| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Meredith Baldwin Weddle. Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 348. $49.95.

The Quaker commitment to nonviolence was more nuanced and complex, Meredith Baldwin Weddle demonstrates here, than scholars have appreciated. The reigning interpretation holds that in 1660 Quaker leaders framed their peace testimony, the "Declaration," as a defensive response to the Restoration of Stuart monarchy, hoping to forestall further persecution by advertising the Quaker's peaceable intentions and easing the minds of royal officials fearful of sectarian uprisings. But Weddle objects to this interpretation's emphasis on political over religious motivation and collective over individual attitudes and behavior. She finds that Quaker apprehensions about violence preexisted the official 1660 declaration, and she demonstrates that Quakers retained and acted on those sensibilities in the New World under very different social and political circumstances. For Weddle, Quaker nonviolence represented a positive and personal spiritual choice, not a desperate last resort. At the same time, Weddle rejects the naïve assumption that Quakers monolithically adhered to uniform rules of nonviolence, showing instead that Quaker communities and individuals creatively balanced, and often reconciled, their religious principles with military or defensive needs. . . .

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