Keeping Us Honest, Stirring the Pot: A Festschrift in Honor of H. Larry Ingle ed. by Chuck Fager (review)

H. Larry Ingle, the most influential Quaker historian of my generation, is author of two major books, one on the Hicksite-Orthodox separations and the other a biography of George Fox, that have significantly enriched our study of Friends. Both were revisionist studies that grounded provocative interpretations on impressive research. So we should be grateful that Chuck Fager, assisted by Becky Ingle, has recruited Quaker scholars, colleagues with whom Ingle taught, and former undergraduate students in order to create a festschrift containing original scholarly articles, personal tributes, reprints of a few of Ingle's many articles, and a comprehensive bibliography of his books, articles and reviews - most dealing with Southern or Quaker history. The introduction and tributes stress Ingle's social activism, iconoclasm, and encounters for good and sometimes for ill with Quaker organizations, traditions, and attitudes, beautifully summarized by the title "keeping us honest, stirring the pot."

The original essays presented here cover materials from the Reformation to the Cold War. As in many other festschrifts, it is difficult to find an integrating theme among the articles, and the easiest method to ensure that none gets lost is to summarize the themes. Hugh Barbour in an erudite article written for church historians assesses the impact of the Beatitudes from St. Francis to the Quaker peace testimony and beyond, with a concentration upon the Radical Reformation. There are four seventeenth-century articles: Rosemary Moore argues that 1660 did not mark a sudden break in Quaker thought and institutions and that earlier developments came to fruition during the Restoration period. Steve Angell examines Fox's 1671 sermon preached in Barbados to illustrate his understanding of family and how he sought to improve treatment of blacks through family nurture. In the best treatment on the subject, Melvin Endy places William Penn's 1691 "Essay on the Peace of Europe" into the context of European history and also the proprietor's policies in early Pennsylvania in order to demonstrate how Penn's actions exemplified his advice "to creep where we cannot run" as a principled and pragmatic response to war.

There is only one eighteenth-century article. John Whittenburg's account of the Regulator movement in pre-Revolutionary North Carolina sheds new light on the geographic, religious, and economic aspects of this armed uprising and uses Quaker Herman Husband's account but does not tell us other Friends' responses.

Paul Buckley asks why nineteenth-century Friends created a mythical account of Fox telling Penn to "wear the sword as long as thou canst" and how Friends continue to use this story. Thomas Hamm shows that the Hicksite Quakers throughout the century consistently opposed the intermingling of church and state espoused by evangelical Protestants. Carole Spencer's essay on Hannah Whitall Smith makes this influential exponent of holiness religion a far more fascinating lady than one can learn from earlier accounts or her classic book The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life.

For the twentieth-century, Emma Lapsanky-Warner describes a Quaker-led communal and integrated housing project in Philadelphia that began just after World War II. Damon Hickey contrasts Amish and Quaker attitudes towards society and youth to question their different rates of making children into adult members. Peter Bien argues that traditional Christian theologies about God derived from either a Platonic or Aristotelian perspective make God too static and that process theology that sees an evolving God and universe is truer to religion and science.

The introduction by Fager and Ingle's essays printed here criticize earlier Quaker historians for ignoring the social context of ideas and seeking to legitimate their authors' present attitudes. They are partially right, of course, but both seem an inevitable consequence of specializing in telling the story of one's own religious community. I would place more emphasis upon the autonomy of intellectual history than they...