‘Do we Still Quake?’ An Ethnographic and Historical Enquiry

Michele Tarter’s (2004) essay, on first generation Friends and their prophecy of celestial flesh, explores the striking bodily manifestations of their spiritual experience, particularly ‘quaking’. Reflecting on this, she writes: ‘it is precisely what we no longer do: quake’. Using interview data from a small group of British Friends I shall show that some twenty-first-century Friends certainly do quake. I use accounts of early quaking, a variety of Quaker commentators, and historical accounts of the understanding of the body, to show the ways in which current quaking is different, and differently understood, from that of early Friends.