The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726 ed. by Rachel Cope and Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

Scholars of Quaker and religious studies, early modern transatlantic history, colonial American literature, and women's life writing and literary history will welcome The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726, the first volume to collect this once well-known Quaker minister's published and unpublished works. Webb (1663–1727) was one of a few hundred eighteenth-century women traveling ministers in the Society of Friends. In colonial America and England, Webb preached in religious gatherings, Quaker meetings, town halls, country barns, and remote forests. Webb is unique in her prolific output, which circulated in manuscript and was excerpted in nineteenth-century Quaker publications. Following a substantial (twenty-three pages) and straightforward introduction, the editors present all of Webb's known writings: her 1712 letter to German Pietest Anthony William Boehm (with his answer), read by thousands; Some Meditations with Some Observations upon the Revelations of Jesus Christ, a lengthy verse-by-verse commentary on Revelations; A Short Account of My Voyage into America with Mary Rogers, My Companion, a travel journal based on Webb's mission trip to England's North American colonies (1697–99); a "Short Memorial" of her early life, convincement, marriage, and spiritual journey addressed to her "dear children and young people"; and a brief letter to her children (1724). Cope and Hutchins consider Webb a "major contributor to the literary and religious history of colonial North America" and her archive the "earliest extant collection of colonial Quaker writings." They hope the volume will "revolutionize our understanding of Quaker eschatology and . . . reintroduce, for modern audiences, a woman who was well known to religious communities on both sides of the ocean during her life and for decades afterward" (5).

For nearly twenty years, scholars have relied on Rebecca Larson's well-documented monograph Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (2009), which examines the lives of Quaker women ministers like Webb. Recently, Naomi Pullin's Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (2018) and Michele Tarter and Catie Gill's collection, New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 (2018), have reignited interest in Quaker women's role in the development of transatlantic Quakerism and religious networks. Cope and Hutchins's volume comes at a critical moment. Aligning with Larson's, Pullin's, and Tarter and Gill's findings, the editors argue that Webb "found creative ways to offer fellowship and encourage the formation of community with her pen" and that her "sense of community was cultivated through her personal reception of the Light of Christ, while also demonstrating how writing about and sharing such religious experiences with others enabled her to stretch the boundaries of Quaker community into a transatlantic context" (11).

The editors' introduction contextualizes Webb within the Society of Friends, one of several radical Protestant sects active after the English Civil War, and within the "theological and ecclesiastical contributions of women in colonial America," which include "developing transatlantic religious and social networks . . . [and] the importance of ecstatic or visionary experiences in the construction of Quaker identity" (4). Most compelling is the editors' argument that Webb's work as a whole must be understood as emerging from her "relational sensibility" (13), a belief that her personal religious experiences and spiritual understanding could benefit specific individuals while uniting people on both sides of the Atlantic—from slaves and servants to governors and statesmen—in a committed network of supportive spiritual kinship. While Cope and Hutchins contextualize Webb's treatment of dreams, visions, spiritual calling, and the colonial wilderness within larger Quaker history, Legacy readers will be interested in the editors' focus on Quaker women's lives in the early modern transatlantic world. For example, Webb's commentary on Revelations and her letter to Boehm use Scripture...