Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric (review)

More than a religious history, Michael P. Graves has penned a multifaceted historical, theoretical, and textual analysis of impromptu speech that will be of great interest to communication and rhetorical scholars. The subject of this book is the unique, early Quaker practice of impromptu preaching—without notes, texts, or prior preparation—which arose from the Quaker belief that ministers ought to observe silence before God and only address the community when immediately inspired by the "inward Light" of the divine Spirit. While considering the whole of the early Quaker period, Graves focuses his textual analysis on the years 1671–1700—a period he describes as "the maturity of early Quaker sermon rhetoric" (25). This lengthy book is divided into four sections, covering areas of early Quaker scholarship, history, doctrine, theory, and practice related to the invention, performance, and justification of impromptu preaching as both a rhetorical art and a spiritual discipline.

Preaching the Inward Light occupies a somewhat liminal space between at least three distinct disciplines. It advances, first of all, a particular set of arguments about Quaker theology, in which Graves claims an evangelical and "revivalistic" identity for early Quakers against what he calls "misunderstanding and misrepresentation of early Quakers as theologically liberal and uniformly 'silent'" (1, 7). Second, the book makes particular interventions related to ongoing scholarship in the field of Quaker studies, and Graves, whose work on early Quaker preaching goes back several decades, is careful to articulate the place that this rhetorical study of original texts occupies and the contributions it makes within this scholarly community. Finally, this is a work of rhetorical criticism from the field of communication studies, which offers a broad survey of common themes, metaphors, stylistic elements, and other features found in extant examples of Quaker impromptu preaching as well as a series of close textual analyses of representative sermons by four prominent Quaker ministers: George Fox, Stephen Crisp, Robert Barclay, and William Penn.

Using the surviving texts of impromptu sermons—many of them based on notes taken and later published by non-Quakers—as the basis for his analysis, Graves's work touches on early Quaker attitudes and innovations on questions of gender, style, trope, argument, the role of text, the purpose of audience, and the function of memory, among others. For scholars of rhetoric and religion, his analysis of biblical text and trope within early Quaker communities offers interesting comparisons and contrasts to the much more voluminous and better-known research on the American Puritans. His detailed explorations of impromptu preaching provoke obvious questions about the function, methods, and social values of impromptu speech in other contexts—secular as well as religious—and his careful, thorough research offers an excellent model for future scholarship in these areas. I found his analysis of key themes, metaphors, and stylistic elements in early Quaker sermons—an extension of his earlier published research in this area—to be a particularly rich and valuable contribution, which not only clarifies questions of audience and constitutive community but also provides a much needed survey of these sermons that contextualizes and enhances the more focused analysis of specific texts that occupies the fourth section of the book.

Considering the length and ambitious scope of Preaching the Inward Light, there are times when I wished that Graves had more carefully articulated the conceptions of "theory" and "rhetoric" that frame so much of the analysis. Theory remains a relatively underdeveloped and vague concept in the book, both as ascribed to early Quaker ministers and as an interpretive tool for Graves's own analysis. Thus, what we end up with in this book is a wonderfully rich and detailed description of early Quaker impromptu preaching that does not go as far as it might in articulating the links between this particular literature and the broader questions of impromptu speech in other historical periods and rhetorical contexts. A particular example of this underdevelopment is perceivable in Graves's consideration of memory in his analysis...