ABSTRACT
Among the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word to promote their prophetic visions and unorthodox beliefs. The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England highlights the interaction of the literary, political, and religious dimensions of Quaker writing as it developed in the Interregnum and Restoration. The early Quaker movement, rightly, has achieved recent recognition as profoundly emancipating and empowering of its women activists. Other essays primarily address the Quaker movement in the Restoration period. Thomas Coms's account of Fox's Journal has much to say about its retrospective quality and the way in which recollection of the 1650s functions in that later period. N. H. Keeble considers ways in which the new idiom of William Penn, rather different from that of Fox or Nayler, articulates the voice of Quakerism in a changed world.
