This study sets out to challenge the accepted notion put forward by some theologians and historians about the nature of mid-seventeenth-century Quaker language in England. Most previous studies of Quaker language look at the prose of just a few of the leading proponents of the movement such as George Fox, Isaac Penington and William Penn. (Baumann’s ethnographic study, 1998, is an exception). This is in addition to publications on language by Quakers of the period themselves (see Farnworth, 1656 and Fox et al, 1660). My doctoral corpus-based study analyses data from a corpus of Quaker tracts I have compiled and which includes tracts by more than 130 different writers, many of them barely known today.
The paper will identify one particular aspect of early Quaker writing in England - that of prophecy - in order to analyse the distinctiveness of the Quaker message from a linguistic perspective. Their message was radically different from conformist Christian denominations of the time in that they believed Christ had already come and the ‘meantime’ of waiting was over. The fifty year period that spans the tracts comprising my two sub-corpora (1655-1670 and 1673-1699) will enable a comparison of the particular connotations of their prophecies concerning the imminent Apocalypse, as they saw it.
I test the hypothesis that between the period of the English Civil War and the end of the seventeenth century there was a reduction in the stridency of tone of their prophetic message as well as the frequency of occurrence with which they expressed it in print. I will compare the corpus data with contemporary multi-domain corpora as well as the King James Version of the Book of Revelations in the Bible, which was the Quakers’ main written source for their prophetic warnings. Quakerism is known for the prevalent but somewhat archaic use in the seventeenth century of thee and thou; this paper aims to go, as it were, ‘beyond thee’.
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