Memory and time in early Quakerism

Abstract

This article explores the ambiguous place of memory – its absences and presences, its strategic mobilisation and theological redundancy – in the practices and writings of the early Quaker movement. Quakers’ commitment to unprogrammed, largely silent, worship and to spontaneous speech meant that memory had no place in their Meetings for Worship. Nevertheless, the movement was actively intent on conserving the memory of its early years, ensuring that its writings, published and unpublished, were preserved, by developing systems of copying and archiving key documents. Memory is thus central to the ambitions and practices of the early movement and yet also rendered redundant by aspects of its theology. The article investigates traces of memory in the composition of the Journal of George Fox, the movement’s first leader, and finds its strategic rhetorical mobilisation of memory to be rooted in Quakers’ distinctive understandings of human and divine time.