The Life and Literary Fictions of May Drummond, Quaker Female Preacher

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, no. 2 (Winter 2015–16)ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.28.2.291 Copyright 2016 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University

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The Life and Literary Fictions of May Drummond, Quaker Female Preacher

Matthew Reilly

Studying the life and literary legacy of May Drummond, a cele-brated Quaker female preacher who was ignominiously expelled from the Society of Friends in 1766, enables scholars to focalize intersections of religious controversy and secular satire during the First Great Awakening. In her travelling ministry, Drummond advocated principles that seventeenth-century Quaker theorists derived from Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Awake”), a twelfth-century Arabic fiction that depicts a protagonist who achieves enlightenment unfettered by the dogmas of religious in-sti tutions and authorities. Drummond’s ministry threatened the increas ingly centralized organization of a transatlantic Society of Friends, while also inspiring writers to appropriate her persona in controversial satires. Alexander Pope invoked Drummond’s humble virtue in order to critique corruptions of church and state, and Samuel Johnson cited her ministry as exemplary of Quaker subversions. My article attributes Drummond’s notoriety to the con vergence of two cultures of writing: an arena of popular print and an internal system of ministerial certification that Quaker elders used to curtail her influence.

Matthew Reilly earned his PhD from the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin in 2012; he teaches at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, Austin.

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This article recovers the celebrated career of a travelling min-ister named May Drummond (1710–77),1 highlighting her debt to an eclectic Quaker textual history and her conflict with an increas-ing ly centralized Society of Friends. During the 1730s, she attained fame and notoriety by drawing on a twelfth-century Arabic fiction that inspired seventeenth-century Quaker theorists of the Inner Light. She adapted Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Awake”) in critiques of priestly hierarchies and manmade artifice, compelling poets to laud her as a Quaker luminary and as a controversial satirist of secular and religious authority. Conserva-tive writers envisioned her as the embodiment of Quaker heresy; at the same time, progressives depicted her as a charismatic non-conformist who was undermined by the Society’s male leadership. Rebecca Larson identifies Drummond as a minister who “became a public figure beyond the Quaker community,”2 yet Larson neglects the tensions that prompted the Edinburgh and London Meetings to declare their disunion with Drummond in 1765 and 1766. I contend that Quaker elders were hostile to her textual sphere of influence, as it radiated outward from her debt to Islamic precedents, to her printed letters and sermons attacking Protestant and Quaker ministers, to her manipulation by (and fame within) secular print culture.

After scandalizing Edinburgh with her conversion to Quaker-ism, Drummond, the popular twenty-one-year-old sister of the city’s Lord Provost, journeyed to London and ascended to instant celebrity in 1735. Anonymous admirers penned hyperbolic panegyrics that stressed her beauty, eloquence, and moral judg-ment. Writers also reframed her ministry in irreverent satire, mocking Protestant ministers and burlesquing the Inner Light as a licentious carnal passion.3 She polarized Alexander Pope

1 Gil Skidmore’s Dictionary of National Biography article dates Drummond’s life from 1710 to 1772, yet the 5 March 1777 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser states, “Last week died Mrs. May Drummond, sister to George Drummond, Esq., Late Lord Provost of Edinburgh.” Skidmore, “Drummond, May (1709/10–1772),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed 21 July 2015, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68159.

2 Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 239.

3 On satirists’ attention to printed Quaker doctrines, see Harry Mount, “Egbert van Heemskerck’s Quaker Meetings Revisited,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 209–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/751371;

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and Samuel Johnson, who invoked her as either an embodi-ment of virtue and foil to corrupt churchmen or as the grotesque exemplar of Quaker freethinking. As her fame spread beyond the Society of Friends, she confronted conservative Quaker rivals, and socially conscious supporters gradually positioned her in contrast to the sect’s emerging orthodoxy. Drummond’s con tro-versial ministry also impacted Quaker textual history. Just three years after her death, London’s Meeting reached con sensus to strike the contentious reference to Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from Robert Barclay’s authoritative treatise on the Inner Light. Quakers pri-oritized experience of the Inner Light over book-medi ated faith, yet they used print to promote communal values and exclusive modes of identification.4 London’s male elders author ized official publications and suppressed mystical and polit ically subversive preachers, who threatened to incite schism in a far-flung trans-atlantic Society, undermine the sect’s legal tolera tion and com-mercial success, or thwart its assimilation into the Protestant “Great Awakening” of the 1730s and 1740s.5 In her Quaker syn-thesis of the Islamic Enlightenment fiction, “Alive, Son of Awake,” Drummond compelled such censorship.

Drummond’s literary reception threatened a Quaker com-munity that was defined by its marginal, uneasy relationship to secular print culture. Writers emphasized her heterodox

and Edith Phillips, “French Interest in the Quakers before Voltaire,” PMLA 45, no. 1 (1930): 238–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/457738.

4 Matthew Horn, “Texted Authority: How Letters Helped Unify the Quakers in the Long Seventeenth Century,” Seventeenth Century 23, no. 2 (2013): 290–314, doi: 10.1080/0268117X.2008.10555615; Meiling Hazelton, “‘Mony Choaks’: The Quaker Critique of the Seventeenth-Century Public Sphere,” Modern Philology 98, no. 2 (2000): 251–70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/438935. On women’s role in Quaker print culture, see Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Paula McDowell, “Women and the Business of Print,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivian Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 135–55.

5 On sectarian conservatism, see Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). On censorship of women ministers, see Judith Rose, “Prophesying Daughters: Testimony, Censorship, and Literacy among Early Quaker Women,” Critical Survey 14, no. 1 (2002): 93–110, doi: 10.3167/001115702782352178; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 356; and Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 165–72.

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teaching, but also refashioned her Quaker ministry in genres of panegyric and satirical poetry. While she suffered as a result of these unauthorized personifications, Drummond also chal-lenged sectarian enemies by releasing her sermons, letters, and polemical tracts through anti-Quaker publishers. She failed to elude censorship, however, for Quaker elders revoked her certificate to preach. They used an internal approval system to prevent her from accessing a transatlantic network, wherein her anti-authoritarian ministry might have divided Quakers and united radicals during the years prior to the American Revolution. During a nineteenth-century transatlantic schism, Quaker historians revived her legacy as a tragic warning against non con formity. They echoed one infamous 1773 poem in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, wherein the “once cele brated” preacher appears “in the character of Winter,” stand-ing “exposed to the cold, blighting winds of contempt, and of poverty.”6 This article instead recuperates her significance as a controversial preacher, who not only instigated satirists such as Pope and Johnson, but also appealed to Quaker progressives and non-Quaker feminists. I will affirm the judgment of Robert Chambers, a nineteenth-century Edinburgh historian, who cited her as “perhaps the most remarkable woman that Scotland ever produced” (see Figure 1).7

The Conversion and Ministry of May Drummond

Quaker historian Mabel R. Brailsford characterizes Drummond as a “hard-headed, quick-witted Scotswoman; immensely popu-lar with companions of her own age, and the ringleader in many a mad frolic.”8 The travelling minister Thomas Story recounts his initial encounter with Drummond when she arrived at Edinburgh’s 1731 Yearly Meeting with “about Thirty of her

6 Clemene [pseud.], “On Seeing a Picture of the Once Celebrated May Drum-mond, a Preacher among the Quakers, in the Character of Winter,” Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 8 March 1773. Walter Scott boast ed of memorizing this poem prior to crafting Jeanie Deans’s famous 1736 fiction al voyage from Edinburgh to London in The Heart of Midlothian (1818).

7 Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh, Vol. ii (Edinburgh, 1825), 50; and Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1861), 559–60.

8 Mabel R. Brailsford, Friends Quarterly Examiner, Vol. lxiv (London, 1930), 222.

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acquaintances.”9 As Story explains, Drummond approached him after meeting to mock him as a Jesuit who secretly scripted his sermon. Story countered Drummond’s sceptical wit, engaged her in a dialogue on Quaker principles, and convinced her to continue attending meeting. Drummond soon shocked family and friends with her conversion, and she unsuccessfully petitioned the Church of Scotland to allow her a forum to expound on the virtue of Quakerism. In the face of alienation in Edinburgh, Drummond joined Story’s 1733 tour to western and southern England. She quickly acquired prestige for her virtuosic preaching and cap-tivating personality, and famously gained a private audience with

9 Thomas Story, The Life of Thomas Story (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1747), 714–21.

Figure 1. [Jonathan Richardson?], Portrait of May Drummond (c. 1760). John Lane writes of “re-lining and [repairing] certain holes in the canvas” on purchasing this portrait. See Lane to Cawth Penney (London, Library of the Religious Society of Friends), Port 40/83.

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Queen Caroline and Princess Amelia upon her arrival in London during the summer of 1735. London periodicals promoted her subsequent travels to Bristol, where “great Numbers of different Persuasions continue their Curiosity to hear her,” and “supports were added to the Gallery of the Friends’ meeting-house to pre-vent its giving way beneath the crowds who thronged it.”10 After her 1738 mission to Ireland, Drummond returned to Scotland and donated £372 7s. in collections to assist her brother in the construction of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary.

While this hefty donation exhibits Drummond’s popularity, it obscures the opposition to her ministry within the Society of Friends. Fellow Quakers were suspicious of her celebrity, since they were aware of her resistance to the sectarian doctrines that dominated the Protestant evangelical revival. First, Drummond touted the Quietist principles of Catholic female mystics after her 1742 preaching tour with James Gough (an Irish schoolmaster and translator of Mme Guyon and Antoinette Bourignon). She coupled these crypto-Catholic sentiments with an “ardent Jacobite politics” in the midst of Scotland’s 1745 rebellion.11 Second, she embraced an Arabic source that was seminal to Restoration-era Quaker Quietists in Scotland, but disparaged by eighteenth-century Protestant evangelicals. While evangelical preachers aspired to win converts to their particular sects, Ibn Tufayl’s narrative proposed that individuals with no formal learning would perceive religious truths more clearly than those reliant on books and ministers. Whereas John Wesley equated “Hai Ebn Yokton” with the “sort of faith” held among “red men” who lack the “great word of the white men,” Drummond set Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān in contrast to Wesley’s strict and exclusive Biblicism, asserting that his “fleecing the People [by their own consent] ... is a sufficient demonstration that no money need be advanced by Government, for the maintenance of a hired ministry in the preaching way.”12 Mid-century Quakers refrained from invoking

10 See The Old Whig or Consistent Protestant (9 October 1735); and General Evening Post (4–7 October 1735).

11 On Scottish Quakers and Jacobitism, see George Burnet, The Story of Quakerism in Scotland, 1650–1850 (London: James Clark, 1952), 155–62; and Brailsford, 326.

12 John Wesley, “On Faith: A Sermon on Hebrews xi.6,” in Sermons on Several Occasions, Vol. viii (London, 1788), 236–41, quoted in Brailsford, 329. See

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Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, a text that had been plagiarized in the Travels of Cyrus (1727) by Andrew Michael Ramsay (a Catholic Quietist mystic), and also parodied in Pope’s scandalous Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741).13 Drummond’s collected sermons, Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge (1736), ex-hibits a debt to Restoration-era Quaker treatises, which co-opted Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as a means of framing the immediate, universal revelations of the Inner Light.

As Drummond explains in her ministry, a person accesses a divine Light by “putting off [the] Body ... a Clogg to a lively Communion.”14 By removing obstructions to an innate spiritual sensibility, individuals acquire a “Conscience”: that “Part in Man susceptible of divine Influence, as the Ear is of hearing, or the Eye of seeing, in the natural Body: When our Eyes are shut, no outward Object can be discovered; just so the Ears, if we stop them, the most charming Sounds can find no Entrance” (I, 13). In a 1735 Devonshire sermon, she distinguishes an Inner Light from modes of perception reliant on physical sense and material evidence, asking: “Is the light that shines on your Eyes, your Eyes? Or is ye sound that strikes your Ears, your Ears? No, by your Eyes you see light, & with your Ears you hear sound, but neither is light your Eyes nor Sound your Ears.”15 Drummond condemns artificial obstacles that impede access to a universal “light which illuminates all Souls, as the sun does Bodies; and in this Light thou shall clearly see Light; for in this Light alone is the Mystery of every beneficial Science truly discovered.” She chastises those who “derogatest from the Power of GOD” and “shuttest [their] Eyes” while their “Ears are stopp’d” (I, 24). Her sermons endorse tropes of mystical experience and untaught revelation: “When thou comest to own [this Discovery] for what it really is, in the Secret of thy Soul ... then wilt thou know, What Eye hath not seen, nor Ear heard, neither

also Susan Davies, Quakerism in Lincolnshire (Lincoln: Yard Publishing Services, 1989), 70–71.

13 In Dictionnaire Philosophique, Voltaire cited Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus as an example of the “Plagiat.” Œuvres completes de Voltaire, Vol. xxxii, Part I (Paris, 1819), 292–93.

14 Drummond, Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge (London, 1736), 12. References are to this edition, cited as I.

15 “May Drummond’s Opinion of Conscience & Account of the Quaker Prin-ciples Deliver’d in Her Sermon at Devonshire 29th 2nd Mo. 1735” (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends, MS Vol. 101[1]).

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hath it enter’d into the Heart of Man, the Things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God (saith the Apostle) hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit; for the Spirit searches all Things, yea the deep Things of God” (I, 16). Drummond is invoking Isaiah 64:4 and 1 Corinthians 2:9, while echoing Quaker adaptations of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, which propose that the immediate and universal operation of an Inner Light is more integral to Christianity than the instruction of books and men.

This ministry reflects Drummond’s debt to two “Quietist” Quakers of Scottish origin.16 George Keith and Robert Barclay articulated the basic tenets of Quakerism in order to gain social acceptance and legal toleration for the emergent sect. Keith conceptualized the Inner Light in the preface to his translation of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (entitled, An Account of the Oriental Philosophy). He discovered “primitive” Quaker principles in Ibn Tufayl’s tale of an autodidact, who acquires direct intuition of the divinity due to his lack of human language or learning. Keith claims Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān “showeth excellently how far the knowledge of a man, whose eyes are spiritually opened, differeth from that knowledge that men acquire simply by hear-say or reading.”17 Ibn Tufayl’s protagonist embodies the capacity for uninstructed vision: “Nor did his ignorance of speech, nor that he knew not to speak, hinder him from understanding the same: therefore he deeply plunged himself into this state, and he saw that which neither the eye hath seen, nor the ear heard, nor came into the heart of man to conceive it” (H, 86). Since no words convey private experiences that transcend reason, the narrator portrays the protagonist’s epiphany in a metaphor of sunlight emanating downward, reflecting upward in a pool of water, showing the protagonist’s “own essence” united to “other essences like unto his,” and displaying “infinite beauty, splendor, and pleasure, which neither the eye hath seen, nor the ear hath heard, nor hath entered the heart of man, and which they cannot describe, who describe other things, and which no man can understand, but he who hath attained it” (H, 94). Barclay imitated Keith’s translation in his

16 On Quaker “Quietism,” see Rufus Jones, The Later Periods of Quakerism (London: Macmillan, 1921), 1:59–61.

17 George Keith, trans., An Account of the Oriental Philosophy, Shewing the Profound Wisdom of Hai Ebn Yokdan (London, 1674), 6. References are to this edition, cited as H.

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Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1678), a famous treatise wherein he outlines Quaker beliefs.18 He cited Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān to theorize a universal Inner Light attained “not by premises premised and conclusions deduced ... [but by] conjunction of the mind of man with the supreme Intellect, after the mind is purified from its corruption, and is separated from all bodily images, and is gathered into a profound stillness.”19 Despite Barclay’s un-equivocal allusion, eighteenth-century Quakers expressed appre-hension about the doctrinal stakes of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. Samuel Newton, a mid-century critic of the Quakers, attacked Barclay’s praise of “Hai Eben Yokdan.” Although its protagonist obtains “the most profound knowledge of God [without converse with man],” the author equates natural religion with “principle points of Mahometan worship and law.” Newton queries whether Barclay believes “the true teachings of the Spirit of God lead to Mahometanism?”20 Quakers did not welcome such controversial attention. On 14 February 1780, London’s Meeting ended a year of “needful care” and “consideration” with a quorum to “leav[e] out the Story of Hai Eben Yokdan” within James Phillips’s new edition of Barclay’s Apology.21

Orthodox Quakers championed Barclay’s authoritative Apology, yet they reviled his close friend Keith, the translator of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. Keith downplayed conventional Quaker doc trines and forms of identification. He promoted an experi mental and experi-ential spirituality, depicting Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as “savoury and refreshing ... where [the narrator] saith, Preach not the sweet savour of a thing, which thou hast not tasted; and again where he saith, In the rising of the Sun is that which maketh, that thou hast not need of Saturn” (H, 6).22 An eminent second-generation Quaker, Keith famously converted Anne Conway, partnered with William Penn

18 On the Quaker reception of Barclay’s Apology, see Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9–11, 175.

19 Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 5th ed. (London, 1703), 193–94.

20 Samuel Newton, The Leading Sentiments of the People Called Quakers Examined (London, 1771), 177–78.

21 See handwritten Morning Meeting Book, Vol. vi (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends, 1762–1783), 324–44.

22 On Keith’s enthusiastic reading of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, see Emily Kugler, Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English Identity (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012), 35, 43–51, 184.

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in his emigration to Holland, and held philosophical dialogues with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and the Kabbalist Francis Mercury Van Helmont (Matthew Arnold’s model for the “Scholar Gypsy”). As a hostile nineteenth-century historian explains, Keith traversed Europe “with a horde of gypsies ... [to] learn their language and customs. He professed to believe in the philosopher’s stone, the universal panacea, and the transmigration of souls.”23 Following the deaths of Barclay (1690) and George Fox (1691), Keith travelled to America and created a schism over occasional conformity. He denied the rationality of words and individual will, and urged Quietist capitulation to the Test Acts. Through the outward accep-tance of oaths and sacraments, he hoped to secure civil rights and political power. After clashing with New Jersey Friends in 1694, Keith retreated to England, converted to Anglicanism, and returned to America in 1701 as a missionary and rival to Quakers.

Story—the Quaker minister who converted Drummond—privately represented Keith as a schismatic, apostate, and turn-coat. Story converted to Quakerism in 1689, and pursued a transatlantic mission (1698–1709) at the height of Keith’s infamy. Story’s subsequent travels—to Jamaica (1709–14), the Nether-lands (1715), Ireland (1716), and Scotland (1728–33)—imply his awareness of an extended Society susceptible to internal rivals such as Keith. Although Story adopted discourses of the Inner Light that derived from Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and Barclay’s Apology, he emphasized moderation and orthodoxy in his ministry. One of Story’s best-known sermons (“Of Knowing One’s Self ”) promotes reliance on the Inner Light “according to a Saying of an experienced Man of God, ‘Eye hath not seen (saith he) nor Ear heard, neither have entered into the Heart of Man, the Things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.’”24 Contrary to Story, Drummond adapted Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān to evoke a universal Inner Light that instructs “the most illiterate Man,” as a “Morning Star” shows “the Road, till the SUN arise that banishes all Shadows quite away” (I, 11–19). Just as Keith compared the Inner Light

23 Robert Smith, ed., The Friend: Religious and Literary Journal, Vol. iii (Philadelphia, 1830), 94.

24 Story, Discourses Delivered in the Publick Assemblies of the People Called Quakers (London, 1744), 6–7, 14–16. On Story’s ministry, see The Friend: Religious and Literary Journal, Vol. lii (Philadelphia, 1879), 226; and Robert Smith, ed., The Friend, Vol. xix (Philadelphia, 1846), 388–89.

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to a sun that dispels the darkness of human error, Drummond critiqued ministers inside and outside the Quaker Society.

May Drummond’s Literary Persona

Drummond’s sphere of influence expands considerably when we consider that writers recontextualized her persona and ministry in poetry, prose fiction, and literary criticism. Textual representations of her include earnest and ironic praise for her Quaker ministry, hostile satire on this ministry, and depictions of her confrontations with conservative Friends. The types are not mutually exclusive, as Pope demonstrates in his “Epilogue to the Satires” (1738). He is not only drawing on panegyrics in periodicals, but also reforming the irreverent poem (likely by Richard Savage, his informant for Grub Street gossip), in which the pseudonymous “Mrs. D——mm——d” burlesques Quakerism and attacks Protestant ministers. Though Pope depicted the Quaker as “sly” in “Epistle to Cobham” (1734), his “Epilogue to the Satires” portrays Drummond as a “simple” embodiment of virtue and as a foil to the “Gospel” of vice spread by “rev’rend Bishops” and “Pulpit Eloquence,” by the “Churchman” and the “Man in Pow’r.”25 By positioning her as a moral counterpoint to religious and political corruption, Pope surprisingly mirrors the praise of her feminist advocates. By casting her as a controversial moral heroine, he motivated Johnson’s anti-Quaker assault on her preaching in his anonymous imitation of Juvenal, entitled London (1738).

In 1736, an anonymous poet in London Magazine includes Drummond among the Quaker “Teachers.” She follows Thomas Story in a procession of Friends: “See where gentle Drummond next appears / With sense and judgment far above her years.”26 The poet imitates Pope’s lines on Timotheus in An Essay on Criticism (“Hear how Timotheus’ vary’d Lays surprise, / And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise!” [p. 155, lines 374–75]). He praises the “soft persuasion” of this “noble Caledonian”:

When to heav’n’s king she doth direct her pray’r,Th’astonished multitude press close to hear;

25 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 552, 688–94. References are to this edition.

26 William A.E. Axon, “Some Quaker Teachers in 1736,” Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, Vol. v (London: Headley Bros., 1908), 48.

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And when she preaches, how the list’ning throngAdmire the melting musick of her tongue!And while with ev’ry theme the maid complies,She bids alternate passions fall and rise!27

Drummond sways an “astonished multitude” and “list’ning throng” by combining eloquence and moral judgment with aesthetic graces that produce “alternate passions” of admiration and desire. Although the poet positions her alongside a body of Quaker male preachers, his allusion to the “melting music of her tongue” implies a low physical passion, as his emphasis on her “theme[s]” reduces her Quaker ministry to a charming narrative. Insofar as the poet expresses a fondness for Drummond’s preaching, it is unlikely that her fellow Friends were flattered by such attention.

In contrast to this panegyric, the author of The Female Speaker; Or, The Priests in the Wrong (1735) scandalously levels lust and spirituality. The author is probably Savage, a dissolute Grub Street hack, who satirized ministers featured in the poem.28 He writes under the persona of “Mrs. D——mm——d,” addressing his epistle to an Anglican clergyman, Henry Stebbing, and an Anabaptist minister, James Foster. “D——mm——d” offers a lewd, mock-feminist rationale for intervening in their debate over the distinctions between primitive Christianity and heresy:

Of all the Female Members ’tis most hard,From use of Tongue alone to be debarr’d:Ye grant us Charms, inward and outward Light,And that to Kiss—in Unity—is right:And sure no part doth more to us belong,Than doth that harmless Particle the Tongue.(Female Speaker, lines 21–26)

In equating the inward and outward “Charms” of Drummond’s ministry, the poem diminishes its seriousness and contradicts her claim that it is “harmless.” The poem’s “Speaker” (a fictional

27 Axon, 48.28 [Richard Savage?], The Female Speaker; or, The Priests in the Wrong: A Poem,

Being an Epistle from the Celebrated Mrs. D——mm——d to Dr. S——b——g and Mr. F——t——r. Occasioned by their Dispute on the Subject of Heresy (London, 1735). References are to this edition. See also Richard Savage, “The Character of the Rev. James Foster” (1734) and “The Progress of a Divine: A Satire” (1734), in The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 188–205.

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Drummond) declares herself a “She Saint” and “Female Champion for the Truth,” who has travelled from her “Native Home” on the “remotest Banks in Northern Tay” (lines 1–4) to settle a “horrid Fray” between “St[e]bb[i]ng fierce” and “indulgent F[ost]er” (lines 99–100). The poem’s frontispiece shows her intercepting Stebbing’s Letter to Mr. Foster on the Subject of Heresy (1735), as a hat-wearing Quaker halts her, and a sickly angel drapes a banner declaring her: “αὐτοκατάκριτος” (autokatakritos or “self-condemned”) (see Figure 2). Foster denied that one could confirm the heresy of any given belief with absolute certainty, yet “D——mm——d” mocks their dispute as evidence of corruption:

Religion still the Controversy provesThe secret Spring that every Faction moves.When Princes war, and Millions daily bleed,Religion, sacred Name! inspires the Deed. (lines 67–70)

She asserts that Stebbing and Foster have been inspired by an “Imp of H——ll” and a “self-same Motive” of pride. Their debate proves that

The Turk, the Jew, the Christian are the same,They’re Hereticks but of a different Name. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Since Hereticks in every Sect abound,And scarce One Man that’s honest can be found (lines 129–30, 441–42)

While “D——mm——d” is naive to the incendiary aspects of her speech, she functions ambivalently as a target of satire on female ministers, and also as the vehicle for satire that ridicules Anglicans and Dissenters alike.

Drummond’s ministry prompted patronizing condemnations from ministers, as well as satirical poems mocking solemn and dogmatic nonsense. In response to her controversial 1738 tour to Dublin, a pseudonymous poet named “Thomas Edinburgh” criticizes Episcopalians for denying the “Doctrine of the Gospel” and “Practice of Primitive Christians.”29 He also responds to “a

29 A Letter from a Young Lawyer to a Scholar in Trinity College; Or, Some Remarks on Mr. Oswald Edward’s Jibing LETTER to Mrs. May Drummond, the Famous QUAKER Preacher from Edinburgh (Dublin, 1738), 5–6. Compare The

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Figure 2. [Richard Savage?], The Female Speaker; or, The Priests in the Wrong: A Poem, Being an Epistle from the Celebrated Mrs. D——mm——d to Dr. S——b——g and Mr. F——t——r, Occasioned by their Dispute on the Subject of Heresy (London, 1735), frontispiece. Reproduced with permission from The Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.

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Piece of ridiculous Banter on the Principle of the Quakers,” written by the Anabaptist minister Oswald Edwards. The poet attributes Drummond’s fame to the animosity of her powerful rivals:

From Scotland a Female of excellent Parts;(Tho’ unskill’d in Scholastical Logical Arts)Came hither to preach––but to preach without Hire:This kindled Episcopal Anger and Fire,And rais’d a Contention all over the NationConcerning her skill in Divine Revelation. Multitudes crowded to hear her displayHer thoughts on Religion, her Language and WayOf directing the wild Apprehensions of Men,Where to find and possess the Philosopher’s Stone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Without the Assistance of Logical Rules,Or Methods invented to wrangle in Schools. (A Letter from a Young Lawyer to a Scholar, 3)

The poem comically contrasts Drummond’s mystical “Philoso-pher’s Stone” with a profit-driven dullness promulgated by paid ministers. In a postscript, Thomas Edinburgh admits the “drolling way” of his satire may seem inappropriately “ludicrous on the Subject of Religion,” and he “shall fall under the Censure of the Serious.” He claims his extravagance mirrors the insane “Scholastic Terms and Syllogisms (or rather Silly-chasms)” into which Oswald Edwards has fallen upon the mere mention of Drummond’s name (for he had never heard her preach). Edinburgh laments that “the Sound of a particular Word should have such an influence on the powers of understanding as to make him write Nonsense, though there are few Scribblers in Divinity but what have a good conceit of themselves” (5–7). The precedent for his satire is Pope’s anony-mous “The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris, Concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of Mr. John Dennis” (1713), wherein the censorious critic John Dennis succumbs to a humorous madness on hearing the title of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713)—a play to which Pope contributed a prologue. In Edinburgh’s rendition of the trope, Drummond’s ministerial opponents surface in the role of foolish dunces.

Traveller Benighted; Or, Remarks on a Pamphlet Address’d to May Drummond (Dublin, 1738).

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According to William Warburton (1751) and Joseph Warton (1797), Drummond is the female Quaker whom Pope references in his 1738 “Epilogue to the Satires.” He cites her alongside James Foster (the Anabaptist minister in The Female Speaker) and Mathias Mawson (Bishop of Llandaff, master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge):

Let modest Foster, if he will, excelTen Metropolitans in preaching wellA simple Quaker, or a Quaker’s Wife,Out-do Landaffe in Doctrine—yea, in Life. (section 1, lines 131–34)30

Pope affirms satire’s ability to elevate humble virtue and correct the vice of those who are impervious to manmade laws. He portrays Drummond as a “low” figure worthy of panegyric and co-opts her persona as a counterpoint to “great” men among clergy and government. While “Virtue may choose the high or low degree,” he claims that “Vice is undone” unless “Greatness own[s] her,” as in recent times when “Nothing is Sacred ... but Villainy” (section 1, lines 137–44, 170). Pope stresses his unbiased objectivity, insisting he never met Drummond:

Yet think not Friendship only prompts my Lays;I follow Virtue, where she shines, I praise,Point she to Priest or Elder, Whig or Tory,Or round a Quaker’s Beaver cast a Glory. (section 2, lines 94–97)

He depicts her in the broad-brimmed “Beaver” hat worn by male Quakers and not in her customary green bonnet.31 In his four-book Dunciad (1743), Pope mocks theologian and textual scholar Richard Bentley, likening his rudeness to the peculiar custom of “upright Quakers” who refuse to remove their hat in the presence of social superiors. He lampoons Bentley’s pride through comic comparison, but adapts Quakers’ radical theory of equality to subvert his critical authority.

Pope does not categorize Drummond as a dunce, yet he represents her persona through a similar strategy of literary

30 Pope incorrectly assumes Drummond’s marital status. See John Croft, Fugitive Miscellany (York, 1792), 88.

31 On “beaver” hats, see Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, 9, 176.

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personi fication. Much as he conveys general satire through portraits of individual dunces, which “strike the Senses” and “raise the passions,”32 so Pope elevates Drummond as an embodi-ment of virtue, a critic of sectarian bigotry and self-assertive pride. He articulates a two-fold “motive for singling out” such low and obscure figures: “First to distinguish real and solid worth from showish or plausible expence, and virtue from vanity: and secondly, to humble the pride of greater men.”33 Instead of citing Drummond as a celebrated Quaker minister, he associates her with unpretentious virtue. Her virtue enables satire on the powerful and corrupt, functioning as a polemical arch-simplicity, akin to Jonathan Swift’s idea for a “Quaker Pastoral,” which inspired John Gay’s “Newgate Pastoral” in The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Unlike his Scriblerus Club collaborators, Pope sympathized with the Quakers as a recusant religious minority, whose historical persecution and outsider status paralleled the situation of British Catholics. He studied Quaker polemic as a source of satire, much as he also adapted Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as an eccentric precedent through which to ridicule religious and secular pride.34 He owned at least one copy of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, as well as a first edition of Barclay’s Apology, given to him by Barclay’s son.35

While Pope famously displayed Drummond as an opponent of contemporary corruption, Protestant writers of anti-Quakeriana vilified her as a monstrous heretic. According to Lawrence Lipking, Johnson caricatures her in “London: A Poem, in Imita-tion of the Third Satire of Juvenal, written in 1738”: “Here falling houses thunder on your head / And here a female atheist talks you dead.”36 As an impoverished Grub Street writer, Johnson

32 Pope to John Arbuthnot, 26 July 1734, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:419.

33 Pope to Jacob Tonson, 7 June 1732, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 3:290.

34 See Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays, Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Associated University Presses, 1982), 311; and Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 302, iv.n205–8.

35 On Pope’s ownership of Barclay’s Apology and Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, see Maynard Mack, “‘Books and the Man’: Pope’s Library,” in Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), 311, 456.

36 Samuel Johnson, “London: A Poem, in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, written in 1738,” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson,

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would have read periodicals advertising facetious orations and mock-dialogues based on Drummond’s ministry. On 12 June 1736, for example, the Weekly Miscellany published rumors con-cerning her intention to debate “Orator” John Henley over 1 Corinthians 14:34 (“Let your women keep silent in Churches”).37 The advertisement ridicules her elevation of the Inner Light over the Bible, for she finds recourse to any “Text at all as an affront to the Body of Quakers; as if inspired Minds could be supposed to Want those sorry Helps of Texts or Theses of any Kind, in Order to harangue an audience” (n.p.).

In mocking Drummond as an atheist who “talks you dead,” Johnson contradicts Pope’s “Epilogue to the Satires.” He also adapts lines from An Essay on Criticism (1711): “Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead; / For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread” (p. 163, lines 624–25). After condemning Pope’s exemplar of moral virtue in London, he translated Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s criticisms of Essay on Man, portraying the poem as heterodox and immoral, due to its praise for an untaught “Indian” persecuted by Christians who thirst for gold, and its support for a philosophical system patterned on an “Arabian scale of existence.”38 Johnson vehemently imposed his own particular religious and social views. In an April 1778 dialogue with the renowned Quaker Mary Knowles, he lost his temper and denounced a Quaker con-vert, whom he maligned as an “odious wench” and “little slut” he would not hope to encounter even in heaven, for “I never desire to meet fools anywhere.”39 In a July 1763 conversation sparked by James Boswell’s attendance at a Quaker Meeting, he dismisses women ministers with crude misogynistic wit: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on its hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”40 Johnson’s

ed. E.L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 6:48; and Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 69.

37 Chambers, Domestic Annals, 559.38 See O.M. Brack Jr., “Samuel Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de

Crousaz’s ‘Examen and Commentaire,’” Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 65; and The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. xvii: A Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Principles of Morality, of Essay on Man, ed. O.M. Brack Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xvii–xx, 400.

39 See Helen Pennock Smith, “Dr. Johnson and the Quakers,” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association 44, no. 1 (1955): 31–37.

40 Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 327.

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analogy characterizes Quaker female preachers as a bizarre modern curiosity, but it also shows them as a potential threat to the established principles of natural and moral law (see Figure 3).

Drummond’s ministry upset conservatives such as Johnson because supporters extolled her as both a feminist preacher and an advocate for women’s participation in the public sphere.41 In September 1735, an anonymous woman poet in Gentle-man’s Magazine hailed her in a plagiarism of Elizabeth Thomas’s panegyric to the educational reformer, Mary Astell: To Almystrea, on Her Divine Works (1722).42 Drummond’s ministry also

41 On hyperbolic praise of Drummond, see Elizabeth Rowe, The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Elizabeth Rowe (London, 1739), 232.

42 Roger H. Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 43.

Figure 3. “A Short Examination of the Spirit of Quakerism,” (“Anti-Quakeriana”) [ca. mid-18th century]. Reproduced with permission from Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford, Pennsylvania.

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appealed to women writers who were antagonistic to the Society of Friends. The anonymous 1761 editor of Susanna Centlivre’s Works thus likened male critics’ neglect of Centlivre to male Quakers’ suppression of Drummond. This comparison is strik ing since Centlivre had mocked Quakers in several plays.43 In A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1717), she shows the heroine’s Quaker guardian as a perverse and paternalistic hypocrite, whom the hero dupes by not only forging credentials of a travelling minister, but also adopting outward forms of Quaker dress and cant that signify manifes tations of the Inner Light. Drummond’s internal critique of Quaker authorities therefore resonates with the satire on paternal istic power and institutional corruption in Centlivre’s most famous anti-Quaker play. In her opposition to Quaker elders, Drummond also inspired male poets who conscientiously opposed ministerial and secular authorities. In his 1784 mis-cellany dedicated to anti-tith ing ideals, Quaker-turned-Deist poet Thomas Crowley printed an epistle to Drummond “by One of her own sex,” praising her for freeing “grov’ling mortals” from ministerial “fetters.”44 Likewise, the Quaker commonplace book of John Catchpool contains a tran scription of an anonymous poem, in which Drummond reforms the “groveling Creature Man” and corrects individuals who strive to “be as God by devious Ways.”45

By mid-century, writers frequently portrayed Drummond as a minister who had departed from conventional paths of sectarian identification. In the Scheme for a General Comprehension of All Parties in Religion (1750), she is satirized as the president of a mock-society to alter the Anglican Liturgy. She is the only female in a group meeting “at the Jews Synagogue in London,” consisting of “his Holiness the Pope ... [the] Churches of the Indian Nations ... [the] Patriarchs of Muscovy and Constantinople, together with the Mufti of the Mussulmen.”46 In 1767, just one year after

43 Susanna Centlivre, The Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (London, 1761), 1:x. See also Ezra Kempton Maxfield, “The Quakers in English Stage Plays before 1800,” PMLA 45, no. 1 (1930): 266–67, http://www.jstor.org/stable/457739; and John Wilson Bowyer, “The Quakers on the English Stage,” PMLA 45, no. 3 (1930): 957–58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/457921.

44 Thomas Crowley, Poetical Essays (London, 1784), 7–8. 45 John Catchpool, Manuscript Book, Vol. 1 (London: Library of the Religious

Society of Friends), p. 82, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, Box Y3/1; item 35.

46 A Scheme for a General Comprehension of All Parties in Religion (London, 1750), 10–13.

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London’s Meeting silenced Drummond, an acquaintance of her host family in Bristol, John Noble, published a novel featuring a protagonist who embodies principles that she co-opted from Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. In this novel, Unca Eliza Winkfield’s pseu-dony mous The Female American, the protagonist is con verted to a spir ituality of the Inner eye and ear while she is a cast away off the coast of America. She pursues a mission to the indigenous tribes on the American frontier, contesting an oppres sive regime of transatlantic Christianity. The Female American appears to be a hitherto unrecognized example of a hitherto un recog nized literary fashion for creating controversial char acters based on Drummond. John Noble disseminated the novel in a circulating library that inspired Richard Champion Jr. (the son of Drummond’s Bristol host) to found a similar venture in 1772. The Female American bears even closer connections to Drummond, for it imitates her brother Alexander Drummond’s Travels through Different Cities of Germany, Italy, Greece, and Several Parts of Asia (1754)—a work that she helped to market and distribute to subscribers.47

Unlike Unca Eliza Winkfield, Drummond was prohibited from extending her mission to America, for Quaker elders revoked her certificate to preach. Neva Jean Specht illustrates the role of the Society’s certificate system: “As migration west grew, the Quakers ... [were] faced with increasingly dispersed membership, [and] did their best to maintain their society’s religious [discipline and exclusiveness]. Certificates of removal helped control their mobile members ... [and eased a] burden of acknowledging who was and who was not a Friend.”48 When the Oxford literary scholar and Regius Professor of Modern History Joseph Spence attended two meetings alongside Drummond in March 1746, he recorded their conversations on Barclay’s Apology, on the “religion of nature,” and on the similarity of Quaker “government” in Britain and America.49 Spence’s regard for Drummond contrasts with

47 Unca Eliza Winkfield, The Female American, ed. Michelle Burnham (Peter-borough: Broadview Press, 2001), 192, 101–2. Alexander Drummond, Travels through Different Cities of Germany, Italy, Greece, and Several Parts of Asia (London, 1754), 158–75.

48 Neva Jean Specht, “Removing to a Remote Place: Quaker Certificates of Removal and their Significance in Trans-Appalachian Migration,” Quaker History 91, no. 1 (2002): 47–48, doi: 10.1353/qkh.2002.0014.

49 Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men, ed. Samuel Weller Singer (London, 1820), 345–46.

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the anxieties of transatlantic Quaker elders, who critiqued her sterile ministry and lukewarm followers, and yet acknowledged the dangers of her celebrity in an arena of popular print wherein satirists proliferated provocative representations of Quaker ideology.50 Whereas the Society could not halt the spread of Drummond’s reputation and radical spirituality in secular print culture, the internal mechanism of written certificates afforded elders the power to harness her speech, restrict her mobility, and curtail her ministerial influence.

The Suppression of Drummond’s Ministry

Drummond did not engage secular writers who imitated her ministry in panegyrics and satires. She did manipulate secular print, however, and even sought anti-Quaker publishers as a means of disseminating her censored letters and disowned ministry. She explicitly disavowed a schismatic campaign to win over disaffected Friends, and justified her publications as an attempt to circumvent and criticize the corrupt ministerial hierarchies both inside and outside the Society. While her unpublished letters document tensions with fellow Quakers, her printed texts clarify a Quaker ministry she derived from Barclay’s Apology and Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. She endorsed secular print as a venue for Quaker expression, scandalizing orthodox members among her sect. After her death, Drummond faded from Quaker history until the nineteenth century, when conservative historians revived her legacy as a tragic embodiment of disobedience and identified her as a Quaker schismatic aligned with other internal enemies, such as Keith and Elias Hicks, who recently incited an offshoot of mystical and progressive Quakers on the American frontier. This section contrasts this orthodox propaganda with Drummond’s handwritten letters and anti-ministerial publications, which display an active attention and passive objection to the rivals who suppressed her ministry.

London’s Quaker elders censored Drummond’s writings before she embarked on her first preaching tour. In 1733, she wrote an

50 See John Fothergill Jr. to Israel Pemberton, June 1739 (Philadelphia: College of Physicians), Gilbert Collection); and May Drummond to James Wilson, Westerhall, near Carlisle, 11 February 1759 (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends), MS BOX 10/11/1.

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open letter to John Shaw, a Scottish Presbyterian minister whom she accused of “preaching a flat Contradiction to the Words of our Lord Jesus Christ, who says, The Kingdom of God is within” (I, 17). She asks him to “lay aside the Cant” and “Trade” he has “learn’d to call Divinity,” and she laments that “so many Men are kept in Pay to detract from [the Inner Light’s] Power and Glory, and to persuade Mankind not to adhere unto it” (I, 19). When she learned that Edinburgh’s elders sent her letter to London, where censors redacted and diluted the argument, Drummond reprinted the full letter in her Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge, which she released through a London bookseller specializing in anti-Quaker texts.51 In a postscript, she denies a “Report being spread over the Town, that the Contents of this Letter were so ridiculous it was not worth the Receiver’s while to give an Answer” (I, 20). She explains a “resolve to print it, more in Regard to Truth than false Censure,” and distinguishes conscientious Quaker principles from any disingenuous or personal motive to slander the established minister.

At the height of her fame in the 1730s, Drummond recognized a faction of enemies in the Society of Friends. In her 1736 letter to a convert named Frances Henshaw, she warned against excess “spiritual pleasure or fellowship” with the Quakers’ assembly.52 A decade later, she confessed to Princess Amelia that certain Friends hoped to secretly “stab my reputation.”53 Amid mounting tension with Edinburgh Quakers in 1758, she complained of a “tyed of Malice,” “lying tung,” and “blasting breathe of Invay” among those who “hath ever been under the [appellation] of friends.”54 In 1759, she sought sponsorship for a transatlantic mission, yet her bid was rejected by William Miller iii: a third-generation

51 See references to J[ames] Roberts in Joseph Smith, ed., Bibliotheca Anti-Quakeriana; Or, A Catalogue of Books Adverse to the Society of Friends (London, 1873).

52 May Drummond to Frances Henshaw, Bristol, 11 August 1736, quoted in A Collection of Letters, Dream Visions, and other Remarkable Occurrences of Some People Called the Quakers (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends, 1788), n.p.

53 May Drummond to [Princess] Amelia, Lancaster, 19 May 1746, in A Collection of Letters, Dream Visions, and Other Remarkable Occurrences of Some People Called the Quakers, 115–16.

54 Drummond’s phonetic orthography implies a self-conscious dialect or loss of an amanuensis. Drummond to James Wilson, Edinburgh, April 1758 (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends), MS 334/1, p. 89.

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birthright Quaker and the new keeper of Edinburgh’s Meeting Minutes, whose priestly authority earned him a “nickname of King of the Quakers.”55 On 2 March 1765, he sent her a letter that prompted her withdrawal from Edinburgh’s Meeting. He charged her with truancy from meeting, but also asserted: “We have far better meetings in thy absence than when thou art present.”56 Her “words are a great burden” to Quakers, and she must remain “silent” until her “doctrine and conduct correspond with the following Queries which were sent down from London.” She circumvented his authority and relocated to London, where she attended Gracechurch Street’s Meeting until April 1766, when its elders learned of her prior conflicts in Edinburgh, and their Monthly Meeting officially declared disunion with her ministry.

Drummond addressed the Society in a broadsheet published in June 1766, condemning the corruption of those who disown the “Spirit of real Christianity” to “[teach] for Doctrine the Commands of Men.”57 Instead of waging “Defensive War” to vindicate a “Reputation blasted by invidiously false Reports” and “the worst Invectives of the Evil one,” she identifies directly with Christ, who was “brought to bear the Cross and despise the Shame.” She claims an unmediated access to the Divine Light, which is justified even if “the whole Race of Mankind disown Unity” with her. Since her conversion, the “divine Word” has been her “Internal Object of Adoration,” and she cannot obey “external Rules” imposed by the sect. She defends her printed broadsheet by comparing it to “written messages delivered by the Prophets,” who believed “the Letter kills, the Spirit makes alive. The Words I say unto you, they are Spirit, and they are Life.” She offers a sort of meta-commentary on secular print, which may function as a transparent medium for the Inner Light, in contrast to the Society’s opaque mechanisms of ministerial certification and censorship.

While her ministry and literary persona reached audiences outside the Society of Friends, Quaker historians ignored and

55 Brailsford, 222. 56 See Brailsford, 326; and William Miller to George Crosfield (ca. 1760–70),

Hope Park, Edinburgh, 20 March 1843 (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends), MS vol. 214/ item 91.

57 Drummond, To the Meeting Assembled in the Chamber at Gracechurch-Street (London, 1766), n.p.

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distorted her legacy. After Hicks’s schism, orthodox Quaker historians altered positive first-hand accounts by her fellow Friends, and also invoked rumors of her mental illness, substance abuse, abject poverty, and theft of food from Quakers’ houses (this final report is especially unlikely, given her wealthy friends and family). Whereas Drummond’s advocates once praised her “surprising genius,” “education,” “quick, lively, penetrating” mind, and “open, generous, tender, & humane” disposition,”58 nineteenth-century Quaker historians instead censured her “masculine, ner vous expressions” and efforts “to affect eloquence.”59 In the early twentieth century, Brailsford corrected this biased portrait, defending her against sectarian detractors and pointing to complex ethnic and gender elements implicit in the reception of her ministry. She remarks on the changes in Drummond’s appearance during her final years in Edinburgh, when she acquired “strong masculine features, and [an] aspect resembling many of the natives of Scotland.”60 Although twentieth-century scholars repaired her damaged reputation and reconstructed her celebrity as a Quaker minister, they have not sufficiently traced her fallout with the Friends to a provocative and unprecedented proliferation of her ministry in secular print.

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In this article, I have argued that the confluence of two cultures of writing led to Drummond’s conflict with members of the Quaker community. While print culture enhanced Drummond’s celebrity, it exacerbated latent tensions with Quaker elders, who wielded the certificate system that confined her to Edinburgh’s Meeting, where her anti-patriarchal ministry collided with the authority of a third-generation birthright Quaker, who imposed strict regulatory ordinances passed down from London’s Meeting. In preaching ideas drawn from a fiction written by a Muslim and translated by a Quaker schismatic, Drummond defied a newly orthodox Society and inspired satirists to revive stereotypical

58 William Cookworthy to Richard Kingston, 1 August 1744 (London: Library of the Religious Society of Friends), Port C/29.

59 Robert Smith, ed., The Friend: Religious and Literary Journal, Vol. xxiv (Philadelphia, 1851), 84; and George Harrison, Memoir of William Cookworthy (London, 1854), 14.

60 Brailsford, 222, 323.

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portraits leveled against prior generations of Friends. Though her concept of the Inner Light derives from the writings of seventeenth-century Quakers, whose doctrinal theories were integral to the internal stability and external toleration that the sect enjoyed during the eighteenth century, contemporaries per ceived her ideals of reform in terms of a radical critique that threatened traditional values and subverted entrenched structures of power.

Drummond’s case demonstrates eighteenth-century Quakers’ attentiveness to the arena of secular literature. While Quakers used print as a means of self-promotion, non-Quakers exploited such treatises to sharpen their ridicule of sectarian doctrines and practices. In privileging an Inner Light and divine spirit that transcends the carnal medium of the word, Quakers aimed to distance themselves from secular print. At the same time, they became savvy at negotiating this sphere, both by suppressing internal dissension through censorship and by restricting the sway of ministers whose testimony non-Quaker writers repurposed to elicit scandal and encourage radical reform. To the extent that Drummond suffered as a result of non-Quaker appropriations, she also circumvented Quaker oversight through print venues outside of the Society’s control. Despite the Quakers’ backlash against Drummond’s extraordinary popular celebrity, fictional representations of her ministry enable contemporary scholars to analyze her career, document her impact on the Society of Friends, and reassess her influence on eighteenth-century cul tural and literary history. Drummond’s career illustrates Quakers’ sensitivity to non-Quaker writings, and shows the sect’s willingness to sacrifice a controversial minister to maintain appearances of outward conformity.

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Documents

The Life and Literary Fictions of May Drummond, Quaker Female Preacher