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The Worlds of William Penn' H-Pennsylvania Tomek on Murphy and Smolenski, 'The Worlds of William Penn' Review published on Thursday, September 17, 2020 Andrew R. Murphy, John Smolenski, eds. The Worlds of William Penn. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 438 pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-978801-77-6. Reviewed by Beverly Tomek (University of Houston-Victoria.)Published on H-Pennsylvania (September, 2020) Commissioned by Jeanine Mazak-Kahne (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53874 This comprehensive collection of essays about the life and times of William Penn builds upon the 1986 classic, The World of William Penn, edited by Richard S. and Mary Maples Dunn, to reassess Penn’s significance and legacy on the tricentennial of his death.[1] Born of a 2015 conference on William Penn supported by Rutgers’ British Studies Center and Department of Political Science, in conjunction with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the collection brings together scholars of literature, art history, material culture, history, cartography, and political theory. The essays, about half of which began as papers for the conference, are divided into six sections: “Materials, History, Memory”; “Irish Worlds”; “Restoration Worlds”; “American Worlds”; “Quaker Worlds”; and “Imperial Worlds.” Collectively they fulfill the editors’ goal of offering “an opportunity to think more broadly about the early modern contexts that gave rise to liberty of conscience, none of the foundational concepts in modern political thought and practice” (p. 3). By focusing on the various contexts of Penn’s life and times, from the intellectual climate in Great Britain to the imperial situations in Ireland and North America to the various social and cultural contexts of all of Penn’s worlds, the collection shows that Penn’s legacy extended far beyond religious toleration, for better or worse. The editors begin by promising to illuminate Penn’s life and times in four ways. First, they claim that the essays “enlarge what we know about Penn the man, an individual enmeshed in a range of personal and professional relationships that enabled him to play an outsized role in the affairs of his time” (p. 7). Second, they illustrate “the importance of Ireland in Penn’s formation.” They also “provide a deeper understanding of the era in which Penn grew up and lived” (p. 8). And, finally, they offer Penn as a “case study for broader examinations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history and culture” (p. 9). While the chapters tend to “downplay Penn’s uniqueness” they do so only to “highlight the complexity of both his life and his times.” With these goals in mind, the editors could have arranged the collection in several different ways, but they managed to find a way that allows the collection to succeed admirably in tracing these key themes throughout the six sections. The first section of the book focuses on material history and memory and offers some of the most fascinating essays in the collection. Elizabeth Milroy’s examination of “The Elusive Body of William Penn” concerns two key moments in the development of a celebratory history of the man, both of which were linked to the construction of Philadelphia City Hall: the attempt to have Penn’s remains Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tomek on Murphy and Smolenski, 'The Worlds of William Penn'. H-Pennsylvania. 09-17-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/8590/reviews/6446565/tomek-murphy-and-smolenski-worlds-william-penn Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Pennsylvania moved from England to Philadelphia and the creation of the Penn statue that sits atop the building. According to Milroy, Philadelphians in the late 1800s set out to ensure that Penn would be “sufficiently appreciated,” by deploying his body “literally as well as figuratively” in one of the public spaces he had originally envisioned for his capital city (p. 14). The Quaker community, including Penn’s lineal descendants, prevented the repatriation of his remains, but the statue was designed and put in place to serve as “a tangible example of the honest and decent leader at a time when the city and country were beset by political corruption” (p. 42). Like Milroy, Catharine Dann Roeber uses the history of material objects to illustrate the lasting impact of Penn’s legacy. Penn’s mobility during his lifetime makes it difficult to investigate his material world, but Roeber manages to draw some significant conclusions, primarily regarding Penn’s “applied ideology” that allowed him to adapt and adjust his behavior and clothing to gain political and social advantage (p. 50). Roeber warns that “to posit Penn’s interests in Pennsylvania as ‘Quaker’ or even as ‘English,’ is reductionist and simplifies the processes of creative reinvention that occur in the provincial setting” and she adds that his descendants extended the construction of his identity beyond his death, creating an image that would “suit their familial, political, and monetary interests” (pp. 54, 60). Emily Mann rounds out the section with a study on the first map of Pennsylvania and its relation to exploitation and empire. Though, as Roeber points out, we know little about Penn’s possessions, what is certain is that among the things he owned and featured in his various residences was a collection of at least seventeen maps. These maps were central to his identity as a proprietor and authority figure, and they allow us to explore his American colony in its wider context. The map Mann focuses on in the chapter, John Thornton and John Seller’s 1681 Map of Some of the South and Eastbounds of Pennsylvania in America, was used as a recruiting tool and served as the equivalent of a “flashy brochure or eyecatching full-page poster ad” to portray Pennsylvania as a “land of possibility” (p. 78). After examining the objects of Penn’s material culture, the editors shift focus to Penn’s life and work in Ireland with essays that collectively reveal the many ways in which Penn’s experiences there influenced his later work in the New World. Marcus Gallo’s “William Penn, William Petty, and Surveying” fits well with Mann’s cartographic study by examining how Penn’s experiences in Ireland led him to use geometric surveys for private property assessment. According to Gallo, the 1659 Down Survey, which redistributed Irish lands among English landlords, set a precedent that helped shape Penn’s understanding of “how a state could properly direct landownership for the benefit of the landholding class” (p. 109). In assessing land quality as well as measurement, it also led proprietors like Penn to see America as a laboratory to test scientific land management’s ability to yield profits for the benefit of English landholders as well as the empire. His Irish experiences also affected Penn’s views on toleration beyond religion, leading him to believe in moderate treatment of indigenous groups. According to Audrey Horning, Penn’s Irish connections shaped his treatment of the people he would later encounter in Pennsylvania and also led him to believe in the importance of assimilation, especially after seeing the results of the English policy of transplanting displaced Irish to the West Indies. His own experiences also left Penn content to retain Irish tenants and workers, and to continue a number of Irish economic practices. Penn’s experiences and the influence of Irish associates left him with an understanding of the value of “pragmatic accommodation,” an idea that became the “underpinning for Penn’s ideas on toleration” (p. 135). Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tomek on Murphy and Smolenski, 'The Worlds of William Penn'. H-Pennsylvania. 09-17-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/8590/reviews/6446565/tomek-murphy-and-smolenski-worlds-william-penn Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Pennsylvania Andrew R. Murphy follows Horning’s assessment with a deeper look at how Penn’s experiences in Ireland led to his views on religious toleration. He points out that it was in Cork where Penn became convinced of Quaker ideals, and it was in a Cork jail where he wrote his first public defense of religious liberty. During a second trip to Ireland Penn wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, a work which lays out his sophisticated and far-reaching case for religious toleration and presents the bedrock of the ideology he would maintain the rest of his life. According to Murphy, Penn was unique among toleration advocates because he was willing to spread toleration to Catholics. His time in Ireland transformed Penn from someone who defended Quakers to someone with a “much broader vision as a proponent of religious toleration as a political approach to religious difference” (p. 149). From Ireland, the collection shifts focus to the Restoration and Penn’s place the European and American religious environments. Elizabeth Sauer begins this section with a literary analysis of the works of John Milton, Paul Bunyan, and William Penn as post-1660 English tolerationists focused on holy experiments. Her goal is to set these authors in the intellectual and cultural climates and literary milieu of their time by following their “errands into the wilderness as architects of new worlds founded on liberty of conscience” (p. 156). Her examination of these works explores the connections between English and American national literatures. Scott Sowerby takes the reader back to England to examine how Penn’s political and philosophical views shaped his relationship with James II, arguing that Penn’s friendship with James was the “most visible outcome of his preference for religious liberty over popular sovereignty” (p.
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