The study also examines many other facets of Quakerism - from the literacy rates of Quakers, and the level of persecution suffered by followers to the reasons for the sect's decline - and concludes with a survey of the changes that had overcome the movement since the heady days of birth."--Jacket.

This landmark volume is the first in a century to examine the “Second Period” of Quakerism, a time when the Religious Society of Friends experienced upheavals in theology, authority and institutional structures, and political trajectories as a result of the persecution Quakers faced in the first decades of the movement’s existence. The authors and special contributors explore the early growth of Quakerism, assess important developments in Quaker faith and practice, and show how Friends coped with the challenges posed by external and internal threats in the final years of the Stuart age—not only in Europe and North America but also in locations such as the Caribbean. This groundbreaking collection sheds new light on a range of subjects, including the often tense relations between Quakers and the authorities, the role of female Friends during the Second Period, the effect of major industrial development on Quakerism, and comparisons between founder George Fox and the younger generation of Quakers, such as Robert Barclay, George Keith, and William Penn. Accessible, well-researched, and seamlessly comprehensive, The Quakers, 1656–1723 promises to reinvigorate a conversation largely ignored by scholarship over the last century and to become the definitive work on this important era in Quaker history. In addition to the authors, the contributors are Erin Bell, Raymond Brown, J. William Frost, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Robynne Rogers Healey, Alan P. F. Sell, and George Southcombe.

This handbook provides an in-depth survey of historical readings of Quakerism; a treatment of its key theological premises and its links with wider Christian thinking; an analysis of its distinctive ecclesiastical forms and practices; chapters on its social, economic, political, and ethical outcomes; as well as an extensive bibliography.

Analyzing the rise and subsequent fall of international piracy from the perspective of colonial hinterlands, Mark G. Hanna explores the often overt support of sea marauders in maritime communities from the inception of England's burgeoning empire in the 1570s to its administrative consolidation by the 1740s. Although traditionally depicted as swashbuckling adventurers on the high seas, pirates played a crucial role on land. Far from a hindrance to trade, their enterprises contributed to commercial development and to the economic infrastructure of port towns. English piracy and unregulated privateering flourished in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean because of merchant elites' active support in the North American colonies. Sea marauders represented a real as well as a symbolic challenge to legal and commercial policies formulated by distant and ineffectual administrative bodies that undermined the financial prosperity and defense of the colonies. Departing from previous understandings of deep-sea marauding, this study reveals the full scope of pirates' activities in relation to the landed communities that they serviced and their impact on patterns of development that formed early America and the British Empire.

This collection of twelve new essays explores the role of women and gender in a broad range of ‘radical’ religious movements of the post-Reformation. Organized into three themed divisions, the first examines the activism of female Quakers in their public performances as preachers and petitioners, in their global travels, and in their domestic lives; the second examines early modern prophetesses and their radical revisions of scripture, gender, body, and voice; and the third concerns women who, in diverse ways, crossed boundaries, including the confessional boundaries of Europe. A strength of this volume is its comparative re-examination of the term ‘radical’. German Anabaptists are discussed alongside unorthodox nuns with the aim of understanding how gender factors into innovative and oppositional religion. Contributors include: Sarah Apetrei, Naomi Baker, Sylvia Brown, Ruth Connolly, Pamela Ellis, José Manuel González, Julie Hirst, Stephen A. Kent, Marion Kobelt-Groch, Bo Karen Lee, Kirilka Stavreva, and Sheila Wright.

In this introductory volume to the Brill Research Perspectives series on Quaker Studies, Quaker Studies, An Overview: The Current State of the Field, C. Wess Daniels, Robynne Rogers Healey, and Jon Kershner investigate Quaker Studies, divided into the three fields of history, theology and philosophy, and sociology. With a focus on schisms, transatlantic networks, colonialism, abolition, gender and equality, and pacifism from Quaker origins onward, Healey explores the rich diversity and complexity of research and interpretation that has emerged in Quaker history. Kershner explores comparisons and divergences in contemporary Quaker theology and philosophy. Special attention is paid to Quaker biblical hermeneutics, mysticism, ethics, epistemology and Global Quakerism. Daniels looks at the sociology of Quakerism as a new field of study that has only recently begun to be explored and developed. He surveys the field of sociological work done within Quakerism from the 1960s to the present day.

Quaker women were unusually active participants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural and religious exchange, as ministers, missionaries, authors and spiritual leaders. Drawing upon documentary evidence, with a focus on women's personal writings and correspondence, Naomi Pullin explores the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750. Through a comparative methodology, focused on Britain and the North American colonies, Pullin examines the experiences of both those women who travelled and preached and those who stayed at home. The book approaches the study of gender and religion from a new perspective by placing women's roles, relationships and identities at the centre of the analysis. It shows how the movement's transition from 'sect to church' enhanced the authority and influence of women within the movement and uncovers the multifaceted ways in which female Friends at all levels were active participants in making and sustaining transatlantic Quakerism.