Print Culture and the Early Quakers by Kate Peters (review)

REVIEWS 283 reproductive prints to the early modern art world. The reader of this and the former catalogue will be convinced that the history of early modern European prints is worthy of much further study. Interested scholars will also find much visual evidence from which to proceed in their own investigations. MAYA STANFIELD MAZZI, Art History, UCLA Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) xiii + 273 pp., ill. In her new book, Print Culture and the Early Quakers, Kate Peters has entered the booming world of print studies with an analysis of how the early Quaker fathers used the medium of print to disseminate their religious beliefs. This study blends historical surveys of prominent Quakers’ activities with an analysis of pamphlets, books, and manuscript letters to offer an intriguing look at the relationship the Quakers had with the seventeenth-century book and printing trade. Peters argues “that Quakers were highly engaged with contemporary political and religious affairs, and were committed in very practical ways to the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on Earth” (1). The Quakers, according to Peters, effectively used the medium of print culture to spread their beliefs across England and Ireland. “The pamphleteering activities of the early Quakers ,” continues Peters, “demonstrate that print enabled a form of political participation ion the society of the 1650s” (1). In her attempt to characterize the Quaker movement in the middle of the seventeenth century, Peters “examines sources generated in the course of the early Quaker campaign” (9). In the first of the three sections of her book, Peters wishes to interrogate the interrelated relationship between Quaker leadership and the tracts they produced , and how they helped establish a national Quaker movement in England. Peters makes the claim that the production of printed tracts and other works constituted an intrinsic part of how the movement began and got up and running . The authors of the important Quaker tracts, Peters demonstrates, held significant prominence in the Quaker movement’s leadership, and as such the works they generated held a particular importance to the movement itself. Peters goes on to argue that these tracts produced by the early Quaker leaders “were produced as a very precise tool” to “address specific audiences” (43). Peters also convincingly argues that the Quakers had significant access to the printing industry, and that they established a complex network by which they disseminated their texts across England. Peters also asks critics to reassess the consensus that the Quakers held tightly to a mistrust of words and books. The final chapter of Peters’ first section offers a case study of the spread of Quaker tracts in East Anglia that demonstrates how Quakers spread their tracts across England to begin a national movement. In the second section of the book, Peters begins by arguing that the printed texts the Quakers produced helped to establish “a systematic and self-conscious ” Quaker movement by the appropriation of the very term “Quaker” (92). After establishing the means by which Quakers claimed their collective identity, Peters addresses a phenomenon readily apparent to any reader of her monograph thus far: the prevalence of women Quaker writers who hold positions of prominence in the movement. Peters argues that “a doctrinal position, on the spiritual equality of women, and on their fitness for public ministry, was very REVIEWS 284 carefully presented in print, while at the same time strategies were developed for controlling their public roles” (125). This chapter holds particular interest in light of the apparent prominence of Margaret Fell in the upper echelons of the Quaker movement. As part of this egalitarian view towards women, Peters argues that the Quakers sought to establish a universal participation in their new faith. In the final section of her book Peters brings the discussion into the realm of the political participation of the Quakers. She argues that “the early Quakers used print circulation, manuscript circulation, and public meetings and forums to bring to light the inadequacies of the English republic’s religious settlement” (194). The Quakers demanded legislative reform to address these inadequacies. The final section of the book ends with another case study, the James Nayler crisis in 1656. James Nayler was...