Quaker ministers for their part deployed several ‘coping strategies’ to discuss and contest their religious identity with opponents and followers. It reveals that different authors, including those stereotyped as Ranters, used the stereotype for a variety of polemical and ideological purposes ranging from discipline and persecution to inclusion, persuasion and debate. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, the Quakers are seen as a homogeneous group, identifiable precisely through their own, careful, deployment in print of their status as Quakers. This chapter draws on recent scholarship arguing for stereotyping as a ubiquitous and meaningful process of political mobilisation and debate. Stereotyping has continued to feature in their historical treatment: Colin Davis famously argued that contemporaries and historians had been duped that Ranters ‘did not exist’ beyond the moral panic about them generated in print. As radical antinomian sects, Ranters and Quakers were subjected to vivid, often hostile stereotyping in print in the 1650s, frequently through shared stereotypes of apocalyptic license and libertarian disorder.
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