Naomi Pullin, who is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, UK, has just published an outstanding account of Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Appearing in the prestigious series, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, the book offers the first account of the ways in which the institutionalism of one of the most controversial of the mid-seventeenth century new religious movements enhanced opportunities for its female members in the period leading up to the American war of independence. Drawing on a massive range of archival sources, Pullin reconstructs the Meetings that monitored the lives of Quaker women and which gave permissions for everything from marriage to missionary work. Paying attention to change over time, and variation across space, Pullin’s book sets a new standard in the study of early modern religious movements.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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When Reality Slows Down