The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit by Leo Damrosch (review)

118BOOK REVIEWS tances of the noble, intimately associated with the circle of Port-Royal, made into a pubUc affair a subject (refusal to give communion to someone who refused to accept the buU Cum Occasione condemning the Five Propositions) normaUy confined to the confessional.The author's conclusion is that Arnauld was not heretical on the issue of the Five Propositions (with the possible exception of Proposition I) and that the decision to exclude Arnauld from the privUeges of the faculty was a tragic mistake which in turn led to a serious weakening of the faculty's enormous prestige and a century and a half of bitter division within the French Church. The last part of the book deals with motivations of the faculty in the Causa Arnauldiana where aU the varied theological currents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are deftly interwoven.This is a difficult task because the plumitifs, the secretarial record of the discussions, were destroyed and only a record of votes kept. A tabulation of these votes on major issues from around 1640 to I675 occupies pages 305-328.This is an admirable piece of research, one that causes the interested reader to anticipate even greater triumphs from its author. Samuel J. Miller Boston College, Emeritus The Sorrows ofthe QuakerJesus:James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. By Leo Damrosch. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1996. Pp. xiv, 322. $39.95.) On October 24, 1656,James Nayler, a one-timeYorkshire husbandman turned Independent preacher m the New Model Army and, since 1651, a demobilized soldier and convinced Quaker, entered Bristol in the company of four men and three women,"some on horseback and some on foot" (p. 148) in the midst of a downpour. What was unusual about theU progress was that Nayler's companions were singing "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbath" and were treating Nayler as the Messiah.Within a week, Parliament had appointed a committee of fifty-five to investigate the blasphemy, thereby appropriating to itsetf functions never envisaged by the Instrument of Government. By the NewYear, Nayler had received 310 lashes, had had his tongue bored, had reversed his entry into Bristol , and was committed indefinitely to BrideweU.The history ofboth the Quaker movement and, more broadly, of CromweUian England had been profoundly altered —and the Restoration of Charles II became a lot more probable. Leo Damrosch, a professor of literature at Harvard University, has written a splendid analysis of this apparently simple event. His study Uluminates the Quaker movement m its formative years and suggests ways in which it forced the "orthodox Puritan estabUshment" of the 1650's to react against its earUer "revolutionary" tendencies. Damrosch's book is excellent for three reasons. BOOK REVIEWS119 FUst, it provides a fine example of the fruitfuLness of a good marriage between Uterary and historical scholarship.The author places the Quaker conventions in a broad Uterary context that stretches from Augustine to WUUam Blake and beyond .At the same time he buüds faithfuUy on much ofthe best recent historical scholarship. In my experience this is an unusual combination.What is also striking about Damrosch's work is that he has not rested content with the 1716 edition ofNayler's writings but has both compared them with the original and has placed their countless bibUcal references in their scriptural context. Secondly, though writing from an entirely secular beUef system, Damrosch provides a comprehensible and sympathetic account of the Quaker religious culture and traces the connections between it and contemporary"Puritanism"or Calvinism. Quakers were often deemed by their outraged contemporaries to be mad. Damrosch demonstrates that, on the contrary, they took Calvinist assumptions to their logical conclusions which were rigorously rooted m the NewTestament. Thirdly, the study deserves to be read widely because it explains why the Quakers in general, and James Nayler in particular, provoked such an extreme reaction in England in 1656. In focusing on the Nayler incident, he shines a bright light on the essential conservatism of the CromweUian regime.The reaction of the "Puritan establishment" to Nayler helps to explain why Charles II was acceptable to most former "revolutionaries" three years later. To criticize such a...