In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • In the Apostle's Words:Elizabeth Ashbridge's Epistle to the Goshen Monthly Meeting
  • Elisabeth Ceppi

In his meticulous introduction to Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, Daniel Shea observes, "Almost everything we know about Elizabeth Ashbridge is derived from her autobiography" (121). The scholarly attention devoted to the text and its author, especially since it was anthologized in Journeys in New Worlds in 1990 , has expanded our understanding of the cultural contexts and historical contingencies that produced Ashbridge as an autobiographer and of the rhetorical strategies of the text itself. Yet Shea's remark has remained largely true.1 Our necessary reliance on the autobiography as an object of knowledge about Ashbridge has been complicated by the fact that extant manuscript copies of her autobiography were not written by Ashbridge herself.2 Furthermore, although Ashbridge wrote her life from her vantage as a Quaker minister, the period between the conclusion of the Life in 1740 and her death in 1755 —the years during which she married Aaron Ashbridge, became a Public Friend, and wrote the Life—has been delineated only by scant second- and third-person accounts.

A recent discovery in the Huntington Library supplies the only first-person evidence of Ashbridge's experience as a Quaker minister and preserves the only extant prose written in her own hand. Among the papers of Ashbridge's fellow Pennsylvania Quaker and traveling minister Robert Valentine is an Epistle dated 19 April 1754 , written by Ashbridge from London to the Goshen [Pennsylvania] Monthly Meeting (Huntington Manuscript Collections RV9 ; a transcript of the letter is included as an Appendix; ellipses are in the original).3 Ashbridge's epistolary warning to her meeting, "our Sion is distemper'd & a libertine Spirit Crept in," aligns her ideologically with what Jack D. Marietta has called the "small community of reformist ministers" who became more active and vocal in the late 1740 s and early 1750 s, the period of Ashbridge's ministry.4 These ministers denounced lagging discipline and increased instances of "delinquencies" like fornication, drunkenness, indebtedness, failure to adhere to "plain speech," and marriage to non-Quakers (Marietta 36-38).5 The Epistle reveals that Ashbridge shared the group's beliefs about the causes of the "distemper": the absence of "true Zeal" among ministers and elders, a corresponding decline of discipline, and the Quakers' increasing preoccupation with worldly prosperity and power.

Because the Epistle preserves Ashbridge's manifest ministerial voice, and because it is likely that her authorship of the Epistle and of [End Page 141] the autobiography coincided roughly, we can now make firmer connections between her life as a Public Friend and the Life.6 In several respects, the Epistle substantiates Julie Sievers's recent contention that the autobiography functions as an allegory of Quaker reform, offering at once an explicit critique of Ashbridge's profligate past and an implicit critique of "Quakers' faltering midcentury piety" (236). Yet even readers like Sievers who recognize the radical strands of Ashbridge's life narrative will find the ministerial voice of the Epistle bracingly distinct from the voice(s) that narrate her autobiography. The epistolary Ashbridge unequivocally embraces her social and spiritual authority as a Quaker minister, as evidenced by her tone, her careful construction of her relationship to multiple audiences, and her radical tropes.

The Epistle compels us to rethink one of the central issues in Ashbridge scholarship: the relationship between authority and authorship in the context of Quaker theology and social practice.7 The main questions about Ashbridge's authority—and about Quaker rhetorical practice in general—have centered on whether the authority to speak Truth is grounded primarily in the spirit or in the body. As Richard Bauman has observed, for the earliest Quakers "all religious expression was fundamentally prophetic, an expression of the Voice of God speaking through his chosen instrument" (Let Your Words Be Few 151). According to this prophetic model, Bauman argues, Ashbridge's authority would be fundamentally spiritual, derived solely from "firsthand spiritual experience of the indwelling Light of Christ, which was the life, power, and spirit of God at work in the human heart and brought to bear upon the human soul...

pdf