, then the list of locations visited and ministered to by Friends expands considerably. These fellow ‘Publishers of Truth’ moved south at the same time that Fox himself did, in 1654, to Cheshire, Oxford, Cambridge, Banbury, and into London, Bristol, Wales and Scotland, extending overseas to Ireland in 1654, Barbados in 1655, and the first Quakers arriving in Boston, New England, in 1656.13 By the end of the 1650s, with the movement less than a decade old, Quaker ‘Publishers of Truth’ had, in their own words and in what Braithwaite calls ‘a fine confusion of geography’, visited ‘Germany, America, and many other islands and places, as Florence, Mantua, Palatine, Tuscany, Italy, Rome, Turkey, Jerusalem, France, Geneva, Norway, Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica, Surinam, Newfoundland, through all which Friends have passed in the service of the Lord’.14 Unsurprisingly, such an extensive programme has led to these early Quaker journeys being called ‘one of the most dramatic outbreaks of missionary enthusiasm in the history of the Christian Church’.15 Many of them were undertaken by the same Friends. In the course of the 1650s alone, for example, Mary Fisher, a servant from Selby in Yorkshire, travelled to Cambridge, Barbados, Nevis, Boston, and Turkey; she finally settled in South Carolina with her second husband in the late 1670s. William Edmundson, from Westmorland, travelled widely

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in Ireland, and visited the American colonies three times; as Frederick Tolles records, his route on his first visit in 1671 ‘lay through Barbados, Antigua, Barbuda, Nevis, back to Antigua and Barbados, thence to Jamaica and to Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, back through Virginia and Maryland to New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, where he sailed for Ireland’.16 Far from being the exception, such stories can be told about the majority of the early Quaker Publishers of Truth. As well as relating the extent and the duration of his ‘public travels in the service of truth’, the narrative of Fox’s Journal is also shaped by much more localised walking, such that his daily life, whether understood as material, psychic or spiritual, could be said to have a pedestrian structure. His default activity, from which he begins and to which he reverts, is walking. Before his convincement, his walking was often a sign of spiritual unease: when he was troubled and could not sleep, he ‘sometimes walked up and down, and sometimes prayed’, or else he ‘walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible . . . and frequently in the night, walked mournfully about by myself ’.17 He gives fear as a motive for his restlessness at this stage: when travelling, he ‘durst not stay long in any place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing with either’.18 (As a walker later in life, he shows no such anxiety about the dangers of conversing with others, but rather seeks out ‘professor and profane’ as whetstones for his spiritual mettle.) As a young man, solitary walking is not only a response to pre-convincement ‘trouble’ but also an act of service to, and an act in anticipation of, the Lord: at Barnet, he writes, he ‘often walked solitary in the Chase there, to wait upon the Lord’.19 Indeed, it is solitary walking which precipitates many ‘openings’ of truth in Fox: And one day, when I had been walking solitarily abroad, and was come home, I was taken up in the love of God, so that I could not but admire the greatness of his love: and while I was in that condition, it was opened unto me by the eternal Light and power, and I therein clearly saw, ‘that all was done, and to be done in and by Christ . . .’.20

Such openings, it seems, could better be found in the fields (‘as I was walking in the fields, the Lord said unto me, “Thy name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life”’, or on the top of hills (‘when I came to the top of a hill . . . the Lord said to me: “Thou must go cry against yonder great idol”’), though they might also be found indoors (‘as I was walking in my chamber: with my eye to the Lord: I saw the angel of the Lord: with a glittering drawn sword drawn southward: and as though the court had been all of a fire’).21 As well as being an act of service (‘waiting on’), solitary walking produced a state in anticipation of (‘waiting for’) such ‘openings’, whether they were visionary or interpretative (both of which were comprehended in the notion of ‘prophecy’

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at the time).22 Solitary walking was itself a fulfilment of part of what the Lord had required of Fox: ‘thou must forsake all . . . and keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all’; and so, he writes, ‘I . . . gave myself up to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, and taken leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and travelled up and down as a stranger in the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart’.23 Alluding here to Hebrews 11.13 (‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth’; see too 1 Peter 2.11), Fox positions himself in relation to his calling through a series of renunciations, separations and departures, a stripping away of carnal ties and hindrances to allow the Lord to reclaim for himself that which is already his own. As well as being a solitary act, however, walking was also a way to stage, manage or avoid encounters with others, for better or for worse. Once, for example, a ‘Scotch priest’ asked Fox ‘to walk with him on top of the cliffs’, with the intention ‘either to have thrust me down over cliff or to have stabbed me’.24 Frequently, Fox’s walking leads him into a beating, as when ‘passing betwixt old Thomas Bewley’s and John Slee’s some rude fellows lay in wait in a lane and exceedingly stoned and abused us’; but sometimes it saves him from one: Fox recalled an occasion when he ‘walked out on foot’ to Robert Widders’s house from Thomas Leaper’s, thereby avoiding a group of men who came to beat him, and who then ‘laid wait in the highways which I should have come in if I had ridden to Robert Widders’’.25 Friends in general became known for their constant passage, either as ministers or as visitors of those detained in prison, and their walking became the means of their opponents intercepting them, as they ‘began to set up watches in the highways to take up all suspicious persons as they called it: which were the friends that came to visit us in prison: which they only took up that they might not pass up and down in the Lord’s service’.26 Characteristically, Fox reports that such opposition merely served to further the spread of truth, as ‘friends was continually moved to speak to one constable and to the other officer and justice: and this caused the truth to spread the more’.27 Hostile encounters were as productive as sympathetic ones in the dissemination of truth. Fox’s Journal conflates the life and the journey, but it shows that journey to be a sequence without progression, a series of events strung out along the fields, paths and roads he walks. He walks on a grand scale and on a local scale; he walks in doubt and in trouble, but also in certainty, and sometimes in triumph, but he walks above all in confirmation of the truth and as an act of service to the Lord. His walking gets him into trouble, but also gets him out of it. He walks with purpose, but usually without a predetermined goal or destination. His walks are acts of departure, a shedding of places and people who thereby become the fixed points between which he charts his journey, but

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they also produce a series of arrivals, exposing him to new people and places, or returning him to places and people he has encountered previously, both friends and opponents. His walks are frequently solitary, as ‘a stranger and pilgrim in the earth’, but they are also social, acts of companionship with his intermittent fellow-travellers, and acts constitutive of a growing community of Friends, nationally and internationally. His ceaseless motion is countered, rhetorically, by an extremity of stasis, in the imprisonments by which his journeys are interrupted. His walking is performative, an elicitation of the Lord opening his truths to him. In short, Fox’s walking was not incidental but profoundly constitutive of what we know of his life, as well as of what we know as his Journal. Quakers, of course, were not unique among seventeenth-century reforming groups in travelling to seek or preserve the truth, or to muster converts. Mobility, in the form of both exile and itinerant proselytism, was undertaken to preserve and propagate the faith, and proved useful, as A. L. Beier noted, ‘to all types of religious dissident, from seminary priests under Elizabeth I to George Fox the Quaker’.28 Early in the seventeenth century, for example, Puritans dissatisfied with the inadequacy of reform within the English church had travelled into exile, first into the Netherlands, later New England.29 Familism, spread in England by an itinerant joiner, held ‘that ministers should be itinerants, like the Apostles’.30 By Fox’s time, there was a well-established tradition of Puritan and sectarian separatist displacement: Hill notes that, ‘Given a favourable spiritual environment, itinerant craftsmen could easily become itinerant ministers, underground before 1640, openly in the freedom of the forties’, and suggests that the New Model Army was an important mechanism for the generation of mechanic preachers and gathered churches, and for the linking up of ‘obscure radical groups scattered up and down the kingdom . . . especially in the lonely North and West’.31 Thomas Corns notes Milton’s sympathy for this practice: as late as 1659, he ‘writes warmly and at some length in praise of itinerant preachers, going out, in the footsteps of the apostles, to spread the gospel where it has least penetrated’.32 Beier suggests, however, that a more common response would have been dismay: After 1640 it must have seemed as though the bowels of Hell had opened to release the hordes of tramping radicals: in Wales alone in 1648 there were reckoned to be 800 itinerant preachers; in 1656 the Wiltshire grand jury presented ‘many evil spirited people which do wander about spreading many evil and dangerous opinions to the dishonour of God’ during an apparent outbreak of Ranting. Such prophets were probably a far cry from the vagrant poor in wealth and status, just as were most recusants, but ironically enough they gave the genuinely uprooted a bad name.33

Examples of travelling religious radicals include the unaffiliated itinerant preacher Richard Coppin, active in the late 1640s and 1650s; the erstwhile

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Ranter Lawrence Clarkson, who wrote that during what he called ‘the period of my Pilgrimage’ he had ‘travelled from one end of England to another, and as yet could find very few that could define unto me the Object of their Worship, or give me a Character what God is’; in 1654 the Fifth Monarchist prophet Anna Trapnel was sent by her Baptist congregation in London to Cornwall to spread news of her ecstatic prophecies and, as it turned out, to continue prophesying; and the prophet Elinor Channel was called to leave her husband and children in order to travel to London from Surrey to convey her prophetic message to Cromwell in person.34 However, while individual sectarian and prophetic journeys were made in number, sometimes of some duration and difficulty, no other religious group at this time premised its identity, its organisation or its modus operandi on itinerancy. So important was this that the Quakers really cannot be considered separate from their itinerant constitution and self-maintenance; it made them who they were, and was a major factor in what constituted them as a threat for their opponents.35 Ministers from Westmorland drew up a petition in 1653 complaining that Nayler and Fox ‘meerly of their own accord, without any Passport, Licence, or Authority whatsoever, that they can shew, or we ever heard of, have entered in to the County .  .  . and powerfully seduced multitudes of People from the Truth’, and Francis Higginson produced one of the first and fullest anti-Quaker polemics, A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (1653).36 His complaint about Quaker ‘irreligion’ opens with reference to Fox, Nayler and others of ‘Satans seeds-men’ who had ‘crept unawares’ into Westmorland, and he concludes by quoting approvingly from John Owen’s ‘Discourse Of Toleration’ (1649):37 There are (saith he [i.e. Owen]) a sort of persons termed in Scripture disorderly, vagabond, wandring, irregular persons. 1. Thes. 5. 14. Acts 17. 5. 2 Thess. 3. 2. 1. Tim. 1. 9. Fixed to no Calling, abiding in no place, taking no care of their Families, that under a pretence of teaching the Truth, without Mission, without Call, without Warrant, uncommanded, undesired, do goe up and down from place to place, creeping into houses, &c. . . . And the Lawes of most Nations have provided that their people shall not be wanderers, and whosoever hath not a place of abode, and imployment, is by them a punishable vagabond.38

Higginson elaborates his objections: Friends’ itinerancy, he suggests, undoes fundamental social bonds: ‘Some of them leave their Wives, Children, Families, Vocations and turn all Journy-men Speakers. Others regardlesse of all at home, wander after them, compassing the Country from place to place, and live upon those of their Fraternity where they light, to their Excessive charge’.39 William Prynne made similar objections; the epigraph to his The Quakers Unmasked (1655) is taken from 2 Timothy 3 and includes the condemnation of ‘they which creep into houses’; he alleges that Quakers are

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‘the Spawn of Romish Frogs’, ‘as Jesuites, Franciscans, Benedictines, Dominicans, and the like’ (some of these were mendicant and/or itinerant orders), making the whole land into ‘a desolate wildernesse’.40 For these commentators, their travels put Quakers into the same category as vagrants, dwellers on the social margins against whom legal sanction and popular opprobrium were quite properly directed. Phyllis Mack notes that Quakers were indeed whipped under Elizabeth’s Act against ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’, the flogging of Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams at Cambridge in December 1653 probably being the earliest case of Quakers suffering under this Act, though many others followed.41 The Act was applied from 1657 to include ‘all persons wandering without sufficient cause’.42 Fox himself notes how vagrancy was a lever used to expel Friends from towns they visited, and was the focus of accusations against which they were required to defend themselves.43 As far as their detractors were concerned, Quaker journeys, usually on foot, were largely indistinguishable from those induced by poverty or criminality. Quakers too understood their travels to have meaning, but for them the meaning was more spiritual than social, or, more precisely, concerned the spiritual symbolism and significance of the social. There were, of course, important biblical precedents for such incessant travel, from the Israelites wandering in exile in hostile Egypt to the figure of Christ himself, whose homelessness in part defined him: as Luke’s gospel has Christ saying of himself, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head’ (Luke 9.58). Joseph Amato suggests in his history of walking that Christ’s ‘very message sprang from his peregrinations’, and, since he ‘called his disciples to the road’, it also shaped the lives of those who followed him: ‘These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew 10.5–7).44 Quaker travel, however, was impelled by an immediacy of calling beyond simple scriptural precedent or emulation. ‘[A]t the command of God’, wrote Fox, ‘I left my relations, and brake off all familiarity or fellowship with young or old’.45 Similarly, James Nayler’s itinerancy was the result of a divine demand: ‘suddainly I heard a Voice, saying unto me, Get thee out from thy Kindred, and from thy Father’s House.”’ Later, drawing on Matthew 10.9–10, Nayler says he was ‘sent out without Bag or Scrip, or Money, into the most brutish parts of the Nation’.46 Like Fox and Nayler, Jane Waugh (later Whitehead) ‘Travelled in obedience to the Lord on Truths account .  .  . she Travelled as in a Land unsown’.47 Quaker work was embedded in and was an aspect of their travels, so the call to travel stood as a synecdoche of the more general call to God’s work. This work required early Friends to address those beyond their own immediate number, as they sought to turn them to the light. They also addressed

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those already convinced, in a spirit of encouragement and to guard against backsliding. In this, as Susan Wiseman has argued, part of the point of sectarian travel in this period was as an exercise internal to the movement – that is, as an occasion for the presentation of a particular kind of self-narrative to the peer group. For Quakers, she suggests, travel ‘seems to have been significant as cultural reinforcement of Quaker self-mythologization as a group and in the structuring of narrative and myth for consumption by this interpretive community’.48 Quakerism was a movement that, from the outset, was particularly adept at fostering mechanisms for its own preservation and perpetuation, whether through the practicalities of Margaret Fell’s Kendal fund, established in 1653 ‘to collect and disburse . . . money to traveling missionaries and their families’, through the narratives it produced for the reassurance and encouragement of its members and the infrastructure established for the dissemination of these accounts, and the system of meetings established for their own self-regulation.49 Wiseman discusses the ways that, in the example of Barbara Blaugdone’s travel narrative, the physical and the spiritual journeys interlock, such that her journey, ‘unmapped physically, . . . [becomes] an index of the spiritual status of the Christians in each part of the country’.50 Blaugdone was not alone in this; James Nayler, for example, also understood his wandering to be an index of the godliness of his work: ‘I am made free to wander any way the lord shall move me so that I may do his will, for there is my peace’.51 The dangers inherent in his reading of his own journeying, however, finally erupted following his notorious Christ-like entry into Bristol in 1656, riding on horseback and accompanied by a small group singing, ‘Holy, holy, holy’, which resulted in his examination by Parliament and his subsequent whipping and branding, and the boring of his tongue.52 The final stage of his punishment was to return to Bristol and ‘undo his crime by literally retracing his route backward’, facing the horse’s tail, in the manner of popular punishments by ritual public humiliation such as the skimmington ride.53 His blasphemous enactment was countered by the imposition of a symbolic anti-journey in a literalised demonstration and repudiation of the preposterousness of the offending journey.54

The peripatetic rhetoric of Fox’s journeys If historians have addressed the question of how itinerancy served to constitute, consolidate and proliferate the early movement, what remains unexamined is the significance of this foundational peripatetic practice within the movement’s rhetorical field.55 In what ways, and to what ends, does itinerancy (walking, specifically, and travelling, more generally) inform early Quaker writing, and in particular Fox’s Journal? To what extent is the movement’s

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distinctive discourse shaped by an itinerant – an open-ended, improvisatory or unfixed – logic? What drives its narrative, and to what rhetorical ends? And to what extent could Fox’s Journal itself be characterised as ambulatory? Fox’s travels, both large-scale feats of endurance and small-scale daily practice, inform the structure and the texture of the prose of the Journal. If the fabric of the Journal is established by Fox’s walking, the same might be said of the overall shape of its narrative. Just as the local incidents and events that comprise the narrative are repeatedly seen to result from Fox’s walking, so too the direction of the narrative itself echoes the meandering path of Fox’s own purposeful but undirected journeys. This is not a narrative that builds towards a climactic resolution. Rather, as I argued in Chapter 3, the narrative is resolved in the early pages of the text as Fox’s anxious quest for the truth is answered by the revelation, one by one, of the central tenets of Quaker belief – the doctrine of the inward light; individual revelation valued above the scriptures; the redundancy of university learning; the insistence on the church as a gathering of people rather than a building of stone and wood; the refusal of hat honour and the requirement to use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to all. No new narrative uncertainties are introduced hereafter, to be resolved through a singular trajectory. Instead, the resolution reached so early is reiterated and confirmed in the life and travels of Fox himself and the movement as a whole. What governs the shape of the narrative beyond this point is not a goal or destination to which all events and details are directed. Rather, to read Fox’s Journal requires the relinquishment of the desire for such a singular trajectory, and the acceptance of the piecemeal accretion of anecdote and incident into what is, paradoxically for a travel narrative, if not a static narrative at least not a driven one; it eddies, circles, pauses, drifts and turns, rather than pursuing a predetermined itinerary. Like its protagonist, the narrative is constantly on the move, but to all appearances going nowhere in particular. If the Journal has no singular destination, what confers shape and dynamism on the narrative of Fox’s journeys? Eric J. Leed, in his study The Mind of the Traveler, suggests a parallel between a journey and certain narrative forms: ‘The structure of the passage is an experience that gives rise to a structure of representation, the epic and journal form of one place, scene, thing after another connected only by the motions of the actor’.56 Certainly, if there is any linearity of trajectory in Fox’s text, then it is conferred by the defining narrative focus on the figure of Fox himself as he makes his journeys, through the recitation of a litany of place-names, and his successive passing from one to the next: ‘And from Romney I passed to Dover: and near unto Dover there was a governor that was convinced . . . and so I passed to Canterbury . . . And so I came to Cranbrook again’.57 Interrupting any sense of a defining structural linearity, however, are two other textual features. First, there is a circularity of narrative motion produced by the many repeated phrases

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to be found throughout, such as ‘and the Lord’s power was over all’; ‘and so we passed’; ‘moved of the Lord’; ‘and when I had cleared myself ’; ‘and from thence’; ‘and many was turned’; ‘and we had a precious meeting’; ‘and many were convinced’; ‘from the darkness to the light’. These increasingly familiar and frequently repeated phrases serve to close the circle of a given incident, returning the reader to a point of familiarity, a textual place already repeatedly visited, and they serve too as the point of departure for the next excursion. These phrases are the Journal’s refrains, condensing the indispensable essence of the narrative.58 They become in effect its home phrases, the places from which it departs and to which it returns, in rather the way that Swarthmoor, through his repeated departures and returns there, became a physical home base to Fox himself. This produces a contingency to the narrative structure of Journal, just as there was to Fox’s journeys themselves. Like them, it is contingent in the sense of being unpredictable and uncertain in its direction or destination; it is mobile without obvious motive. But it is also contingent in that it is dependent on, or led by, something not immediately discernible within its own terms or structures – that is, by the Lord. This double sense of contingency, in fact, makes Fox into what his critic Francis Higginson accused him of being, a ‘journy-man’, in that his activities day to day were by definition uncertain and changeable. Neither apprentice nor master, he worked ‘not on his own account’ but in the service of another.59 The second interruption to the structural linearity of the Journal is the disparate method of the text’s composition and constitution. The linear strand comprises the retrospective account of his life dictated by Fox to Thomas Lower in around 1675–78, but this is punctuated repeatedly by the interpolation, at Fox’s direction, of a plethora of other documents, mostly epistles and papers dictated by Fox at the time of the events he was recounting, but also, at times, accounts by others. So, for example, Fox’s retrospective account of the events of 1652 are interspersed with a contemporary account of his 1652 trial in Lancaster, revised by Lower, and annotated by Fox himself, and with (amongst others) papers ‘concerning the word’, ‘To all yt professe ye Scripture’, and epistles addressed to John Sawrey, to the Long Parliament and officers of the army, two to Priest Lampitt, to the heads and generals of the army, and to the people of Ulverston.60 The interruptions thereby introduced are multiple: to the narrative itself; to the genre, in terms of the kinds of documents interpolated; to the tone, as the relative calm retrospection is interspersed with the warm encouragement of the convinced or the heat of prophecy, warning and excoriation; and to the temporal frame, as the retrospective account is punctuated by the contemporary document. The Journal is thus centripetally constituted, its disparate elements loosely cohering through their accretion to the backbone of the retrospective account, with its focus on the figure of Fox and the events of his life at its core. Never, however, does that centripetal

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force subdue these elements to a singularity. The text remains a patchwork or mosaic, accommodating a variety of earlier documents, in a variety of voices and registers, which can never be subsumed within an overarching masternarrative.61 Just as Fox’s journeys have an air of improvisation, of working with the places, people and events encountered along the way, so too the Journal follows a similar pattern, constituted by multiple encounters between texts of differing temper and provenance. In this sense, the text could indeed be said to share the ambulatory logic of its author-subject. Even if we can posit a structural echo between the composition of the journey and of the Journal, this leaves still to be addressed a central question concerning the impetus behind the two phenomena: why did Quakers travel, and where to? The immediate answer is that these were missionary journeys, made in search of potential convincements and for the settling of meetings, and, as such, they were impressive and ambitious enterprises, extraordinarily successful in some areas (the north and south-west of England, London, Holland, Barbados, the Atlantic colonies), if less so in others (Germany, France, Spain, Malta, Rome).62 But given the prominence of itinerancy in the practice of early Friends and its centrality in their early writings, particularly in Fox’s Journal, what was its importance beyond, or in the service of, this pragmatic proselytising function? How might we read the rhetoric of the walker and the walk? ‘He or she is mystic who cannot stop walking’, concludes Michel de Certeau in The Mystic Fable (1992), a study which offers a characteristically vertiginous perspective on the proliferation of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury European mystics – a term intended to convey the historical specificity of mysticism in this period, as well as its epistemology.63 This phenomenon, de Certeau argues, erupted ‘[a]t the threshold of modernity’, borne of a sense of the evacuation of the divine from the world, and itself constituting ‘the historical figure of that loss’: ‘it is the trial, by language, of the ambiguous passage from presence to absence’.64 He glosses this absence – which is also variously a loss and a separation – thus: ‘The One is no longer to be found. “They have taken him away,” say so many chants of the mystics who inaugurate, with the story of his loss, the history of his returns elsewhere and otherwise, in ways that are the effect rather than the refutation of his absence’.65 De Certeau’s thesis is that, on the brink of Enlightenment rationalism, ‘both bound and hostile to a technicalizing of society’, mystics demonstrates, protests and mourns its own anachronism, vulnerability and demise.66 Its affirmation of presence is itself a symptomatic expression of precisely the absence to which it gave chase. It is in this tension between absence and presence that de Certeau locates the dynamic driving the wandering early modern mystic. Mystics, he suggests, is premised on, requires and produces a state of ‘perpetual departure’:

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He or she is mystic who cannot stop walking and, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of every place and object that it is not that; one cannot stay there nor be content with that. Desire creates an excess. Places are exceeded, passed, lost behind it. It makes one go further, elsewhere. It lives nowhere.67

In reading desire as produced within a dynamic of lack, loss, excess and dissatisfaction, de Certeau (who draws explicitly on the ‘analogy of functioning between mystics and psychoanalysis’ in The Mystic Fable) echoes its Lacanian definition as ‘the force of pure loss [which] arises from the relic of an obliteration . . . [D]esire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference resulting from the subtraction of the first from the second’.68 For de Certeau the link between walking and mystics is wanting – that is, desiring and lacking, the inevitability of the lack endlessly productive of an insatiable desire. The literature of mystics is therefore one of longing, as it makes ‘readable an absence that has multiplied the productions of desire’, demonstrating the absence of the One in its multiple revelations of his presence.69 De Certeau’s analysis is compelling with regard to the itinerancy of Fox for the ways that it suggests differences, rather than similarities, between Quaker and other forms of mystics in their respective motivation by desire and lack. His account of the seventeenth-century French nomadic mystic Jean de Labadie, in particular, is both curiously analogous to the history of Fox offered by his Journal and also tellingly distinct from it. However much Fox might share Labadie’s spiritual itinerancy, in Fox’s case the story of his journeys cannot be told in quite the same way, for desire cannot be extrapolated as the dynamic driving the journey in the same way for him as for Labadie or for mystics more generally. This difference is the consequence of the doctrine of the inward light, which, with its granting of all that could be longed for here, now, in the body and soul of the believer, in the possibility of regaining the conditions of prelapsarian perfection, surely dissolves desire as a motive force. Fox is certainly an instance par excellence of ‘the itinerant walker, Wandersmann’, but his wandering shows no sign of being motivated by the certainty of what is lacking, by the not here, not that identified by de Certeau as productive of the desire and the itinerancy that is its practised expression.70 Instead, Fox is motivated by the certainty of what is present – by the here, this, that is constantly reproduced by his journeys. Rather than manifesting the restlessness of incompletion, of dissatisfaction, of uncertainty – that is, of quest for that which is absent – his restlessness is fuelled by the reiteration, the repeated presence, of the completion, satisfaction and certainty of destination. This returns us to the tension between stasis and motion at the heart of Quaker practice: how is it that the satiation of immanence and presence so often induce, seem even to require, movement? After all, as Fox himself observed, when people turned to the light within, ‘their first step to peace’ was ‘to stand still in the light that showed their sin and transgressions’.71 In the

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face of often repeated beatings and stonings by his opponents, Fox did, indeed, frequently ‘stand still’ and offer no resistance, but the exhortation has a rhetorical force as well as an advisory function.72 In a short epistle of 1652 in which he exhorted Friends no fewer than six times to ‘stand still’, Fox wrote, ‘Stand still in that which is pure, after ye see your selves; and then Mercy comes in. . . . Stand still in that which shews and discovers . . . And stand still in the Light, and submit to it . . .. Your Strength is to stand still’.73 He repeated the point in his epistles many times: ‘stand still in [the light] every one, to see your Saviour’; ‘your Strength is, to stand still, that ye may receive Refreshings’; ‘Friends, Stand still and see, be still and hear, sit at Jesus Feet’.74 The Journal includes an epistle identifying stillness as a test of the strength of convincement: ‘Afterwards you may feell a winter storme Tempest haile [& be frozen] frost & cold & a wilderness & Temptations be patient & still in ye power & still in ye light yt doth convince you’.75 The Quaker Charles Marshall concurred: Friends who feel ‘the Beginning of a Testimony’ should, he wrote, Wait diligently in that Light, low, in the pure Stilness and Passiveness of your Spirits; .  .  . retire inward, and sink down into the pure Stilness, and keep in the Valley . . .; and the more still, humble and passive thou art, who art thus exercised, the Motion of Life will the more live and shew itself, and the Power will arise and clear thy Understanding; .  .  . sit in the still Habitation, and in that Humility and Passiveness thou wast in before, and then the Reward of Obedience thou wilt feel.76

Stillness and silence together comprise the state in which the voice of God can best be apprehended, but they also equate with the passivity, humility and inwardness of the attentive believer, constituting a performance of will-lessness and the obedience that is promised as its own reward.77 Despite the centrality of stillness as well as silence to the symbolism of the meeting for worship, early Public Friends none the less repeatedly left the presence and stasis of the ‘still Habitation’, in Marshall’s phrase, to travel from place to place. Once again, the structure and focus of Fox’s narrative in the Journal offer an analytical perspective on this wandering, for despite my having described the Journal at the beginning of this chapter as a travelogue, and despite the structuring of the text through Fox’s travels, it actually conveys remarkably little detail about the journeys themselves. As a rule, we do not know along which routes he travelled, how long the journeys took, the nature of the terrain, or whether the ways were arduous; the observation that his 1652 ascent of Pendle Hill was accomplished with ‘much ado it was so steep’ is unusual. It is rare that he specifies whether he was on horseback or on foot, more frequently only noting that he ‘passed on’ from, or ‘came to’, a place.78 This is in part the consequence of a more general Quaker lack of interest in the details of quotidian carnal materiality (even in Quaker autobiographical texts

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we seldom find details of family, daily life, home and so on), but the outcome is a narrative whose emphasis falls principally on the pauses in the journeys. Fox’s journeys themselves, and the terrain they traverse, figure only when they are productive of ‘openings’ of truth or, occasionally, when we learn that he spent the night under a hedge – in other words, when something intervenes to halt the figure in motion. Despite being structurally reliant on the journeys of Fox, the Journal thus shows remarkably little interest in them as journeys. They are, narratively speaking, little more than the threads along which are strung the places and encounters told by the Journal. As de Certeau suggests in another investigation of mobility, in which he discusses the grammar and rhetoric of urban walking, these journeys might be analysed through reference to the stylistic figure of asyndeton: ‘the suppression of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs’.79 This figure, he argues, could also be said to structure accounts of spatial practices: ‘in walking it selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. . . . Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and separate islands’.80 In Fox’s text, the journeys are the omitted conjunctions, adumbrated in such refrains as ‘so from thence’, ‘and from thence I passed through’, and ‘so we came to’ but never elaborated, and afforded no narrative weight.81 Instead, the places of departure and arrival are the ‘enlarged singularities and separate islands’ between which he moves. The asyndeton of the Journal produces the journeys as a sequence of departures from and arrivals at the places that intersperse them, and, more especially, the encounters that take place in them. In this, Fox has something in common with other, secular, travellers. Leed remarked that ‘Travelers most often write of where they are going or where they have been, about the sights, incidents and vicissitudes of the journey, not about its unexceptional flows, motions, and pleasures. Periods of pleasant easy passage are unnarratable perhaps because they are unexceptional’.82 The Journal rarely recounts the journey itself, neither its vicissitudes nor its pleasures. However, the few exceptions to this, such as the ascent of Pendle Hill, with its stress on its steepness and the ‘ado’ with which Fox climbed it, suggests a journey far from ‘unnarratable’ per se. On the contrary, its rigours and privations indicate that it could easily have become the historical counterpart of Bunyan’s allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress, a text which – like other seventeenth-century Protestant pilgrimage texts, such as ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, Herbert’s and Vaughan’s poems both entitled ‘The Pilgrimage’, Herrick’s ‘On himselfe’ (‘Here down my wearyed limbs Ile lay’), Donne’s sonnet ‘This is my play’s last scene’ and even Traherne’s rather different ‘Walking’ – loses no opportunity to read and write the details of landscape, way, terrain, orientation and gradient as metaphor, saturated with spiritual

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and soteriological significance.83 Fox’s was a journey that, in other authorial hands, would have lent itself to metaphorising providentialist narration. Instead, the journeys themselves are for the most part no more than asyndetically narrated, sketchy adjuncts to a series of departures and arrivals, means not to an end but to many ends and many beginnings. To depart is to refuse integration, but it is also to produce a new kind of identity; as Leed put it, ‘The departure not only “excorporates” a member from a social body, it also “incorporates” and inaugurates the mobile body’.84 It was, certainly, the very mobility of Friends which at times provided a means of classification: their mobility allowed anti-Quakers such as Francis Higginson, with his complaint that Friends ‘crept’ into Westmorland, to identify them as vagrants; and Fox notes one instance when his own mobility served as a means of identification and a source of disturbance and wonder for a group of observers, who saw it as evidence of either miracle or witchcraft: ‘seeing me a quarter of a mile off they said I could not have gone so far in such an instant except I had wings: and then the meeting was stopped they was so filled with strange thoughts . . . they could not believe I could have gone so far in such a short space’.85 Fox’s mobility is here a mechanism which allows onlookers to articulate a fundamental difference between him and them. It stops him being legible as simply human (though whether for better or for worse is uncertain); it is his mobility which sets him apart, which is beyond belief. Leeds’s expansion on his analysis of departure further illuminates this anecdote of Fox as a creature with wings: his mobility becomes a means by which ‘the traveler is “objectified” and becomes a thing persisting outside those relations that identify him, an autonomous individuality’.86 Having been ‘identified’ in any given place (as some version of Friend or foe), departure from it both detaches him from those categorisations and returns him to an identity in conformity with the Lord’s will, who told him, in his period of spiritual formation, to ‘keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all’.87 Furthermore, departure facilitates a process of categorisation whereby Fox is rendered legible to those he encounters, whether as vagrant and religious dissident or as Friend and Publisher of Truth. If his departures return him to the status of ‘stranger in the earth’, so his repeated arrivals produce encounters with that ‘stranger’ that elicit a response; and rarely does the Journal suggest that this is one of indifference. Invariably, these encounters are characterised by either hospitality or hostility, a polarisation that reproduces and confirms the overwhelmingly binary analytic perspective of early Quakers. The hospitality might be in the form of sympathisers whom Fox seeks out, or in the form of people who listen and are turned to the Lord, and subsequently settled (a verb which requires them to stay where they are) in a meeting. Hostility is to be found in companies of ‘rude people’, who deride, beat or otherwise abuse him, hostile Justices or the clergy, such as the benighted and excoriated Priest Lampitt of Ulverston, to whom Fox returns

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many times, to an encounter premised on the re-articulation and replaying of his profound disagreement with him. This pattern of encounter and departure, hospitality and hostility, is repeated many times, the following one characteristic of many others: Justice Fleming at the Sessions at Kendal was in a great rage against friends, and he bid five pounds to any man in open Sessions that could take me: and as I came to Francis Benson’s, I met one man who had this five pounds proffered him to take me, and when I passed by him he said, ‘That is George Fox’: but he had not power to touch me, so the Lord’s power preserved me over them all: so the wicked justices being in such a rage against me and I often being so nigh them it tormented them the worse. And from thence I came to James Taylor’s at Cartmel where I stayed the firstday: and had a precious meeting. And after the meeting was done I came over sand to Swarthmoor. And when I came there they told me that Colonel Kirkby had sent his lieutenant there to search for me who had searched both boxes and trunks for me at Swarthmoor. And as I was lying in bed, I was moved of the Lord God to go the next day to Colonel Kirkby’s house about five miles off and to speak to him.88

Fox’s passage through Kendal, Cartmel and Swarthmoor initiates a series of encounters in which he himself is the catalyst whereby the godliness or otherwise of those he meets is revealed. On one side of the divide fall Justice Fleming, the man who Judas-like seeks to betray Fox, the wicked justices and Colonel Kirkby; and on the other, Francis Benson, James Taylor, the ‘precious meeting’ and Swarthmoor. Each encounter replays the triumph of the power of the Lord and the light within, and the defeat of Satan: ‘the promise of God is to man and woman that have been deceived by him [the Devil]: the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head and shall break his power and strength to pieces’.89 It is the reprise of this process that, above all, keeps Fox on the move. His journeys produce repeated arrivals, new or renewed encounters, in new or revisited places. The cycle of visit and return not only catalyses the division of the godly from the ungodly but it also pulls the places themselves into the drama of the light within. In de Certeau’s terms, the places through which he moves are themselves transformed into spaces, where ‘place’ implies ‘an indication of stability . . . reducible to the being-there of something dead’, and ‘space’ is understood as ‘composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it’; he concludes, in his much-quoted aphorism, that ‘In short, space is a practiced place’.90 By this analysis, Fox’s ceaseless journeying serves perpetually to transform the stasis of place from ‘the being-there of something dead’ into the practised flux and energy of space. It brings it to life. Fox’s insistent walking of the streets, fields,

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roads and hills separates the hospitable from the hostile and turns the godly amongst them to the Lord, activating an embedded potential which is then animated by the power of the light within. If de Certeau’s Wandersmann moves on because he ‘knows of every place and object that it is not that; one cannot stay there nor be content with that’, Fox continues in his cycle of departure and arrival because as well as the here, this that he encounters on his travels, he is also equally open to being persuaded by the Lord of the importance of there, that.91 There is no good reason to pause on one rather than another. Rather, there is every reason to repeat the drama of the arrival of the ‘stranger in the earth’ at the next place, with its polarising cycle of welcome and rejection, both equally important to the binary analysis by which Friends understood the world. De Certeau suggested that mystics ‘first received its binary structure, opposing an “interior” to an “exterior”’, from its own positioning as heretical: ‘Heresy presents the doctrinal legibility of a social conflict and the binary form of the modality by which a society defines itself, excluding that which it casts in the role of its other’.92 The doctrine of the inward light might have abolished the interior/exterior binary, but it depended still on the foundational polarity between the antagonistic and the welcoming, whereby it too excluded ‘that which it casts in the role of its other’.93 Fox is a godly agent whose introduction into an inadequately differentiated melange effects the necessary separation between the friendly and the hostile, those with him and against him – a separation which, as Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole observed in 1655, is fundamental to Friends’ self-apprehension: there is the seed of the woman, and the seed of the serpent in the world, there is the generation of Cain and righteous Abel. Now it lieth upon you all to know what generation you are of: . . . be not wilfully blind, hearken to the light of Jesus Christ in your consciences, that you may come to see what generation you are of, whether of Cain or Abel.94

Through the cycle of departure and arrival, Fox enables those he encounters to fulfil their responsibilities to ‘know what generation’ they are of. This is, moreover, a cycle sustained by walking, an activity at once mundane, habitual, taken for granted, and itself indicative of what constitutes humanity. Peter Stallybrass has remarked that ‘[t]he mystery of walking is the mystery of a “forked Animall” (The Tragedie of King Lear [First Folio (1623)], 3.4.107) who stands erect, if at all, only through the incorporated sense of balance that the hand of another has given’.95 That is to say, what enables us to move through the world autonomously is predicated on and consequent to a prior dependence, which, Stallybrass argues, is never absolutely superseded but rather incorporated into the self. So it was with Fox. His travels, apparently autonomous, were, he averred repeatedly, acts of contingent dependence on the leadings of the Lord.

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Furthermore, the physiology of walking itself reproduces the precariousness of that initial relation. Oliver Wendell Holmes (physician as well as writer) described walking as ‘a perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery’: It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early period of life. . . . We learn how violent it is, when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is, when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last step of a flight of stairs, and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves forward.96

Holmes finds a disguised, because habituated, danger and violence animating the act of walking, which is detectable only when it is interrupted. This sense of an inherent but unnoticed instability to walking is echoed by de Certeau: ‘movement is a loss of equilibrium. That falling becomes walking if it happens to be the case that a second place exists to follow the first’.97 Here again, in the proximity of falling and recovery, human frailty and redemptive grace, is the double contingency of the walk enacted, on the one hand, in its dependence and relationality, and, on the other, in its instability or unpredictablity, the uncertainty of the latter sense repeatedly and mercifully resolved by the providential and potent heteronomy of the first. The very mundanity of the analogy between walking and salvific providence is itself apposite, for it was in this most unremarked of day-to-day practices that Fox found evidence of, and elicited, the presence of the light within. Of Labadie, de Certeau wrote that ‘his own text was his walking. He wrote with his feet, that is, geographically’.98 Fox’s testimony was, despite his prolific written output, also above all an embodied one, produced in dialogue with the people and places he visited. By repeatedly inscribing the national and international landscapes with their journeying, Fox and other early Public Friends brought to the surface, and brought to life, the inherent godly potential of these spaces and their inhabitants. The Journal suggests that the journeys themselves were of little intrinsic interest to those that undertook them; what mattered was what they precipitated. The movement with which Fox was most concerned was to be found not in his own mobility, in the extraordinary journeys undertaken by him and other Friends, but in the towns and villages where he paused. There, the motion systematically reported, and which became one of the textual home phrases, is the ‘turning’ to the light of those open to the leadings of God. And just as speech leads to silence in the economy of the meeting for worship, so this motion led quite properly to a kind of stillness, in the ‘settling’ of such meetings. Settling, however, was not for Fox and other itinerant Public Friends. In their repeated pattern of departure and arrival, the journeys demonstrate the power of the inward light to turn and to save. A Quaker answer to Grace

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Tiffany’s question in the epigraph to this chapter as to where, specifically, the Protestant pilgrim was travelling would suggest that the actual itinerary is immaterial, for the light shines everywhere. Instead, the itinerancy itself is critical, for to travel was also to travail. It is a literalisation and a fulfilment of John’s words: ‘if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin’ (1 John 1.7).99 Combining fellowship and redemption, itinerancy enacts once again the fusion of the material and the spiritual. The historical, material phenomena of world and body are not, for Quakers, simply fallen, carnal impediments, to be shuffled off by the subject redeemed by death; nor are they allegorical signs of God’s providential gift to his elect. Instead, they are matter redeemable, transformable, by the godly action of the catalysing Christ within. In this, the seamless material-spiritual world of the early Friends is once again revealed, enacted and affirmed.

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6

The limits of the light: silence and slavery in Quaker narratives of journeys to America and Barbados

From its inception, the Quaker travelling ministry was also a publishing ministry. In May 1652, when Fox descended Pendle Hill after his founding vision of ‘a great people’, his immediate response was to write a paper and see to its distribution.1 From the early days of the movement, the activities of travelling and writing went hand in hand, and Fox set the pace in both regards. As he travelled through ‘the 1652 country’ and beyond, he composed and dictated letters, tracts and notebooks.2 Fox and his followers were indeed ‘Publishers of Truth’ in both the broad and narrow senses of the term: they published by means of their restless journeying from place to place, embodying the truth of the workings of the inward light, but also by their production and distribution of printed text.3 Striking in Fox’s account of his Pendle Hill experience was his fusion of the physical landscape through which he was travelling with the spiritual contours of the environment to which he bore witness: as we went I spied a great high hill called Pendle Hill and I went on the top of it with much ado it was so steep: but I was moved of the Lord to go atop of it: and when I came atop of it I saw Lancashire sea: and there atop of the hill I was moved to sound the day of the Lord and the Lord let me see atop of the hill in what places he had a great people.4

If, as I argued in Chapter 5, the landscape through which Fox travelled remained largely unremarked in his account of those journeys, this episode is a striking exception to that habit of textual-topographical invisibility. Pendle Hill itself looms large in Fox’s account. It is a natural feature of undoubted physical presence whose steepness causes Fox ‘much ado’, but it is also a place of prominence in his spiritual landscape, ascended with difficulty but with godly assurance. There, precipitated by the hill’s composite spiritual/material loftiness, his ‘vision’ of ‘Lancashire sea’ combined with a ‘vision’ of ‘a great

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people’ and the places in which they dwelt.5 The physical location of Fox’s Pendle Hill vision gives form to its articulation, and suggests the rich possibilities for Quaker discourse of the blending of a sense of place with spiritual commentary.6 As explored throughout this book, Quaker theology and practice were animated by a rhetoric of unity, a perceived continuity between the spiritual, material and social. Just as the notion of the inward light turned on the indwelling of the divine in the human, and the shaping force of this godly light on the body and behaviours of the believer, so this fusion of the spiritual and the material extended beyond the body, to the places and spaces in which those bodies dwelt and moved.7 However, while carnal constructs, such as populous marketplaces, steeplehouses, streets, barns and gaols, proved to be locations that manifestly lent themselves to invocation and interpretation in Quaker narratives of salvation and suffering, the natural landscape – the hills, rivers, woods and downs – rarely figured. The account of Pendle Hill’s steepness, and the impact this had on Fox as he climbed, is unusual for the way the topography informs Fox’s spiritual vision. More typical of the interface between location and interpretation is the equally iconic episode of Fox’s preaching on Firbank Fell, which took place only a few days after the Pendle Hill ascent. Here too Fox drew on the possibilities of the landscape in his sermonising. When people ‘thought it a strange thing to see a man preach on a hill or a mountain and not in their church as they called it’, Fox responds by telling them that ‘the steeplehouse and that ground on which it stood was no more holier than that mountain’.8 Yet even here, beyond this reference, there is no further textualisation of the landscape, no invocation of the expansiveness of the terrain and of the panorama, nor even reference to the proximity of the river Rawthey, the place ‘near John Blaykling’s where Richard Robinson lived’ at which ‘a great people in white raiment by a riverside’ were to be gathered.9 The English landscape, it seems, only becomes visible and narratable when legible within a spiritual framework, and this happens surprisingly infrequently. This interrelation between journey, text and socio-spiritual topography was complicated and rewritten by the expansion of the movement into the English colonies of the Caribbean and North America. In 1654 Quakerism moved south from its seedbeds in the north, establishing important urban bases in London and Bristol; in 1655, the first Quakers crossed the Atlantic, travelling to Barbados and to mainland America.10 From then on, hardly a year passed without English Friends making this journey, whether to effect conversions, to counter persecution or to rally backsliders. Accounts of these journeys took several forms, principally narrative and epistolary, but also, on occasion, daily notebook entries. This chapter is concerned with the marked difference between Friends’ accounts of the landscape and environment of the mainland and of Barbados – for, if the sheer number of accounts of Quaker journeys to

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these places is itself noteworthy, even more striking is the narratives’ internal unevenness. While Friends’ accounts of their travels in mainland America typically render the landscape visible much as Fox’s Pendle Hill account did, or read a location or a social encounter in spiritual terms, as Fox did on Firbank Fell, their accounts of their visits to Barbados, the earliest, largest and most important Caribbean Quaker community, are strikingly different. These are invariably much shorter, devoid of detail, and curiously ‘unlocated’, the sociospiritual topography unarticulated, in a manner quite unlike the mainland texts. Why the disparity? If the landscape was invoked so vividly by early Friends in their accounts of the American mainland, why was this not also the case in their accounts of Barbados? If it was the newness, the unfamiliarity, of the mainland topography that resulted in its visibility in the mainland narratives, why was this not also the case in the narrativisations of the equally unfamiliar Barbados landscape? To examine this persistent disparity, I shall focus principally on the narrative accounts produced by three Public Friends who travelled from England to both Barbados and the American mainland in the latter part of the seventeenth century: the accounts of George Fox’s visit of 1671–73, Alice Curwen’s of 1675–77, and Joan Vokins’s of 1680–81.11 These accounts are chosen in part because they emanate from Friends positioned very differently within the movement: Fox was by the 1670s its undisputed leader, whilst Curwen and Vokins, although respected Public Friends, did not have equivalent national or international profiles. Furthermore, while Fox’s Journal is a unique document, in terms of its length, its detail and the status of its author-subject, Curwen’s and Vokins’s texts resemble many other contemporary Quaker publications, their travel narratives included in a composite commemoration of the life and sufferings of a recently deceased Friend, comprising testimonies about, and letters to and from, the subject, as well as the narrative account itself. Despite the different genesis and status of the three texts, however, they have in common this marked disparity between the richly detailed narration of the mainland journeys, and the brief, imprecise, unlocated accounts of their island visits. The chapter will be concerned, first, with a close characterisation of these divergent narrative strategies, and, secondly, with seeking to account for them. Fox was the first of the three to go to the Atlantic colonies, travelling out from England in 1671 with twelve other Friends. His account of this journey, which lasted from 1671 to 1673, has to be pieced together from a number of sources, as Fox’s most recent editor, Nigel Smith, enumerates: Some parts of the account of Fox’s travels in America (1671–3) survive in notebooks dictated by Fox on a day-to-day basis . . .. Details of the outward journey from England to Barbados survive in the log of a fellow passenger, John Hull . . .. An account of the latter part of the American journey (November 1672 – June 1673), presumably drawing upon the earlier diaries, was inserted into the Spence Manuscript.12

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Smith includes the latter part of the American journey in his edition of the Journal, where it comprises nearly thirty pages, recording, amongst other things, encounters with Friends in Rhode Island, with Indians at Shelter Island and with adverse terrain in ‘the new country’ of Jersey and in Maryland. Although the landscape it describes differs markedly from that found in Fox’s account of Pendle Hill, the style and narrative referents are familiar: and on the twenty-eighth day we passed about thirty miles in the new country, through the woods’ very bad bogs, one worse than all, where we and our horses was fain to slither down a steep place, and let them to lie and breathe themselves, and they call this Purgatory; and so we came to Shrewsbury, and on the first-day of the week we had a precious meeting.13

In a telling juxtaposition, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Shrewsbury’ co-exist as landmarks in the still largely unmapped space through which Fox was travelling.14 One name delineates the physical terrain through the invocation of a Catholic spiritual hinterland made redundant by the starker binarisms of reformed religion, while the other does so through the transplanting of a place-name from ‘old’ England. Fox’s account also demonstates the extent to which the land was demarcated through the annexation of native American names (Patuxent, Nancemond, Mococomocock River).15 Together, these practices show how the land was rendered intelligible through the planting of names which brought together the old and the new, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the biblical/spiritual and the topographical. The scriptural associations of Fox’s journey are brought into focus by the descriptions of the landscape he is traversing, which consisted in almost biblical extremes, and required biblical levels of endurance from the travellers: we passed over a desperate river of rocks and broad stones, very dangerous to us and our horses, and from thence we came to Christian River, and swam over our horses, and it was bad and miry . . . and the next day we passed all day, and saw neither house nor man through the woods, and swamps, and many cruel bogs and watery places, that we was wet to the knees most of us, and at night we took up our lodging in the woods, and made us a fire . . . and now they say we are a thousand miles from Boston southward, they say that have travelled it; all which we have travelled by land and down bays and over rivers and creeks and bogs and wildernesses.16

As usual, Friends are represented in a structural relationship predicated on opposition and suffering. More usually, that opposition results from the hostility of religious and civic opponents. Here, however, these are strikingly absent – as Fox says, they ‘saw neither house nor man’ as their journey south progressed. Instead, in the absence of these carnal adversaries, water, rock, mud and forest instead constitute an elemental adversity to be endured with patience and overcome with fortitude. It is the combination of this narrative

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of adversity with the extremity of the conditions and the continued invocation of place-names of almost allegorical sonority, such as Christian River, which marks this out as a terrain as exceptional and as charged with spiritual meaning as was that of Pendle Hill. Fox journeys through a symbolic landscape that leads him into and out of the ever-present analogue of the Bible. As he moves south, from Rhode Island and Long Island into Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Carolina, the narrative focus shifts from community to terrain. If the journey in the more established colonies of the north is recounted in the familiar Quaker terms of encounters with Friend and foe, then the account of the less ‘planted’ southerly territories is, in part, a prospectus in which the nature of the terrain is set out, significant for its own sake (its shores, islands and woods harbour isolated pockets of Friends and sympathisers), for what it symbolised (endurance of, and godly delivery from, hardship) and even, perhaps, for what it promised. As this terrain was still only partially annexed to the colonial project, Frederick B. Tolles suggests that Fox might have been exploring this territory ‘with a view to a Quaker colonising venture’: ‘Within eight years the wilderness which Fox had twice traversed, the great middle region stretching from the mouth of the Hudson to the mouth of the Delaware, was in Quaker hands. Meanwhile, Rhode Island to the northeastward and North Carolina to the south had become, to all intents and purposes, Quaker colonies’.17 A link between Fox’s American journey and the subsequent establishing of Quaker colonies depends, Tolles suggests, on only circumstantial evidence. There are, however, textual indications that Fox conceived of his journey as having a different significance from simply the encouragement of isolated Friends, one predicated on a particular analysis of the relation between traveller and landscape. In a postscript, Fox offers an interpretative gloss on his American travels: The great Lord God of Heaven and earth, and creator of all who is over all, carried us by his high hand and mighty power and wisdom over all and through many dangers and perils by sea and land, and perils by deceitful professors without possession, who was as the raving waves of the sea, but made a calm, and perils of wolves, bears, tigers and lions, and perils of rattlesnakes and other venomous creatures of like poisonous nature, and perils through great swamps and bogs and wilderness . . . and the Lord God made all easy by his spirit and power, and gave his people dominion over all, and made all plain and low as a meadow.18

The perils of the journey reside in an undifferentiated mix of hostile landscape, ‘deceitful professors’, and ravening creatures. These are ‘made easy’ by God’s power, who ‘gave his people dominion over all’. The allusion here is to Genesis and the settlement of the newly created earth itself: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,

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and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1.26).19 This comparison, sharpened by Quakers’ sense of the access to prelapsarian perfection offered by living in the light, renders Fox’s journey on the American mainland a more explicitly appropriative one. While it is concerned to establish and consolidate Friends’ communities in this ‘new land’, the invocation of the foundational and biblically sanctioned process of gaining ‘dominion’ undertaken by the unfallen Adam, still living in the image of God, also brings with it associations of a prelapsarian colonial venture, still untainted by sin, where the sovereignty of the incomer can be claimed as both proper and inevitable, validated by the divine sanction of the inward light. Fox does not represent his American landscape as prelapsarian – he is all too obviously ‘travailing’ in a fallen world of obstacles and opposition; none the less, the word ‘dominion’, combined with Fox’s repeated claim that he ‘was come up to the state of Adam, which he was in, before he fell’, suggests an underlying resonance between his own narrative and the account in Genesis.20 Fox’s narrative establishes itself as an account of a spiritual journey in part by recording the material details of the daily experiences of the traveller. These accumulate a significance beyond that of mere personal hardship, and become part of the defining and foundational grand narrative of Quaker ‘sufferings for the truth’s sake’, and it is this narrative that is also rehearsed in other Friends’ accounts of journeys on the American mainland.21 The Lancashire Friend Alice Curwen, with her husband Thomas, undertook her journey two years after Fox’s return, in 1675–77. Her account is much shorter: just five and a half pages relate her call to travel, her journeys in mainland America and Barbados and her return to England. But within those few pages, the text offers a level of descriptive detail about the places, people and events she encountered that are reminiscent of what Mary Louise Pratt in her study of colonial writing calls ‘survival literature’: travel narrative that supplied English readers with ‘first-person stories of shipwrecks, castaways, mutinies, abandonments, and (the special inland version) captivities’.22 Such narratives focus on the fascinating detail and omnipresent dangers of this other place, dangers arising from native inhabitants, landscape and climate alike, all framed and contained by the home that is first left and then returned to. In Curwen’s account, the Quaker colony of Rhode Island is in turmoil as she arrives, with people ‘in an Uproar, Killing, and Burning, and Murdering, and great Distress was upon the People’s Minds’.23 She hears of ‘a new Law that was made at Boston against the People of God called Quakers . . .. And then it opened in us in the Springs of Life, That We must travail thither, and break in upon their new Law’: So we travailed through the Woods and Places where the devouring Indians had made great Desolation in many Places, but the Lord preserved us, . . . and [we] came to a Friend’s House beyond the River, where there were about two hundred people (some Friends, and others) who were come thither for Safety,

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and had fortified the House very strongly about for fear of these Bloody Indians, which had killed two of our Friends within three miles of that place; . . . and so [we] came to Boston again, where being in our Meeting, their Law being now published, the Constable with others came forcibly and drave us out of our Meeting all along the Street, until they came to the Prison, or House of Correction, whereinto they thrust us; . . . And the third day of our Imprisonment they brought us down to the Whipping-Post, but the Presence of the Lord was manifested there, which gave us Dominion over all their Cruelty, and we could not but Magnifie the Name of the Lord, and declare of his Wonderful Work at that time, at which the Heathen were astonished, and shook their Heads: And the next day we were set at Liberty.24

Like many other Quaker accounts of sufferings, this is not without drama and suspense. Adversity is embodied in the landscape; threat is present in the possibility of attack from ‘the Bloody Indians’ as well as in Boston’s anti-Quaker law; setbacks and suspense are provided by imprisonment, pathos by the whipping post and confirmation of Quaker rectitude by their ultimate deliverance. Sufferings here are the route to ‘dominion’, just as they had been for Fox: his, over terrain; hers, over adversaries. If Fox’s account is notable for its investment in the texture and signifying capacity of an elemental landscape, Curwen’s is striking for its dense compaction of the textual referents, the captures, sufferings, setbacks and vindications of secular ‘survival literature’. Joan Vokins’s account of her travels on the American mainland has, in its focus on opposition, much in common with Curwen’s. As a ‘nursing mother in Israel’, her work was to re-gather those errant Friends whose backslidings were threatening to erode the Society. She recounts her disputes with Ranters, when, despite great weakness of body: the God of Wisdom, Life and Power, filled me with the Word of his Power, and I stood up in the strength thereof, and it was so prevailing over the Meeting, that Friends were very much comforted and refreshed, and the Power of Darkness so chained, that the opposing Ranters and Apostates could not shew their antick tricks . . .. [In Rhode Island, when] I came to the General Meeting of Friends, there was that abominable Crew, and Tho. Case, the grand Ranter, was bawling very loud; and I had been there but a very little time, but God’s living Power did arise most wonderfully, and I declared in the demonstration thereof, and soon put him to silence.25

Through a series of challenges and confrontations, the narrative turns on the repeated re-enactment of St Paul’s assertion that the weak will confound the mighty (1 Corinthians 1.27–8); the emphasis is on Vokins’s physical weakness and on its consequent contrary, her spiritual resilience and capacity to ‘tender’ Friends. These mainland American journeys rehearse the familiar Quaker narrative of struggles and sufferings endured in a terrain which, for all its distance from

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the uplands of Lancashire, the marketplace of Carlisle or the streets of Bristol, could still be plotted between the well-established polarities of oppression and deliverance, resolution and inconstancy, godly light and carnal darkness. Quaker travellers showed an unerring capacity to seek out instances of opposition, hostility or oppression – whether human or elemental – which would allow them to endure, suffer and, on occasion, resist and overcome. Alice Curwen’s call to travel to Boston came, after all, as she heard of the execution of four Friends there in 1660.26 As she saw it, and she was clearly not alone in this, there was a strong inverse relation between opposition to Friends and the successful transmission of the word: ‘the more the Enemy seeks to hinder the increase of Truth, the more it spreads’.27 Such assertions reaffirm these Quaker journeys through the colonies of mainland America as framed through a sense of the inevitability of divine purpose, a sense habitually honed through opposition. The image of the land constituted through the narration of these journeys is at once familiar and newly invigorated, the contrasts between its constitutive elements sharply defined. Its distinctive contours derive from the woods, rivers and towns, but also from the people inhabiting them: the networks of Friends, whether gathered in their own communities in Rhode Island and Jersey, or isolated individuals and small groups in the woods and villages along the rivers of Maryland; but also those identified as enemies of the light – the Boston law-makers, the ‘Bloody Indians’, ‘Tho. Case, the grand Ranter’. Perhaps the urgency of the religious struggle, and the sense of millenarian flux and possibility that characterised the years of the movement’s origins in the 1650s, were renewed in later years through its establishment in an environment which, for all its geographical distance, approximated more closely to the social and religious climate of the revolutionary period; perhaps the Puritanism of Massachusetts was a more satisfactory adversary than the one to be found in Restoration London. The gap between the new environment and the old was closed through the retelling of a familiar narrative in a new location, a narrative increasingly intended to fortify existing Friends rather than convince new ones – and fortification might be encouraged by a reanimation of the more elemental struggles of the years of the movement’s inception. It is this sense of elemental struggle which evaporates when the scene of these narratives shifts from the mainland to Barbados. Where Friends’ accounts of their mainland travels are vigorous, detailed, vivid and comprehensive records of journeys taken, disputes engaged, landscapes interpreted and sufferings endured, the Barbados narratives comprise a frustratingly unilluminating set of bland and sketchy accounts. This is from Fox’s account of his time in Barbados: we came to Barbados the third day of the eighth month [Oct.], where we had many and great meetings among the whites and blacks. And there was some

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opposition by the priests and Papists but the power of the Lord and his glorious Truth was over all and reached most in the island. And we stayed above a quarter of a year there and I went to visit the governor and he was loving to me; and a few days before I passed from the island the governor with many more came to see me to Thomas Rous’s house. And many persons of quality were convinced . . .. And we set up meetings in families in every Friend’s house, among the blacks, some 200, some 300, in their houses that the masters and dames of families might admonish their families of blacks and whites, as Abraham did, which is a great service.28

In all, some two hundred and fifty words recount a visit of three months to a place whose natural, cultural and social environment struck other English visitors as radically strange: fascinating and appealing, but also brutal and dangerous. Moreover, we know that Fox’s journey and visit were not uneventful: he was at first unwell, and then much troubled by the island’s ‘filth, dirt, and unrighteousness, which lie as a heavy load and weight upon his spirit, so as it pressed down the spirit of God in him as a cart with sheaves’.29 Yet no further details of Fox’s spiritual exercises follow, nor descriptions of the environment in which he and his companions found themselves. Neither the island’s forests, plantations or towns nor its starkly differentiated social formation provided the usual grist to Fox’s relentlessly textualising mill. Early Friends typically inhabited a dimension that either ignored the material environment or else read it as a dimension of the more substantial reality of the spiritual, such that aspects of the former were legible as signs of God’s truth, the latter immanent within the social and natural environment. None of this is apparent here. Instead, Fox seems unusually interested in recording the social signs of Friends’ successes: a sympathetic governor, the convincement of ‘persons of quality’, the establishment of new meetings. The contrast with his mainland narrative lies in the curious worldliness of this emphasis, where the social substitutes for the spiritual, as if it were its metonym. The invocation of the convincement of persons of quality and the size of the meetings – signs of a social success to which Friends are usually either indifferent or contemptuous – are made to gesture towards the existence of the spiritual, elsewhere, without ever reaching towards revealing its immanence, and never allowing the reader to glimpse its substance. The result is a flat, unidimensional and oddly unlocated record. Fox returns to his impressions of Barbados in a postscript following the conclusion of the narrative proper. This comprises notable events omitted from the foregoing account, and includes reference to a dispute in Barbados between Fox and ‘the priest and the justice’: the Baptists began first and they bawled and railed till one of them foamed at the mouth . . . and they asked me whether I had the same spirit as the Apostles had, and I said I had . . . one of these disturbers his name is Pearson of Barbados, a wicked man which had two wives, as they said, who railed against me in the

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meeting . . . afterwards we had a good meeting and the power of the Lord and his blessed seed was set over all, blessed be his holy name for ever.30

Here, finally, is an account to compare with those of the mainland journey; there is reference to specific people and events, irrational and passionate opposition, resolute adherence to truth, and just and blessed rewards. Yet this appears only as a postscript, recalled as part of a chain of recollections that link Indians to hostile English settlers and to Fox himself. Such detail, moreover, exists not as part of the notebook record but only later finds expression as part of a passage of post-hoc reminiscence of anecdotes of sympathy and opposition. This marginal positioning serves further to underline the sense of the contemporaneous Barbados section as excised of the characteristic detail of the Quaker travel narrative. Curwen’s account of her visit to Barbados, like Fox’s, follows the account of her mainland journey. It too effects a striking reversal of narrative style, offering none of the drama or suspense of the foregoing account: in Five Weeks and Two Dayes we came to Barbadoes. And the next day after we came ashore was their Quarterly-Meeting, where our Testimony was gladly received; and we travailed in that Island about Seven Moneths, where we had good Service both amongst Whites and Blacks; and the Lord added unto our Talent another Talent more; Everlasting Praises (saith our Souls in secret) unto his most holy Name, who hath given us good Success, and is adding unto his Church such as shall be saved in every Nation; for many did gather unto our Meetings: . . .. And when we were clear in our Spirits of this Island, . . . we took Shipping, and came for London.31

The Curwens’ decision to journey from Rhode Island to Boston had been prompted by news of a harsh new anti-Quaker law, and the tension between the inevitability and the deferral of anticipated conflict generates the mainland narrative’s drama and energy. These qualities are strikingly absent from the Barbados narrative but, equally strikingly, could have been generated in the same manner – for in 1676, the year the Curwens travelled there, Barbados passed its own anti-Quaker law, prohibiting Friends from including slaves in their meetings.32 This law was in response to the island’s brutally pre-empted slave uprising of 1675, which had resulted in the execution of seventeen slaves, ‘Six burnt alive, and Eleven beheaded, their dead bodies being dragged through the Streets, at Spikes a pleasant Port-Town in that Island, and were afterwards burnt with those that were burned alive’.33 Whilst the Curwens’ decision to travel to Boston had been explicitly related to the new anti-Quaker law, the Barbadian events and the resulting law played no part in the narrative trajectory; we learn only that Curwen was reluctant to go, ‘fearing lest they should even trample upon my little Testimony’, whilst her ‘Husband [had] much upon him to Barbadoes’.34 On arrival, however, as in Fox’s account, we are assured

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of the visitors’ ‘success’, their ‘good Service both amongst Whites and Blacks’. The latter was clearly in defiance of the law passed on 21 April 1676, yet once again there is nothing in Curwen’s account to indicate this, no sign of the usual Quaker propensity to home in on the possibilities offered by such a clash. Joan Vokins travelled to Barbados in 1681 (the year of a further anti-Quaker law), and spent between two and four months there.35 Her account, like Curwen’s, is a brief reckoning of meetings attended: And when I arrived, I met with many Friends in Bridg-Town, and there took an account of the Monthly Meetings, and went to them and other Meetings as brief as I could; and most Days I had two or three Meetings of a Day, both among the Blacks, and also among the White People: And the Power of the Lord Jesus was mightily manifested, so that my Soul was often melted therewith, even in the Meetings of the Negro’s or Blacks, as well as among Friends. And when I had gone through the Island, and was clear, having been well refreshed with Friends, in the feeling of the Heavenly Power; and in the strength of the same I came aboard the Ship for my Native Land again.36

Although the emphasis here is less on the success of meetings in convincing others, and more on the impact of the meetings on Vokins’s own spirit, nevertheless the co-ordinates between which the narrative is constructed are recognisable from those in Fox’s and Curwen’s accounts: arrival; meetings; the presence of both blacks and whites; Friends’ support; God’s power; departure. In each case, the account of the Barbados visit offers significantly – in Fox’s case, dramatically – less detail than is found concerning the writer’s visit to the American mainland. In comparison with the mainland narratives, their elliptical character constitutes them as an absent presence within the longer accounts: nominally present, but so vague and undeveloped as almost to render them a textual absence. There are a number of aspects of this brevity that give pause. Why, when other stages of the journey are recorded in such detail, did this not warrant more narrative space or detail? Why, given Quakers’ propensity for reading the mainland environments symbolically, are there no emblematic readings of context and incident, as evidence either of Quaker success or of Quaker sufferings? What relation might there be between this terseness and tensions between Barbadian culture and the early Friends? To address these questions, it is necessary first to step back and review the colonial relationship between England and Barbados, and the place of Quakers within this.

Barbados: the Quaker ‘nursery of truth’ Barbados was England’s first Caribbean colony, established in 1627 with the aim of reproducing Spain’s lucrative colonial successes in the region.37 Not

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until the transition from tobacco to sugar cultivation was made in the 1640s and 1650s, and with it the transition from indentured white servants to slave labour, did the colony begin to bring in profits.38 By this point Barbados had acquired a double-edged reputation as a place where fortunes could be made, but with the most brutal servitude in English America. Historians have noted that ‘Most seventeenth-century traders who stopped at Barbados were immediately struck by the unusual acquisitiveness of the people, a trait that seemed to know no moral boundary’, and suggest that the European colonists were drawn to the Caribbean colonies because they promised ‘far more in the way of glamor, excitement, quick profit, and constant peril than the prosaic settlements along the North American coast’.39 Contemporary accounts confirm the perception that this was a society organised exclusively around the acquisition of wealth. Richard Ligon, who visited Barbados from l647 to 1650, suggested approvingly that ‘they that have industry . . . may make it [i.e. Barbados] the Ladder to clyme to a high degree, of Wealth and opulencie, in this sweet Negotiation of Sugar’.40 Father Antoine Biet, a French priest who visited Barbados in 1654, was less laudatory: ‘In speaking of morals, extravagance is very great among the English in these parts. They came here in order to become wealthy. .  .  . The greatest of all the vices which prevail in this country is lewdness. It is a horrible thing to think about: adulterers, incest and all the rest. I will not say anymore on this’.41 Henry Whistler, in Barbados in 1655, was more succinct in his verdict, calling the island ‘the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish’.42 Quaker commentators were, unsurprisingly, similarly condemnatory. The early convert John Rous opened his 1656 pamphlet with the words, ‘O Barbadoes, Barbadoes! who excels in wickednesse, pride and covetousness, oppressing, cheating and cozening’; and Richard Pinder, a Friend from Westmorland who travelled widely in the Caribbean and mainland America, condemned the ‘Masters, and Owners of the severall Plantations’ for being ‘given to the Lusts and Pleasures of this present Evill World’, and for having ‘spent so much precious time, in rioting, feasting, and drunkenness’.43 Fox himself condemned the ‘debauch’d Language and Hellish Lyes’ he encountered there: ‘Truly I could not but wonder, and stand amazed, to hear of such foul, beastly and unmannerly, and uncivil Language, as I have heard since I came here’.44 Apart from those visitors who relished Barbados’s reputation for the speedy acquisition of wealth, few had a good word to say about what they found there. The first Quakers to travel to Barbados stopped there en route to Boston, in 1655.45 Since the usual trade route to New England involved stopping off in Barbados, it became customary for English Friends to follow this itinerary and visit Barbados as a part of their travels to America.46 A steady stream of Quakers evangelised the island, particularly in the 1650s and 1660s, when there was broad religious toleration there: Father Biet commented that ‘All are

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given freedom of belief, provided that they do nothing to be conspicuous in public’.47 Quaker visits continued through subsequent years, if more sporadically, into the 1690s, such that Tolles concludes that ‘there was scarcely a time during the second half of the seventeenth century when one or more Friends from the British Isles were not traveling in some part of the American colonial world’.48 Quakerism quickly became well established in Barbados, and visiting Friends always reported a receptiveness to their message, and further convincements.49 The Quaker commitment to ‘convincement’ seems to have extended to the choice of locations for their meeting houses: one report was critical of the siting of these, observing that ‘with all their seeming humility, [they are placed] by the sides of the most populous roads in the country, eventually with a view of Proselytism’.50 By 1670, there were at least six Quaker meetings established on Barbados, and the community had considerable numerical presence, Shilstone suggesting that at one point there were over 1200 Friends: about six per cent of a white population of around twenty thousand; Gragg concurs with these figures.51 Meetings were sizeable. Levy concluded that from three to four hundred people gathered to listen to Fox at each meeting, and William Edmundson recalls that some three thousand people came to hear his public debate with a parish priest from Bridgetown in 1675.52 The community was not without wealth, status or influence: in one seven-year period, Friends’ sufferings brought them losses of £11,805.53 Some Quakers were prosperous plantation owners and slave owners – a point to which I shall return – but others were drawn from the lower ranks of island society: Besse’s lists show that, in the period from 1674 to 1678, Barbadian Friends included not only a former JP and a former member of the Council, but also shopkeepers, widows, surgeons, and several designated only by the words ‘a poor man’.54 Beckles notes that the social differentiation of Barbadian Quakers was inscribed in their geographical locations: in the parish of St Philip, where the land was of low value, there were a large number of poor white communities, comprising mainly marginalised Irish Catholics and Quakers.55 This was the place described as ‘the nursery of truth’ by the English Friend George Rofe when he visited the island in 1661.56 Fox, Curwen and Vokins found a Quaker community that was by no means small, uniformly impoverished or embattled – no more so, at any rate, than that in England. Barbadian Friends were substantial in number, drawn from across the social ranks of the colony, and of sufficient wealth and influence to cause real concern amongst the ruling classes of the island, such that there were five Acts passed specifically against them (in 1676, two in 1678, 1681 and 1723).57 Visiting Friends found enthusiastic and sizeable meetings, with people eager to hear them speak. As well as finding hostility caused by resident Friends’ refusal to take oaths or to serve in the island militia, and nervousness about the inclusion of slaves in their

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meetings, they also found a number of sympathetic ‘persons of quality’. There must have been a peculiar intensity to this small island community, contained within an area of only 166 square miles, with a reputation for greed, brutality and, by the 1670s, legislative hostility to Friends, coupled with a dynamic network of meetings.58 It was perhaps this familiar combination of lively communities of Friends together with vociferous opposition that prompted Rofe to designate the island as he did; perhaps the Lamb’s War could more readily be seen to be fought there than in the new social configurations of Restoration England. Whatever lay behind Rofe’s phrase, the island could not have been seen by Fox, Curwen or Vokins as straightforwardly fostering Quaker ‘truth’, for this was a community that had accommodated controversial, even divisive, Quaker figures. Following the ‘hat controversy’ of 1661, John Perrot had gone into voluntary exile on Barbados, where he was warmly welcomed by Friends, but from where he was still seen to be a pernicious influence on the wider movement.59 The English Friend William Salt visited him, and was reported in 1665 to be ‘a bad spirit and creeper in darkness’, spreading Perrot’s papers abroad; another Friend wrote to Fox from Barbados in 1664 that Friends here ‘are not like the people they were . . . truly they are full of confusion . . . this people will hear nothing against Perrot’.60 Robert Rich, a loyal defender of James Nayler and a friend of Perrot, also made his home on Barbados; thereafter, ‘whenever fresh divisions arose, as with John Perrot or with Wilkinson and Story, Rich had stood with the disaffected’.61 In the course of the Wilkinson– Story controversy, in the second half of the 1670s, Rich circulated the papers of disaffected English Friends, and in 1680 Barbadian Friends themselves subscribed to a paper that, to Fox, seemed dangerously divisive and weakening of the spirit of unity.62 English Friends visited Barbados, then, not as ambassadors from or to united communities, but as negotiators for a still-contested Quaker mainstream. Indeed, Ingle suggests that Fox visited with the express intent of instigating a system of men’s and women’s meetings, as he had at home, and of thereby eradicating the remaining pockets of Perrot’s followers: ‘Exercising discipline, these new meetings would see that Friends avoided such disorderly practices as permitting men to wear hats when they prayed’.63 Curwen was in Barbados when Rich was still alive and the Wilkinson–Story controversy still at issue; and Vokins arrived in the aftermath of the publication of the controversial Barbadian paper. Barbados Friends were implicated in all the disputations to be found at home, and part of the agenda of visiting Friends was to speak against internal dissent and backsliding. All the elements which typically figured in Friends’ narratives of their travels seem, therefore, to have been in place: a culture of buoyant meetings, some voices of internal dissent and vigorous external opposition or persecution.

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The unwritten testimony: English Friends and Barbadian slavery [T]he many thousand Englishmen who inhabited Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leewards during the seventeenth century rarely bothered to write descriptions of what they saw or did. . . . None of the islands boasted a printing press, nor did the islanders use the London presses. . . .The islanders were men of action, not reflection. They lacked the driving moral purpose and intellectual commitment of the New England Puritans.64

Perhaps, as Richard Dunn suggests here, the lack of a ‘driving moral purpose’ accounts for there being so few written accounts by the Caribbean colonists of their environment and activities. After all, Barbados was unlike the New England colonies in that it was no ‘holy experiment’, no attempt to embody the Puritan vision of a ‘city on the hill’; it was instead a wholly material dream that drove the colonists there.65 A sense of moral purpose was, however, one of the defining characteristics of the early Quaker missionaries, and something that drove not only their itinerant mission but also their ceaseless production and circulation of writing. Yet this sense of purpose – the need to encourage Friends or warn against dissent – was insufficient to prompt Friends to produce narratives of their Barbadian visits of the length and complexity of their usual accounts of their travels. Is it possible to identify anything in what these Quaker writers do say about their perceptions of Barbados to make sense of their uncharacteristic recourse to generalised and superficial accounts of their visits? The one feature of Barbadian society that each writer notes, albeit elliptically, is the one that non-Quaker commentators find worthy of most comment: namely, the institution and practice of slavery. George Gardyner, utilitarian as always, makes only a passing comment, but one that both summarises and glosses over the distinction between white and black people: Barbados, he writes, is ‘thoroughly inhabited with English, and Negroes their servants’.66 In contrast, both Henry Whistler and Father Biet suggest a sense of the affective impact of witnessing the commodification and abuse of slaves. Whistler recorded that ‘Our English here doth think a Negro child the first day it is born to be worth £5 . . .. They sell them from one to the other as we do sheep’, while Biet wrote that: They treat their slaves with a great deal of severity. . . . [T]hey are beaten to excess, sometimes up to the point of applying a fire-brand all over their bodies which makes them shriek with despair. I saw a poor Negro woman, perhaps thirty-five or forty years old, whose body was full of scars which she claimed had been caused by her master’s having applied the fire-brand to her: this horrified me.67

If Biet’s response can be articulated in that simple, unambiguous final clause, Richard Ligon indicates a more ambivalent emotional encounter with slavery:

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Though there be a marke set upon these people, which will hardly ever be wip’d off, as of their cruelties when they have advantages, and of their fearfulnesse and falsnesse; yet no rule so generall but hath his acception: for I beleive, and I have strong motives to cause me to bee of that perswasion, that there are as honest, faithfull, and conscionable people amongst them, as amongst those of Europe, or any other part of the world.68

In some ways, Ligon effects a familiar act of ‘othering’, whereby undesirable characteristics (cruelty, fearfulness, falseness) are located with the category of the other, while those seen as laudable (honesty, faithfulness, conscience) are seen as belonging more properly with Europeans. None the less, his comment pivots on the phrase ‘yet no rule so generall but hath his acception’, signalling the impossibility of maintaining absolutely this distinction, so undercutting any sense of an essential difference between the two ethnic groups, and concluding with the familiar humanist recourse to the notion that people are people the world over. Ligon’s words suggest a struggle between a number of incompatible psychic responses to, and investments in, the practices to which he is witness. The three Quaker narratives offer nothing comparable to Biet’s or Ligon’s affective and complex observations, restricting themselves to passing references to slaves’ attendance at Friends’ meetings. Each notes, in remarkably similar words, that they ‘had good Service both amongst Whites and Blacks’; but only Vokins offers a glimpse of her perception of the ideology of slavery, writing that ‘the Power of the Lord Jesus was mightily manifested, so that my Soul was often melted therewith, even in the Meetings of the Negro’s or Blacks, as well as among Friends’.69 The word ‘even’ separates slaves as a category from others at the meeting; paradoxically, their presence does not make them Friends, but renders them distinct from them. As Susan Wiseman has noted, this kind of textual move constitutes slaves as a social category different from those usually deployed in Quaker writing, by placing them outside the usual broad binary of ‘Friend’, walking in the light, and non-Quaker, walking in darkness. Wiseman suggests that in Quaker travel narratives slaves (and native Americans) are important as ‘marginal counters’ in debates over religious and political authority, emerging in these accounts at ‘points of dispute between systems of authority’. She summarises this textual relation as ‘the incorporation of slaves and Indians into a dynamic and tripartite struggle in Quaker discourse in which the benevolence of Quakers signifies in contrast to the barbarism of other Europeans, especially Puritans’.70 Although we might detect this deployment of slaves as ‘marginal counters’ in Vokins’s text, it is difficult not to conclude that as such they are severely underplayed by a movement which, as Knott suggests, had an ‘instinct for pathos’.71 There is no attempt to invoke these ‘marginal counters’ to critique Barbadian colonial society in the way that native Americans figure in other Quaker narratives, including those of Fox and

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Curwen, to demonstrate either (through contrast) the cruelty and ungodliness of the Puritan authorities or else the wonderful deliverance of Friends from ‘the Bloody Indians’. No such polemical moves are made with slaves; on the contrary, Wiseman cites a Quaker text in which slaves are compared with poor whites in order to elevate the whites and demote the status of the slaves.72 Wiseman’s concept of the ‘marginal counter’ illuminates another such textual moment, in a letter from Alice Curwen to a Barbados widow, Martha Tavernor, ‘that had Negro’s to her Servants, who were convinced of God’s Eternal Truth’, but who would not let them attend meetings: And as for thy Servants, whom thou callst thy Slaves, I tell thee plainly, thou hast no right to reign over their Conscience in Matters of Worship of the Living God; for thou thy self confessedst, that they had Souls to Save as well as we: Therefore, for time to come let them have Liberty, lest thou be called to give an Account to God for them, as well as for thy self . . .; for I am perswaded, that if they whom thou call’st thy Slaves, be upright-hearted to God, the Lord God Almighty will set them Free in a way that thou knowest not; for there is none set free but in Christ Jesus, for all other Freedom will prove but a bondage.73

The ‘Liberty’ that Tavernor is urged to grant them is a restricted one – the liberty to attend meetings. Any extension of this to a more general notion of liberty is circumvented by reference to the ultimate freedom, that to be had in Christ, which obviates all other liberties, ‘for all other Freedom will prove but a bondage’. Curwen’s argument is predicated on a sense of the spiritual equality of slaves (a recognition that they too ‘had Souls to Save’), but these souls are invoked to make a broader argument about the saving of Tavernor’s soul, and buttressed through reference to something approaching a threat, as Curwen suggests that Tavernor’s own salvation might be compromised if she fails to allow slaves to attend meetings: ‘let them have Liberty, lest thou be called to give an Account to God for them’. Despite the recognition that slaves have souls to save, these ‘marginal counters’ are used to make a point about the spiritual standing of a Friend. The souls of the slaves here literally become ‘counters’ – a means to tally up Tavernor’s own ‘account’ with God. This recalls Curwen’s narrative account, cited earlier: we had good Service both amongst Whites and Blacks; and the Lord added unto our Talent another Talent more; Everlasting Praises (saith our Souls in secret) unto his most holy Name, who hath given us good Success, and is adding unto his Church such as shall be saved in every Nation.74

Here the emphasis is on accumulation, first through the invocation of the parable of the talents (Matthew 25.14–30), and then in the reference to the ‘adding’ of the souls of the saved to the church. The souls of the slaves function in a manner disturbingly similar to the way in which the bodies of the slaves figure in the sugar economy: that is, as a means of producing surplus

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value for their masters. The transition to a slave-based economy in place of one based on white indentured servitude is seen by historians as combining with the transition from tobacco to sugar to explain the steep rise in the success of the Barbadian economy, and thereby the wealth of the planters, both Quaker and non-Quaker.75 In economic terms, the conditions under which slaves were transported, bought and kept allowed for the production of high levels of ‘surplus value’. In Marx’s words, ‘The action of labour-power . . . not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above it. This surplusvalue is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product, in other words, of the means of production and the labour-power’.76 Surplus value is thus the value remaining when the worker’s subsistence costs have been subtracted from the total value of the product he produces; any labour undertaken beyond what is needed for his own maintenance is ‘no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself ’, but only surplus value for the capitalist.77 Surplus value thus had for the capitalist, Marx suggested, ‘all the charms of a creation out of nothing’, as it represents pure profit for (in this case) the slave owner.78 A similar trajectory for the production of spiritual surplus value by the slaves as for economic can be charted. The saving of the slaves’ souls produces value for themselves (for ‘they had Souls to Save as well as we’), but also, surplus to this, and here more prominently, value for their masters. Running alongside, and dependent upon, the slave economy of Barbados it is possible to discern a kind of Quaker spiritual capitalism, comprising both the accumulation of souls and the acquisition of spiritual surplus value for the Quaker slave-owners, both of which intersect in the notion of ‘saving’, in both the spiritual and the economic senses.79 How, though, might the invocation of slaves as ‘counters’ within this discourse of spiritual capitalism relate to the lack of narrative engagement, with slavery or with Barbadian society more generally, that characterises these texts? This was clearly not the outcome of Friends’ indifference to the ethical dimension of slavery, or of slaves’ relationship to their masters’ religion. Most Barbadian planters were, in the early decades of slavery on the island, averse to the conversion of slaves to Christianity, for the orthodoxy remained that this would require their manumission, since it was forbidden for one Christian to enslave another.80 Fox countered this theological position from the outset, ‘wrestling’, as Kenneth L. Carroll put it, ‘with the institution of slavery and . . . Quaker responsibilities towards Blacks and Indians who were slaves’.81 In his 1657 letter ‘To Friends beyond Sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves’, Fox reminded Friends that ‘the gospel is preached to every creature under heaven; which is the power that giveth liberty and freedom, and is glad tidings to every captivated creature under the whole heavens’.82 The implication, as in Curwen’s letter to Martha Tavernor, is that slavery was one amongst many

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kinds of captivity, no more and no less real than that experienced by those living in thrall to sin. Rather than seeing slaves’ captivity as situating them in a distinct social category, Fox instead takes it to underline their common humanity with other ‘captivated creature[s]’ and to confirm them as fit hearers of the gospel.83 The liberty afforded slaves by the gospel thus did not need to be distinguished from that offered to anyone else turning to the light. This resulted in a position that was at once more radically inclusive of black slaves than that held by orthodox Christians – ‘they had Souls to Save as well as we’– but also more willing to reconcile Christianity and slavery. As Ingle points out, ‘Fox’s thinking reflected a maturing of the slave culture and acceptance of a new view that no contradiction existed between Christianity and slavery. Hence Christians might hold slaves, at least for the time being – and that time always retreating into an indefinite tomorrow – so that Christians might legitimately be enslaved by others of their faith’.84 As the title to Fox’s 1657 letter makes explicit, Friends were directly implicated in these questions, for they included slave-owners amongst their number. Dunn identified the property holdings of 58 Barbadian Quakers in 1680, from all walks of society (planters large and small, merchants, craftsmen and so on), and found that all but four of them owned slaves, holding between them 1626 slaves. Six of these (including Thomas and John Rous) owned more than a hundred slaves apiece.85 These Quaker slave-owners caused anxiety to the Barbadian authorities not by questioning the institution of slavery per se but by including their slaves in their meetings for worship. This, it was feared, might incite rebellion, and thus the 1676 Act was passed ‘to prevent the People called Quakers from bringing Negroes to their Meetings’.86 Friends’ discussions of their reasons for including slaves in their meetings illuminate their complex relation to the ideology and practice of slavery, and do not sit entirely comfortably with the later narrative of Friends’ pioneering commitment to emancipation.87 In his 1672 letter ‘For the Governour [of Barbados], and His Council & Assembly’, a detailed refutation of criticisms of Friends’ practices, Fox wrote: Another Slander and Lye they have cast upon us, is; namely, That we should teach the Negars to Rebel. A Thing we do utterly abhor and detest in and from our Hearts . . .. For, that which we have spoken and declared to them is, to exhort and admonish them, To be Sober, and to Fear God, and to love their Masters and Mistresses, and to be Faithful and Diligent in their Masters Service and Business; and that then their Masters and Overseers will Love them, and deal Kindly and Gently with them: And that they should not beat their Wives, nor the Wives their Husbands; nor multiply Wives, nor put away their Wives, nor the Wives their Husbands, as they use frequently to do: and that they do not Steal, nor be Drunk, nor commit Adultery, nor Fornication, nor Curse, nor Swear, nor Lye.88

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Inclusion in meetings, it seems, was undertaken with a view to improving what Fox took to be the worst excesses of the behaviour of both slave-owners and slaves. He argued that slaves’ sobriety, godly behaviour and diligent service would cause their masters and overseers to deal kindly with them, but this treatment would be dependent on the adoption of appropriately pious behaviour by slaves. In effect, he recommends a form of reciprocal pact, or covenant, whereby both sides amend their actions with a view to stabilising and ameliorating relations between them. It is an expressly social covenant, concerned with behaviours, rather than a spiritual one, though the foundation for this position continues to be articulated in fully spiritual terms. Advocacy of covenant slavery is the early Quaker response to the institution of which they were later the harshest critics. Fox continued to restate both the social and the spiritual terms of the planter–slave relation over subsequent years. In his To the Ministers, Teachers, and Priests, to which the letter to the Governor and Assembly was appended, Fox restates the argument he had made in his 1657 letter: And if you be Ministers of Christ, are you not Teachers of Blacks and Taunies (to wit, Indians) as well as of the Whites? For, is not the Gospel to be preached to all Creatures? And are not they Creatures? And did not Christ taste Death for every man? And are not they Men? . . . have they not Souls for you to watch over and to cure? Are they not part of your Parishioners if not the greatest part?89

Here, rather than the emphasis being on the social relations produced by and regulated through the institution of slavery, it is on the spiritual dimension of slaves’ inclusion in acts of worship, their souls being as worthy of salvation as those of the priests’ other parishioners. Both dimensions – the spiritual basis of the inclusion of slaves in Christian worship, and the recommendation of a social covenant for the amelioration of conditions and behaviours – are well-developed and forcefully articulated by Fox, and evince a clear sense of Friends’ affective and ethical response to slavery. But these articulations, as already noted, are absent from the journals and narrative accounts, and are found instead in letters and pamphlets. Fox was not alone amongst Friends in making a case for covenant slavery through recommending a quid pro quo between masters and slaves. In 1660, Richard Pinder begins with an argument about the common humanity of masters and slaves, warning plantation owners not to provoke their ‘Slaves, and Bond-Men . . . through cruell usage, for that the Lord hates; they are of the same Blood, and Mould, you are of ’.90 He then proceeds to note the reward of obedience that is likely to be the consequence of such humane treatment: ‘For you being good examples both in word and behaviour, this will answer the witness of God in all you are over: and this will reach more deeply into their hearts, and constrain more obedience then all your cruell usage (in whipping

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them,)’.91 Common humanity is recognised, but a pragmatic covenant slavery recommended. In similar terms, William Edmundson argued that ‘God at the Beginning made Whites and Blacks of one Mould, and Christ Jesus died for Blacks as well as for Whites’.92 This was written in 1675 during his second visit to Barbados, the year of the thwarted slave uprising, in the context of which he records a series of accusations against him very similar to Fox’s. He was accused of wanting to make the slaves into Christians and thereby into ‘rebels, and rise and cut their [masters’] throats’.93 His refutation of the charge also echoes Fox’s: I told him [the governor], it was a good work to bring them to the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus, and to believe in Him that died for them, and for all men; and that that would keep them from rebelling, or cutting any man’s throat; but if they did rebel, and cut their throats, as he said, it would be through their own doings, in keeping them in ignorance, and under oppression, giving them liberty to be common with women (like beasts), and, on the other hand, starving them for want of meat and clothes convenient, so giving them liberty in that which God restrained, and restraining them in that which God allowed and afforded to all men, which was meat and clothes.94

Like Fox, Edmundson argues that belief in Christ would help stabilise Barbadian social relations. Inclusion in meetings effects a humanisation of slaves, he suggests, by requiring certain kinds of civil and pious behaviour, and thereby helps prevent a rebellion; conversely, keeping them in a state of oppression makes them more likely to cut their masters’ throats, because it dehumanises and bestialises them. Through the polemical invocation of slaves as marginal counters in a spiritual reckoning, and beyond the binary of Friend and opponent, there emerges a Quaker position regarding slavery that is both more and less critical than such discourses might suggest. On the one hand, Fox’s rationale for the inclusion of slaves in acts of worship is based on an insistence on their common humanity and common spiritual needs, founded in the notion that all those not yet walking in the light are ‘captivated creature[s]’. On the other hand, however, is Fox and Edmundson’s advocacy of what I have termed ‘covenant slavery’, whereby the institution of slavery is accepted, but an argument made for the amelioration of its practice through a covenant founded on the social behaviours of both slave-owners and slaves, whereby slaves are exhorted to adopt certain European religious and cultural values in exchange for a more ‘humane’ version of enslavement. The argument for the common humanity of slaves, made with regard to their spiritual status, is not extended to the social domain; the common bondage cited as uniting slaves and masters until saved by Christ becomes, instead, a textual decoy whereby their social bondage is ruled out of consideration. Instead of a more socially radical position, achievable through the more typical Quaker fusion of social and spiritual discourses, and whereby

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the response to spiritual bondage might be read as in fundamental relation to its social counterpart, we find an argument endorsing the status quo, and advocating accommodation and incremental improvement through mutual commitment and concession. Just as the inclusion of slaves in Friends’ meetings produced a spiritual surplus value for their masters, so this position too is inflected by commercial discourse, in that its model of the relation between slave owner and slave is one of exchange: the exchange of more humane treatment for loyalty and piety. Another document by Fox, however, momentarily contemplates the possibility of abolishing the boundary between these two dimensions of the Quaker response to slavery, and bringing them to bear on each other: Gospel Family Order, an address originally given by Fox at a men’s meeting held at Thomas Rous’s house in 1671.95 Staying in the house of this wealthy Friend and slaveowning planter, Fox found himself burdened by seeing that ‘Families were not brought into Order; for the Blacks are of your Families’, and wondered how ‘Righteousness might be brought through in the Thing, and Justice and Mercy set up in every Family’.96 His concern is with the material and organisational consequences of the transformation of the Old Testament law, as it related to family order, into the gospel covenant of love. This text is concerned even less than was the 1657 epistle with the spiritual rights of household members. While spiritual equality even in a state of bondage is once again a given, Fox explores the practical consequences of this within the plantation household, and how this is ordered along patriarchal lines of spiritual authority. As in Curwen’s letter, the concern is principally for the consequences for the heads of families of the failure to impose ‘gospel order’ in the household: ‘will it not lye upon you, who ought to take Care for your Families, and order your Families[?]’.97 Their derelictions in this regard, Fox reminds his audience, will have material as well as spiritual consequences: they will not be negligent in outward Things, if they be faithful to God . . . for the Lord said, If that they keep his Law and his Word, then they shall be blessed in the Field and in the Store-house, and blessed in the Basket . . . but they that crucifie the Seed to themselves afresh . . . that brings the Curse upon them in the Basket and in the Storehouse, and in the Field.98

For planters, talk of the impact on their fields, storehouses and baskets of their failure to live in the light must have had a particular and troubling immediacy. It is when Fox pursues further the matter of material consequences that the social and spiritual begin to come together. Because ‘Christ dyed for all’, Fox says, so Friends should preach Christ to ‘Ethyopians’ in their families, ‘that so they may be free Men indeed’.99 However, Fox does not, as we might by now expect, reconfirm this freedom as purely spiritual. Instead, he extends it, after an exposition of its spiritual dimensions, into the social domain:

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it will doubtless be very acceptable to the Lord, if so be that Masters of Families here would deal so with their Servants, the Negroes and Blacks, whom they have bought with their Money, to let them go free after a considerable Term of Years, if they have served them faithfully; and when they go, and are made free, let them not go away empty-handed . . . and this is the Way to have the lost Image of God restored and renewed in us.100

Reiterated here are the terms of a covenant slavery: manumission is to be a reward for faithful service, and for conformity to Christian norms of pious behaviour. Reaffirmed, too, is the sense that the spirituality of slaves has most immediate currency within the spiritual progress of the Quaker masters: this is the way to renew ‘the lost Image of God’ – that is, the prelapsarian perfection which Quakers believed was available in this life to those who turned to the inward light – but, notably, the renewal is to be only ‘in us’.101 None the less, Fox here contemplates, and recommends, the eventual manumission of slaves as the logical conclusion of their spiritual equality. By 1675, Edmundson had arrived at a position similar to Fox’s. In a letter to Friends in America, he asks whether, for ‘Negroes’, ‘the Yoke [must] all wayes rest upon their bodyes[?]’; and he continues, ‘which of you all would have the blacks or others to make you their Slaves with out hope or expectation of freedom or liberty?’.102 Fleetingly, both Fox and Edmundson extend the more characteristic Quaker habit of reading the spiritual as immanent within the social to the institution of slavery. They momentarily integrate the two lines of argument, and address the social consequences of spiritual equality (and in particular the social corollary of spiritual freedom), and the spiritual dimension of this social organisation. However, they do so in such an ambiguous, tentative and parenthetical way as to perpetuate the movement’s equivocation about slavery for decades to come: as Frost points out, Gospel Family Order was sufficiently accepting of slavery per se that it was republished by ‘conservative slave-owning Friends in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1701 to silence the abolitionists’.103 These two brief instances of the integration of the social and the spiritual in early Quaker writings about slavery serve to highlight their exceptional status, and further underline the absent presence of this fusion in the Barbadian accounts. Early Quaker textual engagement with slavery typically relied on a quite exceptional separation of the spiritual from the social; it emphasised the equality of all in Christ, but also recommended ‘covenant slavery’ as a practical means for the amelioration of slavery’s worst brutalities. It is in the conceptual incompatibility of these two lines of argument that sense might be made of the differences between the Quaker narratives of Barbados and of the American mainland. As I showed earlier, accounts of the mainland American travels typically fuse the social and spiritual, reading the latter as immanent in the former. Such fusions are the bedrock of many of the practices of early Quakerism. The refusal of hat honour; the insistence

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on the use of the second-person singular ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, irrespective of the addressee’s rank; belief in providential punishments; going naked as a sign: all these were conscious refusals of the claims of social hierarchy or propriety, and, as with the indwelling light itself, were predicated on a refusal to recognise any distinction between the social and the spiritual, and an insistence that these were not areas of distinct activity and jurisdiction, but were instead part of a single, seamless socio-spiritual significatory domain. The Barbados narratives, however, refuse to discern the spiritual in the social or the material. They eschew the usual inclusive Quaker gaze on, and interpretation of, all that falls within its purview, instead focusing narrowly but imprecisely on ‘good meetings’ and friendly encounters. Oddly, the spiritual domain seems, in these accounts, not to be irrelevant, but to be elsewhere, beyond the reach of the narrative. In place of the synecdochal relation between the inward light and the social or topographical environment seen in the American mainland narratives, where the latter is a partial, indicative and symbolic element of the former, and the former is immanent in the latter, here the insistence on good meetings with large crowds of sympathisers stands in metonymic relation to the light – that is, they are associated with it, but not of a piece with it. A similar, conceptually looser, metonymic relation might be discerned in the way that the wealth that slavery allowed Barbadian Friends to accrue is read in association with the spiritual surplus value that Friends find in the inclusion of slaves in meetings. Such inclusion does not produce them as Friends, but for Friends, just as slaves’ labour produces wealth for Friends. Atypically, an associative relation between the distinct categories of the spiritual and social, rather than their integration, characterises the Barbadian narratives. Both domains continue to figure, but they figure separately, often in separate documents, addressed to different constituencies. Fusion was perhaps unsustainable under the circumstances encountered in Barbados; the spiritual could not be read within the social without the status quo of the sugar and slave economy, in which Barbadian Friends were heavily invested, collapsing under the pressure of the encounter. The social and the spiritual dimensions of slavery figure in Quaker discourse, as we have seen, in particular in the writings of Fox and Edmundson; but the arguments regarding the spiritual equality of slaves were ultimately incompatible with the advocacy of covenant slavery that both also put forward. The irreconcilability of these two positions – spiritual equality and covenant slavery – meant that they had to be advanced separately. Quaker planters and slave owners were themselves invested in that social inequality as well as in their theology of spiritual equality and so, in the context of Barbadian society, belief in spiritual equality could not be articulated in the usual way, through a refusal (symbolic or actual) of social inequality. If slaves were ‘counters’, it was in the calculation of their Quaker masters’ spiritual progress, not in a more broadly focused reckoning of the socio-spiritual

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meanings of the institution of slavery itself. It is in this uncharacteristic separation of the spiritual from the social, related to the uncomfortable relation between the material and spiritual values of the slaves for their masters, that we might begin to find an explanation for the brevity, the flatness and vagueness, the unQuakerliness, of the narrative accounts of the Barbadian visits.

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Conclusion: singularity and doubleness

Early Quakers were both of their time and at odds with it. The advent of the movement in the early 1650s was of its moment, growing, as Geoffrey Nuttall suggested ‘out of the soil and climate of the time’.1 It was a dynamic, vociferous and influential contributor to the great early modern Protestant conversation seen by some, such as Thomas Edwards, as a cacophonous, blasphemous Babel, and by others, such as Milton, as the sign of an intellectual rigour and spiritual maturity commensurate with England’s status as elect nation.2 Quakers spoke the same religious idiom as their interlocutors, of Christ as the light, of the darkness of human sin, the unmerited beneficence of God’s grace, the inevitability of limited atonement, the pervasiveness of human depravity, the inefficacy of human effort, the impotence of will and works, even of election and reprobation. The detail and heated intensity of the disputes between John Bunyan and Edward Burrough, for example, could as well be read as indicative of how much they had to say to each other as of how little they had in common.3 And yet there was also something untimely about the Quakers, something perceived to be out of kilter with, or different in kind from, other contributors to that intense national religious debate. This was the case for those who embraced the Quaker message, such as the Westmorland Seekers Francis Howgill and John Audland, for example, who were part of ‘a seekeing and religeous people ther seprated from the Common way of Nationall worshipe’ until convinced on Firbank Fell by Fox in 1652, just as it was true for those, like Francis Higginson and Thomas Weld, disturbed by the message disseminated by Fox, Nayler, Farnworth and other early Friends.4 Their critics reached for comparisons with the most reviled inflections of Christianity for English Protestants at the time – Roman Catholicism, for its perceived common ground regarding the place of will and works in salvation, and Ranterism, for its doctrine of perfectibility – in order to try to marginalise or demonise the

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Quaker message. The barrage of published opposition against Friends started as early as 1653, and continued in force throughout the 1650s and beyond.5 Itinerant Publishers of Truth were routinely jeered at, hounded, beaten and gaoled; some were even executed by the Puritan civic fathers of Boston in 1659, 1660 and 1661. Non-itinerant Friends suffered the confiscation of their property, fines and imprisonment for their refusal to take oaths or pay tithes.6 So pervasive were such events that records of sufferings quickly became a defining genre within the movement’s self-inscription and self-presentation.7 Early Quakers thus spoke a familiar language, but used it to arrive at conclusions intolerable to many of their interlocutors. In part, this was the result of a quite explicit rejection of the Calvinist position occupied by most other contemporary radical religious groups. Fox’s Journal shows its subject in his early years seeking an answer to his spiritual desires first from the clergy, and then from ‘the dissenting people’ before rejecting both because ‘there was none among them all, that could speak to my condition’; in particular, he rejects what he saw as the uncompromising and paralysing position of spiritual subjectivity produced by the doctrine of predestination, and the way the clergy had ‘frightened people with the doctrine of election and reprobation’.8 For the Calvinist, all fallen humans were sinners, but, through the unearned and unwarranted beneficence of God, some would be saved. The elect were as marked by sin as the reprobate, since humanity could never slough off the burden of sinful corruption in this lifetime. Their common heritage of sin meant that elect and reprobate were, to human eyes, indistinguishable; a godly life might be a sign of sanctification, but was certainly not a guarantee of it. However, the absolute, predestined and unalterable soteriological distinction between the elect and reprobate meant that, for the Calvinist, within those common, sin-marked, carnal carapaces dwelt souls destined for utterly divergent eternities. A superficial and unreliable carnal indistinguishability disguised absolute and irreconcilable spiritual distinctions. Unity masked duality. Quakerism was one answer to the pressure and uncertainty of the dominant predestinarian position on election and reprobation. Saint and sinner were unified, co-existing in the same human subject, as in more orthodox reformed interpretations, but for Quakers in a different configuration. Sinfulness was by no means neglected by the early Quakers; on the contrary, ‘convincement’ was in part a case of being ‘convinced’ or convicted, found guilty, of one’s own sorry sinful state: as Fox put it, ‘In that which convinced you wait, that you may have that removed you are convinced of ’.9 Countless Quaker accounts testify to the painful intensity and longevity of this period of personal conviction.10 Conjoined with this, however, was accession to the inward light – as ubiquitous to the human subject as the state of carnal fallenness. Freed from the fixity of the Calvinist interpretation, the categories of elect and reprobate themselves continued to figure, but as dynamic rather than

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static entities. To live in darkness was a choice made by the hardened human will; to turn to the light was to relinquish that will and accede, by dint of the divine will, to the ubiquitous power of the immanent Christ. The Calvinist calcification of the doctrine of predestination, which dwelt on the unalterable doubleness of ultimate soteriological destinies, exposed as untrustworthy or duplicitous the superficial unity of the sinful human condition. Quakerism, by contrast, announced the reality of a single spiritual condition – the universally present inward light, available to all. The sharply bifurcated doubleness of the human condition (those who turned to, and those who refused so to turn) hereby revealed itself to be unreliable – itself evidence of human frailty and sin, in people’s refusal to accept the unity with the divine and with humanity which was delivered by an indwelling Christ. Quakers reversed the Calvinist structural dynamic of spiritual subjectivity, perceiving duality to be definitive only of the fallen human state, which masked the greater reality, both actual and potential, of divine unity. For Quakers, to live in the light was by definition to live in unity with the divine. As explored in Chapter 1, the light was understood to dissolve all boundaries for those who dwelt there, seamlessly merging human and divine, spiritual and social, past, present and future. It generated a culture committed to a seamless unity endorsed by the figure of Christ, himself explicitly a breaker of boundaries: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace. (Ephesians 2.13–15)

This passage opens with Christ as merely making proximate those who had been distant. The promise is then made of the ultimate proximity of unification, as Christ makes ‘in himself of twain one new man’ through the dissolution of ‘the middle wall of partition’. The conceptual boundary-breaking of the Quakers is thus underwritten by a specific scriptural commitment to such a process, through the figure of Christ. Because of the already returned status of Christ for Friends, however, this condition of unity was to be lived in a world that was simultaneously still fallen, for those who continued to dwell in darkness, as well as renewed, for those in the light. Those dwelling in the light were called on ceaselessly to bear witness to the continuance of carnal duplicity, wherever and whenever it was encountered. Early Friends thus found themselves advocating and inhabiting a condition of unbounded and unified unity, cross-cut by the stark, duplicitous binaries and divisions of the fallen world. Consequently, Quaker discourse was structured around an intense

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preoccupation with, and negotiation of, singularity and doubleness – this, indeed, could be said to constitute, in part at least, the movement’s own singularity vis-à-vis other contemporary separatist groups. This book has traced the cultural implications of this theology of unity across a number of textual and conceptual sites, and has suggested a remarkable consistency to the manifestations of this concern in both the explicit assertion of oneness with the divine, but also in the refusal, recasting or reunifying of the dualities of more mainstream religious discourse, to be seen in the textual forms and rhetorics of the early movement, in its ways of inhabiting and moving through time and space, and in the affective disposition of early Friends. This negotiating of singleness and doubleness is found in its most prosaic but also most concrete form in the movement’s focus on pronominal usage: the insistence on the grammatically consistent use of the second-person singular and plural pronouns, no matter who is being addressed. Farnworth’s The Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth (1655) and Fox, Stubs and Furley’s A Battle-Door for Teachers & Professors to Learn Singular and Plural (1660), among others, are directly concerned with this matter, and explore and justify this stance at length and in detail. The position is explained by Friends’ refusal to respect social differences: if God is no respecter of persons (as is stated in Acts 10.34; Romans 2.11; Ephesians 6.9 as elsewhere in the Bible), then neither should those in unity with God be, as this produces a difference that is indefensible theologically and is itself indicative of precisely the kinds of carnal boundaries erased by truly living in light. More obliquely, however, this reiterative focus on ‘thou’ in the singular, ‘you’ in the plural is itself an insistence on recognising the distinction between singularity and multiplicity. The failure to distinguish the one from the other is not only an inappropriate mark of social deference, a sign of carnality, but also a failure properly to attend to the difference between the ‘individual’ (that which is indivisible, a symbolic unity) and that which is multiple. It is perhaps the underlying preoccupation with keeping these categories separate (as with light and darkness) that helps explain a certain kind of over-emphasis, even over-determination, regarding the repeated return to this issue. Certainly, it is of a piece with other kinds of Quaker attack on the conventions of social decorum, but there is a way in which this attention to pronominal usage shadows and underpins a more thoroughgoing and weightier conceptual preoccupation. A more complicated discursive negotiation of unity and plurality is at work in early Quakers’ characteristic deployment of metaphor. As explored in Chapter 2, usages such as William Dewsbury’s ‘I live in the Lord, and I have a Wife and three Children at Wakefield in Yorkshire’ exploits metaphor’s constitutional suppression of the distinction between tenor and vehicle – its structural insistence that X actually, or literally, is Y, rather than that X is merely like Y.11 Metaphor eliminates syntactical evidence of the comparative relationship

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it is positing, and instead strategically – rhetorically – asserts an identification, by means of the copular ‘is’, between two distinct entities. The polemical force of metaphor results from the substitution, or ‘standing in’, of one thing for another, for that substitution, in itself, makes an argument about that for which it is a substitute. The trope’s foundation in perceptions or assertions of similarity between two entities (the ‘grounds’ of the metaphor) simultaneously eliminates that relation of similarity, and declares, in its place, a self-sameness or unity between them. The duality of the two-term metaphoric structure – X is Y – thus combines with a simultaneous copulative identification of its elements, such that the bipartite structure is exposed as apparent rather than real, or as real only in certain circumstances, or as a false duality masking an underlying identification or unity; in this, metaphor seems a peculiarly Quaker trope. Its assertion of a relation of identity or unity in the place of one of similarity or analogy was particularly resonant for the Quaker mission, for Quakers, like metaphor itself, sought to dissolve the boundaries customarily taken to exist between apparently distinct categories, and to assert instead a relation of identity between them (between the social and spiritual orders, for example, or between Christ and the believer, or between steeplehouse and marketplace). Just as the Quaker insistence on using the second-person singular ‘thou’ or the refusal of hat honour both enacted the principled rejection of any recognition of social distinction as incompatible with the truth of spiritual equality, and just as going naked as a sign asserted a relation between spiritual and bodily nakedness, so Dewsbury’s identification of his home as ‘in the Lord’ relies on the erasure of the boundary between life in this world and the life to come. His resort to metaphor enacts the erasure of the demarcation of the boundary between spiritual and social that his spiritual project also sought to bring about.12 A tendency to strategically exploit the power of metaphor forms a crucial aspect of what constituted the Quakers in the 1650s as such a source of disturbance, both social and religious. In a discussion of the spatial dimensions of narrative structures, Michel de Certeau suggests that: Social delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic outlets and expectations of spaces, where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside the pale.13

De Certeau’s words have an uncannily literal applicability to the situation of the early Quakers. In their early years they were without question seen as social as well as religious delinquents: vagrants, madmen and blasphemers. Moreover, de Certeau’s references to displacement, prison and wandering point to three of the defining social and spiritual circumstances of Friends.

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Quakers also habitually, as we have seen, took the story literally: that is, they denied the metaphoricity of metaphor, exploiting the rhetorical and polemical potential of a trope to expose the inadequacy of a superficial duality in order to reveal its deeper, more potent, underlying unity. Just as Quaker habits of metaphorisation asserted a literal unity beneath a superficial and corrupt duality, so this book has argued that Fox’s Journal is also characterised by a purposive unity that reconciles or unites an apparent generic duality. As discussed in Chapter 4, critics have long debated whether the Journal should more properly be read as a history of the early movement or as the spiritual memoir of the man seen as that movement’s founder, leader and inspiration. The longevity of the debate suggests something of the undecidability of the text’s generic status, its continuing capacity to escape any definitive categorisation. Moreover, this possible generic divide sits somewhat uncomfortably with the Quaker adherence to the principle of unity, and suggests the need for further critical scrutiny. The solution proposed here is that the generic appellation of ‘journal’ itself provides precisely the unity, whether formal or theological, that Quakerism’s discourse requires. The term brings together reference to work and travel; in its relation to accounting or stock-taking, it allows for the retrospection commensurate with both history and memoir; it is a chronologically organised history of a movement which believed both history and chronotic time to be both ended and ending; and it is the first-person account (in part, at least) of a portion of the life of a man who believed his human self to be either irrelevant or else transfigured through its fusion with the divinity of the light within. The split between the generic choice of memoir or history therefore masks the generic unity of the Journal, which succeeds, in the combination of its formal and narrative strategies, in being both linear and reiterative, bound to the specificities of time and place, but also largely uninterested in what characterises any given place at a given time. The form of the journal was generative of the endless presence, in space and time, of what it meant to ‘walk in the light’, to dwell in a godly manner in this world. For Friends, however, dwelling in this world might better be described as dwelling at the intersection of two different manifestations of God’s creation: on the one hand, living in the light transfigured the materiality of the world, just as it did the human subject, the turn to the immanent light restoring the possibility of perfection to both; and on the other hand, Friends were moved, from that position, to testify to the imperfections of the still fallen world and of the still fallen people they encountered. Any doubleness, or duplicity, in this position was produced precisely by the fallen human refusal to accede to the greater reality of divine unity. It was a doubleness of human – that is, fallen – perception, and one itself revealed as insubstantial and imperfect by Friends’ own transfigured understandings. It is this that accounts for the Quaker habit

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of signing off their publications as written by ‘one known to the world by R. Forneworth’, or ‘who is of the world called George Fox, who a new name hath which the world knows not’, and ‘We are witnesses of this testimony, whose names in the flesh are called Thomas Aldam and Robert Craven’.14 Such formulations evince, if rather wordily, Friends’ sense of the partiality and insubstantiality of such traces of their worldly selves, and their supersession by others, here unarticulated, and ultimately, Fox’s words suggest, beyond human language and understanding. Fox’s Journal, in particular, is a text shaped by its author-subject’s perception of his position at the intersection of the fallen and renewed worlds. As the final three chapters of the book variously explored, the practice of itinerancy produced and diagnosed the physical world and those people encountered living within it as either enlightened or as in a condition of darkness, facilitating afresh at each new arrival the turn to the light of some, the confirmation of hearts hardened against God in others. The Journal’s inscription of these journeys constitutes it as a technology for the ceaseless generation of presence. This presence is both temporal, in the fusion of the past of the apostles and the future of the second coming in the timeless kairotic presence of the indwelling Christ, and also spatial, in the reiterated demonstration and revelation of the immanent godly potential of Firbank Fell, Kendal and London, as of hillside, marketplace, cottage and gaol. The Journal’s emphatically linear and chronological structure, and its itinerary of places visited and revisited, is shown to be both relevant and irrelevant, as the located and time-marked here-and-now constitutes the circumstances in which further convincements will continue to be made, but also repeatedly gives way to the timeless transfiguration of the fallen world renewed by the light inhering within it. The Quaker insistence that nowhere was beyond the reach of the indwelling light, and that consequently nothing and nowhere was inherently holier than anywhere else, resulted in the fusion, or at least the imbrication, of categories more typically understood as distinct from, or even opposed to, each other: the divine and the human; this world and the next; pre- and postlapsarian; the corporeal and the spiritual; the social and the religious; past, present and future. If this produced for the most part a rigorous commitment to, and conceptually consistent understanding of, the unity that flowed from this perception, the final chapter of the book posited one striking instance where that consistency was compromised. In the Quaker accounts of their presence and interventions in the slave economy of Barbados, there is an atypical refusal to read a commitment to the spiritual equality of slaves with their masters in seamless continuity with Friends’ advocacy of what I have called a ‘covenant slavery’. To have done so would have exposed the inconsistency between these two positions – equality, on the one hand, and an endorsement of slave-owning, clearly predicated on a foundational inequality, on the other. In this instance,

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the reach of the spiritual was bounded, and the social was circumscribed within its own sphere of morality – albeit a morality markedly more liberal and ameliorative than that more generally advocated in slave-owning societies. In this instance, Quakers were clearly ‘respecters of persons’, in a way that their practices regarding pronominal usage, hat honour and so on had expressly rejected. In this, the reach of the inward light had, in effect, been limited; these two distinct discursive interventions remain distinct, and the social is not read in seamless continuity with the spiritual. This discursive inconsistency or discrepancy in the early Quakers’ engagement with the special circumstances of Barbadian slave-owning society – the allowance of a limit to be set to the unifying light of Christ – maintains an uncharacteristic doubleness to the ways in which social structure is analysed and characterised by Friends. It is, moreover, striking that this investment in an inconsistent duality – a condition typically castigated by early Friends as indicative of error and darkness – coincides with that area of early Quaker practice that has troubled critics and historians for its incommensurability with an otherwise rigorous refusal of respect for social distinctions. Quaker responses to the circumstances they found in Barbados are also distinct from those that typify other early interventions: as Chapter 6 outlined, they are shorter and vaguer, but many of them also lack the force and confidence that more typically characterise Quaker texts. While John Rous’s A Warning to the Inhabitants of Barbadoes (1656) evinces a familiar Quaker excoriation of sin in the planter class into which he had been born, texts written by English visitors to Barbados which address the social organisation of the colony do so more tentatively than might be expected. The confidence that Chapter 3 found in Fox’s Journal, then, is unsustained in circumstances where the unifying light is limited by leaving intact a carnal boundary. The advent of the ‘sacred Self-confidence’ ascribed to Fox was attributed in Chapter 3 to precisely the consequences of the abolition of the boundaries between the human and the divine, and the subsequent assurance of living and moving in and by the power of the inward light. There, unity with the divine is instrumental in banishing the structural dualities so formative of the affective state characteristic of so many Calvinists – a duality of uncertainty (am I or am I not saved?), but also a duality of self-apprehension, where the struggle with Satan is internalised, such that evil itself becomes a constitutive force of the fallen human subject. For Friends, by contrast, the sense of the immanent divine effectively banished the alien once again to the external world of darkness, the sense of a divided self replaced by a sense of internal unity. In turn, a striking access to a position of heteronomous agency conferred a position of empowered dependence on early Friends, such that the deadlock of doubt and fear recorded by so many Calvinist Puritans has little place in Quaker narratives, replaced by the sacred self-confidence of a self beyond selfhood.

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The relocation of the corruption of darkness to the external world recognised the continuing power of sin and duplicity for fallen humanity. The light shone in all, but all had not, and would not, allow it to shine through them. Crucially, however, those sufficiently tender would make the turn from darkness to light. In the unfixing of the rigid Calvinist predestinarian soteriological duality of elect and reprobate, traffic was generated between the two categories. Sin had always been understood as a chosen state, though paradoxically also an inevitable one, but for Friends damnation was now also a chosen, or willed, state. Moreover, as Fox put it, ‘the promise of God was to the seed not as many but as one which was Christ: so the election and choice stands in Christ’.15 A reuniversalisation of the redemptive promise of Christ is here coupled with the identification of choice in him. Through the referred and unifying agency of the inward light, bringing with it the dissolution of human will and accession to the will of the divine, the Calvinist stasis was broken. The energy thereby released was specifically identified with the boundary-breaking of the indwelling Christ, admitting no absolute limits to the reach of his light. The cultural practices of early Friends flowed from this perception of unity, which served to abolish metaphorical, conceptual, social and religious boundaries, its immanence bringing with it the transvaluation of the elements of the fallen world to which they continued to bear witness: the body, the greeting, the address to an interlocutor, clothing, location, communion with the divine. Dwelling at the intersection of the still fallen and the always renewing world, their singular discourse ceaselessly recognised the dangers of a divisive duality and testified to the power of unity. From there, the doctrine of the indwelling Christ unleashed a productive energy – religious, social and rhetorical – that galvanised its adherents, as it returned them to a seamless field of divine signification, where the dualities of here and there, now and then, human and divine, dissolved in the unbounded and ubiquitous timelessness of the kairotic moment of life dwelt in the inward light.

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Notes

A note on references to Fox’s Journal 1 For a comprehensive comparison of Ellwood’s first edition and the Spence Manuscript, see Henry J. Cadbury ‘The Editio Princeps of Fox’s Journal’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 53 (1972), 197–218. The question of a manuscript journal as a source for the 1694 printed Journal remains the subject of some uncertainty. Cadbury concludes that the text Fox termed his ‘great Jornall’ is in fact lost, though similar to the account in the Spence Manuscript and subsequent printed editions; see Henry J. Cadbury (ed.), Annual Catalogue of George Fox’s Papers (Philadelphia: Friends Book Store, 1939), 2; see also John L. Nickalls, ‘The Journal of George Fox: Some Reasons for and Features of the Forthcoming New Edition’, Friends’ Quarterly, 6 (1952), 144–51 (146), and H. Larry Ingle, ‘George Fox, Historian’, Quaker History, 83:1 (1993), 28–35 (33n.8). The character of this lost ‘journal’ remains uncertain. Penney concludes that the printed Journal ‘bears little, if any, evidence of having been preceded by any form of diary, regularly written up, although Ellwood states that Fox “himself kept a Journal”’; see ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 2 vols, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), I.xxxvii. On a further short autobiographical fragment by Fox, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘A Short Account of Some of G. F.’s Sufferings and Imprisonments’, Bulletin of Friends’ Historical Association, 39:1 (1950), 27–31.

Introduction 1 Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of The Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (London: printed by T. R. for H. R., 1653), A2r–v. 2 Thomas Weld, The Perfect Pharisee under Monkish Holinesse, Opposing the Fundamentall Principles of the Doctrine of the Gospel, and Scripture-Practises of Gospel-Worship manifesting himselfe in the Generation of men called Quakers (Gateside [i.e. Gateshead]: printed by S. B., 1653), 51; William Prynne, The Quakers Unmasked, And clearly

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7 8 9 10 11

12

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17

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detected to be but the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuites, and Franciscan Fryers (London: printed for Edward Thomas, 2nd ed., 1655), 1. George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 36. Prynne, The Quakers Unmasked, 5. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 86. Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 15, 16; see too George Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus: With his Packet of Letters from the High-Priests, against the disciples of the Lord (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1653), 1. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 38. Fox, Saul’s Errand, 22; original italics George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 263. Ibid., 263. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speechways during the Puritan Revolution’, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds), Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 72–112. The term ‘doctrine’ suggests something more formally defined than was the case with the theology and religious practices of the early Quakers, whose statements of faith were for the most part informal and responsive, articulated as corrections to the misrepresentations of their beliefs promulgated by their opponents. As Ormsby-Lennon notes, ‘the Quakers preferred “prayer” over “doctrine”, spiritual experience over the niceties of theology’, with the result that their doctrines ‘did not approach any fixity of definition until well after Charles II was restored in 1660’; Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse’, 74. Nevertheless, following Frost, among others, I use the word as it best conveys the absolute centrality and unwavering status of the light within as the core of Quaker belief. See J. William Frost, ‘The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology’, Church History, 39:4 (1970), 503–23. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 134. For a discussion of Quaker perfectionism, see Chapter 1. For Fox’s use of the phrase ‘that of God in everyone’, see quotation on page 3 above, and 160n.21 below. Frost, ‘The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology’, 522. The terms ‘Publishers of Truth’ or ‘Public Friends’ were used for ‘the itinerating Friends with the gift of ministry who spread the Quaker message’; William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1955), 26n.1. Edward Burrough, ‘A Faithful Testimony Concerning the True Worship of God’ (1659), in The Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation (s.l.: s.n., 1672), 474–82 (474). Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 144. The phrase references Braithwaite’s title, The Second Period of Quakerism, in which that ‘second period’ is taken as following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Rosemary Moore, in The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain

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1646–1666 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), passim and especially 214–28, argues that the shift from an ‘early’ phase of the movement to a second phase came later, in 1666. For a useful discussion of accommodations made by the movement in the latter part of the seventeenth century, see Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 216–23. For an overview of the impact of Restoration legislation on Quakers, see ibid., 170–3. Fox issued A Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers, against all plotters and fighters in the world (now known as ‘The Peace Testimony’) following the Fifth Monarchist uprising of 1661. Here, for the first time, leading Quakers committed themselves to non-violence, for ‘the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons’; Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 398–404 (400). Both the dispute centring on Perrot – the so-called ‘hat controversy’, concerning whether Friends should always remove their hats in meetings for worship, or whether they should leave the matter to individual conscience – and the activities of Story and Wilkinson, who objected to the formalisation of meetings and growing institutionalisation of the movement, pivoted on the perception that limits were being set on the free leadings of the light. After the Restoration, Fox spent a number of years formalising a more centralised and hierarchical system of meetings, through which the movement organised and governed itself. On the Peace Testimony, see William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1961), 12–18; H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 172–3, 192–6; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 180–1. On the movement’s internal controversies, see Braithwaite, Second Period of Quakerism, 228–44, 290–323; Kenneth L. Carroll, John Perrot, Early Quaker Schismatic. Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, Supplement 33 (London: Friends’, Historical Society, 1971); Ingle, First Among Friends, 197–205, 261–4, Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 193–203. On the changing modes of organisation of the movement, see Braithwaite, Second Period of Quakerism, 251–89; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 129–41, 180–92, 214–28. Penney’s is the only recent edition of the journal to include the complete transcript of the Lancaster trial; Nickalls’s edition gives an abbreviated version and Smith’s, which comprises only the retrospective narrative portion of the Journal, includes none of this interpolated document. For the epistle to Lampitt, see George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 2 vols, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), I.87–8; to Sawrey, ibid., I.77; to Cromwell, ibid., I.160–64; to the Long Parliament, ibid., I.79. On the question of the editing of the Journal’s accounts of contentious earlier practices, see Henry J. Cadbury, ‘The Influence of Fox’s Journal’, Friends’ Quarterly, 15 (1965), 276–81, 295–304; Richard G. Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research

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University Press, 1992), xvi–xvii, 77; Thomas N. Corns, ‘“No Man’s Copy”: The Critical Problem of Fox’s Journal’, in Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 99–111; and pages 83–4 below. 25 See especially Corns, ‘No Man’s Copy’, on this issue.

Chapter 1 1 Samuel Fisher, Rusticus ad Academicos in Exercitationibus Expostulatoriis, Apologeticis Quatuor. The Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies (London: printed for Robert Wilson, 1660), B3r. 2 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947); Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964); Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624–1691) (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986); Pink Dandelion, The Liturgies of Quakerism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn and Timothy Peat, Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming (Kelso: Curlew Productions and Woodbrooke College, 1998); T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist–Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3 Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985), 3. 4 Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of The Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (London: printed by T. R. for H. R., 1653), 5–6, 4. 5 Thomas Weld, The Perfect Pharisee under Monkish Holinesse, Opposing the Fundamentall Principles of the Doctrine of the Gospel, and Scripture-Practises of Gospel-Worship manifesting himselfe in the Generation of men called Quakers (Gateside [i.e. Gateshead]: printed by S. B., 1653), 17–18, 19. 6 James Nayler, An Answer to the Booke called The perfect Pharisee under Monkish Holinesse (London: s.n., 1653), 12–13. 7 George Fox, The Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded (London: Tho: Simmons, 1659), 206. 8 Richard Farnworth, The Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1655), 8; see too George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 87. Fox notes both ‘Children of Light’ and ‘Quakers’ as nicknames: ibid., 298. On the early movement’s understanding of the ‘light’, see Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, 42; Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word, chapter 4; and Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 80–2. Underwood compares Quaker and Baptist understandings of the light: see Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, chapters 4 and 7. 9 See too John 1 passim. Fox references John thus: ‘the true Light which John bore witness to was the life in Christ the word by which all things was made and created: and it was called the Light in man and woman which was the true Light

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which had enlightened every man that came into the world’ (Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 230). John Story wrote ‘this true Light . . . is no other, but even Jesus the everlasting son of God, as the Scriptures testifieth, John. I.9. and John 8.12. Rev. 21, 24. . . . This true Light lighteth every man’; John Story, A Short Discovery of certain Truths of God (London: s.n.,1664), 4. In this volume, I quote from the 1611 King James Bible; most sectaries favoured the Geneva Bible, but Friends’ allusions to the Bible are usually closer to the former than the latter. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. by E. B. Pusey (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1907), 171. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 34. On the changes to the Quaker movement after the Restoration, see William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1961); Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 234–56; John Punshon, Portrait in Grey: A Short History of the Quakers (London: Quaker Home Service, 1984), chapters 4 and 5; Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution, chapter 6; Richard G. Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), chapter 7; Richard G. Bailey, ‘Was Seventeenth-Century Quaker Christology Homogeneous?’, in Pink Dandelion (ed.), The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 61–82. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 34; the Journal returns frequently to the divine origin, character and transformative power of the light, but see in particular ibid., 230, for a definition. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 14, my emphasis. James Nayler, Love to the Lost: And a Hand Held Forth to the Helpless, to lead out of the Dark (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1656), 57; compare Nayler’s criticism of those ‘wise of the world’ who wrongly limit Christ to a place ‘above the stars’ with the words of Cotton Mather, The Short History of New England (1694), quoted in Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, 135. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 15; my emphasis. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 134. Fox, The Great Mistery, 206. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 134. Rosemary Moore notes that this formulation ‘comes from the older version of Ephesians 5:30, “For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones”’; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 79. Fox, The Great Mistery, 357, 206. For further instances of Fox’s designation of Friends as of the ‘flesh and bone’ of Christ, see Fox, Epistles 99, 155, and 230, in A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, Letters and Testimonies (London: T. Sowle, 1698), 82, 120, 201. Bailey, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Christology’, 68; Fox, The Great Mistery, 207. In his chapter, Bailey differentiates Fox’s Christology from that of other early Quakers. Tarter follows Bailey as a strong proponent of the importance of the idea of ‘celestial flesh’ to Fox’s theology; see Bailey, New Light on George Fox, chapter 4; Michele Lise Tarter, ‘Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal Prophecy in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic World’, in Janet

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Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (eds), A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 145–62. On Quaker Christology, see too Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 146–9. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 263. For instances and variations of the phrase ‘that of God in everyone’ (or close variants) in Fox’s writings, see A. N. Brayshaw, The Quakers: Their Story and Message (London: George Allen and Unwin, 3rd ed. 1938), 54n.3, and Arthur Windsor, George Fox Epistles: An Analytical Phrase Index (Gloucester: George Fox Fund, 1992), 252. For opponents’ reactions to the indwelling Christ and its implications for their understanding of Fox’s theology, see Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 2–5, Weld, Perfect Pharisee, 3–8, and Fox’s account of his Lancaster trial in 1652, in Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 133–5. Bailey offers a fascinating analysis of Judge Fell’s intervention in Fox’s 1652 trial for blasphemy in Lancaster in which he argues that the rebuttal of the charge of claiming equality with God depended on emphasising Fox’s claims of unity with God: ‘equality’ implied two distinct and therefore comparable entities, while ‘unity’ suggested a single entity, its singularity rendering redundant any notion of comparison, since something cannot be compared with itself. See Bailey, New Light on George Fox, 97–110. On the importance of the indwelling spirit to other Puritan groups, see Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, 150–66, Bailey, New Light on George Fox, 4–6. Martin Mason, The Proud Pharisee Reproved (London, 1655), 36; quoted and discussed by Nigel Smith in ‘Hidden Things Brought to Light: Enthusiasm and Quaker Discourse’, in Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 57–69 (65). George Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus: With his Packet of Letters from the HighPriests, against the disciples of the Lord (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1653), 25; Nayler, Love to the Lost, 57; for a useful discussion of Nayler’s conception of the indwelling Christ, see Leo Damrosch,, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 92–7. On Quakerism, the press and censorship, see Thomas O’Malley, ‘The Press and Quakerism 1653–1659’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 54 (1979), 169–84; Thomas O’Malley, ‘“Defying the Powers and Tempering the Spirit”: A Review of Quaker Control over Their Publications, 1672–1689’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982), 72–88. See too Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution, 111; Bailey, New Light on George Fox, xvii–xviii, 76–7, 115–20, 137–290; and Thomas N. Corns, ‘“No Man’s Copy”: The Critical Problem of Fox’s Journal’, in Corns and Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing, 99–111. On the excision of accounts of miracles from the published Journal, see Henry J. Cadbury, ‘The Influence of Fox’s Journal’, Friends’ Quarterly, 15 (1965), 276–81, 295–304. George Fox, A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Ancient, Eminent and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, George Fox (London: Printed for Thomas Northcott, 1694), 553, 562.

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27 Ibid., 13. 28 John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 4. 29 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’, in Margo Todd (ed.), Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1995), 53–70 (62). 30 Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, 162. On the General Baptists, see Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 50–84, and J. F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 23–63. 31 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972; this ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1975), 27. 32 Thomas Collier, A Looking-Glasse for the Quakers (London: printed for Thomas Brewster, 1656), 7. 33 Gerrard Winstanley, ‘The New Law of Righteousnes’, in The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George H. Sabine (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 149–244 (165). On Winstanley and Quakerism, see Richard T. Vann, ‘From Radicalism to Quakerism: Gerrard Winstanley and Friends’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 49 (1959–61), 41–6. 34 Winstanley, ‘Truth Lifting Up Its Head Above Scandals’ in Works, 97–146 (113, 115). 35 Winstanley, ‘Truth Lifting Up Its Head’, 127–8. On Winstanley, see Hill, World Turned Upside Down, chapter 7; Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978); David Boulton, Gerrard Winstanley and the Republic of Heaven (Dent: Dales Historical Monographs, 1999); Andrew Bradstock (ed.), Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649–1999 (London: Frank Cass, 2000). 36 In Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, Underwood compares Quaker and Baptist understandings of the light; see especially chapter 7. For notions of the light in other radical groups, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 66–72, 247–50; Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speechways during the Puritan Revolution’, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds), Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 72–112 (78–9, 86–7). 37 Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 134–5; see too Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 2–3, and Fox, Saul’s Errand, 5–6, 10–11. 38 Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 3. 39 Quoted in Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 36. 40 For the fullest account and analysis of this episode, see Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, passim, and especially 146–62, 222–9. See too William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1955), 241–78; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 35–48. 41 Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 73.

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42 The doctrine of perfectibility had also been found among members of the Family of Love and the Grindletonians; see Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 81–5, 166; Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 93–4. 43 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 27, 27–8. 44 Fox, Saul’s Errand, 12; original emphasis. 45 Edward Burrough, ‘A Declaration to all the World of our Faith’ (1658), in The Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation (s.l.: s.n., 1672), 439–43 (441); Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 86; Nayler, ‘Concerning Perfection’, in Love to the Lost, 21. It is worth noting too that Fox’s statement regarding perfection is taken from the early pages of the Journal, and is thus available only in Ellwood’s 1694 edition as approved by the Second Day Morning Meeting, since the early pages of the manuscript journal are lost. The perfectionist claims, therefore, were allowed to stand, just as were the claims regarding the corporeal indwelling by Christ. Note too John Story’s statement, expressed as ‘Doctrine’, regarding perfection in 1660: ‘we say that the perfection of the Saints was and is attainable in and through Christ, even while they were and are upon the Earth, or else the work for which the true Ministry was given, had been void’; John Story, Babilons Defence Broken down, and one of Antichrists Warriours Defeated: In an Answer to a Scandalous Pamphlet, Intituled, The Quaker-Jesuit: Or, Popery in Quakerism (London: printed for Robert Wilson, 1660), 8. See too Weld, Perfect Pharisee, 14–17. 46 On perfection, see L. Hugh Doncaster, ‘Early Quaker Thought on “That State in which Adam was before he Fell”’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 41:1 (1949), 13–24; Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 149–52; and J. William Frost, ‘The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology’, Church History, 39:4 (1970), 503–23 (516–17). 47 Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, 109:1 (1985), 55–99 (55). 48 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 11–12. 49 Ibid., 16–17. 50 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 16. The ‘discerning spirit’ is a reference to 1 Corinthians 12.10: ‘To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues’. The subsequent two verses are telling with regard to the argument I go on to make about the relationship between ‘discerning’ and ‘unity’: ‘But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.’ 51 Richard Gilpin, The Agreement of the Associated Ministers & Churches of the Counties of Cumberland, and Westmerland (London: printed by T. L. for Simon Waterson, 1656), 57. See too Benjamin Nightingale, The Ejected of 1662 in Cumberland and Westmorland: Their Predecessors and Successors, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1911), I.101. 52 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 20. See 156n.16 for note on ‘Publishers of Truth’. 53 Ibid., 128, 129. 54 Also Revelation 12.17: ‘And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

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make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ’. On ‘the Seed’, see T. Joseph Pickvance, ‘George Fox’s Use of the Word “Seed”’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 41 (1949), 25–8; Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, 157–9. Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624–1691) (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986), 68–71; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 82–3. Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, ‘To the Priests and People of England’ (London: for Giles Calvert, 1655); reprinted as an appendix to Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 222–6 (222). Nayler, An Answer to the Booke called The perfect Pharisee, 29. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 90. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 263. On the implications of early Friends’ notions of unity, see Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 78–9. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 28. See ibid., 82, on the relation between the Bible and individual apprehension of the truth. Quoted by Jackson I. Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, PMLA, 71 (1956), 725–54 (731). Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 228. ‘Extracts from William Penn’s Preface to the Original Edition of George Fox’s Journal, 1694’, in Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, xlvi. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 282. Indeed, when Friends exhibited ‘leadings’ that contradicted those of the principal Friends, these tended to produce deep schisms (such as the Nayler episode of 1656, the Hat Controversy precipitated by John Perrot in the early 1660s, and the Wilkinson–Story dispute of the mid-1670s), for one was either in the light or out of it; there was no half-way house. On these disputes, see Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism and Second Period of Quakerism. This impetus found its most famous extrapolation in the so-called Peace Testimony of 1660, in the affirmation that ‘all people, out of all different judgements and professions may be brought into love and unity with God, and one with another, and that they may all come to witness the prophet’s words who said, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”’ Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 400. Farnworth, The Pure Language, 7. William Prynne, The Quakers Unmasked, And clearly detected to be but the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuites, and Franciscan Fryers (London: printed for Edward Thomas, 2nd ed., 1655). Prynne was not alone among opponents of Quakerism to accuse them of links with Roman Catholicism, an accusation strengthened by their affirmation of a degree of agency in matters of salvation. Higginson wrote that ‘Papists are open Idolaters, and the Propagators of your Superstitions are more horrid Blasphemers: most of your Errours may throw down the Gauntlet to the worst of theirs, besides many that you hold in common with them’ (Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, a2v, original emphasis); Nayler complained that in The Perfect Pharisee Thomas Weld had misrepresented Friends and their deeds, which ‘they doe in obedience to God,

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under the name of Monkish Holinese, Fryars, Pharisees, or any thing that in their subtilty they conceive will make them most odious to people’ (Nayler, An Answer to the Booke called The perfect Pharisee, 3, original emphasis); and Richard Gilpin urged people to ‘Observe what a favourable aspect all their opinions have to Popery’ (Gilpin, The Agreement of the Associated Ministers & Churches of the Counties of Cumberland, and Westmerland, 1656), 57). See too William Brownsword, The Quaker Jesuite, or Popery in Quakerism (London: printed by J. M., 1660), and, for discussion of this criticism, Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 249–50, and Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 92, 265n.15. Fisher, Rusticus ad Academicos, B3r; his emphasis. On Fisher, see Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 288–94, Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 259–68; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 296–9; Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 137–82. Fisher, Rusticus ad Academicos, B3r; his emphasis. Sarah Jones, This is Lights Appearance in the Truth (s.l. [London?]: s.n., [1650]), 2. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 347–8. Fisher, Rusticus ad Academicos, B3r–v. Burrough, ‘A Declaration’, 441. Fisher, Rusticus ad Academicos, B3v. Jones, This is Lights Appearance, 1. Later Friends were also urged to ‘sink down’ into the light: when ‘temptations and troubles appear’, Fox wrote, people should ‘sink down in that which is pure, and all will be hushed, and fly away’; and Charles Marshall also exhorted Friends to ‘sink down into the pure Stilness’. George Fox, Epistle 10, ‘To Friends, 1652’, in Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts (eds), Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1700 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 487; Charles Marshall, An Epistle to Friends coming forth in the Beginning of a Testimony and of the Snares of the Enemy Therein (London?: s.n., 1730?), 4. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 212, 222. Norman Penney (ed.), The First Publishers of Truth: Being Early Records (Now First Printed) of the Introduction of Quakerism into the Counties of England and Wales. Supplement to Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 1–5 (London: Headley Brothers, 1907), 241–2. Fisher, Rusticus ad Academicos, B3r.

Chapter 2 1 Francis Higginson had been instrumental in the arrest of James Nayler and Francis Howgill in Kirkby Stephen in November 1652, which resulted in their trial for blasphemy in Appleby in January 1653; see Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185, and 181–90. Regarding his first-hand experience of Quakers, Higginson wrote, ‘I once heard

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Naylor speak a while my selfe; I have enquired of divers that have been the Auditors of others of them, I have read very many of their Epistles and Papers that are common in the Country’; Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of The Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (London: printed by T. R. for H. R., 1653), 14. See George Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus: With his Packet of Letters from the High-Priests, against the disciples of the Lord (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1653), 29–34, and Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 69–73, for accounts of Nayler’s appearance in court in Appleby, including the exchange between Nayler and Higginson. Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 11, 12. Ibid., 11. For an analysis of Quaker gesture and deportment in relation to codes of civility, see Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 57–63. Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 15. Ibid., 16. For examples of accusations of witchcraft made against and by Fox and other Friends, see George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 110, 117, 120, 268; and on links made between Roman Catholicism and Quakerism, see 163n.67. For a discussion that also analyses the disturbance caused by early Quakerism in relation to Friends’ rhetoric, see Meiling Hazelton, ‘“Mony Choaks”: The Quaker Critique of the Seventeenth-Century Public Sphere’, Modern Philology, 98:2 (2000), 251–70. She argues that opponents’ unease and opposition can be traced to the Quaker excoriation of the clergy’s commodification of scripture and their counter-advocacy of a ‘communism of language’ (Hazelton, ‘Mony Choaks’, 258). The sudden expansion of the movement in 1652–53, as Fox travelled through Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland, has led scholars to dub this area ‘the Quaker Galilee’; see for example Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964), 42; Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 285; Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speechways during the Puritan Revolution’, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds), Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 72–112 (72). Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 14–15. Ibid., 34. See too for example Anon., The Querers and Quakers Cause at the Second Hearing (London: printed by I. G. for Nath: Brooke, 1653). Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624– 1691) (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986), 67. ‘Convincement’ also retained the sense of ‘persuasion’ at this time (as in Areopagitica, when Milton writes of those who, through reading, are ‘trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement’; John Milton, Areopagitica, in Prose Writings (London: J. M. Dent, 1958), 177), but, as I go on to discuss in this chapter, ‘persuasion’ is a complex issue in the context of Quaker ideas of convincement and the indwelling light.

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13 Norman Penney (ed.), The First Publishers of Truth: Being Early Records (Now First Printed) of the Introduction of Quakerism into the Counties of England and Wales. Supplement to Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 1–5 (London: Headley Brothers, 1907), 296, 286; John Story, Babilons Defence Broken down, and one of Antichrists Warriours Defeated: In an Answer to a Scandalous Pamphlet, Intituled, The Quaker-Jesuit: Or, Popery in Quakerism (London: printed for Robert Wilson, 1660), 8. Barbour offers a full account of Friends’ records of the protracted and painful process of convincement; Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 94–126. 14 Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus, 5; see too Nayler in ibid., 33. 15 Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 43. 16 Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 81, my italics. 17 Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 290. 18 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 17. 19 Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 290, 297. 20 Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word, 67; his emphasis. On convincement, see too ibid., 133–5, Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism 1655–1755 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1–46; Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 63–83. 21 Cope and Vann note Quaker resistance to the notion of rhetoric in relation to their own practice; Bauman, Ormsby-Lennon, Hawes, McDowell and Graves, however, all use the term in relation to Quaker discourse. For scholars who use the term ‘rhetoric’ in their analysis, see Jackson I. Cope, ‘SeventeenthCentury Quaker Style’, PMLA, 71 (1956), 725–54 (732–3); Vann, Social Development of English Quakerism, 2; Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 76–8; Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse’, 96; Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18–19; Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 164. Michael P. Graves, Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), offers an extremely comprehensive and systematic contextual engagement of the notion of a ‘Quaker rhetoric’ in relation to an analysis of Quaker sermons from the latter part of the seventeenth century. 22 OED 1a. 23 John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (London: printed by E. Cotes for George Eversden, 1657), 1; John Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence: Or, the Art of Rhetorick, as it is layd down in Scripture (London: printed by W. Wilson for George Sawbridge, 1659), 58. 24 Vann, Social Development of English Quakerism, 9–10. 25 Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 296. 26 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; this ed. republished with A Grammar of Motives, Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1962), 547. 27 Ibid., 544–5.

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Ibid., 570. Ibid., 582. Ibid. See Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’; Ormbsy-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse’; Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few; and Graves, Preaching the Inward Light, 157–224. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 551–2. For Friends, a general distrust of human language as a faulty aspect of fallen creation combined with an acute distrust of the ways and words of ‘hireling priests’, the Church of England clergy supported by tithes, so that the only word of worth was the one uttered by the inward voice of the Lord. Consequently, Vann notes, when Quakers ‘put pen to paper in the effort to reach the witness of God within other men, they shunned the artifices of rhetoric and syllogism’; Vann, Social Development of English Quakerism, 2. Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 297. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 122. Dorothy Waugh, ‘A Relation concerning Dorothy Waughs cruell usage by the Mayor of Carlile’, in Anon., The Lambs Defence Against Lyes (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1656); reprinted as an appendix to Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 227–8 (227). Ibid. On the use of the bridle, see David E. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985), 116–36; Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42:2 (1991), 179–213; Martin Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women cucked or washed”: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 48–80. N. H. Keeble, ‘“Take away preaching, and take away salvation”: Hugh Latimer, Protestantism, and Prose Style’, in Neil Rhodes (ed.), English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 164, 1997), 57–74 (57). Latimer, quoted in ibid., 61. Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 6. Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric in the Renaissance’, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 121–42 (123). Ibid., 125. The definitions of amplification and hypotyposis are from the OED. Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 127. Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique, 112; my emphasis.

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46 Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 127. It was authors such as Keckermann and Franco Burgersdijck ‘who were most widely read and who represented scholasticism to most people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’; John A. Trentman, ‘Scholasticism in the Seventeenth Century’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 818–37 (835). 47 Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 126. 48 Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 73. Bauman notes that Michael P. Graves found only ten extant Quaker sermons recorded before 1687, all by Fox; ibid., 74. 49 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 86. 50 George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 2 vols, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), I.145; Penney’s brackets. I refer to this edition here because, while the epistle constitutes part of the Journal, Smith omits all the epistles from his edition, and Nickalls includes only a much shortened version in his (on 174–6). The passage thus cited also has the advantage of giving an indication of the style and rhythm of the unedited text. 51 On the incantatory quality of early Quaker discourse, see Cope, SeventeenthCentury Quaker Style, 733, and Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 76. 52 Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, 730–7. 53 Fox, Journal, ed. Penney, I.79. 54 Margret Killin and Barbara Patison, A Warning from the Lord to the Teachers & People of Plimouth (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1655), 2. 55 Latimer, quoted by Keeble, ‘Take away preaching’, 61. 56 Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 126, 133. 57 Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence, 77. 58 Joseph Glanvill, An Essay Concerning Preaching: Written for the Direction of A Young Divine; and Useful also for the People, in order to Profitable Hearing (London: printed by A. C. for H. Brome, 1678), 54. 59 Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 131. 60 On Quaker plain style, see Frederick B. Tolles, ‘“Of the Best Sort but Plain”: The Quaker Esthetic’, American Quarterly 11:4 (1959), 484–502 (487), and Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 44–8; on Quaker linguistic ‘plain style’, see Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse’, passim. 61 Shuger, ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 135. 62 Ibid. 63 Cicero considered actio (delivery) to be ‘the dominant factor in oratory’, and both he and Quintilian emphasised the performative dimensions of oratorical delivery. See Cicero, De Oratore, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1942), III.56.213–61.228; II.169–83; Quintilian, Instituto Oratoria, XI.3, in Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Books 11–12, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 85–183. For an overview of the debate about oratory and acting, see Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 12–19. Many thanks to Alison Thorne for providing these references, and for clarifying

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the correspondence between classical and sacred rhetoric on this issue. Crockett, in The Play of Paradox, explores the congruence between Protestantism and theatre. Shuger ‘Sacred Rhetoric’, 137. William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying: Or A Treatise Concerning the Sacred and Onely true manner and methode of Preaching (London: by Felix Kyngston for E. E., 1607), 143–4. William Greenhill, Sermons of Christ (London: R. I. for Livewell Chapman, 1656), A4v. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 122. Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence, 14. Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetoric, 2, 7. Waugh, ‘A Relation concerning Dorothy Waughs cruell usage’, 227. In the Bible, Egypt is a symbol of captivity, repression and worldliness. Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, 2 vols (London: printed and sold by Luke Hinde, 1753), I.519. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 122; Waugh, ‘A Relation concerning Dorothy Waughs cruell usage’, 227. Ibid., 227. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 134–5. Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus, 8. Norman Penney, ‘Going Naked a Sign’, in Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 364–9 (364). See Kenneth L. Carroll, ‘Early Quakers and “going naked as a sign”’, Quaker History, 67:2 (1978), 69–87, and Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 84–94, for delineation and discussion of nakedness and other kinds of Quaker ‘sign’. George Fox, ‘The Short Journal’, in The Short Journal and Itinerary Journals of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 1–72 (21). Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 85. Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 259. Fox, Journal, ed. Penney, I.89; ‘yt’ and ‘ym’ are the form of ‘that’ and ‘them’ generally used in the Spence Manuscript, the copy-text for Penny’s edition of the Journal. Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 213. Fox wrote that Simpson ‘went three years Naked and in Sackcloth, in the days of Oliver and his Parliament as a Sign to them, and to the Priests shewing how God would strip them of their power, and that they should be as Naked as he was, and should be stript of their Benefices . . . And moreover he was made oftentimes to colour his face black, and so black they should be and appear so to people, for all their great profession; and so it came to pass. And then when it came to pass he was made to put on his clothes again.’ Quoted by Carroll, ‘Early Quakers and “going naked as a sign”’, 78. Cited and discussed by ibid., 79, and Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 89. Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 29–30. The performances of other kinds of sign, such as Thomas Aldam’s rending of his hat in front of Oliver Cromwell, were subject to similarly diverse interpretations by Friends themselves; see Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 86–7.

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85 Ibid., 92. 86 Nayler cited by Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 256. 87 George Fox, John Stubs and Benjamin Furley, ‘Introduction’, in A Battle-Door for Teachers & Professors to Learn Singular and Plural (London: printed for Robert Wilson, 1660), A2v. 88 On the relative importance of speech and silence in early Quakerism, see Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, especially chapters 2 and 8. See too Pink Dandelion, The Liturgies of Quakerism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 21–33, and Ormsby Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse’, 93–4. 89 The phrase ‘Let your lives speak’ is to be found on the plaque on Fox’s Pulpit at Firbank Fell, Sedbergh. Despite the phrase frequently being attributed to Fox, I have been unable to identify a precise source for it. The closest I have found are cited here: the phrase from the Journal can be found in Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 129, and see too Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 263: ‘that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people’. The words from the Epistles are taken from Epistle 200 in George Fox, The Works of George Fox (Philadelphia: Marcus T. C. Gould, 1831), 7.191–8 (194). 90 ‘Alice Cobb’s Testimony concerning her Mother Alice Curwen’, in Alice Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, Travail and Suffering of that faithful Servant of the Lord Alice Curwen (London: s.n., 1680), n.pag. 91 Waugh, ‘A Relation concerning Dorothy Waughs cruell usage’, 227. 92 For fuller discussion of this point with regard to the spatialised politics of sectarian discourse in the 1650s, see Hilary Hinds, ‘Sectarian Spaces: The Politics of Place and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Prophetic Writing’, Literature and History, 13:2 (2004), 1–25. 93 The phrase is taken from Richard G. Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), but is also used by Michele Lise Tarter in her ‘Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal Prophecy in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic World’, in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (eds), A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 145–62. 94 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 86.

Chapter 3 1 Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. 2 John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, ‘Introduction’, in John Bunyan, Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xiv. 3 John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 246. 4 Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations by

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Thomas Carlyle, vol. 3 (London: Dent, 1907), 341; H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 37; H. Larry Ingle, ‘Unravelling George Fox: The Real Person’, in Michael Mullett (ed.), New Light on George Fox 1624–1691 (York: The Ebor Press, 1994), 38. William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1955), 39; Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1961), 438, 439. T. Edmund Harvey, ‘Introduction’, in The Journal of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), I.xxix. Cope and Bartell also note the confidence of the tone of the Journal; see Jackson I. Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, PMLA, 71 (1956), 725–54 (726); Shirley Miller Bartell, ‘Uncertainty in Bunyan versus Assurance in Fox’, Quaker History, 58 (1969), 93–103 (101). Doncaster makes a similar point when he notes that ‘it was a fact that they did know an amazing release from the burden and bondage of sin’; L. Hugh Doncaster, ‘Early Quaker Thought on “That State in which Adam was before he Fell”’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 41:1 (1949), 13–24 (21). Cope calls this ‘perhaps the most insistent single phrase in Fox’s Journal’, and Bartell notes it as ‘the characteristic response he made to almost every situation’. Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, 730; Bartell, ‘Uncertainty in Bunyan versus Assurance in Fox’, 101. John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Naomi Winter, ‘“Out of the Paths and Steps of Solid Men” – Masculinities in George Fox’s Journal’, Literature and Theology, 14:2 (2000), 145–59 (149). Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 246. See for example Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), a study of the ‘literary melancholia’ of the Renaissance, and in particular its ‘presumption that the melancholic subject is male’, in which she argues that ‘melancholia disturbs the presumed sexual “identity” of self-representing masculine subjects’ (8, 7, 9). On the threat to masculinity posed by early modern ideas about gender indeterminacy, see Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 25–9, 123–5. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 2. Ibid., 5. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 141. For discussion of the interconnections between Calvinism and sexuality in the formation of subjectivities, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 122–6, 241–51. The line ‘I love an other and thus I hate myself ’ is from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Sonnet XXVI, ‘I find no peace, and all my war is done’, in Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems, ed. Joost Daalder (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 24. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 4.

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16 Roger Smith, ‘Self-Reflection and the Self ’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 54. 17 Gary Waller, ‘The Rewriting of Petrarch: Sidney and the Languages of SixteenthCentury Poetry’, in Gary Waller and Michael D. Moore (eds), Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 69–83 (77). 18 Article XVII of ‘Articles of Religion’ (39 Articles) prepared first under Edward VI, confirmed under Elizabeth, read in part: ‘Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour’; quoted in John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 113. 19 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 20. 20 Regarding Astrophil and Stella, see Waller, ‘The Rewriting of Petrarch’, and Marion Campbell, ‘Unending Desire: Sidney’s Reinvention of Petrarchan Form in Astrophil and Stella’, in Waller and Moore (eds), Sir Philip Sidney, 84–94. 21 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 94. 22 For a comparison of the characteristic affective states of Fox and Bunyan as produced in their autobiographical writings, see Bartell, ‘Uncertainty in Bunyan versus Assurance in Fox’. Hugh Barbour compares Fox’s and Bunyan’s experience of conversion in ‘The “Openings” of Fox and Bunyan’, in Mullett (ed.), New Light on George Fox, 129–43. For a comparison of Puritan spiritual autobiographies (including Bunyan’s) with Quaker modes of self-representation, see Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’. 23 Richard Norwood, ‘Confessions’ (written 1639–40), in Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 153. 24 The term ‘subjectification’ derives from Foucault, and refers to the ‘way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’, indicating a concern with ‘those techniques through which the person initiates an active self-formation. .  .  . These operations characteristically entail a process of self-understanding but one which is mediated by an external authority figure’; Paul Rabinow, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1991), 11. Stachniewski adopts the term because it ‘points to the collaboration of internal with external agencies of control through the medium of discourse’ (Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 6). He elaborates the point thus: ‘“There are two meanings of the word subject,” says Foucault: “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.” The discourse of Calvinism was the power source into which spiritual autobiographers were plugged; and its disciplinary shocks were administered by the agency of both authority figures and the mental processes they had trained to deputize for them’ (ibid., 85). 25 Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings With that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (London: printed for John Wallis, 1683), 7.

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26 Ibid., 15–16. 27 Ibid., 72. 28 Elspeth Graham, ‘Authority, Resistance and Loss: Gendered Difference in the Writings of John Bunyan and Hannah Allen’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim (eds), John Bunyan and His England 1628–88 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 115–30 (124). 29 Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings, 71. On this point, see Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self ’, in Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 209–33 (217–20). 30 On the affective contours of Trapnel’s faith, and their links to her apprehension of the ‘free grace’ of God, see Hilary Hinds, ‘Soul-Ravishing and SinSubduing: Anna Trapnel and the Gendered Politics of Free Grace’, Renaissance and Reformation, 25:4 (2001), 117–37. 31 Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints (London: Thomas Brewster, 1654), 32. 32 Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘Nursing Fathers: Patriarchy as a Cultural Ideal’, in her Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 220. 33 Shuger, Nursing Fathers’, 223. 34 See for example Phyllis Mack, ‘Women as Prophets During the English Civil War’, Feminist Studies 8:1 (1982), 19–45; Christine Trevett, Women and Quakerism in the 17th Century (York: The Ebor Press, 1991); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 172–83, 277–8; Winter, ‘Masculinities in George Fox’s Journal’, 151–5. 35 Michele Lise Tarter, ‘Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal Prophecy in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic World’, in J. M. Lindman and M. L. Tarter (eds), A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 146. For further discussion of the corporeality of early Quaker public discourse, see Chapter 2. 36 Mack, ‘Women as Prophets’. See too Diane Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds), Women, Writing, History 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), 139–58. 37 On the Puritan dissolution of self, see Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, The Historical Journal, 39:1 (1996), 33–56, especially 42–3; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 80–107; Mack, Visionary Women, 7–8. 38 On the significance of the chronological structure of Fox’s text, see Chapter 4. On conversion narrative, see Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 4. Ibid., 4, 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 6, 12. Ibid., 8. Ingle, First Among Friends, 40. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 10, 11. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 33. On Fox’s redefinition of election and reprobation, see ibid., 69, 76, 176, and especially 240: ‘they [i.e. priests and professors] had frightened people with the doctrine of election and reprobation: and said that the greatest part of men and women God had ordained them for Hell, let them pray or preach or sing and do what they could, it was all nothing if they was ordained for hell. And God had a certain number which was elected for Heaven, let them do what they would, as David an adulterer and Paul a persecutor, yet elected vessels for Heaven. . . . So I was made to open to the people the folly of their priests’ doctrines’. Ibid., 33–4. On the ordo salutis, see von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace; Dewey D. Wallace, Jr, ‘The Doctrine of Predestination in the Early English Reformation’, Church History, 43 (1974), 201–15; Dewey D. Wallace, Jr, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 34. Ibid. Ingle, First Among Friends, 42. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 230–1. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 84, 67. Nigel Smith, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., xxv. Ibid., 129, 222. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 175. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 111, 112, 116. These examples are found respectively in ibid., 135, 136, 138 and 162, 138 and 218. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 218. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 308. Ibid., 175, 263. Ibid., 174. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 109. Ibid., 90, 97, 98, 124, 259–62. The Lancaster trial is recounted on 105–6, though this narrative account is brief; the complete extant transcript of the trial can be found in Fox, Journal, ed. Penney, I.63–70, and an abbreviated account of the trial

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transcript is included in Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 133–5. Fox’s trials in Carlisle and Launceston can be found respectively in Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 123–5, 185–91. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 137. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 64, 134. Ibid., 33, 76. Ibid., 121. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of this process of ‘discernment’. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 134. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 257–8. On Fox’s doctrine of ‘celestial inhabitation’, or christopresentism, and the concomitant notion of ‘celestial flesh’, see Richard G. Bailey, ‘The Making and Unmaking of a God: New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism’, in Mullett (ed.), New Light on George Fox, 110–28. For a fuller exposition of his analysis, see Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992). Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’, 43. Ibid. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 127. On Quaker perfectionism, see Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 107–10; Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 51–5; Doncaster, ‘Early Quaker Thought on “That State in which Adam was before he Fell”’; Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 149–50; J. William Frost, ‘The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology’, Church History, 39:4 (1970), 503–23, see especially 513–20; T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist–Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60–1; Bailey, New Light on George Fox, 25–7, 63–5; 94, 99–100, 115, 124; Max L. Carter, ‘Early Friends and the Alchemy of Perfection’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 58:3 (1999), 235–50. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 159. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 34. Ibid., 178. For an analysis of the importance of the difference between claiming equality with, and claiming unity with, the divine at Fox’s trial for blasphemy in Lancaster in 1652, see Bailey, New Light on George Fox, 102–10. Compare these two OED definitions of ‘agent’: ‘B. 1. a. One who (or that which) acts or exerts power, as distinguished from the patient, and also from the instrument’; and ‘4. a. Of persons: One who does the actual work of anything, as distinguished from the instigator or employer; hence, one who acts for another, a deputy, steward, factor, substitute, representative, or emissary’. While Greenblatt’s formulation of the dream of unshakable masculine self-sufficiency

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reifies the subject as agent in the first of these senses, so Fox’s position of potent masculine agency is activated by the latter. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 99. Ibid., 131. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 129. I owe this observation on the saintliness of the emaciated and infantilised body to a paper given by Michele Moatt (Lancaster University), entitled ‘Monstrous Bodies and the Glory to Come: An Examination of the Food-Body Discourse of the Twelfth Century Monastic Reform Movement’, at the ‘Sacred and Profane Identities’ conference, Groningen, Netherlands, November 2005. Winter, ‘Masculinities in George Fox’s Journal’, 148. Ibid., 147. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 105–6, 185–90, 258–62, 101–2. Isabel Ross, Margaret Fell: Mother of Quakerism, (York: The Ebor Press, 2nd ed., 1984), 214–15. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 402. For discussions of Quaker ideas about marriage, as well as about the marriage of Fox and Fell, see Caroline Whitbeck, ‘Friends Historical Testimony on the Marriage Relationship’, Friends Journal, 35.6 (1989), 13–15, and Mack, Visionary Women, 226–32. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 402. Ross, Margaret Fell, 213–19. For a discussion of going naked as a sign, see Chapter 2, 51–2. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 5. For a much-cited ecstatic letter from Fell to Fox, see Elsa F. Glines, Undaunted Zeal: The Letters of Margaret Fell (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 2003), 9–11. For an account of the evidence that Fell might have thought herself to be pregnant, see Ingle, First Among Friends, 228, 342–3n.105. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 9. Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 35. See too Roger Pooley, ‘Grace Abounding and the New Sense of Self ’, in Laurence, Owens and Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England, 105–14. Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 346, 346–7. Ibid., 347–8. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 268. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 410, 412. These two episodes of doubt and spiritual assault both coincided with periods of social and political instability and turbulence; see Braithwaite, Second Period of Quakerism, 265, 437; H. Larry Ingle, ‘Richard Hubberthorne and History: The Crisis of 1659’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 56:3 (1992), 189–200. While it is tempting to read Fox’s bodily and mental disturbances as an internal concomitant of these external crises, it is also the case that Quakerism was the product of a social, political and religious matrix of profound unrest and instability, so that it is, ultimately, difficult to find any absolute qualitative dividing line between these years and others.

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109 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 109. 110 Winter, ‘Masculinities in George Fox’s Journal’, 155.

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An earlier version of this chapter was co-authored with Alison Findlay and published as ‘The Journal of George Fox: A Technology of Presence’, Quaker Studies, 12:1 (2007), 89–106. I am very grateful for her permission to include this work in this book. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 2 vols, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), II.347–8. Fox, Journal, ed. Penney, I.xiii. George Fox, A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Ancient, Eminent and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, George Fox (London: Printed for Thomas Northcott, 1694). Geoffrey Nuttall, ‘Introduction’, in George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), xxx. H. Larry Ingle, ‘Unravelling George Fox: The Real Person’, in Michael Mullett (ed.), New Light on George Fox 1624–1691 (York: The Ebor Press, 1994), 36–44 (38). David Boulton, ‘Public Policy and Politics in Fox’s Thought: The Un-militant Tendency in Early Quakerism’, in Mullett (ed. ), New Light on George Fox, 144–52 (144); John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 231. Nigel Smith, ‘Introduction’, in George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), xi. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 233–5. H. Larry Ingle, ‘George Fox, Historian’, Quaker History, 83:1 (1993), 28–35 (32). Thomas N. Corns, ‘“No Man’s Copy”: The Critical Problem of Fox’s Journal’, in Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 99–111 (110). Geoffrey Nuttall, ‘Reflections on William Penn’s Preface to George Fox’s Journal’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 57:2 (1995), 113–17 (113). Nuttall, ‘Introduction’, in Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 114. Corns, ‘No Man’s Copy’, 110. Michel Foucault , ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1984), 340–72 (341); Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, The Historical Journal, 39:1 (1996), 33–56 (40). Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (London: Penguin, 2003), xxxviii. See especially Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); for a critique of such an approach, see David Aers, ‘A

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Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 177–202. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 89. Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’, 55. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 101–2. I am particularly indebted to Alison Findlay for the subsequent analysis of this passage. For an analysis of the extent to which the account offered by Fox’s Journal is shaped by later events and priorities, see Corns, ‘No Man’s Copy’, 104–10. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 33–4. Ibid., 58–9. Christopher Hill wrote of Fox’s Journal that ‘the story looks different when you know, or think you know, how it ended: when your object in writing is not merely to produce a correct record but to edify and confirm in their faith people living at the end of the story, for whom the beginning meant little’; The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972; this ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1975), 231. William Penn, ‘The preface, being a summary account of the divers dispensations of God to men, from the beginning of the world to that of our present age’, in Fox, A Journal or Historical Account, n.pag. OED: ‘Annals’, 1, 2. Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25 (5, 11). Ibid., 8. Ibid. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 3. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 47–8. The end of time is most explicitly prophesied in Revelation 10. 5–6: ‘And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer’. For other biblical examples of kairotic time, see (as well as those cited by Kermode) Galatians 4.4 ‘But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law’. Penn, ‘Preface’, Ar. Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 12. Bailey, New Light on George Fox, 20, my emphasis. Pink Dandelion, The Liturgies of Quakerism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 13. See too Douglas Gwyn’s formulation of the complex merging of temporalities in early Quakerism: ‘Fox describes the

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life of faith – out of time (or history) as a primary reference, yet still in time and through time. . . . Fox’s description of this entry into the new age, even while one is still engaged with the old age, suggests a relationship between the two in which they do not simply join end to end (as one year succeeds another), but in which the new age diverges from the old into a new dimension of experience’ (Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624–1691) (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986), 117, his emphasis). Pink Dandelion reaches a similar conclusion in his fascinating and comprehensive discussion of Quaker temporalities: ‘The Quaker experience is thus temporal, in that they engage with the world, and meta-temporal in their relationship with Christ the Word. All is headed towards a global meta-temporality where heaven is realised on earth and time and history, and the Church as it has been known, ends’; Dandelion, The Liturgies of Quakerism, 19; see too chapter 1, ‘The end of time and the beginning of Quakerism’, passim. For an important early discussion of Quaker temporality, see Jackson I. Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, PMLA, 71 (1956), 725–54 (744–9). T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist–Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. Ibid., 4–5. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 44–5. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 4. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 86. Ibid., 96. On Quaker conceptualisation of ‘inward and ‘outward, see M. A. Creasey, ‘“Inward” and “Outward”: A Study in Early Quaker Language’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, supplement no. 30 (1962), 1–24. Sherman, Telling Time, 43, 34. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 441. OED: ‘Journal’, 2a, 2b, 3, 4. Nigel Smith, ‘Border Crossings: Fox’s Journeys in an International Context’; unpublished conference paper delivered at ‘Early Quaker Networks and the Politics of Place 1652–1672’ conference, Lancaster, 1 May 2004, 4. ‘Alice Cobb’s Testimony concerning her Mother Alice Curwen’, in Alice Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, Travail and Suffering of that faithful Servant of the Lord Alice Curwen (London: s.n., 1680), n.pag; original italics. Sherman, Telling Time, 59. Smith, ‘Border Crossings’, 2. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 233n.66. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, xxii. See Sherman on the formulation ‘and so’ in Pepys’s Diary: Telling Time, 68. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 102, 106, 274. Ibid., 102, 101–2. In this regard, Gwyn’s analysis of Fox’s habit of combining the past and present (though tellingly, not the future) tense of verbs is pertinent: ‘The vital and

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triumphant message of Quakerism is that the work has already begun. Fox expresses this repeatedly in his proclamations that Christ “is come and coming to reign”, “the church in her glory and beauty is appeared and appearing” . . .. With this figure of speech, he grounds ultimate future in an unfolding present’; Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word, 206. 55 Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’, 43; James Nayler, Love to the Lost: And a Hand Held Forth to the Helpless, to lead out of the Dark (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1656), 56. 56 Henry J. Cadbury, ‘George Fox’s Later Years’, in Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 755, 754. 57 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 26, 58.

Chapter 5 1 Grace Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage: The Holy Journey in English Renaissance Literature (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 29. 2 On the terms ‘Public Friends’ and ‘Publishers of Truth’, see 156n.16. 3 Edward Burrough, ‘A Faithful Testimony Concerning the True Worship of God’ (1659), in The Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation (s.l.: s.n., 1672), 474–82 (474). 4 George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 25. Fox is here also alluding to Matthew 10.7: ‘And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand’. 7 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 6. For Fox’s last journey overseas, to Holland in 1684, see Henry J. Cadbury, ‘George Fox’s Later Years’, in George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 713–56 (730–1); H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 277. 8 Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 72. For accounts of these early journeys, see William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1955), 51–129; Ingle, First Among Friends, 72–106; Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 3–34. 9 Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 66. 10 The estimate was made using the 1655 journeys as identified in Nigel Smith’s edition of the Journal together with Google maps. The distance cannot be given more precisely because Fox’s list of places visited is incomplete and at times imprecise; sometimes, for example, he records only that he went into Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire, and at others that he visited ‘another town’. 11 On the relationship between Quakers and Seekers, see Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 25–7; Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 30–2. On the origins of the movement more generally, see Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, chapter 1;

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Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, chapters 2 and 3; Ingle, First Among Friends, 81–6; Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism 1655–1755 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 10–32; Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985), 7–45; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 3–34; Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 11–40. Kate Peters analyses the importance of print in the establishment of the early movement and its networks; see her Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chapters 1–3. See too Thomas O’Malley, ‘The Press and Quakerism 1653–1659’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 54 (1979), 169–84. On travel and support networks and methods, see Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 51–3; Vann Social Development, 10–12, 97–101; and Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 25–30. On the importance of itinerant ministers to the early movement, see Frederick B. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 24–9, and Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 13–15, 25–8. See too Barbara Ritter Dailey, ‘The Itinerant Preacher and the Social Network in Seventeenth-Century New England’, in Peter Benes (ed.), Itinerancy in New England and New York. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings 1984 (Boston: Boston University, 1986), 37–48. For more details of these (and other) Friends and their journeys, see Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 153–205; 401–33; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 34; Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); Sylvia Brown, ‘The Radical Travels of Mary Fisher: Walking and Writing in the Universal Light’, in Sylvia Brown (ed.), Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007) 39–64; Sünne Juterczenka, ‘Crossing Borders and Negotiating Boundaries: The Seventeenth-Century European Missions and Persecution’, Quaker Studies, 12:1 (2007), 39–53. Norman Penney (ed.), The First Publishers of Truth: Being Early Records (Now First Printed) of the Introduction of Quakerism into the Counties of England and Wales. Supplement to Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 1–5 (London: Headley Brothers, 1907), provides a fascinating and exhaustive contemporary insight into the early Quaker itinerant ministry, as does Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, 2 vols (London: printed and sold by Luke Hinde, 1753). Quoted in Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 337. Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 198. For further discussion of the extent of Quaker geographical ambitions, including Fox’s letter to the Emperor of China, see Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 67–70. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 27. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 5, 12; see too 7. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 6; see too 10, 12. Ibid., 16.

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21 Ibid., 33; 39; 350. For further references in the Journal to fields, see 61, 73–4, 91, 160, 219; and to hills see 83, 127, 128, 143, 229–30, 235. 22 On contemporary understandings of prophecy, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 75–89; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), especially 23–103; Elaine Hobby, ‘Prophecy, Enthusiasm and Female Pamphleteers’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 162–78; Hilary Hinds, ‘Prophecy and Religious Polemic’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 235–46. More generally, see Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds), Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History 1300–2000 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997). 23 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 5, 12. 24 Ibid., 66. 25 Ibid., 127, 109. 26 Ibid., 197. 27 Ibid. 28 A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 140. 29 J. F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 26–8; see too Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 30 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972; this ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1975), 27. 31 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 49, 85. 32 Thomas N. Corns, ‘Bunyan, Milton and the Diversity of Radical Protestant Writing’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing (Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 32; Corns is referring here to Milton’s ‘Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church’ (1659); see Milton, Complete Prose Works, 8 vols, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), VII.273–321; see especially 304–5. 33 Beier, Masterless Men, 140–1. 34 On Coppin, see ODNB; Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 220–3; Lawrence Clarkson, A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness; or Light and Darkness One (London, 1650), A2r; Anna Trapnel’s journey to Cornwall is recounted in her Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (London: Thomas Brewster, 1654); Elinor Channel, A Message from God, by a Dumb Woman (1653) is included as an appendix in Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 219–21. Religious itinerancy was not only an English phenomenon in the seventeenth century. Wanderers, Michel de Certeau notes, ‘abounded during that period in which the Churches ceased organizing space and before a political order was in firm control. There are

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all sorts of wanderers, from the little passersby . . . to the great itinerants’; Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable. Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 292. On the place of itinerancy in the constitution of the perceived ‘Quaker menace’, see Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 37–52; see too Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 124–6. ‘To the Right Worshipfull the Justices of the Peace for the County of Westmorland’, in James Nayler, Several Petitions Answered, That were put up by the Priests of Westmorland, Against James Nayler and Geo. Fox (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1653), 1–2 (1). Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (London: printed by T. R. for H. R., 1653), 1. Ibid., 35; his italics. Higginson is quoting from John Owen, A sermon preached to the Honourable House of Commons, in Parliament assembled: on January 31. A day of solemne humiliation. With a discourse about toleration, and the duty of the civill magistrate about religion, thereunto annexed. Humbly presented to them, and all peace-loving men of this nation (London, printed by Matthew Simmons, 1649). The passage quoted by Higginson is taken not from page 32 of Owen’s text, as he suggests, but from page 82. Owen was a theologian and Independent minister, whose sermon quoted here was delivered to the Commons on the day after the regicide, which he supported as a just restraint on a monarch’s misrule. Interestingly, in the context of Higginson’s citation of him in this context, Owen’s appendix to the text argued for religious toleration, ‘though he acknowledged the state’s right to punish heretics and schismatics who disrupted the peace or employed violence to thwart the gospel’s progress’ (ODNB). Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 28. A journeyman was ‘a mechanic who has served his apprenticeship or learned a trade or handicraft, and works at it not on his own account but as the servant or employee of another’; it was also used pejoratively to refer to a hireling or drudge, or someone who was not a ‘master’ of his trade (OED 1, 2a, 2b). William Prynne, The Quakers Unmasked, And clearly detected to be but the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuites, and Fransciscan Fryers (London: Edward Thomas, 2nd ed., 1655), title page, 1, 2. St. 39 Eliz. Cap. 4. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in SeventeenthCentury England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 445. William C. Braithwaite, ‘The Penal Laws Affecting Early Friends in England’, in Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 347. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 74, 101. Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 45. See too Mark 6.7–9 and Luke 9.2–4. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 6. The allusion here is to Christ’s words in Luke 14.26: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also he cannot be my disciple’. James Nayler, A Collection of Sundry Books, Epistles and Papers Written by James Nayler (London: J. Sowle, 1716), 12, 186; his italics.

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47 T. T. [Theophila Townsend], A Testimony Concerning the Life and Death of Jane Whitehead. That Faithful Servant and Hand-maid of the Lord (London: s.n., 1676), 12, 13. 48 Susan Wiseman, ‘Read Within: Gender, Cultural Difference and Quaker Women’s Travel Narratives’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (eds), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996; this ed: Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 153–71 (154). Wiseman’s sense of ‘Quaker self-mythologization’ accords with de Certeau’s suggestion that ‘What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction’; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 107. 49 Bonnelyn Young Kunze, Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 153. 50 Wiseman, ‘Read Within’, 156. She is discussing Barbara Blaugdone, An account of the travels, sufferings and persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone (London: printed and sold by T. S., 1691). 51 Quoted in Mack, Visionary Women, 224. 52 See Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 241–78; Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, chapter 3 passim; Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 35–48. 53 Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 222–6. On the skimmington ride, see Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 105:1 (1984), 79–113; David Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 116–36; David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 54 On the rhetoric of the ‘preposterous’ – that is, of reversal or inversion – see Patricia Parker, ‘Spelling Backwards’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007), 25–50. 55 This notwithstanding, see an analysis of Quaker gait and posture in Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 58–60. 56 Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 73–4. 57 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 158–9. 58 For an analysis of this aspect of Fox’s prose, see Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, xx–xxv. 59 Higginson, Irreligion of the Northern Quakers, 28; OED: ‘journeyman’: 1. 60 The complete extant transcript of the trial can be found in George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 2 vols, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), I.63–70; see too Penney’s note on the trial on 412. An abbreviated account of the trial transcript is included in Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 133–5. 61 Thomas Corns argues that Fox ‘may have sought to offer a sanitized version of Quakerism more suitable in the puritan winter of the 1660s and early 1670s. But

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any such tendency is unsustained. The legacy he left for his literary executors to sort out was too fissured, too contradictory, too retentive of earlier sentiments and evidence to be rendered quite coherent even by the assiduous Ellwood’; Thomas N. Corns, ‘“No Man’s Copy”: The Critical Problem of Fox’s Journal’, in Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 99–111 (110). Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 401. de Certeau, Mystic Fable. 299. Smith, de Certeau’s translator, explains his translation of ‘la mystique’ as mystics: ‘This term cannot be rendered accurately by the English word “mysticism,” which would correspond rather to the French le mysticisme, and be far too generic and essentialist a term to convey the historical specificity of the subject of this study. . . . I have, therefore, in extremis, adopted the bold solution of introducing a made-up English term, mystics (always in italics, to distinguish it from the plural of “a mystic”), to render la mystique, a field that might have won (but never did, in English) a name alongside metaphysics, say, or optics’ (ix–x). Accordingly, I follow Smith’s lead in italicising mystics in this discussion of de Certeau’s work. There is a longstanding debate in Quaker studies about the accuracy and aptness of conceptualising Quakerism within a tradition of mysticism as opposed to a tradition of Protestantism or radical Puritanism. The former position is usually routed back to the work of Rufus M. Jones, in Studies in Mystical Religion (s.l.: MacMillan, 1909) and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (s.l.: MacMillan, 1914), and to William C. Braithwaite; the latter is traced to, in particular, the work of Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, and Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England. Overviews of this debate can be found in Melvin B. Endy, ‘The Interpretation of Quakerism. Rufus Jones and His Critics’, Quaker History: Bulletin of Friends’ Historical Association, 62:1 (1981), 3–21, and Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624–1691) (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986), xiii–xix. See too Pink Dandelion, ‘Introduction’, 1–8; Hugh Barbour, ‘Sixty Years in Early Quaker History’, 19–31; and John Punshon, ‘The End of (Quaker) History? Some Reflections on the Process’, 32–42, all in Pink Dandelion (ed.), The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Nigel Smith discusses mid-seventeenth-century mysticism in Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 105–225; and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon considers Fox’s use of language in relation to mysticism in ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speechways during the Puritan Revolution’, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds), Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 72–112 (86–7). de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 13, 5. Ibid., 2; my italics. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 299; original italics. Ibid., 8; on the terms and delineation of this analogy, see 6–9. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine

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Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 74–85 (81). de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 13. Ibid., 14. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 93. See Chapter 4, 85–6, for a detailed discussion of just such a violent incident, where Fox’s characteristic stillness is at the centre of, and contrasts with, the tumultuous and ungodly movement of others. George Fox, Epistle 10, in A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, Letters and Testimonies (London: T. Sowle, 1698), 11; reprinted in Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts (eds), Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1700 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 487. Fox, Epistles 16, 43 and 230, in A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, 14, 39, 201. Fox, Journal, ed. Penney, I.224; Penney’s brackets. Charles Marshall, An Epistle to Friends coming forth in the Beginning of a Testimony and of the Snares of the Enemy Therein (London?: s.n., 1730?), 3–4, 4, 6. The 1844 edition of Marshall’s writings dates this epistle as 1677; see Charles Marshall, The Journal, together with sundry epistles and other writings (London: Richard Barrett, 1844), 122–5. Early English Books Online notes that ‘Wing (CD-ROM edition) reports date of publication as 1680’. For a detailed analysis of Marshall’s preaching rhetoric, see Michael P. Graves, Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 100–4. See too Katherine Bull to Dewsbury: ‘there is nothinge for me to doe but to stand stel in the obedience to the light’, quoted in Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 102. Edward Burrough articulated a similar sense of the struggle between spiritual stillness and carnal motion: ‘while waiting upon the Lord in silence . . . being stayed in the Light of Christ within us, from all thoughts, fleshly motions, and desires, . . . we received often the pouring down of the spirit upon us’; Edward Burrough, ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, in George Fox The Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded (London: Tho: Simmons, 1659), bv–b2r. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 83. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101. Ibid. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 221, 173. Leed, Mind of the Traveler, 54. Anon. (attributed here to Sir Walter Ralegh), ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, in Edward Lucie-Smith (ed.), The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 208–10; George Herbert, ‘The Pilgrimage’, in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 494–5; Henry Vaughan, ‘The Pilgrimage’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 224–5; Robert Herrick. ‘On himselfe’ (‘Here down my wearyed limbs Ile lay’), in The Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 123; John Donne, Sonnet 6 (‘This is my play’s last scene’), in The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith

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(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 311; Thomas Traherne, ‘Walking’, in Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 123–4. On Protestant pilgrimage, see Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage; N. H. Keeble, ‘“To be a pilgrim”: Constructing the Protestant Life in Early Modern England’, in Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (eds), Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238–56; on walking and meditation in Traherne’s work, see Richard Douglas Jordan, ‘Thomas Traherne and the Art of Meditation’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46:3 (1985), 381–403. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler, 26. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 88. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler, 44–5. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 5. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 333–4. Ibid., 323. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117, 118, 117; his italics. de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 299. Ibid., 17; his italics. Ibid. Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, ‘To the Priests and People of England’ (1655), in Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 222, 223. Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Mystery of Walking’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32:3 (2002), 571–80 (578). Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Physiology of Walking’, in Pages From an Old Volume of Life: A Collection of Essays, 1857–1881 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892), 121–31 (127–8). de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 271; his italics. Ibid., 291. See too 1 John 2 for further reference to walking in the light and stumbling, and 2 John’s prioritisation of journeying and presence.

Chapter 6 1 George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 83. 2 The phrase ‘the 1652 country’ is used by Friends to designate the area covered by Fox’s 1652 journey from Pendle Hill to Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston, Cumbria. 3 On the importance of itinerancy to the early movement, see Chapter 5. 4 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 82–3. 5 Tolles speculates that Fox’s vision of ‘Lancashire sea’ might be seen as indicative of the importance of the land mass across that sea, and the later Atlantic communities of Friends, to the development of the movement; Frederick B. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 4–5. 6 On the importance of place in accounts of early Quaker travels, see Susan

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Wiseman, ‘Read Within: Gender, Cultural Difference and Quaker Women’s Travel Narratives’, in K. Chedgzoy, M. Hansen and S. Trill (eds), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996; this ed.: Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 153–71; on the relation between text and itinerancy, see Kate Peters, ‘Patterns of Quaker Authorship, 1652–6’, in Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 6–24; and Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). On early Friends’ beliefs about the indwelling light and the godliness of the regenerate body, see Chapter 1, and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Studies in Christian Enthusiasm, Illustrated from Early Quakerism (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1948); Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); J. William Frost, ‘The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology’, Church History, 39:4 (1970), 503–23; Richard G. Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992); and Michele Lise Tarter, ‘Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal Prophecy in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic World’, in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (eds), A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 145–62. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 86. Ibid., 83. Most historians take the first transatlantic Quaker travellers to have been Mary Fisher and Ann Austin. Carroll, however, argues that it may have been Elizabeth Harris; see Kenneth L. Carroll, ‘Elizabeth Harris, the Founder of American Quakerism’, Quaker History, 57 (1968), 96–111. Accounts of Fox’s journeys can be found in varying forms in the different editions of his Journal. My discussion here draws on George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 2 vols, ed. Norman Penney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911); The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); and Fox, Journal, ed. Smith. The other principal texts discussed in this chapter are Alice Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, Travail and Suffering of that faithful Servant of the Lord Alice Curwen (London: s.n., 1680); and Joan Vokins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified: As Manifested and Revealed in his Faithful Handmaid Joan Vokins (London: printed for Thomas Northcott, 1691). Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 456. Ibid., 461. See the incomplete contemporary maps of New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Carolina in J. D. Black (ed.), The Blathwayt Atlas, 2 vols (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970). Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 468, 469. Ibid., 463, 469, 470. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 12. Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 487–8.

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19 More generally, the passage alludes to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt in Exodus 13, 14, 15. 20 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 27. On early modern readings of America in relation to the fall, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Kenneth Olwig, Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 21 For discussion of the importance, and development, of the notion of ‘suffering’ in the movement, see John R. Knott, ‘Joseph Besse and the Quaker Culture of Suffering’, in Corns and Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing, 126–41. 22 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 86. 23 Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 3. 24 Ibid., 4–5; original emphasis. 25 Vokins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified, 34, 35. Thomas Case, of Newtown, Long Island, set up a ‘new form of Quakerism’, asserting that ‘he was come to perfection, and could sin no more than Christ’; Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 232. 26 Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 2. On the executions of Friends in Massachusetts, see Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies, 63–89. 27 Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 12. 28 Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 609–10. The italicised words were inserted by Nickalls from Fox, Journal, ed. Penney, II.255. 29 Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 596. These words are John Hull’s, one of Fox’s travelling companions. Nickalls included this in his edition of Fox’s Journal because of the lack of an account from Fox himself. 30 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 487. 31 Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 6–7. 32 ‘An Act to prevent the People called Quakers, from bringing Negroes to their Meeting . . . whereby the safety of this Island may be hazared [sic]’; Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, 2 vols (London: printed and sold by Luke Hinde, 1753), II.22. 33 Anon., Great Newes from the Barbadoes, or A True and Faithful account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes against the English (London: printed for L. Curtis, 1676), 12. 34 Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 6. 35 Vokins was in Barbados from January or February to April or May 1681, but it is not possible to date the duration of her stay more precisely than this from her text. 36 Vokins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified, 42–3. 37 On the colonial history of Barbados, see Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados 1625–1685 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean 1624–1690

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(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972); Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Hilary McD. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2006); Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). There is some debate among historians as to the timing and correlation of the introduction of sugar and of slave labour to Barbados; see Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted; Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Puckrein, Little England, 12; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 10. In Englishmen Transplanted, Gragg suggests that Barbados in the seventeenth century was in fact no more rapacious or brutal than other colonies; see especially 8–10. It remains the case, however, that seventeenth-century visitors described the society they found in Barbados as acquisitive, fractious, amoral and self-serving. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657), 108. Jerome S. Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654’, The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 32 (1967), 56–76 (67, 68). Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 77. John Rous, A Warning to the Inhabitants of Barbadoes (London: s.n., 1656), 1; Richard Pinder, A Loving Invitation (To Repentance, and Amendment of life) Unto all the Inhabitants of the Island Barbados (London: Robert Wilson, 1660), 6–7, 7, 8. George Fox, To the Ministers, Teachers, and Priests (So called, and so Stileing your Selves) in Barbadoes (London: s.n., 1672), 6, 9. On the history of the Quaker presence in Barbados, see Harriet Frorer Durham, Caribbean Quakers (Hollywood, FL: Dukane Press, 1972); E. M. Shilstone, ‘Some Early Records of the Friends in Barbados’, The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 34:1 (1971): 43–57; Barbara Ritter Dailey, ‘The Early Quaker Mission and the Settlement of Meetings in Barbados, 1655–1700’, The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 39 (1991): 24–46; Larry Gragg, ‘A Heavenly Visitation’, History Today, February 2002: 46–51; Maris Corbin, ‘An Old Quaker Burial Ground in Barbados’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 60:1 (2003): 36–40; Larry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009). On trade routes between England, the Caribbean and New England, see Babette M. Levy, Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies (Worcester, MA:

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48

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American Antiquarian Society, 1960), 303; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 4; and Durham, Caribbean Quakers, 8. Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit’, 69. Gragg estimates that ‘Over seventy “public Friends” visited Barbados between 1655 and 1720’; Gragg, The Quaker Community, 57. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 28. For a comprehensive list of Quaker visitors to Barbados, see Levy, Early Puritanism, 303; see too Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados. For Friends’ comments on their successes in Barbados, see Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 609; William Edmundson, A Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry (London: Harvey and Darton, 1829), 54–5; Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 6; Vokins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified, 42–3. See too Braithwaite, Second Period, 402; Durham, Caribbean Quakers, 10; Shilstone, ‘Some Early Records’, 44. Durham, Caribbean Quakers, 15. Shilstone, ‘Some Early Records’, 43. Gragg, Quaker Community on Barbados, 60. There were also six women’s Meetings thriving in 1677, with at least 186 Quaker women attending them: see H. J. Cadbury, ‘186 Barbados Quakeresses in 1677’, The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 9:4 (1942): 195–7 (195). See too Dailey, ‘The Early Quaker Mission’, 36–40, on the number and size of meetings on Barbados. Regarding Barbadian demographics, Puckrein suggests that in 1652 there was a population of 18,000 whites, and 20,000 black slaves: Puckrein, Little England, 71. Dunn calculates a white population of about 23,000 in 1655, with about 20,000 black slaves; he suggests that the white population stabilised at around 20,000 between 1660 and 1684, while the black slave population increased from 20,000 in 1655 to 46,602 in 1684 (Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 87). See too Levy, Early Puritanism, 301. Levy, Early Puritanism, 300, 301; Edmundson, Journal, 76. Durham, Caribbean Quakers, 25. Besse, Sufferings, II.314–18. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 130. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies, 41. See too Henry J. Cadbury, ‘George Rofe in these American Parts’, Bulletin of Friends’ Historical Association, 35 (1946), 17–26. Durham, Caribbean Quakers, 22. By 1717, however, six years before the last of these Acts was passed, Durham notes that there were only two Quaker meetings remaining on the island, at Bridgetown and Speightstown; ibid., 31. The dimensions of the island are given by Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 19. The ‘hat controversy’ resulted from John Perrot’s argument that Friends should remove their hats during prayer only if directly moved by God to do so, while Fox and most other Friends maintained that it was necessary to remove the hat at such times as a mark of humility before God; see Braithwaite, Second Period, 228–50; Kenneth L. Carroll, John Perrot, Early Quaker Schismatic. Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, Supplement 33 (London: Friends’ Historical Society,

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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1971); Nigel Smith, ‘Exporting Enthusiasm: John Perrot and the Quaker Epic’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 248–64; H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 197–205; Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 193–208. On Perrot’s reception in Barbados, see Carroll, John Perrot, 66–71. Braithwaite, Second Period, 237, 239. Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The Last of James Nayler: Robert Rich and the Church of the First Born’, Friends’ Quarterly, 60 (1965): 527–34 (530–1). John Story and John Wilkinson resisted Fox’s system of formalised meetings, arguing that this ran counter to the movement’s reliance on individual spiritual guidance; see William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1961), 290–323; Ingle, First Among Friends, 252–65; Nigel Smith, ‘Hidden Things Brought to Light: Enthusiasm and Quaker Discourse’, in Corns and Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing, 57–69. Braithwaite, Second Period, 348, 349. Ingle, First Among Friends, 234. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 23–4. Puckrein, Little England, 104. George Gardyner, A Description of the New World. Or, America Islands and Continent (London: printed for Robert Leybourn, 1651), 77. Henry Whistler, quoted in Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 77; Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit’, 66–7. Ligon, A True and Exact History, 53. Vokins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified, 43. Wiseman, ‘Read Within’, 164. Knott, ‘Joseph Besse and the Quaker Culture of Suffering’, 131. Wiseman, ‘Read Within’, 166–7. Curwen, A Relation of the Labour, 18; original emphasis. Ibid., 6. On the Barbadian economy, and its transition from one based on tobacco to one based on sugar, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted; Schwartz, Tropical Babylons; Menard, Sweet Negotiations. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), 201. Ibid., 209. Ibid. I am grateful to Alison Findlay for discussions on this point. Puckrein, Little England, 81. The Church of England later ruled that conversion did not in itself emancipate slaves, rejecting the theological view that one Christian could not enslave another, and argued for the Christianisation of slaves; and in 1691 the Barbados General Assembly approved the baptism of blacks;

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83

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Puckrein, Little England, 167. See too Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 114–16, 141–2, and Gragg, The Quaker Community, 121–41. See too note 87 below. Kenneth L. Carroll, ‘George Fox and Slavery’, Quaker History, 86:2 (1997), 16–25 (21). George Fox, ‘To Friends beyond Sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves’, in Selections from the Epistles, &c. of George Fox, ed. Samuel Tuke (London: W. Alexander and Son, 1825), 94–5 (95). The Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter also made a case for the Christianising of slaves on the basis of their common humanity in his A Christian Directory (1673). For a discussion of this and other contemporary dissenting critiques of slavery, see Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 179–84. Ingle, First Among Friends, 235. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 105. Besse, Sufferings, II.308. On the development of the Quaker position regarding slavery, see Herbert Aptheker, ‘The Quakers and Negro Slavery’, Journal of Negro History, 25:3 (1940), 331–62; Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); J. William Frost (ed.), The Quaker Origins of Antislavery (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1980); J. William Frost, ‘George Fox’s Ambiguous Anti-Slavery Legacy’, in Michael Mullett (ed.), New Light on George Fox 1624–1691 (York: The Ebor Press, 1994), 69–88; Kenneth L. Carroll, ‘George Fox and America’, in Mullett (ed.) New Light on George Fox, 59–68; Carroll, ‘George Fox and Slavery’; Gragg, The Quaker Community, 121–41. Fox, To the Ministers, Teachers, and Priests, 69; original emphasis. Ibid., 5. The Church of England clergyman and missionary Morgan Godwyn cites (in paraphrase) these words of Fox’s in his own text, in which he makes the case for the Christianising of slaves in Barbados and America. Despite condemning Fox’s argument as a ‘Quakers Harangue’, he can only answer it with Ovid’s words: ‘Pudet haec opprobria nobis / Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli [I am ashamed to hear this objected by strangers, and know not how to answer it]’: Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s & Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church (London: printed for the author, by J. D., 1680), 4–6. He also includes the words on the title page of his A Supplement to the Negro’s & Indians Advocate (London: printed by J. D., 1681). Godwyn urged planters to care for the spiritual welfare of their slaves, but saw no difficulty with Christians owning Christian slaves. Pinder, A Loving Invitation, 7. Ibid., 9. William Edmundson, ‘To the Governour and Council, and all in Authority, in this Island of Barbadoes’ (1675), in Besse, Sufferings, II.306–8 (307). Edmundson, Journal, 77. Ibid., 78. I am grateful to Rex Ambler for drawing this text to my attention. George Fox, Gospel Family Order, Being a Short Discourse concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks and Indians (s.l.: s.n., 1676), 19.

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Ibid., 4. Ibid., 9, 12. Ibid., 13, 14. Ibid., 16; original emphasis. For Fox and his followers, a state of human perfectibility, or prelapsarian perfection, was possible in this life through the power of the indwelling Christ within each believer. Turning to the inward light would make good the losses of the fall: as Bailey put it, Friends’ belief that the celestial body of Christ dwelt within them meant they ‘had been restored to the pre-Fall paradisiacal state. In them the restoration of the image of God was absolute’ (Richard G. Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 44). This ‘fusion of flesh and spirit’ is at the heart of ‘Friends’ ideology of immanence – salvation embodied in the “celestially fleshed Christ” of one another’; Tarter, ‘Quaking in the Light’, 148. For a fuller discussion of Quaker ideas of perfectibility, see Chapter 1, 20–1, and 162n.45, above. 102 William Edmundson, ‘For Friends in Maryland, Virginia and Other Parts of America’, in Frost, The Quaker Origins of Anti-Slavery, 66–7 (66, 67). 103 Frost, ‘George Fox’s Ambiguous Anti-Slavery Legacy’, 70.

Conclusion 1 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 150. 2 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or A catalogue and discovery of many of the errours, heresies, blasphemies and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time (London: printed for Ralph Smith, 1646); John Milton, Areopagitica, in Prose Writings (London: J. M. Dent, 1958). 3 Rosemary Moore suggests that the public dispute between Edward Burrough and John Bunyan in Bedford in May 1656, which was then followed up by four books (including Bunyan’s first published work) over the next few months, ‘dealt most fully with the Quaker understanding of Christ’ (Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 105). On this dispute, see too William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1955), 286–8, and T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist–Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51–4. George Fox also responded to Bunyan’s two anti-Quaker texts in The Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded (1659). 4 Norman Penney (ed.), The First Publishers of Truth: Being Early Records (Now First Printed) of the Introduction of Quakerism into the Counties of England and Wales. Supplement to Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 1–5 (London: Headley Brothers, 1907), 243. 5 See Rosemary Moore’s bibliography of anti-Quaker publications 1653–66 at www.qhpress.org/cgi-bin/rmoore/antiq.html (accessed 28 January 2010).

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6 William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson were hanged in 1659, Mary Dyer in 1660, and William Leddra in 1661; as Quakers they had all been banished from Boston on pain of death if they returned; all returned. See Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 404; Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 76-89. 7 The ‘Meeting for Sufferings’ remains an important part of Quakerism today, as ‘the standing representative body entrusted with the care of the business of the Britain Yearly Meeting through the year. This first met in 1675. Its original purposes included obtaining redress from both Parliament in cases of individual suffering and seeking to liberalise the laws relating to religious toleration’; www.quaker.org. uk/meeting-sufferings (accessed 5 November 2009). On the origins of ‘Quaker Sufferings’ literature, see Rosemary Moore, ‘Reactions to Persecution in Primitive Quakerism’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 57:2 (1995), 123–31 (124–6); see too John R. Knott, ‘Joseph Besse and the Quaker Culture of Suffering’, in Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (eds), The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 126-41. 8 George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 13, 240. 9 George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 228. 10 On the ‘hard, slow, inner conflict’ of convincement, see Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 94–126. 11 Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, 2 vols (London: printed and sold by Luke Hinde, 1753), I.519. 12 For a rich and fascinating study of Puritan (principally Calvinist) allegory and metaphor, see Thomas Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 13 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 130. 14 Richard Farnworth, The Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth, Set forth for the confounding false Languages, acted out of Pride, Ambition and Deceit. Or, Thee and Thou, In its place, is the proper Language to any single person whatsoever (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1655), 6; Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 198. 15 Fox, Journal, ed. Smith, 176.

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Index

Adam and Eve 20, 72, 76−7, 126 agency 6, 18, 27−31, 67, 71 heteronomous 73−81, 153 ‘referred’ 30−1, 154 Allen, Hannah 61−6 Amato, Joseph 108 American journeys made by Quakers 104, 123−31 Andrewes, Lancelot 42 annals 88−9 anxiety, spiritual and social 56−73, 76, 79−80 Arminianism 18, 65, 71 asyndeton 115 Audland, John 146 Augustine, St 15 Bacon, Sir Francis 58 Bailey, Richard 17, 72, 160n.21 Baptists 18, 90 Barbados 103−4, 112, 122−3, 128−39, 143−5, 152−3, 190n.39 Fox’s visit to 128−34 Barbour, Hugh 13 Barclay, Robert 15, 17 Bauman, Richard 36, 51−2 Baxter, Richard 85, 193n.83 Beckles, Hilary 133 Beier, A. L. 106 Besse, Joseph 48, 133

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Bible, the, and biblical texts 25, 90, 98, 102, 105, 120, 125−6, 148 Biet, Antoine 132−3, 135−6 blasphemy 52 Blaugdone, Barbara 100, 109 Boston, Mass. 103, 128, 130, 147 Boulton, David 83 Braithwaite, William C. 56, 102−3 Breitenberg, Mark 56−9 Bunyan, John 60−7, 77, 85, 101, 115, 146 Burke, Kenneth 38−40 Burrough, Edward 7, 20, 29, 100, 146 Burton, Robert 58 Cadbury, Henry J. 98, 155n.1 Calvin, John 100 Calvinism 3, 6, 15−19, 27−8, 31, 58−65, 71−2, 77−80, 101, 147−8, 153−4 Canby, George 36−7 Carlyle, Thomas 6, 56 Carroll, Kenneth L. 138 censorship 10 de Certeau, Michel 112−19, 150 Channel, Elinor 107 Chappell, William 42 Charles II 81 Church of England 18, 192n.80 Clarkson, Lawrence 106−7 Claypole, Lady 79 Cobb, Alice 53, 94 Cole, Mary 24, 118

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consecrated ground 25−6 consubstantiality 39 Conventicle Acts 9 conversion narratives 59 convincement, process of 36−40, 114, 133, 147, 152, 165n.12 Cope, Jackson 44 Coppin, Richard 106 Corns, Thomas N. 83−4, 106, 184n.61 Cotton, Priscilla 24, 118 Cromwell, Oliver 81 Curwen, Alice 53, 94, 96, 100, 126−39 Curwen, Thomas 126, 130−1 Damrosch, Leo 20 Dandelion, Pink 13, 90−1, 178–9n.34 Delany, Paul 78 Dewsbury, William 36−8, 41, 48−50, 149−50 Dickinson, James 85 discernment, Quaker spirit of 22−4 Donne, John 42, 46, 115 dreams 22 Dunn, Richard 135, 139 Edmundson, William 103−4, 133, 141−4 Edwards, Thomas 146 Ellwood, Thomas 10, 18, 82, 84, 88 familism 106 Farnworth, Richard 26−7, 30−1, 149 ‘father’, use of term 63−4 Fell, Margaret 75−7, 109 Fell, Thomas 75 femininity 63−4 feminisation of Quaker movement 64 Firbank Fell 91−2, 122−3, 146, 152 The First Publishers of Truth 6, 29−30 Fisher, Mary 103, 108 Fisher, Samuel 13, 28−31 Fletcher, Elizabeth 51 Fogelklou, Emilia 38 Fox, George career as a travelling preacher 41−2, 101−3, 107, 110−18 character 56−8, 66 confidence 66−8, 73, 77−81

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Epistles 44, 53 Journal 7−10, 16, 18, 21−5, 41, 53, 56−7, 61, 65−71, 75−106, 110−16, 119, 123−4, 147, 151−3, 178n.23 genre of 82−3, 94 leadership of Quaker movement 75, 81, 123 marriage 75−7 and slavery 138−44 spiritual development 65−7, 73, 77, 81, 86, 97, 118 subjectivity 56−7, 65−6, 77−81, 84−7 trial at Lancaster (1652) 9, 19, 49, 73, 75, 111, 157n.22, 174n.68 visit to America and Barbados (1671−73) 123−34 Foxe, John 83 Frost, J. William 5, 143 Furley, Benjamin 149 Gardyner, George 135 Glanvill, Joseph 45 Godwyn, Morgan 193n.89 Gragg, Larry 133, 190n.39 Graham, Elspeth 62 Grave, John 36 Greenblatt, Stephen 58, 63−4, 73, 78, 81 Greenhill, William 47 Gwyn, Douglas 13, 37, 178–9n.34, 179–80n.54 Halhead, Miles 100 Harvey, T. Edmund 56 ‘hat controversy’ 134, 157n.21, 191n.59 Herbert, George 115 Herrick, Robert 115 Higginson, Francis 1−4, 14, 19, 33−6, 40−3, 47, 51, 54, 107, 111, 116, 146, 164n.1 Hill, Christopher 106 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 119 Hooker, Richard 42 Howgill, Francis 146 Hull, John 123 hyperbole 45 hypotaxis 96 hypotyposis 44−5, 50

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INDEX

Ingle, H. Larry 56, 66, 83, 134, 139 ‘inward light’ and ‘indwelling Christ’, Quaker doctrines of 4−8, 11, 13−21, 27−32, 37−8, 48−52, 55, 57, 65−72, 75−81, 91−2, 95−9, 101, 110, 113, 117−19, 122, 147−8, 152−4, 156n.12 see also Jesus Christ, incorporation of itinerant ministry 7, 94−5, 98, 100−13, 120−1, 147, 152, 182n.34 Jeffery, William 20 Jesus Christ, incorporation of 17, 46−50, 52, 55, 72, 77 Jones, Sarah 29−31 ‘journal’, use of term 93−5, 151; see also Fox, George: Journal; spiritual journals journeys see itinerant ministry kairotic time see time, conceptions of: kairos Keckermann, Bartholomew 43, 46 Keeble, N. H. 42 Kendal fund 109 Kermode, Frank 89−90, 98 Kerouac, Jack 58 Killin, Margret 44−5 Knapton, Christopher 36 Knott, John R. 56−8, 83, 136 Knype, John 85−6 Labadie, Jean de 113, 119 Lampitt, William 9−10, 24, 51, 70, 111, 116−17 landscape, descriptions of 115−16, 121−7 Latimer, Hugh 42−3 Laud, William 18 Lawson, Thomas 20 Leed, Eric J. 110, 115−16 Levy, Babette M. 133 light within see inward light Ligon, Richard 132, 135−6 Lower, Thomas 9, 87−8, 111 Lutheranism 16 Mack, Phyllis 64, 108 manumission of slaves 143 Marshall, Charles 114

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213

Marx, Karl 138 Mascuch, Michael 94 masculinity, ideas of 56−8, 61−4, 76, 81, 171n.11 Mason, Martin 17 metaphor, use of 48−54, 92, 102, 149−51 Milton, John 106, 146 Moore, Rosemary 21 mystics 112−13, 118, 185n.63 nakedness as a sign 30−1, 51−2, 77, 102, 144, 150, 169n.81 Nashe, Thomas 58 Nayler, James 2, 14−17, 20−1, 24, 52, 75, 77, 98, 108−9 Newton, Walter 76 North Carolina 125 Norwood, Richard 61, 63, 77 Nuttall, Geoffrey F. 13, 18, 83−4, 146 oath-taking 26 oratory 46−7, 168n.63 Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh 3 Owen, John 107, 183n.38 Pacheco, Anita 56 parataxis 89, 96 Patison, Barbara 44−5 patriarchy 58, 63−4 Paul, St 57−8, 72, 98, 127 Pearson, Anthony 70 Pendle Hill 114−15, 121−2, 125 Penn, William 15, 17, 25, 84, 88−90, 98 Penney, Norman 50 Pepys, Samuel 85, 87−8 perfection, human 20, 162n.45, 194n.101 Perkins, William 42, 46−7 Perrot, John 9, 134 Persuasion see convincement, process of; rhetorical practices Peters, Kate 103 Pinder, Richard 132, 140 power, temporal and divine 69−71, 74, 77, 80 Pratt, Mary Louise 126

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INDEX

preaching Protestant 42−3, 45−7 Quaker style of 2−3, 31, 33−5, 43−8; see also convincement, process of; itinerant ministry; rhetorical practices preaching handbooks 52 predestination, doctrine of 18, 60, 63, 147−8, 154, 172n.18 Prideaux, John 38, 42, 48 priesthood of all believers 16 Protestant values 59 providence 21−2 Prynne, William 1, 107−8 Public Friends see Publishers of Truth Publishers of Truth, Public Friends 41, 100−4, 114, 116, 119, 121, 147; see also The First Publishers of Truth Puritanism 57, 63, 106, 153 Quaker Act (1662) 9 Quaker culture and cultural practices 3−8, 11, 25, 30−1, 154 Quaker dress 2, 45−6 Quaker use of language 53, 55, 167n.33; see also ‘thou’ Quakerism and itinerancy 107−9, 112, 114, 119 opposition to and criticisms of 1−2, 5−6, 19−20, 33−6, 40−2, 49−54, 105−8, 116−17, 128, 133, 147 see also women’s experience of Quakerism quaking 34−6, 102 Ranterism 19, 24, 91, 99, 106−7, 127, 146 Reay, Barry 13−14 rhetorical practices 37−42, 45−55, 102, 166n.21 Rhode Island 104, 125−6, 128 Rich, Robert 134 Rofe, George 133−4 Rous, John 132, 139, 153 Rous, Thomas 139, 142 Salt, William 134 salvation 28−9 Satan 22, 60, 62−3, 153

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Sawrey, John 9−10, 44, 111 scold’s bridle, use of 50−1, 54 Second Coming of Christ 15, 90−2, 101 Second Day Morning Meeting 10, 18, 82 seed of the woman and seed of the serpent 23−4, 118 sermons 47 see also preaching sexuality 58−9 of Fox 76−7 Shakespeare, William 58 Sherman, Stuart 87, 94 Shilstone, E. M. 133 Shuger, Debora Kuller 43, 46, 55, 63−4, 81 Sidney, Sir Philip 60 signing-off of publications by Quakers 151−2 ‘signs’, Quaker performance of 50 see also nakedness as a sign Simpson, William 51 slavery 7−8, 130−45, 152−3 ‘covenant slavery’ 140−4 Smith, John 37−8, 42−3, 48 Smith, Nigel 17, 69, 83, 93−5, 123−4 Smith, Roger 59 Smith, William 25 social distinctions 143−4, 149, 153 solipsism 23 soteriology 27−8, 60, 80, 115−16, 147−8, 154 Spence Manuscript 123 spiritual autobiographies 59−60, 64, 82−3 spiritual capitalism and spiritual surplus value 138, 142, 144 spiritual journals 96−7 Stachniewski, John 56−7, 60 Stallybrass, Peter 118 stillness in worship 114, 119 Story, John 9, 36 Stubs, John 149 ‘surplus value’ 137−8, 142, 144 Tarter, Michele Lise 64 Tavernor, Martha 137−9

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INDEX

Taylor, James 85 ‘thou’, Quaker use of 26, 45, 110, 144, 149−50 Tiffany, Grace 100−1, 120 time, conceptions of 89−99 chronos 89−98 kairos 89−98, 154 Tolles, Frederick 104, 125, 133 Tomalin, Claire 85 Traherne, Thomas 115 Trapnel, Anna 62−5, 71−2, 85, 107 travel see itinerant ministry Trelawney, Elizabeth 73 tropes 48, 150−1 Underwood, T. L. 13, 20, 91 unity, Quaker spirit of 24−6, 29−32, 122, 148−51, 154 vagrancy 108, 116 Valiant Sixty 100 Vann, Richard T. 38 Vaughan, Henry 115

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215

Vokins, Joan 96, 100, 123, 127, 131−6 walking, activity of 104−6, 118−19 Waller, Gary 59 Waugh, Dorothy 41−3, 48−54, 96 Waugh, Jane 108 Webster, Tom 72, 86, 98 Weld, Thomas 1, 14−15, 146 West, William 70 Whistler, Henry 132, 135 White, Hayden 89, 92 Wilkinson, John 9 will, Quaker concept of 28−31, 37 Williams, Elizabeth 108 Winstanley, Gerrard 19 Winter, Naomi 57, 75, 81 Wiseman, Susan 109, 136−7 women’s experience of Quakerism 35, 64, 81 women’s writing 61−3 Worden, Blair 21−2 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 58, 73

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