Witness, Warning, and Prophecy: Quaker Women's Writing, 1655-1700

The forty texts collected in this volume offer a small but representative sample of Quaker women’s tremendous literary output between 1655 and 1700. They include examples of key Quaker literary genres—proclamations, directives, warnings, sufferings, testimonies, polemic, pleas for toleration—and showcase a range of literary styles and voices, from eloquent poetry to legal analyses of English canon and civil law. In their varied responses to the core Quaker belief in the indwelling Spirit, these women left a rich literary legacy of an early countercultural movement.

"Anyone interested in early modern women’s writing, or in Quakers more generally, will find here an extraordinary and fascinating range of materials. I felt positively excited just reading the list of contents, and was delighted to find, too, that the  headnotes to the pieces are well designed, giving the kinds of contextual and other information that a reader might most need, and drawing on the best sources when providing those contexts. The annotation is also most useful, enabling readers to understand exactly how the writers are transforming their sources to produce their new messages. Given the excellent prior work of both the editors, none of this is surprising, but it is cause for celebration."

-Elaine Hobby, Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies, Loughborough University

TERESA FEROLI, author of Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (2006), is associate professor of English at New York University’s Tandon School.

MARGARET OLOFSON THICKSTUN, author of Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (1988) and Milton’s Paradise Lost: Moral Education (2007), holds the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Literature at Hamilton College.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women 14.1 (2019): 247–249. Reviewed by Catie Gill.
Modern Language Review 115.4 (2020): 901–902. Reviewed by Patricia Phillippy.
Quaker Studies 23.2 (2018): 279–281. Reviewed by Catie Gill.
Renaissance & Reformation 42.3 (2019): 224–226. Reviewed by Meghan C. Swavely.
Renaissance Quarterly 72.2 (2019): 722–723. Reviewed by Rachel Adcock.