Researching Quakers: UnPlain Quaker Craft – defying accepted wisdom

This is the last of five sessions running throughout 2021 on the processes of academic Quaker research and some of its most recent findings. This session is based on a PhD currently entitled ‘“Women Professing Godliness with Good Works: Quaker Women’s Decorative Arts Before Ackworth and Westtown, 1650-1779’. The focus is on seventeenth-century English needlework and eighteenth-century Philadelphia wax and shellwork. The former half is dedicated to Quaker samplers made in and around the City of London in the seventeenth century and the latter half explores six wax and shellwork shadow boxes made by female members of Quaker Philadelphia’s elite. This session starts to suggest why the art of Quaker women was so decorative and contrasted so greatly with the Quaker tenet of plainness before approximately 1800.

To find out more about the other remaining session in the series, simply click on the link below:

Romance and reality – the life cycle of a PhD