Quakers

In the long eighteenth century the judges at the Old Bailey came to allow Jewish, Scottish, Muslim, Hindu, and Chinese witnesses, but not Quakers, to swear oaths according to their own cultural practices.  Although a non-Christian witness might be able to give testimony under oath, the jury still had to assess the veracity of the evidence.  The increasingly adversarial mode of felony trials in the eighteenth century made the separation between who was legally able to testify and who was credible more pronounced.  Barristers and prisoners raised concerns about the oaths of blacks and non-Christians as means of impugning the truthfulness of a witness.

During the late seventeenth century the Atlantic trade experienced unprecedented growth. The New
Institutional Economists attribute this to the emergence of new institutions for property rights
enforcement. During this period, Quakers emerged as the region’s most prominent trading community.
This paper constitutes the first study of the London Quaker community. In contrast to the literature,
claiming that they enjoyed a competitive advantage due to their church’s formal institutions for
contract enforcement, this paper argues that Friends’ formal institutions for contract enforcement
emerged only after 1750. This constituted a response to contemporary concern about debt.

This essay reappraises the origins of French Quakerism based on new archival research conducted on both sides of the Channel. It identifies 34 Quaker missionaries in 17th- and early 18C France, sheds new light on the French reception of Quakerism and suggests possible connections with non-violent, charismatic movements in Languedoc.

Amnesty International estimated in 1977 that between 600,000 and 750,000 Indonesians had been or were still imprisoned as a result of the Army-led anti-communist violence in Indonesia in the mid-1960s. This article charts the relationship between members of Amnesty International and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) with a political prisoner on death row in East Java, Gatot Lestario, a former leader of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article draws on the letters he wrote over a period of three years before his execution in 1985 and interviews with his pen pals. It traces the ways in which he encouraged his pen pals to advocate for human rights in Indonesia and their responses, as well as his own involvement in political prisoner advocacy. This case study illustrates the disappearance of Indonesia's previously close and solidary relationship with the socialist world and its replacement at the people-to-people level with human rights activism involving Western activists. This is particularly evident in the increasingly important role played by members of Amnesty International, the Quakers and other overseas organizations concerned with Indonesia. Finally, the article assesses Gatot Lestario's impact, after his execution, on the development of a long-term advocacy network for Indonesia's political prisoners.

My article traces the changing attitudes toward slave conversion in seventeenth-century Barbados -from hesitant discomfort in the mid-seventeenth century, to virulent rejection in 1680 -and argues that the attempted rebellion of 1675, which was widely blamed on Quaker proselytising efforts, played a pivotal role in the development of an antagonistic attitude toward missionaries in Barbados. The 1675 attempted rebellion, I suggest, linked slave conversion with slave rebellion in a new and decisive way that had repercussions throughout the British West Indies.

A questionnaire was sent to all Monthly, Preparative and other Business Meetings and worshipping groups in Britain Yearly Meeting for completion on 7 May 2006. With an over 80 percent response rate meaningful statistics can be calculated for attendance at Meetings for worship, Meetings for business and involvement by Friends and attenders in the business of the Society.1

Trade in the early modern Atlantic grew a great deal. While acknowledging that this growth had important economic, social and cultural consequences, scholars have yet to fully explain its causes. This paper argues that formal religious institutions were key. Based on records from colonial Philadelphia, it shows how the Quaker meeting created a legal forum to resolve commercial disputes. The meeting enforced its verdicts by gathering and disseminating information about disputes locally and across the Atlantic world through the Society of Friends' formal organisation of meetings. Thereby, it re-enforced reputation mechanisms, facilitating the expansion of Philadelphia's trade. In pre-modern societies, long-distance trade constituted a key motor for economic growth. The expansion of trade in the British Atlantic facilitated social mobility and the emergence of the middling sorts as an economic and political force in England. Some prominent scholars have argued that it laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution, making it the root of present-day global inequality. 1 The factors determining trade expansion, however, remain unclear. Economic historians researching trade have been strongly influenced by the New Institutional Economists (NIE). 2 These argue that within Europe, the emergence of strong, centralised states who enforced property rights enabled trade. European states were however unable to extend their control to the American colonies. The growth of trade in the Atlantic despite weak state structures poses a puzzle yet to be solved. This article offers a solution to this puzzle. Based on the extensive records of colonial Philadelphia's Quaker Monthly Meeting, it shows that in the face of weak state institutions, formal religious institutions evolved to enforce property rights. Its argument is threefold. First, the Meeting established its own legal forum, where it solved commercial disputes through arbitration. Second, it did this in order to compensate for the unreliable public courts. Third, it ensured that litigants honoured its decisions by means of a formally reinforced reputation mechanism. The importance of reputation mechanisms in early modern trade is well established. The Quaker Monthly Meeting is distinct as it found a way to employ reputation mechanisms formally, thereby increasing their impact. It

The article demonstrates that outsiders wishing to break into the German religious scene in the late seventeenth century concentrated their energies mainly on Pietist women, revealing that contemporaries recognized these women as leaders of the reform movement. After tracing the attempts of English Quakers to spread their religion to Germany through contacts with women such as Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate, the article turns to the correspondence of Quaker leader William Penn (1644-1718) and Pietist activist Johanna Eleonora Merlau (1644-1724). A close reading of a newly discovered letter from Merlau to Penn provides new insights into her role in early Pietism and also reveals a significant Quaker influence on her thinking. The article concludes that, through female reformers like Merlau, the English dissidents had a significant impact on German Pietism.

Orientalist and colonial representations of harems have resulted in the association of North African women with domestic confinement. North African authors such as Assia Djebar (1980), Malek Alloula (1981) and Fatima Mernissi (1994), however, suggest that this view is biased. While focusing largely on Fatima Mernissi's memoir, Dreams of Trespass, this article builds on these authors' exploration of the various ways in which women of the Maghreb are portrayed, in order to provide a clearer understanding of the dynamics of women's space in the context of colonial North Africa.

This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities (dualist and monist; progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier ‘heretical’ tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism). This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the Enlightenment at its best.

This article contributes to a new perspective on the historical Jesus in early modern intellectual history. This perspective looks beyond German and academic scholarship, and takes account of a plurality of religious, social, and political contexts. Having outlined avenues of research which are consistent with this approach, I focus on radicalised socio-political contexts for the emergence of ‘history’ as a category of analysis for Jesus. Two contexts will be discussed: the late eighteenth century, with reference to Joseph Priestley, Baron d’Holbach, and their associations with the French Revolution; and the interregnum period in seventeenth-century Britain, with reference to early Quaker controversies and the apologetic work of Henry More. I identify ideas about Jesus in those contexts which have echoed in subsequent scholarship, while challenging the notion that there is a compelling association between sympathetic historical conceptions of Jesus (as opposed to theological) and a tendency towards radical and revolutionary politics.

O abolicionismo estadunidense foi tudo menos simples: antes de falar de um movimento uno, podemos entendê-lo como um longo debate que se estendeu por 177 anos até que seu objetivo central fosse atingido. Assim, é mais correto falarmos de múltiplas fases do movimento, cada qual com sua filosofia, com sua expectativa perante os negros emancipados e, sobretudo, com uma ideia própria de como alcançar seus alvos. Identificaremos em 1829 uma ruptura entre duas grandes visões de emancipação: uma gradualista e moderada, remontante à época colonial, e outra imediatista e radical. Esse é o momento em que o negro ganha presença na mídia jornalística e literária, contribuindo com argumentos e estratégias de combate antes oclusas à esfera pública os quais, por fim, transformaram o abolicionismo num movimento de massas capaz de alterar os rumos daquele país.

ABSTRACT: Abolitionism in the United States was anything but simple; instead of assuming it as a unified movement, one can fathom it as a long debate which ranged for 177 years before its goal was achieved. Therefore, it is more correct to talk about multiple phases of this movement, each with its philosophy, with its expectations towards emancipated African Americans and, above all, with its own ideas of how its goals could be brought about. Hereby, we identify a disruption between two major views of emancipation taking place in 1829: one gradualist and moderate, dating back to the Colonial Era, and the other immediatist and radical. Such was the moment where blacks gained presence in the journalistic and literary media, thereby contributing with arguments and fighting strategies which were hitherto hidden to the public sphere and which, from that point on, transformed abolitionism in a mass movement capable of altering the course of that country.

During the 1850s there was rising concern in the Society of Friends about declining membership. From the 1840s attempts were made to obtain hard statistics on adherence and in the late 20th century another decline again reduced numbers to the level of the 1850s and 1860s.
This thesis reviews and analyses data from the middle of the 19th century to 2012, illuminating variation in both membership and participation in church worship and governance. It presents new data on participation in meeting for worship and provides geographical and socio-metric data on the origins of enquiries about Quakerism, providing both a research tool for further work by bringing large volumes of information together and illuminating the ways in which the size and the social structure of the Society of Friends has varied with time. Available from University of Birmingham eTheses repository http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/5787

Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis  2017/2
The aim of the article “The Relations Between Puritans and Quakers in 17th Century New England” is to analyze very complicated relations between two specific religious groups after their migration to the “New World”. The author presents history of both religious movements and circumstances of their settlement in America. She also explains how political structures created there by the Puritans influenced the situation of the Quaker missionaries. The main part of the article is an analysis of the reasons behind a profound Puritan hostility towards Quakers. The author divides these reasons into three categories: theological, theological-political, and socio-political, stressing the importance of the last category. Finally, she tries to explain how Quaker presence and attitude influenced future development of American political system.

Streszczenie: Celem artykułu jest ukazanie skomplikowanych relacji między purytanami a kwakrami w kolonialnej Nowej Anglii, zwłaszcza w drugiej połowie XVII wieku. Autorka przedstawia genezę obydwu ruchów religijnych i okoliczności przybycia członków tych wspólnot do kolonii w Ameryce Północnej, omawia struktury polityczne stworzone tam przez purytanów oraz wyjaśnia, jakie miejsce zostało w nich przypisane kwakrom. Analizuje też przyczyny szczególnej niechęci purytanów do kwakrów, wyodrębniając wśród nich trzy kategorie (teologiczne, teologiczno-polityczne oraz społeczno-polityczne) i podkreślając znaczenie tych ostatnich. Ponadto, wskazuje na wpływ, jaki pojawienie się kwakrów wywarło na kolonie purytańskie, a także na przyszłe amerykańskie rozwiązania prawne dotyczące relacji państwo–Kościół. Słowa kluczowe: purytanie, kwakrzy, kolonialna Nowa Anglia, prześladowania religijne, radykalizm społeczny

Women Friends (or Quakers) held an antithetical position in their religious community during the
nineteenth century. They were considered to be spiritually equal to male followers, and permitted
to preach in public, yet were excluded from every major decision making process concerning the
religion due to their gender. This text discusses the letters published in Quaker journals in 1873
on the subject of the position of women in the Religious Society of Friends. It analyses how this
correspondence played a pivotal role in making Quaker women’s battle for gender equality in their
religious organisation visible to a national unisex audience.

Resumo: O presente artigo tratará dos primeiros anos da Pensilvânia, colônia britânica fundada pelo quacre William Penn. Por meio de revisão bibliográfica, buscamos compreender de que maneira o imaginário político da região, que mais tarde se tornaria chave no processo revolucionário americano, foi influenciado pela perspectiva radical de seus primeiros habitantes. Para tanto, nossa trajetória de análise parte do arranjo entre o colonizador e o rei para a concessão das terras que se tornariam a colônia, passa pela resistência que os quakers encontraram na sociedade inglesa do século XVII por conta de seus modos marcados pela insubordinação, chega à América para compreender qual foi a colônia encontrada pelos seus " desbravadores " e termina na construção ideológica posterior que tentou construir uma imagem gloriosa da experiência colonizadora.

Abstract: This paper aims to provide analysis of the Pennsylvania early years as a British colony " established " by the Quaker Willian Penn. Through literature review, we tried to understand how the region political context, which later would become the key of the American Revolution, was affected by its first inhabitants radical perspective. In order to accomplish it, our study path initiates with the agreement between Penn and the King about the land agreement that would become the Colony, than the resistance that the Quakers had found in this XVII Century Society raised by their kind of insolence, and ends in America to understand what kind colony the pioneers had found and also interpretates in a critical perspective the ideological construction of a Glorious Image of the colonization process.

This essay was published in The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman, edited by Michael Heller (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Press, 2003, pp. 17-44). As an analysis of Woolman's spiritual development, this essay tracks the influences upon his life, as reported in his journal, and gathers wisdom from those reported experiences.

This thesis is a geographic and temporal case study of the carpentry and joinery trades present in the Delaware River Valley region from the period of Anglo-European settlements in the 1660s to about 1740. This examination of the region’s craft traditions emphasizes what its colonies share: patterns of settlement, ethnicity, kinship, religion, material richness, and commercial interdependence.

This study closely examined the construction of and materials used in case furniture produced in New Jersey or Pennsylvania individually, or in the larger Delaware River Valley region as a whole, revealing the persistence of Anglo-European craft traditions in colonial America, and a relative stasis in internal casework construction as a result of the apprenticeship system.
The similarity of construction and material found in these objects indicates the shared cultural expectations of craftsmen and their patrons, illustrative of the craft tradition of the Delaware Valley Region, not of any one colony.  It also speaks to the significant role of New Jersey's timber in intercolonial commerce. This further suggests that extant furniture defined as made within Philadelphia or Pennsylvania without any further details of maker and place of manufacture could have been produced anywhere in the Delaware River Valley, including New Jersey, Chester County, and the Lower Counties (Delaware). In addition to case studies examining furniture of this region, this study identifies over two hundred and fifty members of New Jersey’s woodworking trades who utilized the colony's material wealth and interpersonal resources for individual success.

The attached PDF contains the title page, copyright page, epigraphs, and table of contents for "The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience" by Alan E. Johnson (available in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon websites throughout the world).  For additional information, see http://www.amazon.com/First-American-Founder-Williams-Conscience/dp/1511823712/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436397728&sr=1-1.

[A Quaker in Lisbon: the Travels and the Writings of Ann Gargill]. Anne Gargill was born in Swine (East Riding) in 1625. In January 1656 she published the short pamphlet A Warning to all the World. Shortly afterwards she went to Plymouth with the intention of going to Spain to evangelise, writing a letter to Fox prior to her departure from London. Her ship Lisbon at the end of April and upon landing Gargill directed herself to the King’s palace, but when she discovered that he wasn’t there she returned to the ship. On 2 May, two Inquisition officials went aboard the ship and spoke with her. Three days later she was brought to the Inquisition palace in Lisbon and interrogated. The Inquisition decided to release her, fearing that her detention would cause diplomatic problems with England, but ordered her to set out for England with the first ship. In September 1656 Ann Gargill published A brief discovery of that which is called the Popish Religion. In 1659, Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers told the Maltese Inquisitor that Anne Gargill had founded Quaker congregations in Spain. In the spring of 1657 Anne Gargill was in Holland where she caused discord and dissent in the Quaker community of Amsterdam, and for this reason was disowned by the Quaker leaders. In the following months a small group formed around her in Amsterdam. A woman of strong spirituality and keen intelligence she probably opposed the process of organisation of Quakerism that followed Nayler’s entry into Bristol. The story of Gargill is extremely interesting because it symbolizes some of the contradictions of early Quakerism. A movement that emerged as the supreme instance of freedom of the Spirit, original Quakerism experienced in the protagonism of women as Gargill one of its characteristics. The organizational process, a direct result of increasing repression, forced the more reasonable leaders of the movement to abandon some of the characteristics of its early early days and to define a Quaker theology that would not limit itself to the enthusiastic action of the Spirit within every man and every woman. Some people of more intense spirituality opposed this development, and were marginalized or expelled by the movement; this was the case of Anne Gargill. It is significant that among those who opposed the hierarchicalization of the movement a significant number were those, like Gargill, had excelled in the missionary activity (Villani also cites Perrot who, after having been a prisoner of the Roman Inquisition would lead a schism among the Quakers on the issue of the freedom of the Spirit). For those who had risked their lives to preach the free gospel of Inner Light it was intolerable to think that their movement would progressively structure along the lines of other churches with a hierarchy, a Church discipline, and a defined credo. Gargill’s prudent and cautious responses to the Portuguese inquisitors – examined by Villani in the article – would suffice to prove that not everyone who can be considered part of this extreme wing of Quakerism were frantics, led by their intransigence to risky headlong rush. However, it is highly probable that if they had taken over the movement leadership and not the more prosaic common sence of George Fox and his supporters, the movement would hardly have escaped unscathed the storm of the Restoration. The price that Quakerism paid to the marginalizing and expulsion of these restless spirits, however, was undoubtedly that of a radical transformation. If at the beginning of the movement the only article of belief was that you had to listen to “that something of God” present in every man and woman, Quakerism gradually became a true Church to which members must conform, not to risk excommunication and expulsion. And so, it is not coincidental that among those who most vigorously opposed to this outcome there were people like Gargill who had risked their lives to assert the freedom of conscience in Catholic countries.

[The First Quakers and the Jews]. The article describes the mission of Menasseh ben Israel to England in 1655 for the readmission of the Jews in that country, highlighting how he was accompanied by Raphael Supino, a leading member of the Jewish community of Livorno (later a follower of Sabbatai Zevi). Following an examination of the characters of “philo-Semitism” that spread the revolution in England, the debate that followed the proposal of Menasseh ben Israel, to which the Quakers also contributed in favor of readmission writing numerous conversionist works with the intent to demonstrate the harmony between the Old and New Testaments. This philo-Semitic attitude of the Quakers is also manifested during their missions in the Mediterranean and Italy. In 1656 – a year full of millenarian expectations – the Quakers promoted a collection to fund their missionary activities and the following year a group of six Quakers left for Jerusalem. Once in Livorno one of them, the Irish John Perrot spoke in the synagogue there. The intervention of the inquisitor of Pisa pushed the Governor to solicit their departure. The Quakers, however, had had time to spread some of the texts of their movement that, originally published in English, had been translated into Latin, French, and Italian in view of these missions. Villani highlights how the Quakers who arrived in Venice, also with missionary intents, had been alerted by the Jews of the town of the fact that two of their comrades had been arrested by the Inquisition in Rome. Villani also discusses two paintings by Alessandro Magnasco representing an interior of Synagogue and a Quaker meeting, painted in the early 1700s for Ferdinando de’ Medici. The fact that these two paintings had been painted at the same time, one as pendant to the other, leads the author to cautiously hypothesize that the choice of these curious subjects may be related to the memory of the Quaker mission in Livorno in 1657 and to their preaching in the synagogue. In an appendix to the article are published in full three texts Quakers turned to the Hebrews. The first is a short text aimed at the conversion of Jews (Bosom Opened To The Jews by William Tomlinson), the second, Immanuel The Salvation of Israel by John Perrot, is, apparently, the report made by him of the sermon he gave in the synagogue of Livorno and the third, Certe Considerationi proposte agli hebrei by Isaac Penington, is perhaps the only seventeenth-century Quaker text translated into Italian in print. Apparently the only copy of this text is preserved at the Friends’ Library in London. The article, reconstructing for the first time Quaker propaganda to the Italian Jews, shows unexpected and unexplored relationships between the latter and foreign Protestants and the religious complexities of seventeenth-century Italy.