The Quakers and the Impact of their Dissenting Origins on the Abolitionist Movement: John Woolman and Anthony Benezet (XVII-XVIII centuries), Costel Coroban (original) (raw)
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Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture, 23.1 (December 2019), pp. 45-61, 2019
Whilst in the Fleet in the summer of 1639 the Leveller John Lilburne made a dramatic claim: ‘I have read a great part of the Booke of Martyrs, with some Histories of the like kinde: and I will meantaine it, that such an unparaleld Act of crueltie and barborous tiranie, as have been exercised upon mee, is not to be found in them all’. Lilburne was not alone in depicting his prison suffering as far exceeding those recorded in John Foxe’s sixteenth-century martyrology 'Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Dayes' (1563), or the ‘Book of Martyrs’ as it was more commonly known at the time. When imprisoned in Oxford Castle in 1643, the Parliamentarian soldier and later General Baptist leader, Edmund Chillenden, exclaimed that his prison ordeal would ‘fill divers hundred sheets of Paper to make a second Book of Martyrs’, one that would even surpass it ‘with more sadder Stories then are to be found in Queen Maries cruelties’.This essay investigates how Nonconformist prison writers, contrary to the statements above, did inevitably and irresistibly re-do rather than out-do Foxe. By examining the Foxean cues they re-used and recycled, we can begin to see how their accounts were a complex palimpsest of conceptual, mnemonic and journalistic representations of imprisonment in early modern Britain.
Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist by Gary B. Nash
Journal of Southern History, 2018
Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation. Edited by Larissa Tracy. Boydell. 2017. xviii + 406pp. £60.00. Flaying as a punishment-for treason or otherwise-was a rare occurrence in the pre-modern world. Indeed, as some of the essays in Larissa Tracy's collection establish, even allusions to human flaying in some pre-modern cultures are hard to find. Mary Rambaran-Olm notes only 'scattered references to flaying in Old English literature' (p. 101); William Sayers finds likewise that 'the flaying of the human body features only marginally in the traditions of early medieval Ireland' (p. 261). In cultures where flaying is allowed as a punishment in the law it is an exceptional one and the known instances of it being meted out are few and far between. It is, nonetheless, a persistent image in some medieval genres (hagiography, romance and literature of the life of Christ, in particular), as well as in the post-medieval imagination, as this collection demonstrates across its fourteen essays and epilogue, which span from the eleventh to the early seventeenth centuries, and range across Irish, English, French, Italian and Scandinavian examples. While its main subject thus sometimes proves elusive, this book's usefulness partly derives from the explanations it finds for the literary prevalence of human flaying in cultures where its practice is unusual if not nonexistent. For this reason too it is necessarily a book that is about many other things-flagellation, cannibalism, painting techniques, surgical instruments and Mediterranean conflicts, among others-but, perhaps most prominently, also about skin: its relation to the body and to the self, and to what constitutes the individual human as well as the social body. Rambaran-Olm's inquiry into the emergence and persistence of the so-called 'Dane-skin' myth in the seventeenth century and beyond is illustrative. The fantasy of pre-modern flaying (that eleventh-century hostile Danes, living in England, are massacred, flayed and their skins displayed on church doors) is used, Rambaran-Olm argues, to construct and uphold a post-medieval sense of national identity. Thus she notes: 'For seventeenth-century viewers', the skin-bound doors 'were material evidence of Anglo-Saxon fortitude and moral justice in punishing invaders for crimes against their community and Church' (p. 105). It is another near myth of human flaying that forms the focus of Perry Neil Harrison's epilogue on early modern anthropodermic bibliopegy (or, the binding of books in human skin). Harrison notes that 'scientifically verified examples of the practice during the Middle Ages are exceedingly rare, and perhaps even non-existent' (p. 368). However, Harrison argues that one verified
Humaniora, 2014
This paper discusses how and why the Quakers dealt with human rights issues in the United States before 20th century, ranging from the mid 17th century to the mid 19th century. It applies Nash Smith’s interdisciplinary theory as a theoretical approach. The Quakers, as a Christian religious group, had got several features or identities since George Fox declared its existence in England in the mid of 17th century. They lived in simplicity, adopted the principle of pacifism, rejected paying tith and tax, rejected taking off hat, used archaic words, and so forth. However, the Quakers in the United States had shown a new feature or identity; namely, the enforcement of human rights in the eras before the 20th century. The human rights enforcement was motivated by their piety and loyality to the Quakerism. In other words, it was an expression of their belief in Quakerism. This theology empowered their thoughts and actions in responding issues pertaining to human rights of the minorities i....
Justified Treason Through Nonviolence: The Quaker Involvement during the American Revolution
This paper is about the position the American Revolution established for the Quakers. They were a known peaceful religious order which prided itself in their noninvolvement of the American Revolution. They refused to take an oath, join the ranks of the military service, and rescinded their financial support of any group which backed the effort of the revolutionary war. The American Revolution forced the Quakers to fully stand with their convictions of nonviolence and their pacifistic nature. They supported their stance through biblical teachings and a foundation set forth by their orders founder. The American Revolution required the Quakers to establish a new identity and society after they were exiled because of their nonviolent stance. Through banding together in a common belief and position they fortified their society under the teaching of peaceful resistance, a notion which stayed with the Friends throughout history.
Prospects, 1999
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. Certa...