ABSTRACT
For historians, as for many literary scholars, the inspiration of Christopher Hill has been crucial to the study of radical politics and radical writing. The broad historical surveys of radicalism in the 1980s paid little attention to the literary aspects of Quaker tracts; there was little concern for intended audiences, publishing strategies, stylistic devices and so on. Indeed there was more interest in the geographical "spread" of Quakerism or in the social characteristics of its adherents than in the movement's use of print culture. While historians were preoccupied with arid inconclusive debates about the social characteristics of Quakerism, literary scholars continued to study radical writing. It also endorsed the expression of female subjectivities, as Norman T. Burns shows, but Phyllis Mack argues that acceptable forms of female self-expression became more constraining, even masochistic, in the later seventeenth century.
