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Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Over the past summer, I spent a month as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, where I was researching an eighteenth-century female preacher. The most entertaining and unexpected find over that month pertained to an image archive classified as “Anti-Quakeriana.” One of the more interesting aspects of Quaker history (in my opinion) is their retention of documents released by rivals and detractors. Hence the origin of the classification, “Anti-Quakeriana.” As a result of such practices, scholars and historians now have an archive rich in cultural contexts and historical negotiations that mark the transitions from a seventeenth-century “schism” to an eighteenth-century “sect.” Below, I briefly discuss a series of paintings and engravings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female ministers.