Janet Moore Lindman's volume is a careful and insightful investigation of what she calls “practical Quakerism”—a term meant to invoke both the “specific acts” associated with Friends’ spirituality and how members pragmatically “construct[ed] a workable concept of Quakerism” during a period of profound change inside and outside of the Society (6). Her deft attention to the former offers a model for how to excavate individual and communal spirituality. Her judicious analysis of the latter was also successful. Though the events and forces she traces are well-worn territory (“schism, industrialization, western migration, print culture, and reform activism” [4]), Lindman does not allow any one of these themes to drive or define this period of transformation. Her narrative works at the micro- and macro levels, offering a full picture of how the Religious Society of Friends and its members addressed and absorbed broader societal changes.
Lindman organizes the volume into three parts: “Seed Time,” “Fruitless Exercise and Distress,” and “A Work of Redemption,” each an image from George Dillwyn's unpublished work. These sections “trace the course of American Friends” by analyzing the impact of schism, evangelicalism, further division, and reform activism (5). Part 1 includes three chapters on piety, education, and death. In each, she explores “the interiority of Friends’ faith,” examining Quaker practice across the different stages of one's life (17). Her chapter on “the choreography” of dying and the “literature of death” was especially effective, particularly the closing pages in which she demonstrates how the Hicksite schism impacted mourning rites and the grieving process (81–82). In Part 2, Lindman appraises the internal and external factors that divided the Society, with three successive chapters on Hicksites, Gurneyites vs. Wilburites, and Progressive Friends. Her argument that “through foreign influence, Orthodox Quakers came more in line with mainstream American religious culture,” was persuasive and compelling (101). Part 3 concludes with a chapter on the “communal connection” afforded by Quaker manuscript and print culture and a particularly innovative and useful chapter on how Friends “revised history and invoked collective memory to present their version of the Quaker religion” (151, 176). Taken together, these eight chapters reveal “a religious culture rich in contradiction, diversity, and innovation” (203).
Lindman takes a long and broad view of this “transitional period. . .between the tribalism of the eighteenth century and the worldliness of the later nineteenth century” (5). This fruitful decision eschews beginning or ending her narrative with a particular division or crisis and gives equal weight to the “internal and external forces” that shaped Quakerism (4). It also avoids a declension narrative, helpfully refocusing our attention on the vivifying spirit that (re)animates Friends’ religious faith, practice, and community. I did want to know more about how Lindman thinks geography might have changed a member's experience or expression of Quakerism. Historians have written much about North vs. South, East vs. West, rural vs. urban, rich vs. poor in this period, so Lindman's decision to intermingle Friends from regional and socioeconomic backgrounds seemed an argument as much as a methodology.
A Vivifying Spirit is filled with the kind of small details a skilled researcher and writer such as Lindman exhumes and mines. Whether the dress donned by a Quaker man during jury service or by four generations of Mott-Davis-Hallowell women in a family photograph, the titles acquired by a young boy for his small family library or a young woman's end-of-the-year diary entry, or the number of times “Jesus Christ” increasingly appeared in subsequent editions of Piety Promoted, Lindman expertly deploys these individual examples as compelling evidence in support of her larger arguments (28, 29, 161, 168, and 175). There were a few moments where readers may wish for further contextualization or perhaps additional analytical frameworks. In a particularly evocative passage, Lindman describes for readers the graffiti “Orthodox women are d-mn bitches” scrawled at the Birmingham Meetinghouse and the charges of “harlot” lobbed against “brazen” and “bald” Quaker women. She concludes the section by affirming “female leaders were delegitimized during this crisis,” but I wanted to know more about the impact of changing gender norms (99–100). Did Quaker women comment on this disparity? Did it influence their decision to align with one movement over another? These questions led me reflect on other moments where gender might have been a useful analytical tool, such as Lindman's section “The Feast of Reason” where she analyzes the “holistic model” of “mind, heart, and spirit” (19) and her chapter “Reforming Friends” in which she chooses to focus primarily on temperance and abolition (130). As with the uniform approach to geography mentioned above, the choice to discuss Quaker men's and women's faith together is interesting and likely with merit, but one worth addressing all the same.
Lindman's skill in bringing to life the religious beliefs and practice of both well-known and lesser-known Friends is to be commended and emulated. She joins many Quaker scholars in arguing that “to compartmentalize Quakerism is to misunderstand the Religious Society of Friends” and, indeed, her exploration of the process by which the “practices that made Quakers unique and insular fell away” reveals as much about the transitions occurring in outside society as inside the Society (7, 198). A Vivifying Spirit is a valuable book that will benefit a wide readership, especially those interested in how religious individuals independently and collectively responded to internal divisions and external pressures.
