QT: We’re now talking with Erin Bell, a doctoral graduate student from York University in England. Erin, please tell us a bit about your own background and your research interests.

EB: I’m not a Quaker, but I became very interested in researching Quaker history after I read Witnesses for Change [Witnesses for Change: Quaker Women Over Three Centuries. Edited. by Elizabeth Potts Brown and Susan Masher Stuard, Rutgers University Press,1989–Ed.] about Quaker female preachers.

One reason this interested me is because at about the same time the Anglican Church in England was debating whether to allow women priests. And it seemed as if a lot of the issues that were play-ing out in the late twentieth century in England had been played out during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Quaker women preachers. I decided to do my PhD research on early Quakers in Coun-ty Durham, which is my home county in the northeast of England, and on masculinity, because I was interested in gender and religion.

QT: The paper you gave at this Fox conference had to do with how the work of James Naylor got to be published by British Friends, the changes that Quaker editors made in these works in the publications process, and what some of these changes might indicate about conditions and issues among Friends then. One of the things we wanted to ask you about for background, was a phrase you used, which is perhaps common enough among scholars in your field, but which is new to us, namely "polite religion." Can you tell us something about "polite religion," where it came from and what it meant, because it’s clearly important to understanding Quakerism in the period you were looking at.

EB: The term "polite religion" is not my own, it comes from a book called Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, [Philip Carter, Longman, 2000–Ed.] and it considers the ideas of masculinity and the emergence of "polite society" and ideas of "civility." . . . And what it means for the Quakers, and for many denomination, is instead of rancorous debates between, say, Quakers and Anglicans, which had begun to be rejected after the Restoration [of Charles II in 1660], these were replaced by what might be represented as more reasoned debate, as for example represented by the works of William Penn. He was obviously classically influenced, and took on board what people like Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671-1713–Ed.] thought, which was in summary, that dissenters wouldn’t get anywhere if they frightened people, by seeming to be too rancorous in their arguments. If they toned their arguments down but have the same content, then they will get further in their desire to achieve religious tolerance, which was one of the key issues for them before 1689 in Britain.

QT: So is this interpreted as being part of social evolution after all the militance and fires of the English Revolution and then the Restoration died down? Or was there more to it? Some scholars suggest that when Penn comes along, he has an upper class background, and he was more familiar with "civilized ways," courtly ways, and this began to be imported into Quakerism with Penn and his generation. Or was it a broader thing?

EB: Yes, "polite religion" was a broader thing, in the research I mentioned earlier, it’s traced in Christianity in general in Britain in the early eighteenth century; it doesn’t just occur in Quakerism. I think it means that the writers favored by orthodox Quakerism changed, and became more in line with the broader ideas of "polite religion." Obviously Naylor is a special case, because he did ride into Bristol in imitation of Christ, but writers writing in a similar vein to him seem by the 1670s to have gone out of fashion. And writers like Penn, who certainly profited from a classical background, and wrote short, pithy statements which were classically influenced, and would therefore be more easily picked up on and understood by outsiders, came into favor. And I think this is how we see polite religion affecting the Friends at the time.

QT: Now your paper looked specifically at the works of James Naylor, and what a hard time they had getting published as Quakerism went from being very contentious to learning how to be polite, is how I would summarize it. And as a result, these works had to be actually edited and changed; you cited many examples where language was changed. It was very striking. Can you say a bit more about that?

EB: Leo Damrosch [author of The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, Harvard U. Press, 1996–Ed.] picked up on the way in which the lan-guage was changed when Nayler’s works were republished in 1716. And he’s considered it and I’ve only developed his work slightly.

I really think that the works that are more representative [of this evolution] are the works that missed out [entirely on being published]. Some of the works that were missed out were incredibly rancorous, and a few changes would not cover that up. The contents of some of the works, for instanace describing Anglican priests as essentially spawn of the devil–well, obviously this is not ideal for a group who were trying before [the Toleration Act in] 1689 to help end their sufferings at the hands of the Anglican clergy. And even after 1689 they are still suffering as a result of the tithes testimony [a form of tax resistance], even though they have a limited measure of religious freedom. So what’s more crucial is not the writings that were changed, but the works that were left out entirely.

QT: But could you give us a few examples of phrases that were changed?

EB: George Whitehead said in the Introduction [to Naylor’s works], trying to appeal to the charity of the eighteenth century reader, to really think about what Naylor was writing, and that perhaps Naylor hadn’t written things as clearly as he might have done. So one example is: "the letter" is replaced by "the scriptures," to make it entirely obvious what Naylor was talking about.

Other changes weren’t just to clarify; a comment like, in the original it was something like, "so the Maker might be well pleasing to his creation," and for the sake of orthodoxy, eighteenth century Friends changed this to "the creation might be well pleasing to the Maker." Which of course is a fundamental inversion of what Naylor originally wrote.

QT: As you have looked through these works, what about the extent of these changes–are there tens, dozens, hundreds?

EB: It’s very hard to put a number on it. It’s easier to say that there were twenty-three controversial tracts that were left out. So yes, there were probably dozens and dozens of changes throughout what was published, and they differ in form and content. They can be hard to count: how do you count the deletion of a paragraph, is it to count every word in the missing paragraph?

QT: And as you read these works, there are all these changes that have been made, but are you told that they have been changed?

EB: No, you [the reader] aren’t told at all.

QT: Now, have you done any comparative work, putting Naylor’s writings alongside those of any other of these early Friends? I know some scholars have looked at Fox and found that there were many changes in the Journal.

EB: No, I haven’t done work on Fox. But one of the most significant examples that I have studied is what was done to William Sewel’s History of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers. Because when you compare the 1717 Dutch edition [of Sewel] with the 1722 English edition, the changes made to the section on Naylor are very significant indeed.

QT: And what is the significance of some of those changes?

EB: The 1722 English edition has footnotes; the Dutch edition does not. The English footnotes stress, for instance, that Naylor came from honest parents, and that his father was a husbandman [or farmer].

Now the husbandman is an absolutely key figure of identity in eighteenth century Quakerism. The figure of the husbandman appears throughout journals along with the imagery of husbandry. It represents prudence, not living beyond your means; these are key ideal Quaker traits in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they stress that Naylor was like this.

Also in the Dutch edition it says that Naylor did resemble the depiction of Jesus in the letter of Publius Lentilus to the Senate of Rome, and the English edition leaves this out entirely. [This letter] was a spurious description that was believed in by early Christians, and early Quakers often carried around this description, including some of Naylor’s followers. Unsurprisingly it was removed from the English edition, because it seemed as if it was still saying, actually Naylor did look like Jesus, and all of that they wanted to avoid so much, [because] it recalls the accusation [against Naylor] of blasphemy.

QT: When I look at this "editing" from my twenty-first century perspective, I’m troubled by it. I like to have documents that I can regard as authentic, meaning containing the words that the author wrote. Also, as a Quaker, I like to think that earlier Friends, especially very early Friends, told the truth. And in terms of my values, this "editing" constitutes altering the "truth" of the original documents, never mind distorting what actually happened. You may be doing what sounds like technical textual work here, but does your dissertation look at issues like this as well?

EB: It does to some extent. I think one of the main lessons to learn is the one Leo Damrosch drew which is: beware. Eighteenth century documents may not represent seventeenth century viewpoints. In a way this is really surprising. But to be fair, in the nineteenth century you do get the republication of some seventeenth century Quaker journals, which are word for word–bar the occasional misspelling and the removal of capital letters– exactly the same as the first edition. So given that [early] Quakerism was going through so many changes up and into the early eighteenth century, I don’t really think it’s surprising that they altered things.

And I don’t believe they’re shown to be "lacking in truth." Rather, it’s been pointed out that by reworking things, the later Friends believed they were getting at more of the truth. And if you believe that the written word is faulty because it can’t express what’s going on inside, then you will try to write and rewrite it if you think that’s the best thing to do to get at the truth.

QT: So it sounds like you’re saying that if we could eavesdrop on the early editors of these works, such as George Whitehead, we might find them saying to themselves, "What Naylor really meant to say was this . . ." or "When he wrote that paragraph he was, what–? Clouded in his mind? Or "Naylor would really have liked it better if it was said this way . . ."?

EB: Yes. I think that must have been one of Whitehead’s motivations because his comment was, Please read this with charity, because Naylor was sometimes clouded in his judgment. But that’s not the only motivation, especially for leaving out works entirely. There we can perhaps see some political reasons: Naylor may have been superseded by someone else writing in the same area who was more orthodox, or that simply the tone [of the work] was just too rancorous for it to be reprinted. There wasn’t just one reason why the works were published and why they were published in the condition that they were.

QT: I recall something, I think, from Christopher Hill, in which he said that when Fox prepared his Journal, he very much minimized and de-emphasized Naylor’s role in the early movement, particularly in contrast to his own work.[See Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat, Penguin, 1985; cf especially Chapter 5–Ed.]

EB: Yes.

QT: Is that something that would have been continued by Whitehead and company?

EB: I don’t think so. For Whitehead, enough years had passed after Naylor’s and Fox’s deaths, for the works to be republished. There is a case to be made that George Fox stopped publication of Naylor’s works when it was initially suggested in 1676. But I don’t think that Whitehead was trying to downplay Naylor’s role in relation to Fox. I think he was trying to downplay the very difficult aspects [of Naylor’s career] for eighteenth century readers, such as the ride into Bristol. I think it’s Leo Damrosch who comments that Whitehead never goes into these details; it’s like a blank. It’s as if the pages are being torn out and self-edited. He’s edited Naylor’s works, and he’s [also] self-edited his own account of Naylor.

QT: That’s still disturbing to me as a twenty-first century person with a contemporary outlook and a journalistic background.

Now, this is all from your dissertation. Give me an idea what else your research deals with, and how this Naylor material fits into the rest of your work.

EB: Since I’m looking mainly at County Durham Friends, I’ve got a chapter on the discipline, and the gendering of discipline among County Durham Friends. This is from the County Durham minutes that I’ve looked at. [There’s] a chapter on the socio-economic background of County Durham Friends, like their occupation, where were they, that sort of thing.

I’ve also got a chapter on Sufferings, which fits most closely with the chapter on Naylor. It does look at how County Durham sufferings, as collected by County Durham Friends, compares – group for group, women-men, town-rural, rich Friends-poor Friends– to the way these sufferings are represented in Besse’s Sufferings, [a multi-volume compilation first published in 1753–Ed.] and Besse’s earlier attempts to collect the sufferings in the 1730s. And what I come out with is, again, Qukerism is being remodeled, between the time the sufferings are being collected, and the time they make it into Besse’s 1753 work.

Quaker sufferings have been remodeled, so that the center stage is given to rural dwelling men, preferably husbandmen, or people who are near husbandmen in occupation, because again it’s to maintain the hard-working, prudent, productive, spiritual and economic view of Quakerism.

This can be seen in the remodeling of Naylor; they’re trying to make him fit into the suffering category, although they never say he’s a Quaker martyr, they don’t say explicitly certainly up to and including 1722 that he was martyred. They do say that his punishment was over the top, it was excessive for what he had done. So he fits into the suffering category, and he also fits into the husbandman category, and these two are difficult to separate. This is part of how I’ve looked at the development of ideas of ideal Quaker manhood.

QT: "Ideal Quaker manhood," eh?

EB: (Chuckles) Yes, you can gather ideas from journals, especially when they begin with the testimonials of Friends about the journal writer, the adjectives they list come up again and again and again. And they stress Old Testament patriatrchal values, and again, the idea of husbandry is absolutely key to it.

QT: Husbandry. How would merchants, or people who lived in town fit into this?

EB: Well this is the thing. I suppose you could aspire to be like a husbandman but not actually be one, because this is a spiritual category. You don’t actually have to be a husbandman, but it helps. If you wanted your suffering to appear in Besse, for instance, you have a substantially better chance if you actually are a husbandman. At least in County Durham, you have a much better chance if you actually are a rural dwelling male involved in agricultural work. At least you do compared to the original sufferings [as collected by County Durham Friends], which actually show a pretty even balance between urban and rural sufferers.

QT: What about men and women?

EB: [As I recall] it’s almost half and half [in the Durham original], slightly more male sufferers are listed, which isn’t surprising, because the head of the household would go declare the sufferings–although widows, and women whose husbands were in prison would go and give their sufferings themselves. Whereas in Besse, I can’t recall precisely, but it’s a far, far smaller proportion of women who appear there, for County Durham, than there is in the locally kept records.

QT: Wow, this is fascinating stuff. When do you expect to be finished?

EB: I have to be finished by the end of December.

QT: Well, we’ll look forward eagerly to fuller publication of your work and its results. Thank you for talking with us.

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