Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (review)

112Quaker History vised by a large cast of historians and archivists, informed by the collections of 24 libraries and depositories in the United States and Britain, the editors have performed a lasting service to the history of Pennsylvania. The work is eminently interesting to historians of American political institutions . One cannot ignore the effects of America's most progressive colony on American government and equally well, the men who led and defined it. Yet before this work, there were extended biographies of only two of the 325 legislators in this volume. The 325 essays are loaded with the political facts of each legislator—his offices, his committee appointments, the bills, petitions, and letters he drafted, services he performed, and more. The editors have even included his attendance record at bodies such as Provincial Council. This kind of institutional detail may make for dull reading, but in tracking the careers and evaluating the significance of politicians it is a relief to discover effortlessly when they were on or off various bodies, committees, and lobbies. But for other readers, there is more. The biographies reveal the geographical and genealogical origins of the men, as well as specifying their spouses, children and heirs, some collateral kin, and also occupations , wealth, probate records and legacies. Social, economic, and family historians will enjoy these helps. The large majority of these legislators were Friends so that historians of the Society will be interested to know that the volume specifies such Quaker activities as the legislators' services on behalf of monthly meetings, appointments to quarterly and yearly meeting, and their scrapes with the disciplinary machinery of the Society. If they affiliated with particular factions within Quakerism or without in this very factious period, their affiliations are clarified. The work is a finding or research tool too. Its thirty-page list of sources is an excellent guide to manuscripts and depositories and bibliography of secondary works on the period. Each biography is amply footnoted and can lead the reader to further information. Regarding lawmaking, the volume describes legislative organization and procedures , in the manner that historian Joan de Lourdes Leonard has done, but in more detail. It details charter or constitutional changes, franchise and elections procedures. It lists chronologically all legislation passed, all members ofthe Provincial Council and assembly and committees therein, including the Delaware members to 1704. The editors have also included short monographs on Pennsylvania Friends' relationship with William Penn, on religious factionalism, and tables and charts of religious affiliations, age, government service, probate, occupations , and more. If there is a fault in the volume it is an unavoidable one of ellipsis and ambiguity . Condensing the public life of David Lloyd, for example, into fourteen pages while including as much as possible will require the reader to interpolate at times. The price of the volume is considerable, but the value far exceeds it. In conception as well as execution, this undertaking has no equivalent in the bibliography of early America. We hope the project thrives and anticipate the succeeding volumes. University of ArizonaJack Marietta Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991. xii + 197 pp. Notes and index. $44.50. Book Reviews113 In this book, Carla Pestana attempts to use Quakers and Baptists as a means for examining the growth and evolution of two alternative forms of religious experience in colonial Massachusetts and, thus, to provide a broader perspective on popular patterns of religious belief in the Bay Colony. Since both groups were the product of voluntary associations, the theological impulses that gave them life, shaped their membership, defined their relations to the larger community and influenced their evolution throughout the colonial period need to be explored if scholars are to have a complete picture of the non-Puritan outlets of popular religious behavior. Pestana's argument rests upon the primacy of religion as a means for defining the social context of colonial Massachusetts. The distinctive evolution of both the Baptists and the Quakers rests upon theological premises. For Pestaña, theological differences attracted dissidents and helped to refashion their particular social and institutional environments. Quakers were the product of a dissident, partly alien religious sensibility markedly at odds...