ABSTRACT
The story of early Quakerism has been told many times. The definitive modern narrative work, William Braithwaite’s monumental The Beginnings of Quakerism, is largely based on George Fox’s journal, early suffering records like The Great Book of Sufferings, and Joseph Besse’s A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Call’d Quakers.1 Braithwaite’s work also utilized, to a limited extent, letters written in the early period of the religious sect. Braithwaite’s text was originally published in 1912 and reprinted in 1955, and while it is the most comprehensive narrative study to date, it is limited because of its focus on the “heroic period of Quaker history” by essentially providing “a Quakerly version of the late nineteenth-century style.”2 Braithwaite’s tome overemphasizes the originality of Quaker beliefs, accepting the theory “that Quakerism derived not from Puritanism as much as from continental Anabaptism,” a claim that is dismissive of England’s seventeenth-century cultural milieu. Sydney James has stated that Braithwaite’s work confined “attention too strictly to the Quakers” and “needed the sustaining power of a comprehensive understanding of English history, which [Braithwaite] did not give them.”3 Essentially, as a denominational study written by a sympathetic Quaker author, Braithwaite’s work was not critical of his brethren’s sources and therefore did not call Fox’s or others’ assertions into question. Thus, when Fox claimed originality and supremacy of the religious movement, Braithwaite reiterated this idea. In contrast, an examination of letters, rather than merely focusing on Fox’s journal or other documents that provide a retrospective retelling of the early years, may give us new insights into the development of this religious community. Furthermore, by shifting the focus to letters, Margaret Fell’s place in the development of the community becomes more centrally located and thereby provides new insights into this otherwise Fox-centric story.
