Review of New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800, Edited by Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Scholarly interest in early Quaker women is not particularly recent, but the research gathered in the edited volume New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800 shows that this area of inquiry remains vital and continues to be reassessed. While the editors gesture to Mabel Richmond Brailsford’s Quaker Women, 1650-1690 (1915) as a “pioneering work” (1), the scholarship on early Quaker women began in earnest during the 1990s as a part of the broader growth in the field of women’s studies—although this was preceded by the books of Margaret Hope Bacon, especially Mothers of Feminism (1986). Studies such as Phyllis Mack’s Visionary Women (1992), and Hilary Hinds’s God’s Englishwoman (1996) treated Quaker women as integral to understanding seventeenth-century radical religious women generally, and Elaine Hobby and Michelle Lise Tarter authored important stand-alone articles solely focused on women Friends. Entire monographs dedicated to the subject soon appeared in the form of Rebecca Larsons’s Daughters of Light (1999) and Catie Gill’s Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community (2005). Yet, as Tarter and Gill—the editors of the new volume—point out, their edited collection is “the first of its kind,” that is, a book “bringing together a community of scholars in religion, history, and literature to assess the dynamic impact of these women within their society and throughout the transatlantic world” (1)

Book Review: Ben Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn, Timothy Peat. Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Philadelphia: Plain Press, 2018.

The provocative arguments in this unique book about the centrality of the second coming to Quakerism are challenging to summarize but easy to recommend: this is a work that many Friends could benefit from reading. That it has not been widely read is, I suspect, one of the reasons for its reprinting, two decades after its initial publication. While the insights offered by Ben Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn, and Timothy Peat in Heaven on Earth have appeared elsewhere in separate and better known studies by the same authors, here they come together with a particular force and urgency. The book itself arose out of a 1997 course at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre taught by these three men, and reading it one can feel a desire to connect and a willingness to take risks often more characteristic of the classroom or seminar than the scholarly text. Heaven on Earth is learned, but it is also deeply personal—as Dandelion writes in the introduction, “the apocalyptic resonances of early Quaker witness continue to disturb and inspire us” (3)

Homogeneous CO Hydrogenation: Ligand Effects on the Lewis Acid-Assisted Reductive Coupling of Carbon Monoxide

Structure-function studies on the role of pendent Lewis acids in the reductive coupling of CO are reported. Cationic rhenium carbonyl complexes containing zero, one, or two phosphinoborane ligands (Ph_2P(CH_2)_nB(C_8H_(14)), n=1-3) react with the nucleophilic hydride [HPt(dmpe)_2]^+ to reduce [M-CO]^+ to M-CHO; this step is relatively insensitive to the Lewis acid, as both pendent (internal) and external boranes of appropriate acid strength can be used. In contrast, whether a second hydride transfer and C-C bond forming steps occur depends strongly on the number of carbon atoms between P and B in the phosphinoborane ligands, as well as the number of pendent acids in the complex: shorter linker chain lengths favor such reductive coupling, whereas longer chains and external boranes are ineffective. A number of different species containing partially reduced CO groups, whose exact structures vary considerably with the nature and number of phosphinoborane ligands, have been crystallographically characterized. The reaction of [(Ph -2P(CH_2)_2B(C_8H_(14)))_2Re(CO)4]^+ with [HPt(dmpe)_2]^+ takes place via a “hydride shuttle” mechanism, in which hydride is transferred from Pt to a pendent borane and thence to CO, rather than by direct hydride attack at CO. Addition of a second hydride in C_6D_5Cl at -40 ºC affords an unusual anionic bis(carbene) complex, which converts to a C-C bonded product on warming. These results support a working model for Lewis acid-assisted reductive coupling of CO, in which B (pendent or external) shuttles hydride from Pt to coordinated CO, followed by formation of an intramolecular B-O bond, which facilitates reductive coupling

Trialkylborane-Assisted CO_2 Reduction by Late Transition Metal Hydrides

Trialkylborane additives promote reduction of CO_2 to formate by bis(diphosphine) Ni(II) and Rh(III) hydride complexes. The late transition metal hydrides, which can be formed from dihydrogen, transfer hydride to CO_2 to give a formateborane adduct. The borane must be of appropriate Lewis acidity: weaker acids do not show significant hydride transfer enhancement, while stronger acids abstract hydride without CO_2 reduction. The mechanism likely involves a pre-equilibrium hydride transfer followed by formation of a stabilizing formateborane adduct

John Woolman

John Woolman (b. 1720-d. 1772), a Quaker shopkeeper, tailor, and farmer from West Jersey, traveled extensively throughout colonial America as an itinerant minister and produced writings on the most important social problems of the era. Woolman was part of a group of ministers working for increased discipline and broad reform among Friends. He cared deeply about the right conduct and purity of Quaker meetings for worship, and these concerns informed his social thought, as did his various livelihoods. His experience selling goods from his store and the produce of his farm made him increasingly aware of how the transatlantic economy depended on enslaved labor, and in his early twenties he began to think seriously about enslavement as an evil with which Quakers needed to reckon. Witnessing plantation slavery on a journey to Virginia and North Carolina in 1746 reinforced Woolman\u27s concerns and inspired his first antislavery essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754). Woolman began composing a journal recounting his life for the moral and spiritual edification of Friends in 1756, during the violence of the Seven Years\u27 War. This imperial conflict radicalized many Quakers in colonial America, as Friends took a firmer stance against war, helped to negotiate on behalf of Indigenous people, and approved stricter measures against coreligionists who practiced enslavement. This trend can be seen in Woolman\u27s second antislavery essay, Considerations on Keeping Negroes ... Part Second (1762), in which he took a stronger position against enslavement by focusing on the violence of the African slave trade. In the last decade of his life, Woolman would write about a growing range of social issues. His 1763 journey to the Native settlement of Wyalusing to visit the Munsee leader Papunhank made clear to him the plight of Indigenous peoples dispossessed from their land. As Woolman focused less on the business of storekeeping and more on farming, he also wrote against the oppression of tenant laborers by wealthy landowners. His last essay published during his lifetime, Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind (1770), is a theological reflection on social ills of wealth. Woolman died while traveling in ministry among Quakers in England, and his journal was published posthumously as part of The Works of John Woolman (177 4 ). No other colonial American writer wrote with such clarity and theological conviction about the injustices of the transatlantic economy and the need for reforms to address them

Towards a Literary History of Quaker Writing in the Atlantic World

Among eighteenth-century Quaker writers, John Woolman was idiosyncratic, as illustrated by the fact that in his journal he recorded an ac-count of his own death. Needless to say, this was not usually done. Instead, it was conventional for posthumously published Quaker journals to include not only an autobiographical narrative of spiritual development but also additional material written by qualified Friends offering further testimony and giving details about how and when the author died. The first printing of Woolman’s journal in his posthumous Works (1774) is accompanied by such material about his 1772 death in York, England, but this was not the mortification of which he wrote. Rather, at the end of Woolman’s journal in an entry written just over a month before he would die of smallpox, he recollected how, back on his farm in Mount Holly, New Jersey, “in a time of sickness with the pleurisy a little upward of two years and a half ago, I was brought so near to the gates of death that I forgot my name” (185)

“Friend Thou Art Often in My Remembrance”

A recently discovered letter by Elizabeth Ashbridge expands the very small archive of documents related to this important Quaker minister, gives scholars a better understanding of the circles in which she moved, and offers an occasion for reflection on epistolary writing in the eighteenth century. Written to her fellow Quaker Margaret Bowne, the letter fascinates as a dense record of the overlapping transatlantic, commercial, and ministerial connections Friends maintained during the period. It also illustrates the persistence of Pauline epistolary tropes in the context of an ostensibly “secular” familiar letter, reminding scholars of the pitfalls of thinking of the secular in opposition to the religious. Finally, it underscores the importance of reading documents such as Ashbridge’s letter intertextually, alongside Quaker journals, diaries, and even novels