Women's Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets

Margaret Fell (1614–1702), one of the co-founders of the Society of Friends and a religious activist, was a prolific writer and distributor of Quaker pamphlets. This volume offers eight texts that span her writing career and represent her range of writing: autobiography, epistle or public letter, examination or record of a trial, letter to the king, and argument for women’s preaching. These selections also document Fell’s contributions to Friends’ theology, exemplify seventeenth-century women’s English-language literacy, illustrate Fell’s theories of biblical reading, and exhibit the common qualities of Quaker rhetoric.

"This wonderful, eye-opening volume enables Margaret Fell finally to take her rightful place, center stage, as one of the founders of the Society of Friends (or Quakers). Tireless and fearless, she spoke her truth to Friends and to their opponents — including the king — for many decades, enduring periods of harsh imprisonment as a result. This selection of her writings, comprising many genres, reveals her to have been an adept and assured rhetorician, by turns admonitory and exultant, measured and mystical, prophetic and practical. The editors’ judicious and meticulous scholarship opens fascinating perspectives onto Fell’s life and work for scholars and students alike."

-Hilary Hinds, Professor of Literary Culture, Lancaster University

JANE DONAWERTH, professor emerita of the University of Maryland, is author of Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language and Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, and co-translator of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues.

REBECCA M. LUSH is associate professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. She has published on Aphra Behn, James Fenimore Cooper, and Gerald Vizenor in journals including Studies in American Indian Literatures and Early Modern Women.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women 14.2 (2020): 129–131. Reviewed by Catie Gill.
Friends Journal April (2019): 21. Reviewed by Lauren Brownlee.
Modern Language Review 116.1 (2021): 165–166. Reviewed by Rachel Adcock.
Quaker History 108.1 (2019): 42–45. Reviewed by Robynne Rogers Healey.
Quaker Universalist Voice (2019): https://universalistfriends.org/library/margaret-fell. Reviewed by Quaker Universalist Fellowship Editors.
Renaissance & Reformation 42.2 (2019): 216–218. Reviewed by Nilab Ferozan.
Renaissance Quarterly 72.4 (2019): 1512–1514. Reviewed by Katey E. Roden.
The Sixteenth Century Journal 51.2 (2020): 563–565. Reviewed by Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull.