George Fox and Early Quaker Culture

By Hilary Hinds

What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism? In George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Hilary Hinds explores how the Light Within became the organizing principle of this seventeenth-century movement, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine. Taking an original perspective on this most enduring of radical religious groups, Hinds combines literary and historical approaches to produce a fresh study of Quaker cultural practice. Close readings of Fox’s Journal are put in dialogue with the voices of other early Friends and their critics to argue that the Light Within set the terms for the unique Quaker mode of embodying spirituality and inhabiting the world. In this important study of the cultural consequences of a bedrock belief, Hinds shows how the Quaker spiritual self was premised on a profound continuity between sinful subjects and godly omnipotence. This study will be of interest not only to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature and history, but also to those concerned with the Quaker movement, spirituality and the changing meanings of religious practice in the early modern period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847797667

Hilary Hinds

Hilary Hinds is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University.

Book preview

George Fox and early Quaker culture

George Fox and early Quaker culture

Hilary Hinds

Copyright © Hilary Hinds 2011

The right of Hilary Hinds to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed in the United States exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,

NY 10010, USA

Distributed in Canada exclusively by

UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,

Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978-0-7190-8157-6

First published 2011

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Bembo

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed in Great Britain

by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

In memory of Peter Widdowson (1942–2009),

the very best of colleagues

Contents

Acknowledgements

A note on references to Fox’s Journal

Introduction: seamless subjects

1 ‘As the Light appeared, all appeared’: the Quaker culture of convincement

2 ‘Let your lives preach’: the embodied rhetoric of the early Quakers

3 ‘And the Lord’s power was over all’: anxiety, confidence and masculinity in Fox’s Journal

4 A technology of presence: genre and temporality in Fox’s Journal

5 ‘Moved of the Lord’: the contingent itinerancy of early Friends

6 The limits of the light: silence and slavery in Quaker narratives of journeys to America and Barbados

Conclusion: singularity and doubleness

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

My greatest debt of gratitude is to the previous and present generations of Quaker scholars and scholars of Quakerism whose work has proved so stimulating to my own. Without the careful rigour and analytical perspicacity of their scholarship, my own work would be immeasurably the poorer.

I am grateful to Lancaster University for allowing me a period of sabbatical leave in 2008, and to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Research Fellowship in 2009–10. The book would have been still longer in the making without them. Thanks too to the staff of Lancaster University Library, and particularly those in the Interlending and Document Supply section, who have consistently responded to my requests quickly and efficiently.

Earlier versions of some of these chapters have previously been published elsewhere, and I am grateful for permission to republish here. Parts of Chapter 2 were published in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007); an earlier draft of Chapter 3 was published in ELH, and versions of Chapters 4 and 6 appeared in Quaker Studies. The article which was revised to become Chapter 4 was originally co-authored with Alison Findlay, and I am very grateful for her agreement that I include it here.

The following people have helped me variously by encouraging me to undertake this work, chasing up elusive references, commenting on early drafts of chapters or refereeing applications for research leave, and I am grateful to them all for undertaking this largely invisible labour: Elspeth Graham, Josef Keith, Philip Martin, Lynne Pearce, Althea Stewart, Helen Wilcox and Sue Wiseman. Ellen Ross, at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, gave me an exceptionally warm and generous welcome when I presented a paper there based on aspects of this work in April 2009. Thanks to my anonymous readers at Manchester University Press for their helpful and incisive comments on the book proposal, and to all the staff at the Press who had a hand in seeing the book into print.

Particular thanks go to my colleagues on the Lancaster Quaker Project: Alison Findlay, Meg Twycross and Pamela King. While that project has its own focus, impetus and trajectory, there has also been cross-fertilisation between the two areas of work, and I have benefited enormously from discussions we have had. I am grateful to them all for ideas exchanged, and excursions made, over the years, but thanks go in particular to Alison for reading and commenting so generously, enthusiastically and insightfully on a draft of the book.

More generally, I would like to thank the three members of my ‘care of the self’ team for all their variously restorative contributions to the closing months of the project; they made all the difference. But final and most heartfelt thanks go to Jackie Stacey, who supported and encouraged me in the completion of this book to a greater extent than I could have dared to hope for, and to Anna Stacey, who weathered the ups and downs of the process with cheerful equanimity. I trust they know just how grateful I am.

A note on references to Fox’s Journal

This book draws extensively for the development of its argument on George Fox’s Journal, a document whose complex history and identity is reflected in the vastly differing character of the editions published over the last century. Deciding which edition to use as the main reference point in the book presented a difficult choice, contingent as it was on a number of different issues: the kinds of readerships I hoped to address; the differing accessibility of the principal editions; and the materials included in or omitted from each of those editions. To clarify the complexity of the choice and explain the decision that I reached, I include the following detailed note on the various available editions.

Three new scholarly editions of Fox’s Journal have been published over the past hundred years, each very different from the others. The first was Norman Penney’s two-volume verbatim et literatim edition of the so-called Spence Manuscript, which is the closest we have to a manuscript source for Fox’s Journal.¹ Penney’s edition, published in 1911, has the advantage of being the most comprehensive edition, and consequently the one that best represents the textual and compositional complexity of the Journal. It reproduces the spelling and punctuation of the manuscript, and includes all the earlier letters and papers interspersed in the narrative sections. It has the disadvantage, however, of being a rare and relatively inaccessible edition: it is out of print, to be found for the most part only in major libraries, and has the added obstacles of unfamiliar and at times erratic spelling and punctuation that follow conventions radically different from our own.

The second candidate was John Nickalls’s 1952 edition, a modern spelling version of Fox’s Journal, and based on the Spence Manuscript as printed in Penney’s edition. It is without question a readable and accessible as well as a scholarly text, and it remains the most frequently cited recent edition in critical and historical studies of Fox. However, it is also a relatively heavily edited text. Not only has the spelling been modernised, so too have the grammar and punctuation. It omits or abbreviates many of the documents that intersperse the retrospective narrative section in the Spence Manuscript. Moreover, it incorporates sections from other texts: Fox’s earlier Short Journal of the mid-1660s; the first edition of the Journal, edited by Thomas Ellwood and published in 1694, itself a heavily edited version of the manuscript sources, and other notebooks and letters, both by Fox and, on occasion, by others. By conflating these different sources into a single composite account, it presents as comprehensive a first-person picture of the life of Fox as possible. It does so, however, by presenting the Journal in a more regular and coherent form than even a quick glance at Penney’s 1911 edition would show it to be.

The third possible version, Nigel Smith’s 1998 edition, takes yet a different course. It is based on the Spence Manuscript, and does not supplement it with sections from other texts. The spelling has been modernised, but the punctuation and grammar of the original have been retained, thereby allowing readers ready access to the cadences and registers of Fox’s prose. This results in an account that retains the pitch, tone and pace of Fox’s retrospective narrative, dictated by Fox to Thomas Lower in the mid-1670s. However, this edition includes only the narrative portions of the journal; all the interpolated documents, which form such a substantial part of the Spence Manuscript (and even of Nickalls’s edition) are omitted. While this has the advantage of emphasising, as the back-cover copy of this edition puts it, ‘the immediacy and excitement of the original’, it none the less results in a tidier and more coherent sense of the Journal than that found in the Spence Manuscript or in Nickalls’s edition, not least in that it loses the crucial temporal mix of retrospection and contemporaneous commentary inherent in the Spence Manuscript’s combination of the narrative portions with earlier letters and papers.

This book not only is intended to be a contribution to the scholarship on Fox but also aims to engage readers interested in the history, rhetoric and practices of early modern spirituality. As this argument relies heavily on evidence from Fox’s Journal, I wanted readers to be able to follow up references to that text in a readily available edition, but one that also retained as far as possible the textual character of the documents dictated by Fox. For that reason, I decided to use Smith’s edition as the main source for citations from the Journal, as it is both accessible and readable, but also scholarly and retentive of linguistic and grammatical features of the Spence Manuscript. Where I cite epistles and papers that form part of the journal as assembled by Fox, but all of which are omitted from Smith’s edition, I refer wherever possible to the next most accessible edition, which is Nickalls’s. Where I refer to epistles and papers omitted from Nickalls’s edition, I cite Penney’s edition of the Spence Manuscript. My solution is not a tidy one, and at times results in all three editions being cited in a single chapter. For this I apologise, but hope that it is clear why I concluded that this was the least worst option. I hope readers will bear with it.

Introduction: seamless subjects

The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are generally known today as an inclusive and tolerant movement, broadly Christian, committed to working for peace and consensus, socially activist, politically radical and culturally liberal. At the time of their inception in the 1650s, however, their reputation was less benign. Early Friends were seen by more orthodox believers as at best misguided and at worst evil. ‘[B]lasphemous heretical seducers … tumultuous, factious, impious and barbarous’, wrote the Anglican minister Francis Higginson in 1653, and, as George Fox, James Nayler and other founding Friends made their journeys through the north of England in the early 1650s, gathering followers and settling meetings as they went, their activities, demeanours and beliefs prompted many such vehement denunciations.¹ The Independent minister Thomas Weld likened them to ‘grievous Wolves … endeavouring to make havocke of the Flocke’, and the Puritan William Prynne called them ‘the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuites, and Franciscan Popish Fryers’.² The force, number and detail of these passionate rebuttals from so early in the movement’s history suggests something of the speed at which it was coalescing and gaining new adherents, and of the disturbance caused to more orthodox believers already sensitised by the advent of so many new radical religious groups over the course of the previous decade.

Critics of the Quakers were enraged by almost every aspect of Friends’ ways of worshipping, behaving and speaking, flouting as they did many of the rituals of social politeness, as well as more familiar and conventional ways of worshipping. Consequently, Quakers were seen by some as uncooperative and socially inflammatory, by others as blasphemous and diabolically inspired. Friends would not participate in the pleasantries and courtesies of daily life, refusing to greet passers-by with the usual ‘good morrow’, or to show the customary deference to social superiors: George Fox recalled that ‘when the Lord sent me forth into the world, he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low. And I was required to thee and thou all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor … neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to anyone’.³ The way Quakers dressed also offended; Prynne objected to ‘[t]heir use of vile and course aray and condemning not only all Pride and Luxury, but lawfull decency in apparell’.⁴ Quakers worshipped in private houses, in barns and on hillsides rather than in consecrated buildings, because ‘that steeplehouse and that ground on which it stood was no more holier than that mountain’.⁵ Friends sometimes trembled and shook during their meetings. Higginson complained that many ‘fall into quaking fits … as it were in a Swoon’; ‘these Quakings’, he believed, were ‘Diabolical Raptures immediately proceeding from the power of Satan’.⁶ Quakers interrupted church services, inveighing against the priest; they preached in fairs and marketplaces against ‘their deceitful merchandise, and cheating and cozening; warning all to deal justly’; and they sometimes walked naked through the streets as a sign of the spiritual nakedness of those still dwelling in darkness.⁷ They seemed deliberately and systematically to provoke the civil and religious authorities: when, for example, James Nayler went into a field to preach to a crowd, and was accused by the priests of breaching a parliamentary ordinance by speaking in public, he replied, ‘This is not a publick place’, at which a priest expostulated, perhaps not unreasonably, ‘Is not this a publick place, the Town-field?’⁸ Nayler’s insistence on the primacy of a spiritual interpretation of the ‘Town-field’ erases its material reality and conventional meanings. While seventeenth-century English people would have been likely to agree with him that life in God was the ultimate reality, most would have seen this as still to come, in the promise of redemption, and to be attained only at the moment the sinful human frame fell away. To assert as Nayler did that he lived in a world already remade by the living presence and currency of his union with God smacked of wilful arrogance and truculence.

Such apparently perverse refusals of the conventional understandings of place, action or accoutrement were, however, as far as Friends were concerned, anything but wilful. As they saw it, in worshipping, speaking and behaving as they did, they were following the leadings of the Lord, complying with the immediate call and command they had received from him. They were simply being obedient to the truth as it had been revealed to them, and living in the faith, or, as Fox put it in one of his epistles, ‘spreading the Truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, the covenant of and peace with God’.⁹ Truth was to be spread by testifying or preaching – Fox records many occasions when he addressed potential converts for several hours at a time – but it was also to be spread by example. How Friends lived every detail of their lives was to be a model for godly living for all whom they encountered: ‘be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come’, wrote Fox, ‘that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone’.¹⁰ For Fox, lives spoke. ‘Your carriage and life’ were themselves acts of preaching, intervening and advocating in the great ongoing struggle between light and darkness, and speaking just as surely as did words; both were means of bringing people to the light of Christ. Strikingly, Fox suggested that such an approach to living would lead Friends in the ministry ‘to walk cheerfully over the world’; and indeed, Quaker culture was characterised if not exactly by cheerfulness, then certainly by a signal absence of the anxiety and self-doubt that so frequently tormented many of Fox’s Calvinist contemporaries, whether in the more mainstream inflections of reformed Christianity or in other prominent radical religious groups of the time. There is a boldness and lack of compromise in the textual utterances, and a notable self-confidence and stalwart courage in the behaviour of early Friends, apparently secure in the position from which they promulgated the word of the Lord.

The early Quaker discourse under scrutiny in this book is therefore understood as a broad and inclusive category, comprising not only Friends’ words but also their deeds. Their written testimonies, warnings and exhortations are examined, but so too are accounts of the ways that they inhabited and moved through the social and material world. Since, as Fox put it, ‘your carriage and life may preach’ – that is, their demeanour and behaviour were explicitly understood as instruments of conversion or ‘convincement’ – these spoken, written and lived practices together comprised a distinctively Quaker rhetorical complex, whose characteristic idioms, modes of address and conduct together served as a means not only of convincement but also of encouragement, a point of identification for those already convinced, and an excoriation of those who wilfully persisted in their sinful lives in darkness. Moreover, these practices contributed to a distinctive Quaker culture, constituted not so much by Friends’ particular inflections of belief but by their interpretation, articulation and enactment of those beliefs in their daily lives – their habits of speech and writing, their ways of talking to Friends and to non-Friends, their manner of worship (most distinctively, in their trembling or quaking), which set them apart from other believers of the time. While Baptists or Independents might be identified by distinct sets of beliefs and ways of worshipping, Quakers were noticed as much for the ways in which their interpretation of the Christian faith was manifested in conspicuous ways of talking (what Hugh Ormsby-Lennon calls ‘speechways’), dressing, greeting and travelling as for what they believed.¹¹

It is the words, habits and practices of early Quaker culture which are examined in this book. It analyses a range of early Quaker writings, both in their own terms and also in relation to, and sometimes explicitly in dialogue with, more prevalent patterns of belief as articulated in contemporary writings from other sectarian writers, and in critical responses to the advent of the Quaker movement such as that of Francis Higginson. By scrutinising Friends’ modes of self-presentation, their engagement with others, their ways of making a case, of recording events, of encouraging steadfastness or of castigating opponents, the book explores the hypothesis that the dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine brought about by the turn to the inward light set the pattern for a distinctive and broader cultural practice, whereby that initial and fundamental fusion of categories brought others in its wake. I ask what it was about Quaker belief that resulted in such sharply differentiated customs or patterns of thought, speech and behaviour: why so confident, and why so confrontational? What enabled them to gather followers in such number in the early 1650s, in the teeth of such antipathy from the clergy and civil authorities? What sustained early Friends in their itinerant ministry and in their sufferings? For all their own sense of difference and separateness as the only bearers of truth in a world that had strayed from the right apprehension of the word of God, Quakerism none the less emerged from the flux and ferment of the radical religious and political activity of the mid-seventeenth century, and many of their views were on a continuum with those of many other contemporary religious and political groups. So what was it that set Quakers apart, both in their own eyes, and in the eyes of those who observed, judged, joined, opposed or denounced them?

This book suggests that answers to these questions lie in the shaping doctrine of the Quaker movement: the belief in the inward light of divinity, or the indwelling Christ.¹² It argues that the distinctive culture of the early Friends emanated quite directly from this single core principle, the sine qua non of the movement. The doctrine of the light within, as articulated by Fox, Nayler and other first-generation Friends, integrated the believer into the divine in an absolutely fundamental way, such that the inward light of Christ was understood quite literally as the animating force of the human subject. ‘The Father and Son are one’, wrote Fox, ‘and we are of his flesh and of his bone’; and as a consequence, believers were partakers, at least potentially, of the saviour’s sinlessness and perfection.¹³ The implications of the light as an immanent force had to be taken seriously. Its inwardness did not leave intact or unchanged the corporeal human host, but utterly transfigured him or her, materially as well as spiritually, so that the believer was remade by acceding to that indwelling light. The act of turning to the light was, in effect, an act of recognition not only of the divine light that dwelt in everyone but also of its incorporation, such that the human subject thereafter was in unity with that divinity, and necessarily transformed by it. That unifying integration with the divine did not render fallen human believers divine, nor did it render them equal with God, but it did deliver up to them what Fox referred to as ‘that of God’ within.¹⁴ The doctrine of the light within thus comprised a blended vision of divine omnipresence, literally inhabiting the material as well as the spiritual world, and thereby dissolving any straightforward categorical distinction between the human and the divine, as it also dissolved, in consequence, the boundaries between the corporeal and the spiritual, between fallenness and perfection, and between the sacred and the social. These oppositions, through which early modern religious subjectivity was typically constituted, were reformed or recombined by Friends in such a way that, in their understanding, not only the divine and the human but also the spiritual and the social, the past, the present and the future all merged in a seamless field of godly signification.

Tracing the idea of the internalisation of Christ, and the consequent conception of Christ’s promised return as already in place in the bodies and lives of those who turned to the inward light, the book explores the place of this foundational abolition of distinctions, and, flowing from it, the subsequent dissolution of a number of conceptual and categorical boundaries. Each chapter examines a particular dimension of early Quaker activity as an element in the constitution of a distinctive culture among the early Friends, tracking its characteristic contours and consequences through its relation to the doctrine of the indwelling Christ and the seamless subjects of early Quakerism. It begins by analysing the Quaker culture of discernment and unity premised on the doctrine of the indwelling Christ; it then examines Quaker practices of preaching and convincement, through a study of the embodied rhetoric of the early movement; Fox’s often-noted sacred self-confidence, through a close reading of his spiritual development as constituted by his Journal; Quaker notions of temporality, through a study of Fox’s Journal as a retrospective daily record; the spatial relations of public ministry, through a study of Quaker itinerancy; and finally an anomalous but indicative instance of a Quaker refusal of boundary dissolution, through a study of Quaker slave-owning in Barbados. Such phenomena, I shall suggest, are habitually and systematically structured through the erasure of the categorical and absolute distinctions between human and divine, corporeal and spiritual, past, present and future, body and place, and all can be traced back to the foundational categorical erasures enacted by the doctrine of the indwelling Christ. The Quaker scholar J. William Frost suggested that ‘Quaker theology began with, was structured by, and concluded with the inward light of Christ. All of these words were essential’.¹⁵ The project of this book is, in effect, to explore, elaborate and exemplify Frost’s assertion, pursuing the rhetorical and practised consequences for early Quaker cultures of this central tenet.

The book opens with an exposition of early Quaker understandings of the inward light, its properties and its consequences. Chapter 1 asks how it was that the concept of the indwelling Christ, or light within – in many ways a conventional, familiar and uncontentious Christian trope – set the terms and established the structure both for the scathing Quaker condemnations of their opponents and for the discourse of inclusivity and consensus among Friends. It finds an answer to this question in the ways in which the Quaker model of that inward light provided conceptual underpinning for both the ‘spirit of discernment’ and the ‘spirit of unity’ by which Friends judged those whom they encountered. The chapter analyses two defining qualities of the light, as perceived by Friends: its universality, and its immanence. The universality of the light introduced a renewed and transformed sense of individual agency into the soteriological equation, as the human subject turned, was turned, or refused to turn, to that light. This agency was intensified by the insistence on its immanence, an indwelling divine presence that transformed the fallen human subject by emphasising his or her access to ‘that of God within’, thereby erasing any absolute boundary between human subject and divine presence. This erasure served to unsettle the Calvinist binary of the elect and the reprobate, producing a third constituency of human subject: those open to being turned to the light through a process of convincement. Together, this introductory chapter argues, the insistence on the presence of the returned Christ within the believer, and the accompanying restoration of a modified sense of agency to that believer, set the terms of a distinctive spiritual, political and social Quaker culture.

Chapter 2 widens the focus to examine how the inward light figured in the ministry of the First Publishers of Truth – in the convincement of new Friends, and in the condemnation of those who hardened their hearts towards the light.¹⁶ The chapter suggests that the opprobrium levelled at early Friends was not so much owing to the divergence of the forms and strategies of the rhetoric of Quaker ministry, which had much in common with orthodox preaching practice, but much more to do with the Quaker refusal to set limits to the place, time or manner in which that ministry was carried out. The erasure of the boundary between the sacred and the secular entailed the rejection of the notions of consecrated ground, of the ordination of ministers and of formalised acts of worship, so that Quaker preaching could be performed by any Friend experiencing an immediate call to such work, in any place, and at any time. Quaker rhetoric thus occupied an unbounded field of operation, and drew on a wide repertoire of linguistic and symbolic modes of preaching, since, by definition, the inward light rendered out of bounds nothing that it touched.

Turning more directly to the pivotal figure of George Fox himself, Chapter 3 suggests that the foundational dissolution of boundaries between human and divine established in the earlier chapters generated access to a quality in Fox and other early Friends characterised by Thomas Carlyle as a ‘sacred Self-confidence’. Taking his Journal as the focus, this chapter examines Fox’s own account of his affective transformation from an anxious seeker after truth in a predominantly Calvinist religious context to a confident, assured bearer of that truth in a world still torn between the forces of light and darkness. How, the chapter asks, did the inward light structure and direct this shift towards an unshakeable assurance in Fox, and how did it maintain it, in the face of a range of contrary pressures? How does the subjectivity constructed by the Journal negotiate not only the forces of opposition in the wider culture but also the forces of ‘anxious masculinity’ so often found in other kinds of seventeenth-century self-inscription? The chapter locates this transformation in a relationship of ‘heteronomous agency’ predicated on the movement’s conception of the indwelling Christ; this model of dependent potency, it argues, established a mode of confident subjectivity rarely found in other contemporary radical religious groups.

Close analysis of Fox’s Journal is developed further over the next two chapters, which together argue that the form this text takes – a form which has long caused critics to debate whether it should more properly be thought of as a spiritual memoir or as a history of the early movement – is profoundly shaped by particular Quaker formulations of temporality and spatiality. Chapter 4 investigates the Journal’s paradoxical commitment to an insistently chronological structure in the service of a faith that found the dissolution of chronological time inherent in the turn to the inward light. It argues that this can be explained through seeing the Journal itself as, in effect, a ‘technology of presence’, a means of ceaselessly demonstrating and performing the continual and multi-temporal irruption of the inward light. Chapter 5 turns to the Journal’s structuring focus on Fox’s journeys, and raises questions about the movement’s commitment to an itinerant ministry, and the ways in which, in Edward Burrough’s words, ‘The worship of God in itself … is a walking with God’.¹⁷ While an itinerant Christian proselytising ministry was as old as the journeys of St Paul, there was none the less something unusual about the Quaker commitment to such a practice – unusual in that no other radical religious groups at the time made physical travail such a cornerstone of their modus vivendi, but unusual too in that such restlessness sits strangely with a faith premised on the silent stillness of the meeting for worship. This chapter argues, however, that the itinerancy of Fox and other early Friends, as memorialised in the Journal, becomes itself a means of demonstrating the ceaseless presence of the indwelling Christ; as Fox put it, ‘if you love this light, it will teach you, walking up and down and lying in bed’.¹⁸ Just as utterance was generative of silence in the meeting, so movement was generative of the stillness required when waiting on the Lord. And just as Chapter 4 demonstrates how temporal boundaries are erased through the narrative form taken by the Journal, so Chapter 5 suggests that the journeys recorded there erase the boundaries between different early modern conceptions of space.

Chapter 6 continues the examination of spatiality in the early movement, but broadens the focus to look at the seventeenth-century Quaker presence in transatlantic English colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Its starting point is a puzzling discrepancy between Quaker accounts of visits to Barbados and those to the American mainland: while the latter are detailed, complex and recognisably constructed around the same kinds of oppositions and alliances as are to be found