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Insider and Outsider History: Theories of Quaker Origins from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Rosemary Moore
Rosemary Moore*
Affiliation:
Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies in association with the University of Birmingham
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Extract

In the words of a modern Quaker historian, ‘Friends are an historical people, and we derive much of our identity from our tradition’. During the past hundred and fifty years the history of Quaker beginnings has several times been reinterpreted, as different Quaker theologies have risen to prominence and been given historical underpinning, and the interpretations themselves then subjected to historiographical reflections by later scholars. Much of this process has been ‘insider’ history, written by Quakers, but in the second half of the twentieth century Quaker beginnings became for a time a preoccupation of mainstream secular history, which has greatly changed the understanding of early Quakerism.

Type
Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 365 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Stephen W. Angell, Pink Dandelion, J. William Frost and John Punshon for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

References

1 Punshon, John, ‘The End of (Quaker) History’, in Dandelion, Pink, ed., The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives (Aldershot, 2004), 32–42, at 37.Google Scholar

2 Notably the work of the Hicksite Friend, Janney, Samuel M., History of the Religious Society of Friends from its Rise to the Year 1828, 4 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1859–60).Google Scholar

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4 See Hamm, Thomas, ‘George Fox and the Politics of Late Nineteenth Century Historiography’, in Dandelion, , ed., Creation of Quaker Theory, 11–18, for a full account of this period.Google Scholar

5 For these developments, see Kennedy, Thomas C., ‘An Angry God or a Reasonable Faith: The British Society of Friends 1873–1888’ JFHS 57/2 (1995), 183–98.Google Scholar

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7 From John Wilhelm Rowntree’s address to the Manchester Conference, ‘Has Quakerism a Message to the World Today?’, in The Society of Friends: Report of the Proceedings of the Conference … in Manchester … 1895 (London, 1896), 75–83, at 82.

8 Jones, Rufus, The Trail of Life in College (New York, 1929), 89–91 Google Scholar. Jones’s interest in mysticism developed independently of the British movement associated with Friedrich von Hügel and William Inge. However, the preface to his Studies in Mystical Religion (London, 1909), vi, acknowledges Inge as among the people who ‘read and criticised some of the chapters’.

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14 Ibid, xxxiv.

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35 Cooper, Wilmer A., ‘The Legacy of Rufus Jones’, in Practice in the Presence: Essays in Honour of T. Canby Jones, ed. Snarr, D. Neil and Smith-Christopher, Daniel L. (Picken, IN, 1994), 15–35.Google Scholar

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37 Underdown, David, A Freeborn People (Oxford, 1996), 68–9 Google Scholar, has a summary of historians’ views of the mid-seventeenth century as they then stood.

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40 See Punshon, John, ‘The Significance of the Tradition: Reflections on the Writing of Quaker history’ [presidential address to the Friends Historical Society], JFHS 60/2 (2004), 77–96 Google Scholar, at 95, where he suggests that divisions in American Quakerism are such that ‘no grand narrative of Quakerism can be established unless it is firmly based on the reality of the divisions’.

41 Weddle, Meredith Baldwin, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar describes variations in Quaker pacifism. Guiton, Gerard, The Growth and Development of Quaker Testimony, 1652–1661 and 1960–1994 (New York, 2009)Google Scholar, takes a more traditional Quaker view, that Quakers were pacifist from their beginnings.