Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, Series Number 8).

Cambridge:: Cambridge University Press, 1983.. 1st Edition.. Hardbound . BINDING/CONDITION: dark aqua binding with gilt spine text; a Very Good book, with a Very Good dust jacket.. 8vo (9.25 inches tall) . References, index. Description: The publisher's blurb reads: ''Amid the spiritual and intellectual turmoil of seventeenth-century England, the Quakers emerged and grew into a distinct and enduring religious movement. This book offers a fresh and striking insight into early Quaker history through a study of their distinctive ways of speaking, which, together with their use of silence, served as a specific identifying feature of the movement. Using the combined perspectives of the ethnography of speaking, symbolic anthropology, and the historical sociology of religion, Richard Bauman shows that for the early Quakers speaking and silence were key symbols, providing both a vocabulary for conceptualizing their principles as well as a vehicle for carrying these principles into action. Silence was not merely an abstention from speaking or an empty interval between utterances, but an act as richly textured and multi-dimensional in its meanings as speaking. Both united thought and action. Processor Bauman discusses many instances of the operation of speaking and silence.''