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The Radical Travels of Mary Fisher: Walking and Writing in the Universal Light

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The Radical Travels of Mary Fisher: Walking and Writing in the Universal Light THE RADICAL TRAVELS OF MARY FISHER: WALKING AND WRITING IN THE UNIVERSAL LIGHT Sylvia Brown The Quaker Tapestry was begun in 1981 as a means of depicting the 350 years of the history of the Society of Friends. Along with panels dedicated to such generally known Quakers as George Fox and William Penn, the Tapestry commemorates the seventeenth-century traveller Mary Fisher as “one of the many women ‘publishers of the truth’ ”.1 Both the words and the images on this panel constitute a narrative that not only purports to represent Fisher’s travels but also suggests how they should be read. The Tapestry, however, is only a recent example of a long line of narrative re-fashionings. From the beginning, Fisher’s story was told and retold, by herself and by fellow Quakers, by con- temporaries and near-contemporaries, in order to challenge the idea of difference in its most global sense. In her \ rst extant piece of writing, a letter to an “un just judge” written from York gaol, Fisher invoked God “w[ hi]ch respecteth no man’s person”, urging the judge to do justice by doing likewise.2 Fisher and other early Friends, often to their cost, behaved as if this sort of levelling justice were already a reality in the world, as if the eschatological appearance of the divine Judge who does not unjustly distinguish between persons was happening now, present in an almost performative sense in their words and actions. 1 The Quaker tapestry has 77 panels made by 4,000 men, women, and children. It is on display from April to November each year at the Exhibition Centre in Ken- dal, Cumbria UK. For more information, see the Exhibition Centre’s website www. quaker-tapestry.co.uk. See also Quaker Faith & Practice, 3rd ed. [ The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, 2005], 28:13. The cartoon is also reproduced here, along with a delineation of the Society’s present position on ‘missionary’ work: “We long to reach out to those who may nd a spiritual home in the Society; we do not claim that ours is the only true way, yet we have a perception of truth that is relevant to all if, as we believe, the light to which we witness is a uni- versal light”. How far this non-proselytizing model of witnessing was implicit in the \ rst period of Quakerism is one of the questions of this chapter. 2 “From Mary Fisher presiner at Yarke”, undated, A. R. Barclay MSS., vol. 324, f. 173, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. Quoted by Althea Stewart, “Public Justice and Personal Liberty: Variety and Linguistic Skill in the Letters of Mary Fisher”, Quaker Studies 3 (1998): 143. 40 sylvia brown This chapter will examine Mary Fisher’s travels and extant writings as radical attempts to overcome difference in the light of this eschatological imminence. Of particular concern will be the linkages between sexual, social, ethnic, and religious difference. I hope to show that the radical performative and narrative attempts of early Quakers to dissolve these differences were, although courageous, ultimately uneven in their success. Insisting on the dissolution of difference in one part of the journey or the story often meant not its disappearance but its displacement, on difference being even more deeply etched elsewhere. The Pattern of Mary Fisher’s Journeys The Quaker Tapestry panel dedicated to Fisher reproduces narrative elements and emphases that have been present from the seventeenth century. Fisher’s travels began in England, but the stories of her early journeys among people who might have been assumed to be her own kind, including the English colonists of Barbados and Massachusetts, consist almost entirely of accounts of cruel persecution and endurance. These stories of sufferings, however, point up by contrast the exemplary and glamorous meeting for which Fisher is most famous. Around 1658, Fisher, an unmarried servingwoman from the north of England, tra- velled across much of what is now Greece and into Turkey in order to meet Sultan Mehmed IV, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, where he lay encamped with his army at Adrianople. Contemporary accounts tell us not only that she made it but emphasize the courtesy with which she was received—a fact that might have been especially surprising to an early modern reader steeped in stereotypes of the cruel and lasci- vious Turk and acquainted also, perhaps, with claims that the Great Turk was Antichrist himself.3 Thus, where difference might have been expected, we are offered instead the story of a meeting such as might characterize the millennial ful llment: one where differences of class, nation, gender, and religion apparently melt away. Fisher’s work as a leveller of difference began almost as soon as she was ‘convinced’ around the age of thirty, at which time she was a ser- 3 See Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1971), 181–82. English Protestant millenarians typically predicted the destruction of Rome as one of the signi cant events of the last days; some predicted the destruction of ‘the Turk’ as well (26, 110)..
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