Matrimony in the True Church: The Seventeenth-Century Quaker Marriage Approbation Discipline by Kristianna Polder (review)

Kristianna Polder's Matrimony in the True Church is a recent addition to the growing historiography on early Quakers. The Quakers were one among a number of religious radical groups that proliferated during the mid-seventeenth-century English civil wars. Their longevity, outlasting the Restoration's suppression of dissent, owed something to their transformation from an enthusiastic and prophetic sect to one of quiet conservatism. This transformation, taking decades, was enabled by Quaker social reorganization through marriage discipline, a process whereby the community approves the marriage, and the recasting of the family order. Later Quakers in America would become known for their domesticity, as Barry Levy has shown in Quakers and the American Family (1992), but they were not so in their early radical phase. Polder's focus on marriage discipline thus constitutes an importance piece of the puzzle in understanding the Quakers' transformation over the course of the first half-century of their existence. The author proposes to examine the marriage discipline or approbation process as a way to understand Quaker self-perception as the "True Church."

Polder's introduction is largely an overview of the existing literature on the subject. The first section presents the historical context of the origin of the Quakers; the second section gives an outline of the chapters and discusses the Quakers' "obsession with marriage approbation" (6); the third section is another literature review, but this one focuses on marriage discipline itself; finally, the fourth section reviews the documentary sources. Three chapters follow this introduction. Chapter one addresses the process of marriage approbation and discipline within marriage. Polder suggests that the founders George Fox and Margaret Fell established this marriage discipline to counteract public hostility and the accusations that Quakers engaged in immoral sexual behavior. The chapter's opening section discusses hostile outsiders' views of early Quakers, such as John Perrot and James Nayler, whose mystical and sexual practices made them and, by extension, the entire Quaker sect notorious. But rather than viewing these figures as representing differing interpretations of the sect in its early inchoate days, Polder defaults to a reading from a later Quaker perspective when it had become more conventional. Accordingly, she focuses on Fox and Fell's promotion of the marriage discipline, where marriage is contracted after both the individuals involved and the entire community were satisfied that they had followed God's will, as revealed through the inner promptings of the spirit; that decision involved lengthy deliberation. Quaker marriage ceremonies themselves were simple; they did away with practices such as the exchange of rings and the custom of the father "giving away" the bride. Because the Quakers rejected marriage conducted by a priest but still needed to prove the validity of their marriages, they developed a process of approbation by their own community that involved investigation and certification at their monthly meetings. Polder uses an examination of these meetings to highlight a number of instances that show how Quakers contracted marriages and resolved conflicts, as in the case of one woman who promised to marry two men. By the late 1660s, separate women's meetings were established to lessen the burden that the marriage approbation process was placing on the men's meetings.

Chapter two examines the theology of Quaker marriage discipline within Fox's trope of "the church coming out of the wilderness" (116). The first sections analyze what Fox meant by "wilderness," contrasting it with other Christian authors' interpretations, including those by eschatalogical authors like Jakob Böhme, who, Polder contends, might have influenced Fox. Fox's belief in a divine inner presence becomes externalized in the community of believers or "True Church" (135). The second half of the chapter largely focuses on Quaker efforts to maintain unity among its members by rejecting, among other things, exogamous marriages—marriages with non-Quakers—including the significant early case of Margaret Fell's daughter...