The first half of this book seeks “to examine how a group of people in the mid-seventeenth century were able to make use of print to spread their ideas; and to identify the impact of print on the growth of a successful, national movement” (9). Peters certainly succeeds in revealing just how pervasive print was in the early Quaker world. In rich detail, we are shown the networks that allowed manuscripts to travel up to London and finished books to wend their way back to the provinces—where they were read aloud as often as they were consulted privately. The written and spoken word was perhaps not as much of an anathema to the Quakers as has sometimes been suggested. We are shown how the whole publishing enterprise was financed, and we are guided through the issues and debates that Quaker authors discussed. Quakers certainly had an idiosyncratic view of the printed word. Only their utterances were truly authentic: guided, just like those of the apostles of old, by the urgings of the Holy Spirit. All the rest, as Richard Farnworth put it, were “gilded expressions … that doth arise from the wisdom of the flesh” (33). For all that, Peters reveals that the Quakers were engaged in the same frenetic publishing revolution as their fleshly contemporaries, and there are rich pickings here for any historian interested in the mechanisms of early modern print culture.

More contentious is the notion that, by the mid-1650s, print had allowed a coherent, unified Quaker movement to emerge. As Peters ably documents, print was a useful tool for the movement's leadership—a way of defining orthodoxy, building up links between scattered communities, chastising error, and enforcing internal discipline—but did these processes really come to fruition quite as quickly as Peters suggests? Historians and literary theorists continue to squabble about precisely how much we ought to trust the printed word as a source of unvarnished evidence. What seems undeniable is that books written almost exclusively by the Quaker elite had a vested interest in portraying a homogeneity and doctrinal certainty that, in truth, was still being hammered out.

If the claims are exaggerated, however, the substance of the first half of the book is extremely rewarding. Unfortunately, there is one further criticism concerning structure. As Peters explains in her acknowledgments, four out of the first five chapters in her book (out of a total of eight) are reworkings of previously published material. There is nothing disreputable in this, but there are some moments when the book does suffer as a result. Several ideas are repeated more often than seems necessary, presumably because they were required in each of the earlier stand-alone articles. We are also treated twice to an account of the infamous debate during the 1980s when Colin Davis joined battle with a number of his peers over the issue of whether a Ranter “movement” really existed. All of the reworked chapters are certainly pertinent to the author's argument and constitute a series of “case studies”: how the networks of print culture grew up in East Anglia, how the term “Quaker” was seized upon by the movement, how the issue of female preaching was discussed in print. Nonetheless, there are moments when the first half of the book feels more like a concoction, albeit an artful one, than a unified whole.

In the second half of her book, Peters seeks to “modify the assumption that Quakers were outside mainstream political life and significant only as a marginal group of mystics” (226). Rather than merely snipers from the sidelines of a corrupt society, the Quakers are portrayed as struggling, not least through the medium of print, for the inauguration of an authentically godly commonwealth. Their constituency was the entire population. Peters makes a valiant effort to justify these claims. We are presented with an account of how the development of Quaker print culture intersected and coincided with the broader political chronology of the 1650s—how Quaker writers responded to and influenced specific political events. The Quakers’ dealings, whether in public or in private, with politicians and army leaders are also documented.

Ultimately, however, none of this alters the fact that, during the 1650s, most Quakers grew ever more alienated as political circumstances turned increasingly against them. Quakers certainly alerted the nation to corruption and injustice and published endless accounts of the persecution they endured—processes that Peters describes with great panache. In this way, Peters argues, Quakers had a crucial impact on debates about the extent and nature of religious toleration. Perhaps they even helped to create that much-discussed phenomenon known as public opinion. But did they make a more concrete, more quantifiable contribution?

At the outset of the book Peters laments the fact that “Quakers in the 1650s are widely seen as a group of religious dissidents who were disillusioned with English Society” (1). But surely that is precisely what they were. Reform, first and foremost, was to be pursued within their own communities. They did not posit a constructive national program of reform, and while they grumbled about tithes they lacked a sophisticated socioeconomic agenda. As Peters writes, Relatively few of the Quaker publications were concerned explicitly with issues of national political significance and, before 1659, none offered specific constitutional proposals” (226–27).

Peters has written a bold, nuanced book that demonstrates an enviable command of her sources and a keen sense of the interplay between literate and oral culture. One might contest some of her ultimate conclusions, but she has done so much valuable, painstaking work along the way that this hardly matters.