Dublin's Merchant-Quaker: Anthony Sharp and the Community of Friends, 1643-1707.

Bailey, Richard G.

Dublin's Merchant-Quaker: Anthony Sharp and the Community of Friends, 1643-1707, by Richard L. Greaves. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1998. x, 337 pp. $55.00.

Serious scholarly research into Irish Quakers has been increasing in recent years. Richard Harrison, Cork City Quakers, 1655-1939 (1991) was followed by Richard Vann and David Eversley, Friends in Life and Death: the British and Irish Quakers in the Demographic Transition, 1650-1900 (1992) and Helen Hatton, The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland 1654-1921 (1993). In 1997 Harrison published A Biographical Dictionary of Irish Quakers. Now the foremost American authority on seventeenth-century British non-conformity has turned his attention to Ireland. Richard Greaves's two recent monographs God's Other Children: Protestant Non-Conformists and the Emergence of Denominational Churches in Ireland, 1660-1700 (Stanford, 1997) and Dublin's Merchant-Quaker are important additions to the study of Irish Quakerism.

Anthony Sharp left no journal and many of the several thousand papers attributed to him are missing. Most of his polemical exchanges remain in manuscript form. Important guild records and state papers were destroyed during the civil war in 1922. But Greaves succeeds in recreating and enlivening the social and religious world of Sharp through patient, prodigious research that is one of the trademarks of his scholarship. We are also drawn into Sharp's world of guild business, ritual, and procession. When James II ordered Dublin guilds to renew their charters it was Sharp who negotiated for the weaver's guild of which he was a free brother and later master.

Greaves's biography is set within the interpretive framework of sect transformation, following the theoretical studies of Bryan Wilson, most recently in The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements in Contemporary Society (1990). Sharp, who was born in England in 1643 and became a Quaker after migrating to Ireland in 1669, is characterized as "part of the new wave of Quaker leaders -- commercial and professional men" (p. 260) who contributed to a transformation of Quakerism "from sect to denominational church" by "restraining their revolutionary ardor" and embodying "institutionalized religious authority" (p. 262). Sharp's role as guild master and alderman enabled him to enhance his civic influence and establish his wealth as a wool merchant while at the same time advancing the Quakers' cause. His success as a Quaker in commerce helped Quakers become more socially acceptable -- an acceptance "manifest in Quaker participation in the Jacobean magistracy, the guilds, the transatlantic commercial network, and colonial partnerships" (p. 104). It may b argued that Quaker participation in the Jacobean magistracy had less to do with their new-found social respectability, and more to do with James's ill-conceived attempt to break political opposition to his pro-Catholic policies. Nonetheless, newfound wealth and social resFectability were all part of a transformation of Quakerism that occurred during Sharp's time. Sharp himself became one of the wealthiest men in Ireland and that wealth was subject to criticism from Quakers who thought that worldly and materialistic success was antithetical to teachings of the founders of Quakerism. Unfortunately, Greaves does not tell us how Sharp's business was affected by English restrictions on the export of wool cloth after the Irish uprising of 1690.

As a member of the Dublin men's meeting, Sharp's business acumen was an invaluable asset. He dealt with matters relating to administration, finance, recordkeeping, and correspondence. He helped to edit testimonies of deceased Friends and gathered data concerning the sufferings of Irish Friends, especially during the fighting between James and William. He frequently petitioned authorities on behalf of Quakers who suffered distraint for failing to pay tithes. In 1695 Sharp traveled to the Netherlands and Schleswig as a public Friend. He pressed for conciliation during the Wilkinson-Story dispute but condemned some Dublin Friends who espoused Boehme's teachings.

Irish Friends were stricter than their English counterparts in the maintenance of gospel order and Sharp played an important role in shaping and enforcing conduct. On occasion he censored sexual misconduct of Friends. The Dublin men's meeting was especially diligent in regulating Quakers who ran alehouses and Quaker merchants who were involved in the import of tobacco. Worldly pleasures and fashions were eschewed. Life from birth to death was without adornment. Sharp was on a committee that monitored Quaker apparel. His own family life was without blemish, but not without sorrow. His first wife died of tuberculosis and all four of their children died in infancy. His second marriage saw only four of their sixteen children survive into adulthood.

Sharp was no trained theologian like Barclay or Penn. Nor was he a charismatic leader like Fox. But he was an able defender of the faith. He had a substantial debate with Catholics over the matter of women preachers. He also dueled with a Congregationalist over perfection and the nature of the resurrection body, a Presbyterian over immediate revelation, a Church of Ireland clergyman over the sacraments, professional clergy, and tithes, and with Muggletonians over predestination. Greaves's inquiry into Sharp's polemic against the Muggletonians is especially useful since very little is known about Muggletonians in Ireland. This book provides valuable insight into the social, religious, and civic life of an important Quaker leader and his Quaker community in late seventeenth-century Dublin.

Richard G. Bailey

Toulouse, France