The history of Quakerism is typically cast into periods, a first of founding zeal running between 1652 and anywhere between 1656 and 1666 followed by a more pragmatic mode as Quakers came to terms with persecution under the Restoration. The Act of Toleration in 1689 and the Affirmation Act of 1694 are often seen to herald a third period in which Quakers were more fully accepted into the religious landscape of Britain, albeit still suffering constraints on their bid to be full citizens along with other Nonconformists until the nineteenth century. This volume, by Madeleine Pennington, breaks with, and contests, that arbitrary division in looking at theological change across the first half century of Quakerism, and also in the way Pennington contextualises Quaker theological thinking within a treatment of wider currents of innovation, notably the emerging Enlightenment.

Pennington moves the scholarship of the early changes in Quakerism beyond a social-political model espoused by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and his student Barry Reay and mirrored in part by later accounts of the first decades of the movement. Thus, for Pennington, changes in Quaker expression in the 1660s cannot simply be attributed to changes in the social context and the advent of nationwide persecution. Theological reputation, Pennington argues, was as important as social respectability. Instead of sea changes of thought associated with changes in, say, the law, she shows rather a sustained Quaker theological engagement with wider currents of thought. Quaker theology and their Christian identity, she suggests, was a process of constant navigation and negotiation as, amongst other changes, Quakers emphasised an inward second coming of Christ less and looked more to a future outward event.

The book charts Christological change over the decades but the endpoint of seventeenth-century doctrinal dynamics and the ultimate focus of the volume is the case of George Keith. Keith was a key Quaker leader in the 1670s and a close collaborator with Robert Barclay, also from Aberdeen, who began to systematise Quaker theology. Keith and Barclay joined other Quaker leaders, George Fox and William Penn, in their mission to the Palatinate in 1677 to recruit Pietist leaders to the true Quaker Church. Keith went on to become surveyor-general of East Jersey in 1685 before becoming part of a controversy on both sides of the Atlantic that ultimately led him to separate from the Quakers in the mid-1690s. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England and was one of the first missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to help bring Jews and Quakers to Christianity. He ended his days as a minister at Edburton in Sussex and his gravestone is behind the church there. Keith ended up taking one Christological line, the Quakers another.

Whilst still a Quaker, Keith wished to emphasise the outward historic Christ alongside the light of Christ within, whilst other Friends saw the inward Christ as sufficient, whilst not wishing to appear to marginalise the historical Jesus. It was partly a matter of emphasis and where sufficiency lay and what it could be attributed to. As with all schismatics, Keith's final departure marked the loss of a shared identity with the movement he critiqued, and indeed the movement's loss of a sense of him as a Quaker in spiritual unity with the body. Keith's public breaking of the ranks and printing of tracts without permission were the focus of as much antagonism as the detailed doctrinal differences: Quakers needed to present themselves as the true Church, bound together by a spiritual unity and Keith's behaviour disturbed and disrupted this project. At the same time, Pennington argues, Keith's own thinking developed to a point whereby he found himself more the decided Anglican than Quaker, casting ‘Christ within’ as merely figurative. This was step too far for the Quakers but, importantly for Pennington, this breaking point and the exchange of arguments also reveals just how far most Quakers had shifted their theological thinking since the 1650s, particularly in their attitudes to the historic Christ.

The book is very well written and the arguments clearly articulated. It is meticulously referenced and the only surprising omission in the sources is the work of Clare Martin, one of the few scholars on Quaker studies to have included Keith in their work in recent decades. I only found one typographical error, where Stephen Angell was referred to as Steven. It is an important book for all scholars of early Quaker history, but also, as Pennington argues, for all scholars of religion in terms of how they may best characterise change within a religious movement, and for all scholars of the history of ideas in the seventeenth century. For Pennington, Quaker ideas need to be taken more seriously as they offer a lens to better understand the intellectual milieu of the time. This book makes a compelling case for this claim and offers a great role model for other scholars to follow in terms of how best to undertake this intellectual project.