Amid the spiritual and intellectual turmoil of seventeenth-century
England, the Quakers emerged and grew into a distinct and enduring
religious movement. This book offers a fresh and striking insight
into early Quaker history through a study of their distinctive ways
of speaking, which, together with their use of silence, served as a
specific identifying feature of the movement.
Using the combined perspectives of the ethnography of speaking,
symbolic anthropology, and the historical sociology of religion,
Richard Bauman shows that for the very early Quakers speaking and
silence were key symbols, providing both a vocabulary for
conceptualizing their principles as well as a vehicle for carrying
these principles into action. Silence was not merely an abstention
from speaking or an empty interval between utterances, but an act
as richly textured and multidimensional in its meanings as
speaking. Both unified thought and action. Professor Bauman
discusses many instances of the operation of speaking and silence,
including, among other central elements of early Quaker belief and
practice, the contexts and settings of Quaker religious
communication, the patterns and functions of Quaker "plain
language," and the Quaker testimony against the swearing of oaths.
In particular, he examines the role of the minister, both as a
dynamic speaker who played out the tension between speaking and
silence, and as a link between the outside world and the Quaker
inner community. He also uses the role of the minister to trace the
changes in speaking, and, correspondingly, the direction of the
Quaker movement, during the seventeenth century.
This book is unique in that it comprehends both the cultural
and social aspects of Quaker history by explicating their
construction of meaning through their use of language. Its unified
approach will make it of interest to sociolinguists, social
historians, symbolic anthropologists, and sociologists of
religion.
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