In Night Journeys, Carla Gerona examines the importance of dreams to the formation of Quaker spirituality and community from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Observing that from its inception “the Quaker community … thought of dreaming as an especially powerful spiritual experience” (2), she shows how dreamwork, or the experience, interpretation, and retelling of dreams, “allowed Friends to define and redefine themselves, as well as their relationship to each other, to their nation, and to non-Quaker others” (3). Although peoples of many religions in this era thought of dreams as divine communications, Quakers were unusual in the authority they granted to dreams, in the approaches they took to their interpretation, and in the intensity with which they repeated dreams to each other. Gerona delivers an especially fascinating account of the oral and written mechanisms through which Quakers communicated their dreams to each other and, sometimes, to non-Quakers. Above all, the history of this dreamwork illuminates the approach that Quakers took to resolving frictions between the religious identity of the individual and the group, granting space for individuals to grapple with problems of conscience or critique authority but also exerting a collective pressure that, over time, smoothed out the extremes of religious expression and belief.

Dreamwork's significance to the maintenance of community was especially important because of the geographic dispersal of Quakers during the colonial era. Gerona draws upon the notion of “mapping” to describe how Quakers positioned themselves through their dreamwork in the space of the growing British empire: “Early American Quaker dreams acted as visual and psychical markers that helped this innovative group crisscross—and shape—a very real, though sometimes foreign, Atlantic world” (9). As they settled in America and traveled further afield as missionaries, Quakers used their dreams to reconfigure a sense of self as part of a British empire, benefiting from their membership in that empire even as they expressed ambivalence about its actions and goals. The story of dreamwork therefore not only involves the development of Quaker spirituality but also the moral quandaries that the Society of Friends confronted through their participation in colonialism and imperialism. While she describes the changing nature of this dreamwork, then—noting, for example a shift in the late seventeenth century from sometimes violent apocalyptic visions to quietist dreams that advised temperance, pacifism, and self-control—Gerona is attentive to the broader geopolitical context of spiritual dilemmas within the Quaker community. Dreamwork, she notes, highlighted Quakers’ growing preoccupation with the morality of slavery, with relations between colonists and Indians, and with the question of whether to support the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Provoking disputes and expulsions in local Meetings, while jeopardizing ties between Friends in Britain and America, the American Revolution proved to be particularly traumatic for this religious community. Gerona devotes an especially poignant chapter to the dreams that Quakers experienced and debated as they came to terms with the rift that the Revolutionary War created in the British Atlantic world.

This is an ambitious and perceptive book. One of its greatest payoffs lies in the many historical narratives—of the Friends’ gradual adoption of an abolitionist position, of the shift toward quietism, and of interclass tensions increasingly visible among Quakers or between them and others—that are told more completely through a focus on dreamwork. In addition to its obvious relevance to specialists in the history of Quakerism, Night Journeys contains material of interest to scholars of visions and other para-rational phenomena during the Enlightenment; of colonization, slavery, and empire; of women and religion; and of transatlantic Anglo-American culture. Indeed, the book provides an excellent example of the impact that the recent explosion of scholarly interest in Atlantic studies has had on British and American historians. Although there is some disproportional representation of the Philadelphia area, Night Journeys retains admirable grasp of the vibrant transatlantic community of which individual Friends felt themselves to be full-fledged members. Gerona shows that the history of Quaker dreamwork, complete with recitations, retellings, and incorporations into letters or commonplace books, also vividly tells the story of a geographically dispersed community held together through the oral, written, and printed circulation of personal testimonies.

Of course, there are costs as well as benefits to the wide-angle perspective Gerona has taken here. The otherwise cogent and scrupulous analysis is spread thin at a few points in the book, as the author strains to cover the many issues introduced by a focus on dreamwork. Also, the many descriptions of various Quaker dreams, while fascinating and richly detailed, leave one longing for a clearer, more comprehensive taxonomy of the dreams and their interpretations, especially as they differed from contemporaneous dreams of non-Quakers. Certain features (e.g., “agricultural images … and well-traveled roads” [14]) do emerge as characteristically Quaker, but such information is doled out piecemeal throughout the book rather than presented in a more centralized manner. By the end of the study readers are likely to have a clear sense of the issues with which Quakers grappled through dreamwork, as well as of the methods Quakers used to communicate those dreams, but not of the images and narratives that made the dreams or the dreamers’ interpretive strategies unusual for their place and time. The corpus of dreams remains, ironically, incompletely mapped. The result is a sometimes slippery discussion of the broader significance of Quaker dreams, as the book shifts between stressing similarities and highlighting differences between Quakers’ and their contemporaries’ visions. This flaw is quite understandable, however, because Gerona is careful not to overstate the uniqueness or the ordinariness of Quaker dreamwork, especially for a community that eschewed hierarchy and valued individual spirituality. This may also be a characteristic reaction of a literature scholar to a historian's project, and it should not distract from the many strengths of this creative and significant study. If anything, these minor shortcomings indicate the largeness of this topic and the worth of more scholarship in this area. Gerona has performed a valuable service in illuminating the wealth of material provided by Quaker dreamwork, and her book no doubt will inspire important new directions in scholarship on Quakers and on transatlantic religious culture.