The Circulation of Quaker Texts, 1650-1700

Compelling Reading: The Circulation of Quaker Texts, 1650-1700 Brooke Sylvia Palmieri A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at University College London September 2017 !1 !2 I, Brooke Sylvia Palmieri, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. !3 !4 Abstract This is a work about the publications and archival habits of a radical minority. The Quakers organised themselves around reading, writing, archiving, and publication— activities in which every member was expected to participate. The paradox of these activities is that while they focused upon individual spiritual development, they were dependent upon and tested by intensely collaborative authorship and communal reading. Reading amongst Friends was an element of their spiritual identity, and also a direct inheri- tance of changes in information production and circulation triggered during the Civil Wars of the 1640s. Over time, Quaker reading practices changed along with the publications they produced and circulated, especially at the onset of state-sanctioned persecution during the Restoration. Publications, which initially featured Quaker leaders as authors, extended to include the testimonies of the broader membership experiencing persecution. Alternate readings of Quaker texts fuelled the doctrinal disputes between members. So too did the makeup of membership change, widening audiences, attract- ing scholars on the one hand, and non-English speakers on the other. With- in current scholarship on the history of reading, Quakers show how individual readings developed in a communal environment. Within the study of book history, Quakers show how the uses of print were integrated with the uses of manuscript, and they offer insight into the role oral discussion plays in “reading,” which in turn, has shaped the outcome of what has survived. Finally, within religious history, the purpose of this thesis is to detail what it meant for men and women at the end of the 17th century to document their experience of revolutionary religious fervour of the Civil War period in its aftermath — and how that fervour structured the production and circulation of texts for centuries to come. !5 Impact Statement For over three centuries, the Quakers have maintained a model of consensus-driven spirituality that has informed the way they have archived the experiences of their members, and the circulation of publications describing those experiences. Within academia, “Compelling Reading” documents the history of the earliest formation of these habits over the course of five decades during which Quakers experienced incredible persecution as a religious and political minority. Outside of academia, “Compelling Reading” offers a long history of—and a blueprint for—community-based heritage activity, publication, and archive-keeping for minority groups. As Quakers have historically been anti-violent and anti-racist, and have been involved with abolition, suffrage, and more recently environmental and LGBTQ rights advocacy, this thesis charts a social history that might be interpreted and reapplied to contemporary activist groups addressing those issues. !6 Table of Contents Introduction p. 8 Chapter 1 Absolutely Dead Things: Quaker Reading and Spirituality p. 36 Chapter 2 The Book as Archive, the Archives behind Books: Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Quaker Record-keeping Practices p. 84 Chapter 3 Truth and Necessity: How Quakers used their Records in Print p. 125 Chapter 4 Communal Readings: The Fine Line Between Consensus and Censorship p. 165 Chapter 5 Expanding Light: London, Amsterdam, Philadelphia p. 218 Conclusion and Coda p. 271 Acknowledgements p. 284 Works Cited p. 286 !7 Introduction “Compelling Reading” begins with the act of reading as the source of a dif- ferent, but recognisable, concept of textual culture. In this project I am ded- icated to describing the spiritual, communal basis of reading, writing, editing, and publishing habits, and from them, an alternative view of the book in the world at the close of the 17th century. The small religious sect that sus- tains my inquiry is the Religious Society of Friends, known from their origins in 1650s as Quakers, or Friends, and I offer here the first sustained study of Quakers as readers working against the grain of a wider Protestant culture. As diligent readers of the bible, the Quakers saw themselves and their pamphlets, books, and manuscripts in keeping with the example set forth by the apostles, and the earliest “primitive” Christians. As readers of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, they saw themselves as continuing the work of the religious reformers of the 16th century. As a group of radicals founded in the chaotic aftermath of England’s bloodiest conflict to date, the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Quakers adapted the beliefs, imitated the printing habits, and welcomed into their membership radicals from among the Levellers, Dig- gers, Ranters, and Seekers. As readers of the texts composed by one an- other, their community was defined by the relationships and debates fos- tered in print and manuscript between individuals from a broad cross-sec- tion of society, both in England and abroad. In tracing the adaptation of Quaker reading habits from a small community of itinerant preachers to a wider membership, the story told here is ultimately one about the transfor- mative and expansive possibilities of reading. Each of these areas of reading informed a departure within Quakerism from conventional views of “the book” within Christianity. Taken title by title or pamphlet by pamphlet, texts written by Quakers look and feel in keeping with the textual culture of their time, but surveyed as a whole as I do here, the interrelated mass of books, pamphlets, broadsides, correspondence, and manuscripts are justified in their creation by an alternative theology. Protestant, but also Catholic, understandings of textuality were dominated !8 by the sanctity of the bible, whether in the form of an illuminated manuscript chained upon a lectern, or as the printed, vernacular works upon which Luther’s concept of sola scriptura relied. This troubling materiality of the Word of God—sacred yet made manifest by the work of human hands in a fallen world—reached a point of crisis across Europe after 1517. The crisis persisted into, and beyond, the 1650s, but the Quaker viewpoint of the bible, and by extension the world of print itself, dismissed the problem. “Spirit,” rather than “letter,” was always of primary importance, and always to be found through, but outside of the text. For Quakers, it was blasphemy to conflate spirit with the text itself. In Quaker belief, divinity was to be ac- cessed instead through the individual’s “inner light,” relegating books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and the other texts they produced and consumed to a position of secondary importance, secondary only to action, both spiritually and socially, a “dead letter.” While texts were from the beginning crucial to exchanging news, maintaining communities spread over great distances, and describing experiences of conversion and persecution that would oth- erwise be lost, they were never imbued with the divine spark that troubled conventional Protestant (and even Catholic) understandings of scripture. By focusing in detail on the textual culture of the Friends, “Compelling Read- ing” seeks to describe a small but complicated world of interlocking habits in order to disrupt a larger assumption we have made about print and its place in the world. Instead of a tension between letter and spirit, the chief Quaker concern when it came to how texts were created and circulated, was the extent to which those texts nourished a sense of community. The problem was both external, because the Quakers were harshly persecuted after the Restora- tion, and internal, because the religion was defined by its adherence to a concept of individual spirit. The Quakers organised themselves around reading, writing, archiving, and publication—activities in which every member was expected to participate. But the paradox of these activities is that while they focused upon individual spiritual development, they were dependent upon and tested by intensely collaborative authorship and communal reading. Schism was a constant threat. Nevertheless, agree- !9 ment and argument alike resulted in a profusion of textual materials, and controversy itself was a regular element of Quaker experience. Quakers kept excellent records documenting their process of establishing consensus both in the works they published, and the vast collection of meeting minutes and correspondences detailing their writing habits, collective editing habits, all of which documented—and appealed for—the survival of the sect de- spite harsh persecution. For in addition to the Quaker belief that—internal- ly—the spirit must always come before the letter, was externally the imme- diate threat of violence. The majority of Quaker documents and printed works in the period I deal with were made and circulated under duress, pairing a minority view of the book in the world with the experience of the oppression of a minority. By focusing on the spirited, spiritually driven Quaker textual tradition, “Compelling Reading” intervenes in five main fields of research: Quaker Studies, the wider study of religion in the Early Modern Period, and studies within the field broadly construed as History of the Book, and Archive Stud- ies.

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