The Quaker Meeting Houses of Ireland: An Account of the Some 150 Meeting Houses and 100 Burial Grounds in Ireland, from the Arrival of the Movement in 1654 to the Present Time (review)

56Quaker History The fundamental question is whether this book with its flaws is a better choice for a modem reader than struggling through one of the older versions currently available. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Paul BuckleyEarlham School of Religion The Quaker Meeting Houses of Ireland: An Account of the Some 150 Meeting Houses and 100 Burial Grounds in Ireland, from the Arrival of the Movement in 1654 to the Present Time. By David M. Butler. Dublin: Irish Friends Historical Committee, 2004. 256 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. This year (2004) is the 350th anniversary of the Quaker movement in Ireland. As part of the commemorations, the Irish Friends Historical Committee has published The QuakerMeetingHouses ofIrelandby David M. Butler. The author's previous two-volume Quaker Meeting Houses of Britain (1999) set the stage for the Irish volume. Although it should be considered a stand alone work, Butler's Irish book is akin to a third volume. It has the same dimensions, a similar cover design, and a similar treatment of the subject. The book is organized into six sections. The introductory pages provide basic information on Irish Friends, including an extensive list of sources. The next four units cover the provinces of Ireland. Each province has an introductory essay, a list of sources pertinent to that province exclusively, and an entry for each meeting. The entries provide an historical essay with sketches and floorplans of the Friends meeting house (FMH). In his 55page appendix, Butler enlarges upon his excellent essays from the Britain books, inserting Irish examples as appropriate. One of my greatest surprises was to find that Butler retained the following sentence from his 1999 appendix (page 206): "No outside precedents show in the design of early Quaker meeting houses, only those arising from within the movement." This understanding has been challenged recently. Meeting houses such as Lisburn (1709, p. 165) and Ettington (England, 1688) are strikingly similar to the Puritans' Guyhirn Chapel (1660), and the Hertford FMH (England, 1670), is quite similar in appearance to the 1653 Sudbury Congregational MH. Did Friends and other English nonconformists borrow from each other during the late seventeenth century? Or are the similarities superficial or coincidental? Butler does not say. When I spoke with Butler in the spring of 2004, he said he sought to identify in the book the uniquely Quaker traits of FMHs in Ireland. Two Book Reviews57 examples ofintrinsic Quaker values surfacing in the Irish book represent a break with his English volumes. In Ireland, as in America, the dominant signification of the term gallery was the facing bench area, not the balcony -like area (loft). Butler notes this and follows suit rather than using the term minister 's stand as in his English volumes. Second, Friends traditionally have not used the prefix saint in proper nouns, as that was usually inconsistent with the use of the word hagios in scripture. Whereas in his earlier work, Butler included entries under "St. Austell" (1:70) and "St. Helens" (1:337), neither being the name used by Friends, in this volume Butler describes the location of a Dublin burial ground as "Stephen's Green [usually with the prefix St, but not among Friends]." With the completion of this book, seven of the eight yearly meetings organized before 1800 have a printed inventory of meeting houses. New York YM remains as the architectural "black hole" of the ancient yearly meetings. These works vary in quality and thoroughness, but Butler's works in England and Ireland are first rate. Seth HinshawDowningtown, Pa. Historical Dictionary of the Friends (Quakers). Ed. by Margery Post Abbott, Mary Ellen Chijioke, Pink Dandelion, and John W. Oliver. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2003. 32 + 432 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, bibliography , and index. $80. Prior to this book's publication, there were few up-to-date resources for reference in the area of Quaker studies. For scholars looking for reference sources, improvisation has often been the order ofthe day. The Haverford College library, for example, possesses a "Dictionary of Quaker Biography " that is housed in over 100 bi nders. The initial volume states that it was begun under the editorship of William Bacon Evans a half-century ago. This mammoth...