Suffering and Subscribing: Configurations of Authorship in the Quaker Atlantic

Jonathan Beecher Field

In the late 1650s and early 1660s, Quakers suffered in New England and published in England. Quaker apologists in New England, Barbados, and London worked in concert to publicize their persecutions, producing a distinctive, transatlantic propaganda network. This discursive formation allowed Quaker apologists to make significant interventions on behalf of their oppressed brethren in New England.  These Quaker narratives of persecution create a distinct reconfiguration of authorship. Texts are essentially authored by the suffering of the subject in the text—the name identified with the text is the sufferer, not the often anonymous person bringing the narrative to press. One Quaker suffers, another “subscribes.” The act of authorship is associated more with the act of suffering than with the physical processes of writing and publishing.  This diffusion of authorship creates a medium for narrating sufferings that integrates colonies and metropolis into a network for reporting and publicizing the sufferings of Friends, or the Quaker Atlantic. This discursive formation has ramifications outside the denominational history of the Quakers. Understanding this network and its function prompts a reexamination of the relationship of authorship and experience for colonial authors in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. The distinct material circumstances of transatlantic publication shape the form and content of colonial books in the Atlantic world, and understanding the formation of this archive is critical to our broader understanding of this world.

[WP #0608]