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“As the Discharge of My Conscience to God”: Narrative, Personhood, and the Construction of Legal Order in 17th-Century Quaker Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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On August 25, 1681, William Penn sat down to write to James Harrison, a fellow Quaker from Lancashire, about the New World. Having received a charter from Charles II for a new North American province — Pennsylvania — five months earlier, Penn was in the midst of intense preparation to ensure the success of his endeavor. Despite the considerable time and effort that Pennsylvania was taking from him, Penn still continued his work on behalf of persecuted Friends in England; during the early years of Quakerism, he frequently used his influence in the royal government to secure the release of imprisoned Quakers. Penn himself had run afoul of the law in January of 1681, having been forced to defend himself against charges that his profession Quakerism was really a cover for “popery.” Perhaps this recent incident, only months before his letter to Harrison, reminded him of what he had long suspected: that the Society of Friends would never be free from persecution in Anglican England. Certainly, he had higher hopes for Pennsylvania.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1. William Penn to James Harrison, 25/6mo./1681, in The Papers of William Penn, 5 vols., ed. Dunn, Mary Maples and Dunn, Richard S. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 19811987), 2: 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar (herafter cited as PWP). Note that I have chosen here to use the old-style dates for Penn's correspondence in which March was the first month of the year.

2. See Dunn, Mary Maples, William Penn: Politics and Conscience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Endy, Melvin B. Jr, William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

3. See Minutes of the London Meeting for Sufferings, in PWP, 2: 93–94.

4. William Penn to James Harrison, in PWP, 2: 108.

5. See the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) entry for experiment and the usages of that term in the 17th century.;

6. William Penn to Thomas] J[anney], 21/6mo./[16]81, in PWP, 2: 106.

7. Clifford Geertz, borrowing from Heinz Kohut, has distinguished between experience-near and experience-distant forms of cultural understanding. Using Geertz's terminology, Penn's understanding of the term holy experiment, while experience-near for him, remains experience-distant for the historical observer. See Geertz, , “ ‘From the Native's Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, ed. Geertz, (New York: Basic, 1983), 5570, esp. 57–58, 64Google Scholar.

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22. Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 2628, 3536, 45, 77, 8184, 9495, 114, 143, 148, 166, 172, 175–76, 184–85, 204, 209, 216, 225, 29, 290–91, 311–12, 316, 320, 326, 395–96, 400Google Scholar; and Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 15–44Google Scholar.

23. See especially the seminal work by Brown, Kathleen M. on gender, race, and power in the colonial Chesapeake (Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996] esp. chs. 2–3)Google Scholar. See also Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, “Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. (hereafter cited as WMQ), 54 (01 1997): 193228CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1500–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968)Google Scholar; and Chaplin, Joyce, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” WMQ 54 (01 1997): 229–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Introduction: The Changing Definition of America,” and Armitage, David, “The New World and British Historical Thought: From Richard Haklyut to William Robertson,” each in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Kupperman, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995), 129 and 5275Google Scholar, respectively; and Morgan, Jennifer L., “ ‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1700,” WMQ 54 (01 1997): 167192CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For changes in English natural thought more generally during this period, see Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (1983; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

25. Fletcher, Anthony J. and Stevenson, John, “Introduction,” in Fletcher, and Stevenson, , Order and Disorder, 12Google Scholar; and Amussen, “Gender, Family.” For theoretical discussions of the naturalization of worldview that underlie the analysis here, see Berger, Peter and Luckman, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 6772Google Scholar; and Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, Richard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 159–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. On legitimacy and production of authority, see Berger, and Luckman, , Social Construction, 61, 65, 69 ff, 8485, 92128, 174 ffGoogle Scholar; Bourdieu, , Outline of a Theory, 19, 165, 168, 170–71, 188, 196, 196–97Google Scholar; Weber, Max, Economy and Society, ed. Roth, Gunther and Wittich, Claus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 3138Google Scholar; and Foucault, Michel, “Truth and Power,” in Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 109133Google Scholar.

27. For discussions of narrative and historiography that have influenced the discussion here, see White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; White, , “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 125Google Scholar; Cronon, William, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (03 1992): 1347–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cover, “Nomos and Narrative”; Walzer, Michael, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic, 1983)Google Scholar; Ricouer, Paul, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19841988)Google Scholar; and Kramer, Lloyd S., “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Hunt, Lynn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 97128Google Scholar.

28. For a discussion of changing ideas of time in Renaissance Europe, see Grafton, Anthony T., “Chronology and Its Discontents in Renaissance Europe: The Vicissitudes of a Tradition,” in Time: Histories and Ethnologies, ed. Hughes, Dianne Owen and Trautmann, Thomas R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 139–66Google Scholar. For changing ideas of time in England, see Pocock, Ancient Constitution; Pocock, J. G. A., “Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Pocock, , Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, , “Time, Institutions, and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding,” in Pocock, , Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Macmillan, 1971)Google Scholar; and Pocock, , “Modes of Action and Their Pasts in Tudor and Stuart England,” in National Consciousness History and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ranum, Orest (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

29. Berger, and Luckman, , Social Construction, 103Google Scholar. On Sir Edmund Coke's construction of a common-law legal heritage stretching back to time immemorial, see Pocock, , Ancient Constitution, 3741, 233Google Scholar, and Little, , Religion, Order, and Law, 175–76, 217Google Scholar. On Sir Henry Spellman's historical construction of Parliamentary supremacy dating back to the Anglo-Saxon past, see Pocock, , Ancient Constitution, 91123Google Scholar. The intense resistance to the legal elite's definition of custom, however, illustrates that visions of historical continuity could be — and frequently were — mobilized for contradictory ends. See Wrightson, “Two Concepts of Order”; and Walter, John, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629,” in Brewer, and Styles, , Ungovernable People, 4784Google Scholar.

20. See Veall, , Popular Movement, 7478, 97111Google Scholar.

31. On the debate over predestination, see Tyacke, , Anti-Calvinists, passimCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. There has been a voluminous literature on the question of personhood, identity, and self — far more than can be dealt with here. The following works have influenced the discussed of individuality, personhood, self, and identity. For a general review of contemporary discussions on personhood, see Harris, Grace Gredys, “Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis,” American Anthropologist 91: 599612CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven, eds., The Category of the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, especially the essays by Marcel Mauss (“A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Person; the Notion of the Self”), N. J. Allen (“The Category of the Person: A Reading of Mauss's Last Essay”), Michael Carrithers (“An Alternative Social History of the Self”), Louis Dumont (“A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism”), J. S. LaFontaine (“Person and Individual: Some Anthropological Reflections”), and Charles Taylor (“The Person”). Another helpful introduction to this topic that is less historically minded is Shweder, Robert and LeVine, Robert, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, especially the essays by Clifford Geertz (“From the Native's Point of View”), Michelle Rosaldo (“Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling”), and Robert Shweder and Edmund Bourne (“Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-culturally?”). For a discussion of gender and the performances of identity, see Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

33. Numerous competing accounts place the origins of “modern” individualism in a variety of times and place and attribute this rise to a variety of causes. For arguments that attribute this rise to changes in subjectivity wrought by the Protestant Reformation, see Mauss, “Category of the Human Mind,” and Dumont, “Modified View.” For American religion and Revolutionary ideology, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Isaac, Rhys L., The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982)Google Scholar; and Jay Fleigelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance. For analyses that attribute the rise of individualism to long-term changes in economic and family structure, see Macfarlene, Origins of English Individualism; Macfarlene, Family Life; Stone, , Family, Sex, and Marriage, ch. 6Google Scholar; Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Baldick, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1962)Google Scholar; Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Heller, Thomas C. et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 5363Google Scholar; and Davis, , The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For discussions that place the rise of cultural individualism in Europe in the Renaissance, see Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Middlemore, S. G. C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945)Google Scholar. Karl J. Weintraub places the rise of modern individuality in the Renaissance — a product of increased historical consciousness in that era -but argues that the creation of a cultural individualism continued well until the end of the early modern period (ca. 1800), when autobiography as a genre (and individualism as a cultural category) were firmly established (Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” Critical Inquiry 1 [1975]: 821–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For studies that place the rise of individualism earlier, see Benton, John F., “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Benson, Robert L. and Constable, Giles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 263–95Google Scholar; and Bynum, Caroline Walker, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82109Google Scholar. Michel Foucault finds the beginnings — not the origins — of modern subjectivity in the epistemic transition from Renaissance to Enlightenment. See Foucault, , The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1973)Google Scholar; and Foucault, , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar.

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35. Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatistes, 3rd ed. (London, 1634), 5, 188–90, 260Google Scholar, cited in Amussen, , “Gender, Family,” 196, 202Google Scholar.

36. Paul Ricoeur has suggested that it is only within the emplotment of a historical narrative that the characterization of subjectivity can take on its full meaning (Time and Narrative, 1: 44).

37. The secondary literature on the early history of Quakerism is voluminous. For introductions to the early history of the Society of Friends, see Barbour, Hugh and Frost, J. William, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood, 1988)Google Scholar; and Braithwaite, William C., The Beginnings of Quakerism, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1955)Google Scholar. H. Larry Ingle's biography of George Fox offers the most recent discussion of the Society's most influential early leader (First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of American Quakerism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994]Google Scholar). For a discussion of William Penn's role in the Society of Friends, see Endy, Melvin B. Jr, William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

38. There is some debate among historians regarding the origins of the Society of Friends, specifically concerning whether George Fox can be considered the founder of Quakerism. Whereas modern Friends (and many historians) generally consider Fox the denomination's founder, Christopher Hill, among others, has argued that this perspective slights other Quakers, such as James Nayler, who were equally influential within the early movement. For secondary literature that corroborates Penn's assertion that Fox was “the first instrument by whom God was pleased to gather” Friends, see Endy, , William Penn, 5455Google Scholar; Braithwaite, , Beginnings of Quakerism, 2850Google Scholar; Barbour, and Frost, , The Quakers, 2535Google Scholar; and Ingle, , First Among Friends, 5960, 8586, 8889Google Scholar. Ingle treats Fox's leadership role as organizational as well as spiritual, recognizing that many Quakers and non-Quakers saw James Nayler as the spiritual leader of the Quakers. For an opposing view, see Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 231–58Google Scholar; and Reay, Barry, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 8Google Scholar. The quote from Penn is taken from A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers, in Penn, , The Peace of Europe, The Fruits of Solitude, and Other Writings, ed. Bronner, Edwin B. (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 266320, at 298Google Scholar.

39. Fox, George, The Journal of George Fox, ed. Jones, Rufus M. (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United, 1983), 66Google Scholar.

40. Fox, , Journal, 81Google Scholar.

41. Fox, , Journal, 82Google Scholar.

42. Fox, , Journal, 8485Google Scholar.

43. Fox, , Journal, 154–61Google Scholar; and Bronner, Edwin B., introduction to Penn, Peace of Europe, xxGoogle Scholar. See also Penn, (Brief Account, 300)Google Scholar for accounts of Fox's success; and Braithwaite, William C., The Second Period of Quakerism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 5561, 334–39Google Scholar.

44. For this estimate of the size of the Society, see Braithwaite, , Beginnings of Quakerism, 512Google Scholar. Braithwaite, has argued about the Revolution that “[t]he religious climate was thus singularly favorable to the growth of Quakerism” (Beginnings of Quakerism, 27)Google Scholar. Barry Reay has more recently offered an estimate of approximately the same size (Quakers, 27). H. Larry Ingle has argued that the suffering Friends' steadfast spirits in the face of persecution actually helped attract converts to the sect (First Among Friends, 212).

45. Technically speaking, there was no single coherent body of Quaker theology, particularly from the Revolutionary period. My discussion here is based primarily on the writings of two of the early leaders of the movement: George Fox and Robert Barclay. Although this approach does pose some difficulties, given that each of these authors' major works (Fox's Journal and Barclay, Robert, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Being an Explanation and Vindication of the Principles and Doctrines of the People Called Quakers [Providence: Knowles and Voss, 1847]Google Scholar) were published during the Restoration period, I hope to emphasize the ways in which these later theological tracts formalized, rather than radically revised, earlier doctrine. For discussions that place Quaker thought within the context of 17th-century English Puritanism and spiritualism, see Endy, , William Penn, 854Google Scholar; Endy, , “Puritanism, Spiritualism, and Quakerism: A Historiographical Essay,” in The World of William Penn, ed. Dunn, Richard S. and Dunn, Mary Maples (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 281301Google Scholar; and Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 231–41Google Scholar.

46. Barclay, , Apology, 2021Google Scholar.

47. [Fox, George and Nayler, James], Saul's Errand to Damascus (1653)Google Scholar, cited in Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1750, ed. Barbour, Hugh and Roberts, Arthur O. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973), 256Google Scholar (hereafter cited as EQW). For Fox's assertion that Oxford and Cambridge were schools for spiritual beggars, see his Journal, 105.

48. Barclay, , Apology, 3, 2021Google Scholar.

49. Fox, , A Declaration of the Difference (1656)Google Scholar, cited in Reay, , Quakers, 34Google Scholar.

50. Public Records Office, London, Assi 44/6; Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore Manuscripts iv.52, each cited in Reay, , Quakers, 34Google Scholar.

51. Barclay, , Apology, 3, 4Google Scholar.

52. Barclay, Robert, Anarchy of the Ranters and Other Libertines, in EQW, 512–43Google Scholar.

53. On Quaker claims to be “primitive Christians,” see Nayler, James, Letter to Margaret Fell (1653), in EQW, 470–71Google Scholar; Aldam, Thomas, Letter to Margaret Fell (1654), in EQW, 471–73Google Scholar; Aldam, Thomas, Letter to Amor Stoddard (1652/1653), in EQW, 473–74Google Scholar; Taylor, George, Letter to Margaret Fell (1654/1655), in EQW, 474–76Google Scholar; and Burrough, Edward, Letter to Margaret Fell (1655), in EQW, 476–78Google Scholar. For the definitive Quaker statement of Quakerism as primitive Christianity, see Penn, William, Primitive Christianity Revived in the Faith and Practice of the People Called Quakers (London, 1696)Google Scholar, in William Penn on Religion and Ethics: The Emergence of Liberal Quakerism, ed. Barbour, Hugh (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 609–26Google Scholar.

54. Barclay, , Apology, 67Google Scholar. For further discussions of the universality of the light within, see Fox, , Journal, 102Google Scholar; Braithwaite, , Beginnings of Quakerism, 36Google Scholar; and Endy, , William Penn, 4445Google Scholar.

55. Fisher, Samuel, Rusticus Ad Academicos (1660)Google Scholar, sig. B3, cited in Reay, , Quakers, 33Google Scholar.

56. This description of individuated selfhood as the product of interior spiritual reflection is taken from Mauss, “Category of the Human Mind,” 19–23; Dumont, “Modified View,” 113–19; and Bercovitch, , Puritan Origins, 135Google Scholar.

57. Fox, , Journal, 537Google Scholar. The most complete treatment of women in 17th–century Quaker England can be found in Mack, Visionary Women. See also Brailsford, Mabel Richmond, Early Quaker Women, 1650–1690 (London: Duckworth, 1915)Google Scholar; and Bacon, Margaret Hope, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), ch. 1Google Scholar.

58. Mack, , Visionary Women, 1Google Scholar.

59. In referring to the Quakers' belief that all people contained the light within as universalist, I am referring to a universal possibility of religious revelation, not universal salvation, as in the modern-day Universalist Church. Endy discusses this distinction (William Penn, 44–45).

60. Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 83, 164, 166, 371Google Scholar. These are of course, rough terms; neither the Seekers nor the Ranters — nor even the early Quaker movement — had any real organizational orthodoxy.

61. Hill, discusses some individual thinkers who rejected entirely notions of sin and hell, but the Quakers appear to have been the only sect that collectively endorsed the possibility of worldly spiritual perfection (World Turned Upside Down, 151–84)Google Scholar.

62. Barclay, , Apology, 9Google Scholar. For an earlier discussion of this by Barclay, see A Catechism and Confession of Faith (1673), in EQW, 314–49, esp. 328–30. The possibility of worldly sinless perfection is also discussed by Reay, in Quakers, 3537Google Scholar.

63. Fox, , Journal, 97Google Scholar. For other examples, see [Fox, and Nayler, ], Saul's Errand, 251–62Google Scholar; [Nayler, James], An Answer to a Book Called The Quaker's Catechism (1655) in EQW, 280Google Scholar.

64. Barclay, , Apology, 9Google Scholar.

65. Fox, , Journal, 104, 556Google Scholar.

66. There is some historical debate as to the importance of the peace testimony among early Friends. Although Fox appears to have consistently supported pacifism from an early point (Fox, , Journal, 128, 212, 345–68, 390–94, 471–75Google Scholar; and Ingle, , First Among Friends, 121, 156–57, 172–73Google Scholar), Reay and Hill have argued that early Quakers were actually a quite militant sect (Reay, , Quakers, 1520Google Scholar; and Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 241–48Google Scholar). It is perhaps most accurate to say that adherence to the peace testimony among Friends was uneven until after the English Civil War, after which it become an indelible part of Friends' testimony. For the plain style, see Fox, , Journal, 380–82Google Scholar; and William Penn, No Cross, No Crown, in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 4482Google Scholar. See also Bauman, Richard's discussion of Quaker plain speaking in his Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 10, 125–27, 139Google Scholar; and Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh, “From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speechways During the Puritan Revolution,” in Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Burke, Peter and Porter, Roy (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 72112Google Scholar.

67. For an introduction into the comparative discussion of time, see Hughes and Trautmann, Time.

68. See, for example, [Nayler, ], An Answer, 286Google Scholar.

69. Penn, , Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670)Google Scholar, in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 416Google Scholar.

70. See Aldam, Thomas, False Prophets and False Teachers Described (1652), in EQW, 359–62Google Scholar, which Barbour and Roberts note as the earliest Quaker writing to appear in print (EQW, 358). See also [Nayler, ], An Answer, 286, 289Google Scholar. For later reiterations of this theme, see Penn, William, Wisdom Justified of Her Children, from the Ignorance and Calumny of H. Hallywell (1673)Google Scholar, in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 336350Google Scholar. See also the references cited in note 53.

71. In Besse, Joseph, A Collection of Sufferings (1753)Google Scholar, cited in EQW, 131.

72. Marshall, Charles's “Testimony Concerning John Camm and John Audland” (1689)Google Scholar, in EQW, 82.

73. Dewsbury, William, True Prophecy of the Mighty Day of the Lord (London, 1655)Google Scholar, in EQW, 93, 95.

74. Fox, George “The Younger,” A Noble Salutation and a Faithful Greeting…” (London, 1660)Google Scholar, in EQW, 404; and Smith, Humphrey, The Vision of Humphrey Smith Which He Saw Concerning London (London, 1660)Google Scholar, in EQW, 142–44.

75. Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 35, 96, 122, 190, 199, 287–90Google Scholar; and Bloch, Ruth, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. Fisher, Samuel, Apokrypta Apokalypta (London, 1661)Google Scholar, in EQW, 305–14.

77. Fisher, , Apokrypta, 310–11Google Scholar.

78. Fisher, , Apokrypta, 310, 313Google Scholar.

79. See Hughes and Trautmann, Time, esp. Dianne Owen Hughes, “Introduction” (1–20) and Nancy M. Farriss, “Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology Among the Maya of Yucatan” (107–38). Farriss cogently argues that, contrary to many theorists who had drawn stark distinctions between the linear history of the West and the cyclical history of the “rest,” nearly all cultural constructions of time incorporate both stereotypically linear and cyclical elements (108–9).

80. See Bauman, Richard, “Speaking in the Light: The Role of the Quaker Minister,” in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. Bauman, Richard and Sherzer, Joel, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press), 144–162Google Scholar; and Bauman, , Let Your Words Be Few, 120–36Google Scholar.

81. The Journal of Charles Marshall (London, 1844), 57Google Scholar, cited in Bauman, , Let Your Words Be Few, 23Google Scholar.

82. Barclay, , Apology, 34Google Scholar.

83. For the James Nayler controversy, see Braithwaite, , Beginnings of Quakerism, 241–76Google Scholar; and Ingle, , First Among Friends, 128–32, 140–50, 202Google Scholar. For the John Wilkinson—John Story controversy, see Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 290323Google Scholar; and Ingle, , First Among Friends, 251–54Google Scholar. For John Perrot, see Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 22850Google Scholar; and Carroll, Kenneth L., “John Perrot, Early Quaker Schismatic,” Journal of the Friends Historical Society 33, suppl. (1971)Google Scholar; and Ingle, , First Among Friends, 195205Google Scholar.

84. For discussions of the creation of the formal Meeting structure, see Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 215–50Google Scholar; Ingle, , First Among Friends, 8586, 8889, 9394, 102106, 116–17, 151–52, 222–26Google Scholar; and Penn, , A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People, Call'd Quakers (1694)Google Scholar, in A Collection of the Works of William Penn, ed. Besse, Joseph (1726; rept. New York: AMS, 1974), 858–92, esp. 864–73, 876–78Google Scholar. While many Quaker historians have seen the creation of Meeting discipline as a necessary evolution in the movement's development, some radical historians have treated its organization as almost a betrayal of Quakerism's early radical potential. See Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 253–58Google Scholar; Reay, , Quakers, 103–23Google Scholar.

85. Barclay, , Anarchy, in EQW, 523Google Scholar.

86. This account of Quaker discipline is taken from Barbour, and Frost, , The Quakers, 4, 7, 80, 97, 107–12Google Scholar; and Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 497523Google Scholar.

87. See Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, excerpted in The Goffman Reader, ed. Lemert, Charles (New York: Blackwell, 1997), 4551Google Scholar.

38. See, for example, the exhortations to self-discipline in Penn, , No Cross No Crown (1669)Google Scholar, in Barbour, William Penn on Religion; and Barclay, Anarchy. See also Mack, 's discussion of selfhood and discipline, in Visionary Women (127–64, 351402)Google Scholar.

89. For arguments that a combination of cultural narratives of historical change and an emphasis on individual conscience was integrally tied to the English Revolution in particular and radical politics more generally, see Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and Walzer, Exodus and Revolution.

90. While historians of 17th-century England have agreed on the spiritually radical elements within Quakerism, they have disagreed regarding the movement's political radicalism. Hill, (World Turned Upside Down, 253–58)Google Scholar and Reay, (Quakers, 1520)Google Scholar have emphasized the Society's early militancy, whereas Braithwaite, (Beginnings of Quakerism, 434–67, 515)Google Scholar and some others have argued that the early movement was less politicized (see note 66).

91. Reay, , Quakers, 18Google Scholar. Mark Kishlansky has argued that Hill et al. have overemphasized the impact of religious sectarianism in the Army, pointing out that religious radicals, in absolute numbers, did not dominate. That said, Reay's findings — that while Quakers did not dominate the Army, the early Quaker movement did have a sizable number of former soldiers within it — are still persuasive. See Kishlansky, , “The Creation of the New Model Army,” P & P 81 (1978): 5174Google Scholar; and Reay, , Quakers, 18Google Scholar.

92. Penn, , Great Case, 422Google Scholar. For more on Penn's efforts for toleration, see Penn, , An Address to Protestant upon the Present Conjuncture (1678)Google Scholar, in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 450–78Google Scholar; Penn, , A Perswasive to Moderation to Dissenting Christians (1685)Google Scholar, in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 488–90Google Scholar; and Dunn, , William Penn, 132–61Google Scholar.

93. Tomlinson, William, A Word of Reproof (1656)Google Scholar, cited in Reay, , Quakers, 38Google Scholar; and Cotton, Priscilla and Cole, Mary, To the Priests (1656)Google Scholar, cited in Reay, , Quakers, 38Google Scholar.

94. For background on the English legal reform movement, see Veall, , Popular Movement, esp. 65–127Google Scholar.

95. Fox, George, Several Papers Given Forth (1660)Google Scholar, cited in Hill, , World Turned Upside Down, 271Google Scholar; and B[illing], E., A Declaration of Present Sufferings (1659)Google Scholar, cited in Reay, , Quakers, 39Google Scholar.

96. See Veall, , Popular Movement, passimGoogle Scholar.

97. [Billing, Edward], A Mite of Affection (1659)Google Scholar, in EQW, 411–21.

98. See the “General Introduction,” in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 120Google Scholar; Dunn, , William Penn, 1316Google Scholar; and Horle, Craig, Quakers and the English Legal System, 1660–1688 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 116–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a revisionist view of the Penn—Mead trial, see Pencak, William, “What Is a Fair Trial? The Case of Penn and Mead,” in Law and the Conflict of Ideologies, ed. Kvelson, Roberta (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 199209Google Scholar.

99. Penn, William, “Exceptions Against the Procedure of the Court,” in PWP, 1: 175–76Google Scholar. The editors of Penn's papers date this document from Penn's letterbook September 5, 1670, the day Penn and Mead's trial ended.

100. Dunn, , William Penn, 1316Google Scholar; and Horle, , Quakers, 114–16Google Scholar. William Pencak has argued that the notion that the jury returned an initial verdict of not guilty was a bit of a fiction propagated by Penn himself (“What Is a Fair Trial?” 207).

101. These phrases are taken from Geertz, Clifford, “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective,” in Geertz, , Local Knowledge, 175Google Scholar.

102. For the transition to quietism with the Meeting, see Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 160, 177, 179, 408–11Google Scholar. Braithwaite, actually links the rise of quietism to New World colonization, arguing that many of the most active Friends emigrated, dulling the evangelical impulses of English Friends (Second Period of Quakerism, 408–11)Google Scholar.

103. See, for example, Fox, , Journal, 264, 458–59Google Scholar; and Ingle, , First Among Friends, 162, 175, 189, 192, 193Google Scholar. The term orthodox is used here advisedly. In calling Fox and other pacifists orthodox, I mean to refer to the doctrinal positions that became the mainstream orthodoxy within the Society of Friends after the establishment of the Meeting structure, not to suggest that Fox's views on militancy in the 1660s were somehow representative of Friends as a whole. Indeed, Fox's need to distinguish between Quakers and Fifth Monarchists, as well as the number of Quakers arrested for their involvement in the latter movement, raise the possibility that a reasonable number of English Quakers in the 1660s may have been Fifth Monarchists. Braithwaite, rejects this claim (Second Period of Quakerism, 7, 9, 13, 221, 223)Google Scholar. The major historian of the Fifth Monarchy Movement — Bernard S. Capp — does not argue that there were significant numbers of Quakers among the Fifth Monarchists, but does emphasize how often they were grouped together in the public mind. See Capp, , The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 147–8, 151, 159, 199Google Scholar.

104. Dunn, , William Penn, 1542Google Scholar; and Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 1820Google Scholar.

105. Penn, , An Address to Protestants of all Perswasions (1679)Google Scholar, in Besse, , Works of William Penn, 800801Google Scholar. Penn's attempts to frame religious toleration in terms of the creation of a virtuous citizenry may have been the result with his early experiences with colonization in West Jersey. See the essays in The West Jersey Concessions and Agreements of 1676/177: A Roundtable of Historians, New Jersey Historical Commission Occasional Papers (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1979)Google Scholar; and Fea, John, “Rural Religion: Protestantism and Society in West Jersey, 1664–1800” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY–Stony Brook, 1999)Google Scholar.

106. Dewsbury, , True Prophecy, in EQW, 98Google Scholar.

107. Horle, , Quakers, 18 and passimGoogle Scholar.

108. Braithwaite, , Second Period of Quakerism, 248Google Scholar.

109. See PWP, 2: 66.

110. Penn to Harrison, 25/6mo./1681, in PWP, 2: 107.

111. Although there is no single standard biography of Penn's life and works, Penn has attracted a number of chroniclers. On Penn's religious thought, see Endy, William Penn. On his political thought, see Dunn, William Penn. For Penn's social context, see the essays in Dunn and Dunn, World of William Penn. The most accessible means of examining Penn's life is in the Dunn and Dunn, Papers of William Penn. For his collected writings, see Barbour, William Penn on Religion; and Besse, Works of William Penn.

112. See Smith, Joseph's Descriptive Catalogue of Friends Books (London, 1867)Google Scholar.

113. This statement should be qualified somewhat by noting that Penn is still frequently read among modern–day Friends. Outside of the Society, however — among a more general audience, so to speak, Penn's readership has been smaller. I am indebted to J. William Frost for reminding me of Penn's continuing importance to modern-day Quaker readers.

114. Dunn, , William Penn, 50Google Scholar.

115. There is some debate as to whether or not Penn's thought can actually be described more accurately as “Whig” or “Commonwealth.” Compare Ryerson, Richard Alan (“William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth: An Interpretation of the Constitutional History of Early Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History, 61 [1994]: 392428 [esp. 400–5])Google Scholar with Dunn, (William Penn, 2732)Google Scholar. Dunn groups Commonwealth and Whig ideology together.

116. The standard sources on Penn's original constitutions are Nash, Gary B., “The Framing of Government in Pennsylvania: Ideas in Contact with Reality,” in WMQ 33 (1966): 184209Google Scholar; Nash, Gary B., Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 2847Google Scholar; and Bronner, Edwin B., William Penn's “Holy Experiment”: The Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681–1701 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1961), 11, 2930Google Scholar; and Dunn, , William Penn, 8889, 9397, 99100, 104–6, 153, 183–84, 186–88Google Scholar. The most recent and thorough treatment of Pennsylvania's early constitutional history is Ryerson, “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth.”

117. Nash, , “Framing of Government,” 202–3Google Scholar; and Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” esp. 395–96Google Scholar. Ryerson bases his argument that Penn's populism was less than has been thought on his revisionist — but not unfounded —contention that Penn actually had little to do with the drafting of the earlier, extraordinarily democratic provincial constitution, the West Jersey Concessions (“William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 400). For a competing claim that Penn did play a major role, see Fea, , “Rural Religion,” ch. 1Google Scholar.

118. Nash, , “Framing of Government,” 190–91Google Scholar.

119. William Penn to Col. [Algernon] Sydney, October 13, 1681, in PWP 2: 124.

120. See the drafts reprinted and annotated in PWP 2: 137–238.

121. There is some debate as to the author of the “Fundamentall Constitutions” and the date of its creation. Whereas the headnotes in the PWP and Jean R. Soderlund's edited William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, an offshoot of the PWP project, claim Penn as the author and summer 1681 as the probable date of its writing, Ryerson suggests that Penn could not have been its author and argues that an early 1682 date is more accurate (see PWP 2: 140–57; Soderlund, , ed., William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 1680–1684: A Documentary History [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983], 96108Google Scholar; and Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 402, 424 n. 33, 424–25 n. 34Google Scholar). Although Ryerson's argument for the later date of authorship for the “Fundamentall Constitutions” is persuasive, his argument that Penn definitively did not write the “Fundamentall Constitutions” is less so. In this essay, I take an agnostic position as to whether Penn was the author of “Fundamentall Constitutions” but do consider the document an expression of Quaker legal thought, regardless of whether Penn himself wrote them.

122. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP, 2: 141–42Google Scholar.

123. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP, 2: 142Google Scholar.

124. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP 2: 142Google Scholar.

125. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP, 2: 142Google Scholar.

126. Thompson, Martyn P., “The History of Fundamental Law in Political Thought from the French Wars of Religion to the American Revolution,” American Historical Review (hereafter cited as AHR) 91 (12 1986): 11031128, esp. 1112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kelley, Donald R., “ ‘Second Nature’: The Idea of Custom in European Law, Society, and Culture,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Grafton, Anthony and Blair, Ann (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 131–72Google Scholar.

127. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP, 2: 142Google Scholar.

128. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP, 2: 153Google Scholar.

129. Fundamentall Constitutions,” Constitution XIV, in PWP, 2: 148Google Scholar. For the Quaker opposition to debtor's prison, see [E.B.], A Mite of Affection (1659), in EQW.

130. Nash, “Framing of Government”; and Ryerson, “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth.”

131. Wood, Gordon S. notes the tradition of legislators receiving written instructions from voters in New England without noting this tradition in Pennsylvania as well (The Creation of the American Republic [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1969], 189, 191)Google Scholar.

132. Dunn, makes a case for the “Constitutions” republican character (William Penn, 9396)Google Scholar. Ryerson has argued that the “Constitutions” were much more properly thought of as a product of Commonwealth thought, while the Frame of 1682 was the product of a Whiggish philosophy (“William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 402–3). Although I think these distinctions are real, I find the documents similar enough in much of their style and proposals to group them both under the category of “republican” thought.

133. The Frame of Government and Laws Agreed Upon in England (London, 1682)Google Scholar, in PWP 2: 211–227. This change, however, was in line with what James Harrington had suggested in his classic Commonwealth text, Oceana (Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 402–3Google Scholar).

134. Ryerson has pointed out that Nash's explanation for Penn's conservative frame of government — appeasing his wealthy investors — might be a persuasive cause for Penn's decision to reject the “Constitutions” and draft the 1682 Frame ( “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 403), although Nash himself does not apply the argument to this change ( “Framing of Government,” 197–201). See also Dunn, , William Penn, 9495Google Scholar.

135. PWP, 2: 220.

136. Ryerson dismisses the preface to the frame with minimal discussion, and no comparison to the earlier text's preamble, and neither Dunn nor Bronner compare the frame's preamble to that of the “Constitutions.” (Bronner does not deal with the “Constitutions” at all.) Nash argues that the preface to the 1682 Frame is largely the same as the preamble to the “Constitutions” (Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 11, 23Google Scholar; Dunn, , William Penn, 9197Google Scholar; and Nash, , “Framing of Government,” 197–98Google Scholar).

137. 1682 Frame, in PWP, 2: 212.

138. Penn's vision of magisterial and political authority reflected prevailing Anglo-American ideas on rulership and magisterial authority. See Breen, T. H., The Character of a Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), ch. 1 and passimGoogle Scholar.

139. Horle, , Quakers, 161–81Google Scholar. Penn himself had challenged the divine right of civil governments, arguing that Quakers — and Christians in general — should distinguish between what was due Caesar and what was due God (see Penn, , Address to Protestants, 472–77Google Scholar).

140. 1682 Frame, in PWP, 2: 212.

141. 1682 Frame, in PWP, 2: 213.

142. See the OED discussion of the term constitution. Gordon Wood describes the differences between English and American conceptions of “constitution” and the gradual American transition to a “modern” notion of constitution as fundamental law and dates this change to the 1760s (Creation, 260–61, 266–67). For a further discussion of colonial ideas of “constitution” as the component parts of government, see Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6677Google Scholar.

143. My use of the terms moral capital and political capital is drawn from Pierre Bourdieu, 's discussion of the role of cultural capital in maintaining order and authority (Outline of a Theory, 89, 183–84)Google Scholar.

144. Cover, , “Nomos and Narrative,” 105–6Google Scholar; and Cover, , “Violence and the Word,” in Minow, et al. , Narrative, Violence, and the Law, 203–39Google Scholar.

145. These terms are Cover's. See the foregoing discussion on these schisms within Quakerism at pages 127–128.

146. Fundamentall Constitutions,” in PWP, 2: 142Google Scholar; 1682 Frame, in PWP, 2: 220.

147. William Penn to the inhabitants of Pennsylvania, 8/Apr./1681, in PWP 2: 84–85.

148. 1682 Frame, in PWP, 2: 214.

149. It is not my intention to enter into a long discussion on the nature of social contractarianism, and how Penn's particular notion of the social contract fits into that concept's long history. Suffice to say, I think that Penn's notion of Pennsylvania's legal legitimacy deriving from a system of mutual obligations — “obedience” for “just administration” — does indeed represent a form of constitutional contractarianism. For a discussion of this term, see Boucher, David and Kelly, Paul, “The Social Contract and Its Critics: An Overview,” in The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls, ed. Boucher, and Kelly, (New York: Routledge 1994), 1013CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Thompson, Martyn P., “Locke's Contract in Context,” in Boucher, and Kelly, , Social Contract, 8691Google Scholar. For a discussion of the social covenant as law, see Elazar, Daniel J., Covenant & Commonwealth: From Christian Separation Through the Protestant Reformation; The Covenant Tradition in Politics, Vol. 2 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, esp. his discussion of 17th-century England (231–307).

150. See Penn, William, Tender Counsel and Advice (London, 1677)Google Scholar, in Barbour, , William Penn on Religion, 144Google Scholar. See also Pennington, Isaac, Letter to unnamed Friends, in EQW, 236–37Google Scholar; and Dewsbury, ,True Prophecy, in EQW, 97Google Scholar. See also the references at notes 53, 68, above.

151. Penn did call for the creation of jury systems, allowing citizens to have a voice on matters of fact and law (see Laws Agreed Upon in England, in PWP, 2: 221–22).

152. See Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]), 514Google Scholar, for his discussion of the difference between representational public authority — which presupposes a one-way dialogue between rulers and ruled — and a multivocal public sphere.

153. See Thomas Rudyard's Commentary on the Frame of Government,” in PWP, 2: 184–89Google Scholar; “Benjamin Furly's Comparison of the Fundamental Constitutions with the Frame of Government,” and Benjamin Furly's Criticism of the Frame of Government,” in PWP, 2: 228238Google Scholar.

154. Great apologies to Jon Butler for stealing his line (Butler, , Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 37Google Scholar).

155. For narrative discussions of the early founding Pennsylvania, see Nash, , Quakers and Politics, 4889Google Scholar; Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 3149Google Scholar; and Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 415–19Google Scholar. For documentation of Penn's activities during the critical first fifteen months in Pennsylvania, see PWP, 2: 297–507.

156. George, Staughton et al. , Charter to William Penn, and Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania Passed Between the Years 1782 and 1700; Preceeded by the Duke of York's Laws in Force from the Year 1676 to the Year 1682, with an Appendix Containing Laws Relating to the Organization of the Provincial Courts and Historical Matter (Harrisburg: Hart, 1879), 107–8Google Scholar. See also “Legislation of Pennsylvania,” in Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol. 1: 1682–1709, ed. Horle, Craig W. and Woceck, Marianne S. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 3032CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

157. Soderlund, Jean R., “The Second Frame of Government,” in Soderlund, , William Penn, 265–73Google Scholar. For Penn's debates with the legislature over the shape of the 1683 Frame, see “Minutes of the Provincial Council and Assembly,” in Soderlund, , William Penn, 226–65Google Scholar. See also Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 410–12Google Scholar; Nash, , Quakers and Politics, 6772Google Scholar; and Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 3940Google Scholar. Bronner, however, does not discuss any significant friction between Penn and the colonists over the 1682 Frame, something which Nash and Ryerson emphasize.

158. Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 413, 420–21Google Scholar.

159. See Nash, , Quakers and Politics, 6972Google Scholar. For Penn's characterization of politics in Pennsylvania, see PWP, 3: 128.

160. Hymes, Dell, “Ways of Speaking,” in Bauman, and Sherzer, , Explorations in the Ethnography, 433–52, esp. 446Google Scholar.

161. See note 87.

162. On the concept of culture as a deep structural element of social life, see Bourdieu, 's discussion of the culture concept (Outline of a Theory, 2, 23, 27, 8485)Google Scholar.

163. For narrative discussions of Penn's fight with Baltimore, see Dunn, , William Penn, 100–3, 107, 109Google Scholar; Nash, , Quakers and Politics, 68, 7476, 84, 87, 104Google Scholar; Ryerson, , “William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth,” 414–15Google Scholar; and Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 22, 6567Google Scholar. For the documentary record of Penn's legal troubles, see PWP, 2: 111–14, 256–59, 281–84, 329–33, 344–46, 357–58, 381–437 passim, 471–558 passim, 624–630.

164. A majority of Pennsylvania's legislators were Quaker during the colony's first two decades. Craig Horle notes that, with the exception of the first session, Quakers comprised a majority of the Assembly throughout the 17th century in Pennsylvania. His findings for the Provincial Council are similar; with the exception of 1694 — when royal governor Benjamin Fletcher appointed his own council, dismissing Penn's appointees — Friends comprised well over 50 percent of the Council (see Horle, , “Religious Affiliation of Legislators,” in Horle, and Woceck, , Lawmaking, 115–21Google Scholar). For discussions of Pennsylvania's early legal distinctiveness, see Offutt, William M. Jr, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men”: Law and Society in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1710 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 124Google Scholar; and Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 3151Google Scholar.

165. See Veall, , Popular Movement, and pages 2124Google Scholar.

166. George, et al. , Charter, 144 and passimGoogle Scholar. This penal reform in Pennsylvania happened concurrently with an increasing desire for capital and corporal punishment in England. See Hay, Douglas, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, et al. , Albion's Fatal TreeGoogle Scholar.

167. George, et al. , Charter, 112Google Scholar.

168. George, et al. , Charter, 164–64, 227, 121, 172Google Scholar. In England, by contrast, sheriffs were responsible for appraising goods for sale. This practice provided a convenient way for many law enforcement officials to express their anti-Quaker animus by confiscating Quaker tradesmen's means of production and selling them at low prices. This method rendered many Friends bereft of all of their goods (see Horle, , Quakers, 125–39)Google Scholar.

169. George, et al. , Charter, 111, 121Google Scholar.

170. George, et al. , Charter, 117Google Scholar.

171. George, et al. , Charter, 123Google Scholar. Despite this provision, the colony's laws were not printed regularly until after 1701.

172. George, et al. , Charter, 120Google Scholar.

173. George, et al. , Charter, 121Google Scholar.

174. George, et al. , Charter, 121Google Scholar.

175. See Offutt, , Of “Good Laws”, 66Google Scholar. I should note, however, that it is unclear whether the Philadelphia Quaker Meeting had officially taken a stance on this before 1701. Offutt's evidence for this preference is an English Quaker manuscript that he dates to before 1687 (287 n. 25) The earliest record of Pennsylvania Friends issuing this advice, however, comes from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Minutes, 1701 (microfilm copy at Quaker Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, Pa.). See also Tolles, Frederick B., Meetinghouse and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682–1763, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1948), 75Google Scholar.

176. George, et al. , Charter, 128Google Scholar. For a discussion of the Quaker method of visitation, see Barbour and Frost, The Quakers. This law has been cited by numerous commentators, including Offutt, Bronner, Lawrence Friedman, and Peter C. Hoffer, as evidence of Quaker influence in the Pennsylvania legal system. Indeed, in some surveys of colonial legal history (Friedman and Hoffer) this is one of the only mentions of colonial Pennsylvania. My research into the legal records of early Pennsylvania, however, suggests that the attention given to this law is out of all proportion to its actual use in practice. See Friedman, Lawrence, A History of American law, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985)Google Scholar; and Hoffer, Peter C., Law and Peoples of Colonial America (1992; rept. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Smolenski, John, “Speaking in Court: Verbal Performance and the Construction of Self in the Legal Culture of Early Pennsylvania,” paper presented at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies,December 4, 1998Google Scholar.

177. George, et al. , Charter, 118121Google Scholar.

178. George, et al. , Charter, 111Google Scholar.

179. George, et al. , Charter, 113–14Google Scholar.

180. Note that there was not a single vice law passed during the next seventeen years (Table 1).

181. Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 3151Google Scholar; Nash, , Quakers and Politics, chs. 1–2Google Scholar; Dunn, , William Penn, 97100Google Scholar; and Offutt, , Of “Good Laws”, 121Google Scholar. See also note 176.

182. Michel Foucault has described a similar process to this in his well-known Discipline and Punish, in which he argued that the encroachment of disciplinary practices into several domains of 18th-and 19th-century life, especially within the penal process, were instrumental in constructing docile subject bodies in France. In his narrative, the abolition of torture; the redefinition of criminality so that reforming the criminal, rather than punishing him, becomes the primary end of penalty; and the rise of the prison are the major events that lead to this result. Interestingly (in terms of this essay), Foucault's argument on the meaning of this transformation actually hinges in no small degree on his reading of the relationship between Quaker theology and the Cherry Hill prison, which, in his view, epitomized the triumph of the carcereal ideal in the United States, arguing that Fox's belief in the power of the inner light over the conscience provided the model for the prison designers' attempts to force prisoners to reform by looking inward, submitting to their inner conscience, and accepting not just a new attitude, but a new morality (Discipline and Punish, 238–39, 318 n. 7). Although the broad strokes of Foucault's argument are indeed provocative, the findings presented in this essay suggest that his chronology, his assessment of the homologies between theology and legal praxis, and his analysis of the genealogical relationship between the two bear some revision, at least in the case of 17th-century Pennsylvania.

183. On the development of masculine or patriarchal prerogative as a phenomenon of the 17th-century British North American world, see Norton, Mary Beth, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996)Google Scholar. For specific regional case studies, see Levy, Barry, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Brown, Good Wives; and Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1994)Google Scholar. On these developments in England, see Stone, , Family, Sex, and Marriage, 149180Google Scholar; Fletcher, , Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 99279Google Scholar; and Amussen, , “Gender, Family,” esp. 67–94Google Scholar.

184. George, et al. , Charter, 116Google Scholar.

185. George, et al. , Charter, 115Google Scholar.

186. George, et al. , Charter, 115Google Scholar.

187. George, et al. , Charter, 145Google Scholar. Several scholars have suggested that scolding and railing (alternately “rayling”) were specifically gendered crimes, most frequently speech attacks by women on men. See George, Robert Blair St., “ ‘Heated Speech’ and Literacy in Early New England,” in Seventeenth-Century New England, ed. Hall, David D. and Allen, David G. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 275322Google Scholar; Norton, Mary Beth, “Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 44 (1987): 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kamensky, Jane, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20, 22, 26, 40Google Scholar; and Dayton, , Women Before the Bar, ch. 7Google Scholar. David E. Underdown has suggested that these terms are similarly gendered in 17th–century England (“The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Fletcher, and Stevenson, , Order and Disorder, 116–36Google Scholar). In my own investigation of the extant court records of 17th-century Pennsylvania, I have not found a clear pattern of gendered enforcement of these laws, although there are some instances where the enforcement of crimes of slander and defamation are clear cases of policing the categories of masculinity and femininity (Smolenski, “Speaking in Court”). However, that does not necessarily prove that the intent of these early statutes was not gendered.

188. George, et al. , Charter, 108Google Scholar.

189. George et al., Charter. There was also a property requirement for voting, as well.

190. Nor was this act an isolated one. Later that term the Assembly decreed that candidates and voters who gave or received gifts during elections were barred from ever voting or holding office again, respectively; it also declared that magistrates guilty of bribery and extortion were to be removed from their posts and fined. The following year, the legislature mandated that all officials convicted of swearing or obscenities would suffer double the consequences (George, et al. , Charter, 108–9, 133Google Scholar).

191. Lying in conversation, listed as a crime by itself, did bring a half-crown fine or three days hard labor (George, et al. , Charter, 116–17Google Scholar).

192. See the Oxford English Dictionary entry for convicted. This is borne out by the use of the term convicted in the extant 17th-century court records. See the Records of the Courts of Quarter Sessions and Common Pleas of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 1684–1700 (Meadville: Tribune Publishing for the Colonial Society of America, 1943), and Record of the Courts of Chester County (Philadelphia: Patterson and White for the Colonial Society of America, 1910).

193. Bauman, , “Speaking in the Light,” 154–55Google Scholar.

194. George, et al. , Charter, 130Google Scholar.

195. George, et al. , Charter, 116Google Scholar.

196. George, et al. , Charter, 120Google Scholar.

197. George, et al. , Charter, 151Google Scholar.

198. George, et al. , Charter, 151Google Scholar. In part because of this law, there were strict penalties for counterfeiting county seals passed early on in Pennsylvania (George, et al. , Charter, 133, 206Google Scholar).

199. George, et al. , Charter, 130Google Scholar. There is no evidence, however, that suggests that such a jury was ever called. Francis Jennings has downplayed the significance of Penn's writings on this matter, arguing that Penn's remarks that “six of each side shall end the matter” in disputes between Indians and colonists “reflected [his] historical scholarship rather than his intentions in courts.” Jennings further asserted that Penn was drawing an analogy between the jurisdictional conflicts between Wales and England in the 10th century rather than prescribing legal regulations in Pennsylvania (“Brother Miquon: Good Lord!” in Dunn, and Dunn, , World of William Penn, 195214Google Scholar, citation at page 213n. 33). Given that Jennings's argument was based on his reading of Penn's promotional literature rather than Pennsylvania's early statutory history, however, this position needs to be challenged.

200. This definition is taken from Bauman, Richard and Sherzer, Joel, “Introduction,” in Bauman, and Sherzer, , Explorations in the Ethnography, 6Google Scholar.

201. See Horle, , “Religious Affiliation,” 115121Google Scholar, esp. “Figure III-1: Religious Affiliation of Assemblymen (1683–1709),” 115, and “Figure III-10: Religious Affiliation of Provincial Councilors (1683–1701),” 120.

202. See George, et al. , Charter, 268Google Scholar.

203. George, et al. , Charter, 221–44Google Scholar. Even Fletcher's forays into regulating public discourse were limited and self-serving; of his two laws prohibiting public speech acts, one was designed to protect himself, prohibiting any from criticizing him in public.

204. See George, et al. , Charter, 260–62Google Scholar.

205. See, for example, Breen, , Character, esp. 119–21, 133, 136–37, 155–67, 181, 195–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roeber, A. G., Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680–1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1981), 373Google Scholar; Isaac, , Transformation of Virginia, 133–35Google Scholar; Dayton, , Women Before the Bar, 291–92Google Scholar; Little, Ann Marie, “A ‘Wel Ordered Commonwealth’: Gender and Politics in New Haven Colony, 1636–1690” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996), esp. chs. 2 and 3Google Scholar; and Fletcher, and Stevenson, , “Introduction,” 1526Google Scholar. Dayton's work on Connecticut also includes New Haven colony before it was incorporated into Connecticut.

206. See Breen, , Character, 1921, 36, 43, 48, 59, 64, 67, 73, 80, 82, 89, 106, 189, 217, 267, 271Google Scholar; Isaac, , Transformation of Virginia, 2021, 94, 113–14, 132–35, 309–11, 312, 348–49Google Scholar; and Roeber, , Faithful Magistrates, 81Google Scholar. For an analysis of legal culture and discourse in Delaware, see Brophy, Alfred L., “ ‘For the Preservation of the King's Peace and Justice’: Community and English Law in Sussex County, Pennsylvania, 1682–1696,” American Journal of Legal History 60 (1996): 168212Google Scholar. For a discussion of another Quaker's legal thought that bears a striking resemblance to Penn's, see Brophy, , “ ‘Ingenium est Fateri per quos profeceris’: Francis Daniel Pastorius' Young Country Clerk's Collection and Anglo-American Legal Literature, 1682–1716,” University of Chicago Law School Roundtable, a Journal of Interdisciplinary Legal Studies 3 (1996): 637734Google Scholar.

207. On the fine for speaking against judges and courts in Virginia being less than in Pennsylvania, see Roeber, , Faithful Magistrates (82)Google Scholar, and Smolenski, “Speaking in Court.” On the disciplining of bodies as the central aspect of state and legal authority in Virginia, see Brown, , Good Wives, 148–51, 350–61Google Scholar. On corporal punishment being meted out according to rank in colonial Maryland, see Semmes, Raphael, Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1970), 39Google Scholar. On the necessity of a severe legal code as part of the Puritan ethic of leadership, see Breen, , Character, 6162Google Scholar. On corporal punishment in Connecticut, see Dayton, , Women Before the Bar, 10, 31, 181Google Scholar. On corporeal punishment in New York, see Greenberg, Douglas, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–1775 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 39Google Scholar. On the severity of corporeal punishments in England, see Veall, , Popular Movement, 2529Google Scholar.

208. Roeber, , Faithful Magistrates, 73112Google Scholar; and Isaac, , Transformation of Virginia, 8890, 110, 317Google Scholar.

209. There has been a great deal written about blasphemous religious speech in Puritan New England. For insightful examples, see Kamensky, , Governing the Tongue, 6, 7, 3637, 40, 95, 168, 184, 186Google Scholar; and Westerkamp, Marilyn, “Engendering Puritan Religious Culture in Old and New England,” in Empire, Society, and Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, ed. Canny, Nicholas, Illick, Joseph E., Nash, Gary B., and Pencak, William (University Park: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1997)Google Scholar (also published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 64, spec. suppl. [1997]: 105–22Google Scholar).

210. Francis Jennings has argued that Penn has deserved his reputation of being more humane to the Indians than other colonial rulers (“Brother Miquon,” 195). For a broad comparative study that argues for Penn's (and Pennsylvania's) distinctiveness with respect to Indian policy, see Bitterli, Urs, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492–1800, trans. Robertson, Ritchie (Cambridge: Polity, 1989)Google Scholar. On colonial legal relations with Indians more generally, see Hoffer, , Law and Peoples, 5069Google Scholar; Merrell, James H., “ ‘ The Customes of Our Countrey’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bailyn, Bernard and Morgan, Philip D. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991), 142–46, 155Google Scholar; and Merrell, , Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 4953, 120Google Scholar. On the 17th-century English notion that neither English nor international law could be applied to native North Americans, see Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1975), 45, 7881, 132–33Google Scholar.

211. Offutt, , Of “Good Laws”, 121Google Scholar. For comparative discussion of private law in New England that highlights some of the distinctive elements of Pennsylvania's legal reformist code, see Mann, Bruce, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Konig, David Thomas, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Nelson, William E., Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725–1825 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar. For an argument that local private legal customs predominated over provincial legal orders for much of the 17th century in Massachusetts, see Allen, David Grayson, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth-Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1981)Google Scholar.

212. On Penn's fight with the Assembly over this issue, see PWP, 3: 145, 183, 197, 209–10, 329, 456–58, 462–63, 507–9; Nash, , Quakers and Politics, 6773, 8081, 87, 103, 111–14Google Scholar; and Bronner, , William Penn's “Holy Experiment”, 214–17, 218, 235–36, 237–38Google Scholar.

213. See Root, Winfred Trexler, The Relations of Pennsylvania with the British Government, 1696–1765 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1912), 129–30Google Scholar. See also PWP, 4: 160–68.

214. See PWP, 2: 66.

215. The Anglicization model of colonial legal development mentioned here owes a tremendous debt to John M. Murrin, who first articulated this thesis with his work on colonial Massachusetts (“The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Colonial America: Essays in Political and Social Development, ed. Katz, Stanley N. and Murrin, John M. [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983], 540–71Google Scholar). Cornelia Hughes Dayton's study of gender and law in colonial Connecticut makes a strong case for legal Anglicization somewhat similar in its broader strokes to the argument here (Women Before the Bar and Turning Points and the Relevance of Colonial Legal History,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 50 [1993]: 717CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For two discussions that place the Anglicization thesis within the broader context of colonial legal development, see Konig, David Thomas, “A Summary View of the Law in British North America,” WMQ 50 (1993): 4250CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Katz, Stanley N., “The Problem of a Colonial Legal History,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New Modern History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Greene, Jack P. and Pole, J. R. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 457490Google Scholar. For an overview of the literature, see Hoffer, , Law and Peoples, 93, 94, 96, 114, 126, 139Google Scholar.

216. Nash, describes the end of Quaker infighting and the rise of a one-party system, which he describes as the “maturing of Pennsylvania” (Quakers and Politics, 306–44)Google Scholar.

217. Horle, and Woceck, list the religious composition of the Assembly during this period (Lawmaking, 115–21)Google Scholar. Tully, Alan (William Penn's Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania, 1726–1755 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977])Google Scholar, and Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977])Google Scholar and Ryerson, Richard A. ( “Portrait of a Colonial Oligarchy: The Quaker Elite in the Pennsylvania Assembly, 1729–1776,” in Power and Status: Officeholding in Colonial America, ed. Daniels, Bruce [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press 1986], 106–35)Google Scholar each detail and analyze the mechanics of Quaker political dominance throughout this forty-five-year period.

218. For a tabulation of the numbers of political tracts printed in Pennsylvania during this period, see Nash, Gary B., “The Transformation of Urban Politics,” in Nash, , Race Class, and Politics: Essays on American Colonial and Revolutionary Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 141–70Google Scholar. The table listing political publications is located at page 165. Excepting the pamphlet controversies of the 1690s (relating to the Keithian Schism) and the 1720s (relating to the struggle between Isaac Norris, David Lloyd, James Logan, and Sir William Keith), the period from Pennsylvania's founding to 1756 saw, on average, only two to three political pamphlets per decade.

219. Peter Thompson's recent work on colonial taverns suggests that studies of urban public discourse need to move beyond the treatments of print and examine everyday urban conversations. Even so, Thompson's Quaker reactions to slanderous talk in the taverns reveals a similar pattern. See Thompson, , Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. 112–13, 123–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

220. In this sense, the public sphere of colonial Pennsylvania most emphatically does not fit the model of political discourse put forth in Warner, Michael's seminal Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Warner focuses on Benjamin Franklin as a representative figure of Pennsylvania's public culture — and colonial culture generally — while missing the importance of the public deference accorded Friends in print. On Franklin, see Warner, , Letters, 7396Google Scholar.

221. For claims of divine sanction for Quaker rule, see Lloyd, David, A Vindication of the Legislative Power (Philadelphia, 1725)Google Scholar. Lloyd's Vindication was the centerpiece of an active — and successful — strategy on his part to regain control of the Assembly during that election cycle. Although one previous historian has seen Lloyd's Vindication as evidence of class politics, such a view misses that Lloyd's undeniably populist appeal was couched in a claim of Quaker specialness. See Nash, , “Transformation,” 151Google Scholar.

222. The literature on deference — or the lack thereof — in colonial America is voluminous and growing. Most historians of early America have relied in their discussions of deference on the work of Pocock, J. G. A. ( “The Classical Theory of Deference,” AHR 81 [06 1976]: 516–23)Google Scholar and Pole, J. R. ( “Historians and the Problem of Early American Democracy,” AHR 67 [04 1962]: 626–46)Google Scholar. More recent studies, such as Richard R. Beeman's interpretation of colonial politics, have argued that deference declined dramatically as politics became more populist (Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ 49 [07 1992]: 401–30)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Zuckerman has recently argued that there never was any measurable deference in early America (Turner, Tocqueville, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America,” JAH 85 [06 1998]: 1342)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Zuckerman's analysis defines deference strictly in terms of face-to-face conduct. My argument for deference here, however, eschews Zuckerman's approach and argues, à la Pole and Pocock, for understanding deference in public and political life more broadly.

223. For a discussion of the term charter group and its applicability to founding cultures in early British America, see Breen, T. H., “Creative Adaptations: Peoples and Cultures,” in Greene, and Pole, , Colonial British America, 205, 215–21Google Scholar.

224. Offutt, , Of “Good Laws”, ch. 1Google Scholar. Offutt singles out David Hackett Fischer for criticism for his reliance on the charter-group idea (Fischer, , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989])Google Scholar. For discussions that rely on a general cultural-influence model, see Levy, Quakers; Tully, William Penn's Legacy; and Lemon, James T., The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

225. Offutt, , Of “Good Laws”, 22Google Scholar. Offutt's concept of regional culture, which he uses to contextualize his findings, is taken from Greene, Jack P., Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

226. See Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. Even the pantheon of distinguished Quaker colonial historians have fit the Society of Friends in this narrative of early piety, secularization, and revitalization. See Tolles, Meetinghouse; Bronner, William Penn's “Holy Experiment”; Marietta, Jack D., The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Soderlund, Jean R., Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

227. For discussions of the relationship between religion and the ordering of public life, see Juster, Susan M., Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Dayton, Women Before the Bar. On the relationship between religion, gender, and speech economy, see Kamensky, Governing the Tongue; Dayton, Women Before the Bar; and George, St., “Heated Speech,” 275322Google Scholar. For an intriguing discussion of the relationship between religion, speech, and memory, see Lepore, Jill, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar.

228. This point is made by Konig, , “Summary View,” 4250Google Scholar. The cited phrase appears on page 48. On courts — and especially court day — in colonial Virginia, see Roeber, , Faithful Magistrates, 73111Google Scholar; and Isaac, Transformation of Virginia. On Maryland, see Semmes, , Crime and Punishment, 121Google Scholar. For Connecticut, see Mann (Neighbors and Strangers) and Dayton, (Women Before the Bar) and, for Massachusetts, see Konig (Law and Society).

229. The primary exception to this statement is the pathbreaking work by Brown, Kathleen (Good Wives), esp. 91–94, 108–9, 112, 116–36, 187–211, 215, 218–22Google Scholar. See also Dayton, Women Before the Bar.

230. Several works are associated with this return, although not all of the authors identify themselves as so-called new narrative historians. See particularly Ulrich, Laurel, A Midwife's Tale: The Diary and Life of Martha Ballard, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar; Demos, John, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Knopf, 1994)Google Scholar; Fischer, David Hackett, Paul Revere's Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Taylor, Alan, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1995)Google Scholar; Slaughter, Thomas P., The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York: Vintage, 1996)Google Scholar; and Lepore, Name of War. See also the H-Net debate regarding Slaughter's Natures of John and William Bartram and the “new narrative history” more generally (see Eric Robert Papenfuse, “Papenfuse On Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram,” h-shear@h-net.msu.edu, March 23, 1998; John Stauffer, “Stauffer Responds to Review of The Natures of John and William Bartram,” h-shear@h-net.msu.edu, March 24, 1998; John Smolenski, “Smolenski Responds to Reviews of The Natures of John and William Bartram,” h-shear@h-net.msu.edu, March 25, 1998; and Thomas Slaughter's responses to these reviews, posted on h-shear@h-net.msu.edu the same days as the reviews appeared).

231. Demos, John, “In Search of Reasons for Historians to Read Novels…AHR 103 (12 1998); 15261529, citation at page 1529Google Scholar.

232. Lepore's Name of War, an examination of the histories of King Philip's war, is an exception to this trend among the “new narratives” of early America.