Witnessing the Last Days: a Review Article

Book Reviews Edited by Thomas D. Hamm Witnessing the Last Days: a Review Article TheEmergenceofQuaker Writing: DissentingLiterature in Seventeenth Century England. Edited by Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein, London, & Portland OR, Frank Cass, 1995, 150 pp., Notes to each essay. $22.50 The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on theFree Spirit, By Leo Damrosch, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1996, iv & 322 pp., Notes and Index. $40.00. Early Quakers in the 1650s wrote voluminously, and have been examined exhaustively, by Friends within and rebels against the Quaker "establishment ," by Mennonites, by mystics, by British social historians led by Marxist Christopher Hill and Barry Reay, and also by Richard Bauman, an expert on speech and Quaker silence. A new perspective has been opened by scholars of English literature, who look in detail at what early Friends wrote and meant, rather than simply "decoding" Quaker texts into symbols of social conflict or mystical states. Without undue dependence on earlier studies of radical puritans and Friends by Geoffrey Nuttall, and "the Lamb's War" perspective developed by T. Canby Jones, Douglas Gwyn, and me, the new writers explore most ofthe same early Quaker writings we assembled or cited. They deal responsibly with questions that Richard Bailey raises about Fox (and others did about Nayler) who called them-" selves reincarnations of Christ, by extending their critical search into all early Friends' trust in the Spirit's guidance, and thus into the implications of Quaker perfectionism and the ethic of inner leading that scholars call antinomian. Friends avoid careful thought about this ethic: Kenneth Henke, a star student at ESR, tried in vain to systematize it for a thesis at Princeton. Corns and Loewenstein have each written on radical religion and politics in the English Commonwealth. They do not explain how, from the Universities of Wales and Wisconsin, they drew out their collection of essays by other scholars mostly new to early Quakerism ifnot to the early Friends' world of thought. (Most have worked on Milton, Winstanley, or Puritan women.) Kate Peters' survey of "Patterns of Quaker Literature," placed as an introduction, rightly criticizes too tight classifications of genres or topics. She notices letters as well as early Quaker processes for supervising the printing and distribution oftracts. She stresses the leaders' discipline of doctrine, and denies Quaker writers' "personal involvement in a cosmic struggle." But Lowenstein's own essay," The War ofthe Lamb: George Fox and the Apocalyptic Discourse of Revolutionary Quakerism" 48Quaker History shows "the intense human agency interwoven with divine forces which characterizes the fierce Quaker engagement with worldly institutions" (25). He combines Fox's first call, in Newes Coming Up out ofthe North (1653), that "all hearts must be ript up and laid naked and open before the mighty God" with Fox's prophetic condemnation in 1659 as the Lamb 's Officerofall officers in Church and State in the corrupted Commonwealth. Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay on "Margaret Fell, ... a 'Mother in Israel' calls to the Jews," though familiar ground to modern Quaker readers, explores the influence kabbalist theory and apocalyptic hopes for Jewish conversion had in England around 1 660, even though Gardiner ignores the apocalyptic hopes of Jews then around Sabbatai Zvi. "Fell attains a millenarian . . . kind ofegalitarianism that cuts across and calls into question our racial as well as class and gender categories." Norman Burns on "the Singular Experiences of Mary Penington," and Elaine Hobby on "Early Vindications of Quaker Women's Prophecy" note that women found it harder to publish after the Restoration of 1660 than before, hence it became more crucial to defend Womens Speaking. Corns' own essay on "The Critical Problem of Fox's journal," N. H. Keeble on "William Penn: the Politic and Polite in QuakerProse," and John R. Knott on "Joseph Besse and the Quaker Culture of Suffering" all make good critical points, but add few new insights to earlier studies, with some ofwhich they seem unfamiliar. Ann Hughes' "Historian's Afterword" returns us to the Christopher Hill tradition. But also from Oxford comes Nigel Smith's "Enthusiasm and Quaker Discourse," which looks at the extravagant writings ofJohn Perrot and John Pennyman, but mainly at the "mad...