Providence,punishment and identity formation in the late-Stuart Quaker community,c.1650–1700

For centuries, Englishmen and women believed that any misfortune, from the smallest malady to a natural catastrophe, signified divine “justice.” Scholarship on providence and miracles has shown that beliefs in divine intervention were enhanced by the political and religious conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century. This article seeks to refine our understanding of the role of providence in confessional identity formation through an examination of Quaker providential interpretation between 1650 and c.1700. It explores the ways in which Quakers appropriated accounts of divine judgement, circulated them within their community and memorialised them for the benefit of future generations. The discovery of an attempt to create a nationwide record of judgements to befall Quaker persecutors shows that providential stories had a significant role in uniting, and ensuring the survival of a disparate and heavily persecuted religious community.     

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

Collecting Looerryminer's ‘Testimony’: Aboriginal Women,Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands

In 1832 British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ to the antipodean colonies on a mission sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends. This article examines Backhouse and Walker's mission to witness the ‘testimony’ of Looerryminer and other Aboriginal women who had lived with sealers in the Bass Strait Islands. It argues that this investigative journey is best comprehended in the context of the long tradition of Quaker transimperial travel ‘under concern’ and particularly their abolitionist witnessing undertaken from the late eighteenth century and its associated texts with their distinctive form, language and repertoire. Urging that we read ‘along the grain’ of the archive in line with Ann Stoler, the article explores the travel and curious translation of humanitarian abolitionist sentiment, text, and action across and between colonies of settlement, and the various ‘species of slavery’ that were imagined, constructed and examined by Quaker humanitarians in this Age of Reform.     

Discipline: The codification of Quakerism as orthopraxy, 1650-1738

Quakerism emerged from the religious, social and political turmoil of the Interregnum when sects multiplied and many diverse individuals were joined in their criticism of the state church. What began as a loose network of Seekers, united largely in their opposition to Anglicanism, was organised and given a distinctive shape by several energetic visionaries and most notably George Fox, a Leicestershire artisan. From 1650, this pioneering group preached the Quaker gospel first across northern England and soon throughout the country and in Europe and America. They are interesting to us for a number of reasons but particularly because they manifest a unique paradox: whilst eschewing all creeds, Seventeenth-Century Quakers wrote voluminously in an attempt to shape their faith and, in particular, their practice. In this paper I will argue that early Friends circumvented the need to distinguish between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, through their emphasis on orthopraxy. Drawing on Bourdieu's work on codification and the habitus I will examine the complex development of Quaker Discipline precipitated as it was in and through Meetings for Church Affairs and the various writings of "public Friends"--a process of textualisation culminating in the first Book of Discipline of 1738.     

Spinoza’s translation of Margaret Fell and his portrayal of Judaism in the Theological-Political Treatise

The English Quaker Margaret Fell worked hard to have her conversionist pamphlets to Dutch Jews translated into Hebrew, and Richard Popkin has suggested that Spinoza was Fell’s translator. This article offers further evidence for Popkin’s claim by suggesting that Fell’s influence can be seen in chapters 4 and 5 of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Fell’s and Spinoza’s remarks about Judaism and Jewish ceremonies bear significant similarities, as do the biblical passages they use to support their statements. Spinoza also challenges Fell’s arguments, though, by resisting her Pauline method of reading the Hebrew Bible and reading with a historicist method instead. Spinoza’s apparent use and revision of Fell’s arguments are significant because they speak to the role of the Quakers – and, notably, of a Quaker woman – in early modern intellectual history and because they sharpen our view of Spinoza’s opinions of Judaism.     

The role of black Barbudans in the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the colonial Caribbean and South Carolina

Some significant problems remain in understanding the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the Caribbean and North America, especially regarding the role of blacks in that process. Research to date has identified the Greater Antilles, especially Spanish Cuba and British Jamaica, as the sole Caribbean sources of settlers who established the herding systems of, respectively, Mexico and South Carolina. Yet an open-range cattle herding system also occurred in the British Lesser Antilles, which provided many of the settlers for the South Carolina colony. Archival and field research in Antigua and Barbuda provide the basis for comprehensive reconstruction of that system's material culture and herding ecology, demonstration of the role of blacks in its operation, and comparison with other relevant systems to consider whether the British Lesser Antilles might also have been involved in the process through which open-range cattle herders established themselves in South Carolina during the late seventeenth century.     

The politics of neutrality: the American Friends Service Committee and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939

Abstract

From the early months of the Spanish civil war (1936–9) the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the American Quakers’ central service organization, was engaged in a large-scale relief operation on both sides of the front line. While Quaker aid workers on the ground were running hospitals, orphanages and child feeding stations on the Republican and Nationalist side, the operation triggered a sometimes heated debate at home. Quakers had to bridge the tension between the universalist ethos of a transnationally connected and internationally active religious group whose individual parts, in turn, closely integrated into, and were largely dependent on a national framework of action consisting of governments, the media and national-based groups of donors and supporters. Against this backdrop the article will reflect on the complex and shifting meaning of humanitarian neutrality. In the article the author will show how the claim to neutrality, always contested and precarious, could work as a gate opener for humanitarian aid vis-à-vis state and non-state actors alike, as a platform for co-operation with international institutions as well as a deliberately used capital on an increasingly competitive ‘humanitarian market place’.     

‘Subjective Testimonies’: Women Quaker Ministers and Spiritual Authority in England: 1750–1825

It was generally believed by historians that the increasingly formal regulation of belief and practice in the Society of Friends (Quakers) during the eighteenth century led to a decline in the influence and authority exercised by women in the denomination. Recent research has indicated, however, that although women were denied equal status and roles in the Society's new disciplinary bodies, the period also saw them beginning to outnumber men as the principal upholders of charismatic spiritual leadership through the ministry. These conflicting trends suggest that there were tensions and ambiguities within Quaker discourses on the meaning of gender and its implications for the exercise of religious authority. Using the testimonies of religious experience constructed by women ministers, this paper explores those discourses and illuminates the ways in which they were exploited, questioned and transformed by women. It argues that belief in the equal capacity of men and women for divine service was cut across by the conviction that sexual difference played a crucial part in shaping religious experience. Ministering women negotiated and manipulated the relationship between spirituality and femininity, both to understand themselves as instruments of divine power and to challenge the establishment of a male hierarchy in their church.     

Friends Farm: Australia’s First Quaker Commune

Australia has a long and rich history of religious groups trying to establish some sort of utopia by removing themselves from urban centres to rural idylls. The first of these was H errnhut, in western Victoria (1853–1889), and today there are many such as D anthonia B ruderhof and N ew G ovardhana, in NSW, C henrezig, in Queensland and R ocky C ape H utterites in Tasmania. While Quakers in the UK and USA have a tradition of forming rural communes starting from the seventeenth century, the first, and most important of such in Australia was F riends F arm, established in 1869 on what is now Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. This group was led by the charismatic Alfred Allen, a radical Quaker from Sydney. He believed that he had been reborn, held Christ within him, and had achieved sin‐free perfection. He was disowned, twice, by Sydney Quakers after when he led his small band of would‐be communards to the “wilderness” of Queensland where they sought to create a perfect society. Not surprisingly, it did not quite work out that way.     

“Bringing Light to our Land… When She was Dark as Night”: Northerners,Freedpeople, and Education during Military Occupation in North Carolina, 1862–1865

When Union armies arrived in eastern North Carolina in 1862, they encountered escaped slaves eager to acquire education. Soon after the armies occupied the region, missionaries and teachers arrived seeking to educate and uplift these former slaves. They brought their own preconceptions of helpless blacks, and a blind confidence in a New England system of education. But they also brought very different ideas of how the educational mission should be accomplished. Disagreements led to conflicts within the benevolent societies, replete with nasty bickering, reprisals for insults, and much uncivil behavior. During wartime occupation, freedpeople utilized their northern benefactors to gain autonomy over their lives and institutions. However, given the often combative nature of the northerners’ relationships with each other, it is remarkable that the freedpeople were able to acquire the educational skills and degree of autonomy that they did.     

‘The innate yearnings of our souls’: Subjectivity,Religiosity and Outward Testimony in Mary Howitt's Autobiography (1889)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in women's involvement in nineteenth-century religious cultures. However, the overwhelming focus remains firmly on the role of religion in providing motivation, sustenance and justification for women's involvement in feminism and other public campaigns. Questions of faith and devotion, spirituality and Christian selfhood, and the relationship of spiritual freedom to other liberations – religious issues that are at the heart of many women's life histories – remain largely unaddressed. This article focuses on the life of Mary Howitt, the popular nineteenth-century English poet, journalist and campaigner for women's rights, whose Autobiography (1889) describes an extraordinary religious journey. Raised in a strict Quaker household, Howitt resigned from the Society of Friends in the midst of a Unitarian interlude in the 1840s, became deeply involved with Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally moved to Rome, both physically and spiritually, at the end of her life. The article explores Howitt's representation of the Quaker piety of her youth as stifling and oppressive in its concern with outward forms of religious observance, particularly an emphasis on a traditional style of dress and on resisting ‘worldly’ activities, including poetry and art. A reading of the autobiography alongside her earlier writing reveals how themes become ‘composed’ into a coherent, stable life story, one shaped by later nineteenth-century public discourses that allowed for a greater religious fluidity and a new reflection on childhood experiences.     

Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century Midwest Foodways: Ceramic and Zooarchaeological Information from the Moore-Youse House and Huddleston Farmstead

Settled by families from the South and the Northeast, during the 1800s Indiana was a cultural crossroads. Ceramic and faunal data recovered from excavations conducted at the Moore-Youse house and Huddleston farmstead in east central Indiana provide a relevant archaeological example of midwestern foodways during the nineteenth century. Vertebrate faunal material from the two sites reveals early use of wild resources followed by greater reliance on beef and pork after the 1850s. Stratigraphic analysis results of zooarchaeological information are also presented to illustrate diachronic trends in faunal use at the two residences.     

Locke and the Elements of Natural Philosophy: Some Problems of Attribution

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that John Locke’s interactions with the Quakers and his reflections on their doctrines and behaviour provide the salient background for understanding the content and polemical orientation of the chapter on enthusiasm in An Essay concerning Human Understanding. The terms of reference and key features of the vocabulary of the chapter “Of Enthusiasm” that Locke added to the fourth edition of the Essay derive from the Quakers and from Locke’s critical reflections on their doctrine of immediate inspiration. While Locke acknowledged that the phenomenon was to be found among other religious groups, it was the Quakers whom Locke had in mind when he formulated his philosophical critique of enthusiasm.     

SOUTH APPALACHIAN MISSISSIPPIAN AND PROTOHISTORIC MORTUARY PRACTICES IN SOUTHWESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

Abstract

Mississippian societies of southwestern North Carolina are generally thought to have been less centralized and less hierarchical than their counterparts elsewhere in the Southeast. This paper compares and contrasts mortuary patterns at the Warren Wilson, Garden Creek, and Coweeta Creek sites to reconstruct patterns of social and spatial differentiation within late prehistoric and protohistoric communities in southwestern North Carolina. These sites include, respectively, a late prehistoric stockaded village, a platform mound and village, and a protohistoric Cherokee town with a public structure and several domestic dwellings. Distributions of burial goods and the placement of burials indicate that some social distinctions were reflected in the treatment of the dead by Mississippian and protohistoric groups in southwestern North Carolina, and that those distinctions were embedded in the architecture and built environment of these sites.     

The Newcastle Upon Tyne Peace Society (1817–50)

The 1816 foundation of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace in London was followed by the creation of a number of Auxiliary societies throughout the country. This paper analyses the history of the Newcastle Auxiliary, covering its establishment in 1817, its disaffiliation from the London Society in 1840, and its subsequent re-affiliation in 1850. After an initial period of quietism after their formation, the paper demonstrates how the radical pacifism of the society developed in the 1830s and 1840s, placing their activities in relation to the specificities of Newcastle’s political history, wider transformations in the British peace movement, and the influence of transatlantic networks of American peace advocacy and anti-slavery activism. The local Richardson family of Quakers personified these transformations, even as anarchists such as Joseph Barker represented a militant outer fringe of the society. Ultimately, however, the society struggled to garner wider support in Newcastle, clashing with local Chartists and with the town’s militarist merchants and businessmen in 1848. The paper therefore demonstrates how the Auxiliary societies need to be thought of active, agential organisations which negotiated the contradictions between their pacifist ideologies and the local and regional milieus within which they were enmeshed.     

Denominational difference in Quaker relief work during the Spanish Civil War: the operation of corporate concern and liberal theologies

The denominational differences between American and British relief workers in the Spanish Civil War are not immediately obvious, and cannot be identified by simple reference to the ideologies of the societies with which they claimed allegiance. This is both because orthodox American Quakerism and the theology of the London Yearly Meeting were very similar in the first half of the twentieth century, and because, when we attempt to compare the two groups, we are not comparing like with like. Those who worked for the (British) Friends Service Council (FSC) – and they came from a number of countries – were representing the witness of the London Society of Friends. Those who worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) were representing only the theology of that committee. In the 1920s the denominational identities of the American Quakers were beginning to settle into patterns which we recognize in the twentieth century. As part of this settlement American Quakers tentatively agreed to cooperate in matters of relief, a cooperation which produced the AFSC. However, in order to walk the precarious tightrope of interdenominational tension, the AFSC was forced to develop its own independent identity and its own distinctive character. While the AFSC is not a denomination in the usual sense of the word, it is possible to see it as possessing its own culture and theologies. It has a cohesiveness that allows us to compare practice and belief with that of the FSC where it is not possible to make a comparison between American and British workers in this context – in part, because very few of the “British” in Spain were actually British – nor to compare the British and American Societies. This paper will attempt, through focusing on the place of the Peace Testimony in the relief work in which the two sets of Friends were engaged, to indicate the differences of theology and practice displayed by the two “denominations.” However, this paper should be recognized as part of a larger and longer work engaged in considering the role played by the Testimony of Social Justice in the working out of the Quaker Peace Witness in the middle years of the twentieth century.     

THE PREHISTORY OF MR. ELI LILLY

Abstract

The disciplinary mythology of North American archaeology grudgingly acknowledges Eli Lilly’s financial support for research. At the same time it systematically devalues and even deletes his role as a productive scholar, the author of original works on the prehistory of Indiana, the creator of an effective archaeological seminar on the prehistory of Indiana and the Eastern United States, and the guiding force in the establishment of several enduring archaeological institutions. This paper documents the scholarly contributions of Eli Lilly. It shows how his mind and management skills were even more important to the development of archaeological research in the Midcontinent than was his financial support for many important archaeological research projects.     

Clio's Southern Sisters: Interviews with Leaders of the Southern Association for Women Historians

In the 1950s, the outstanding historian Anne Scott was finishinggraduate school and looking for a job. Oscar Handlin sent herto the University of North Carolina. She said, "When I got downhere, I was told that the University of North Carolina had neverhired a woman in the history department, and never would." FletcherGreen, the chair, told Oscar Handlin, "Could you send me a youngman to teach American history next year?" Handlin replied, "I’vealready sent someone to Chapel Hill, Fletcher." The departmentrelented and let her teach four sections of the introductorycourse, but did     

Abundant Gifts of Stone and Bone

An abundance of points, flakes, bones, shells, and bodies is considered sufficient to raise the hypothesis that these offerings and their places constitute a type of fertility shrine. This paper documents several possible lithic and bone-offering places in eastern North America, among them Allumettes Island, Quebec; Tick Creek Cave, Missouri; James Creek, West Virginia; and Pen Point, South Carolina. Perhaps the most significant Late Archaic shrine marked by an abundance of points, deer bones, and human burials is Indian Knoll, Kentucky. The proposed fertility or increase rite practiced was that for a hunt god.     

Rolling to Mechanisation: Excavations at Lymm Slitting Mill

An archaeological excavation at Lymm slitting mill in Cheshire was undertaken by Oxford Archaeology North in 2005 as a key component of the Lymm's Life Project, which was financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The slitting mill was established in the second quarter of the 18th century, and was one of a group of important iron-working sites in the area that were managed by a local Quaker family. The remains probably represent the best surviving example of a slitting mill in England, and one of a very small number that has been subject to archaeological study and consolidation. The slitting mill had been excavated by a local group between 1968 and 1974, although the site was eventually backfilled before a detailed survey was produced and a full synthesis of the results was never published. This paper discusses the archaeological work undertaken on this important early mechanised iron-working site, and places it in its context of 18th-century slitting mills in north-west England.