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“Licencious gaddyng abroade”: A Conflicted Imaginary of Mobility in Early Modern English Protestant Writings

“Licencious gaddyng abroade”: Représentations conflictuelles de la mobilité dans l'imaginaire protestant de la période moderne
Elspeth Graham

Résumés

Cet article suggère que l’histoire d’un simple mot comme « gadding », peut être révélatrice. Si l’on suit ses occurrences dans les imprimés anglais de la période moderne, on constate qu’il est presque toujours utilisé de façon péjorative ; de façon récurrente, « gadding » évoque un esprit troublé, désordonné, indiscipliné, effréné, à bout de nerfs, affairé, malin – ou catholique romain. Le mot est particulièrement utilisé dans les années 1580 et 1660. Ces décennies correspondent à des périodes d’anxiété culturelle, religieuse et politique particulièrement intenses au sujet de l’itinérance et d’autres formes de mobilité géographique. Quand on s’attache notamment à la traduction anglaise de 1583 des Sermons de M. Jean Calvin sur […] Deuteronome et à sa relation avec les textes orignaux de Calvin et leurs contextes, on se rend compte que l’anxiété engendrée par la mobilité est un trait particulièrement anglais de la pensée protestante.

Mais, pour de nombreux membres des sectes du milieu du XVIIe siècle, cette inquiétude héritée du siècle précédent coexiste avec un désir de voyage. C’est donc le conflit imaginatif et spirituel produit par cette tension qui est au cœur de cet article. Commençant avec les récits bien connus des procès d’Anna Trapnel et de John Bunyan, en passant par les exemples de plusieurs récits spirituels de non-conformistes, cette étude retrace les façons dont cette position ambivalente étaye tout une gamme d’usages écrits et oraux. Ces lectures suggèrent qu’en raison de sa dynamique particulière, le protestantisme anglais était prédisposé à devenir un lieu crucial dans la gestion de l’inquiétude politique, économique, épistémique et sociale qu’engendrait la mobilité à l’époque moderne ; elles montrent également comment la mobilité en elle-même est devenue une préoccupation centrale de la pensée protestante anglaise de la période moderne.

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Texte intégral

Fixity and mobility: introduction

1When the Fifth Monarchist and prophet Anna Trapnel was tried as a witch in Truro, in Cornwall, in the far South West of England in 1654, after travelling there from her home in London, Justice Lobb, the foreman of the jury in the court, asked her “how it came to pass that [she] came into that country”. Trapnel answered, “I came as others did that were minded to go into the country”. The interrogation then proceeds:

  • 1 Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea in Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, Helen Wilcox (eds.), (...)

Lobb: But why did you come into this country?
AT: Why might not I come here, as well as into another country?
Lobb: But you have no lands, nor livings, nor acquaintance to come to in this country.
AT: What though I had not? I am a single person, and why may I not be with my friends anywhere?
Lobb: I understand you are not married.
AT: Then having no hindrance, why may I not go where I please, if the Lord so will?
1

  • 2 Cf. Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Cr (...)

2It is the gendered implications of this exchange that are most readily noticed in it.2 But Justice Lobb’s statement, “you have no lands, nor livings, nor acquaintance to come into this country”, also sums up quite precisely those factors which officially determine an individual’s place, identity and status in seventeenth-century English society. The extract is a succinct reminder to us that, in conventional thought, no individual, man or woman, has an identity that is anterior to or transcendent of his or her fixity. “Life” and the more material “livings” are distinct but proximate concepts in the seventeenth century. People are defined legally and socially by the place they belong to, and how they are attached to that place: through possession of land, their income from land or property, or their employment by someone with possession of property or land, as well as by their familial, household and kinship ties. Trapnel, in defending herself, presents – with striking boldness – an alternative articulation of personal identity, inflected through a claim for an individual’s right to geographic mobility. She inverts the conventional understanding of familial ties: in asserting her single status, she implies that marriage or kinship bonds create locational restriction, rather than belonging.

  • 3 Trapnel had, initially, been reluctant to travel to Cornwall, but ultimately became persuaded of th (...)

3The confidence of Trapnel’s self-reported assertion of the right to travel across England, brought about through a congruence of personal, political and spiritual potentials of a particular moment in the 1650s, is defiantly oppositional.3 As such, it reveals the contested values associated with mobility. But, of course, travel and individual geographic mobility take a wide variety of forms and have an equally broad range of motivations in the early modern period. There is domestic and overseas, licensed and unlicensed, travel; there is migration, itinerancy and travel driven by commercial, religious and political concerns, or by the economic needs of survival; there is exploration stimulated by intellectual interests created through new thought and new technologies; there is voluntary and forced mobility; and there is travel arising from inter-regional and international conflict, connection or competition as well as from curiosity about the unknown. In our own past century, and especially over the last two decades or so, attention to the specifics of all these forms of movement and travel has provided increased and more nuanced understanding of the diverse manifestations of the impulse towards mobility in the period and a corresponding diversity of interpretative opinion in relation to it.

  • 4 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, London, Longman, Green and Co, 1912, p (...)
  • 5 The term “history from below” is particularly associated with A. L. Morton in his A People’s Histor (...)

4In particular, the insistent repetition of early modern legislative attempts to control the irregular movement of the poor within England has led has to a wide historical and literary-critical interest in the phenomenon of domestic itinerancy. Early in the twentieth century, R. H. Tawney (quoting Robert Cecil from 1597 on the effects of enclosure in creating depopulated towns and so “fill[ing] the country with rogues and idle persons”) famously remarked that the sixteenth century lived “in terror of the tramp”.4 Tawney’s instigation of attention to this phenomenon from the viewpoint of “history from below”, with its aim of understanding the lives of the poor and displaced from their own perspective, has produced a long inheritance.5 Some forty years ago, Paul Slack re-evidenced the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ preoccupation with unrestrained mobility, summarising contemporary attitudes:

  • 6 Paul Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598-1664”, The Economic History Review, Second Seri (...)

Social commentators of all kinds were unanimous, from the royal physicians concerned about the danger to public health and Bacon appalled at this “seed of peril and tumult in a state” to magistrates and ministers like Lambarde and Perkins who agreed that the laws against vagrants were “grounded upon the laws of God and nature itself”. Vagabonds became the scapegoats for all social problems. They were carriers of rumour, sedition, and disease, and they infected others with their “licentious liberty”.6

  • 7 A. L. Beier, Masterless Men. The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, London and New York, Methue (...)
  • 8 L. Woodbridge, op. cit., p. 16.
  • 9 P. Fumerton, op. cit., p. 4-5.

5And from Slack’s probing behind officialdom’s fear in order to examine “the vagabond as he was”, through the influential work of A. L. Beier in his Masterless Men, to more recent literary re-readings of textual documentation of this long preoccupation with control of the domestically dislocated and rootless, re-valorisations of the lives and significance of mobile poor have continued to emerge in recent decades.7 Linda Woodbridge, for example, examines how differentiation of the settled poor from the mobile poor is integral to all poor law legislation, and sees fear of vagrancy as a projection by “the respectable” onto vagrants of “qualities they disowned in themselves – social mobility, linguistic innovation, sexual misconduct, sedition, idleness.”8 Patricia Fumerton, rather differently, takes a conceptually forceful stance by conceiving of the body of unsettled people as having its own implicit agency in bringing about a positive form of emergent subjectivity; she suggests that the mobile poor represented “a new notion of ‘low’ subjectivity – economic, social, psychological, and metonymic – that escaped the ‘bound’ and made a home of homelessness”.9 All of these interpretations share an understanding that impoverished rootlessness importantly represents a social tension in early modern society, whether that tension derives from a perception of a broad population norm of fixity in place that is threatened by minority mobility or whether itinerancy is seen as a metonym of a more profound – perhaps enabling – social transition enacted through the lives of the mobile poor.

  • 10 Mark Brayshay, “Waits, Musicians, Bearwards and Players: The Inter-Urban Road Travel and Performanc (...)

6A rather different strand of thought on itinerancy, however, suggests that recent research has changed our ideas of the overall extent of travel and mobility in the period. The historical geographer, Mark Brayshay, for instance, in tracing the travels of itinerant minstrels, players and bearwards (often included in official records as vagabonds) states that through recent scholarship, “[t]enacious old myths about the isolation of England’s early modern provincial communities, denied contact with their neighbours and regions further afield by impassable roads and a general fear of travel, have been challenged and laid to rest”.10 Or, focussing on the actualities and technologies of travel rather than the socio-economic issue of itinerancy and vagabondage, Dorian Gerhold asserts that,

  • 11 Dorain Gerhold, Carriers and Coachmasters. Trade and Travel before the Turnpikes, Chichester, Phill (...)

The traditional picture of roads in the horse-drawn era – impassable in winter, vehicles hopelessly bogged down in mud, travellers drowning in deep ruts, irregular and expensive road services, most goods haulage by packhorses prior to turnpiking and all significant traffic passing by river or coastal vessel – was long ago swept away by detailed research, although much history is still written as if it had not been.11

  • 12 Andrew Hadfield, “The Benefits of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel before Empire”, in A Compa (...)

7Domestic travel, the arguments of historical geographers and transport historians suggest, was regular, for a greater variety of purposes and more widespread than was once assumed; mobility should not be viewed only through the lens of the legislative or literary documentation of vagrancy and rogue-culture writings. Similarly, writing in the broader context of travel rather than impoverished itinerancy, but with reference to overseas voyages of exploration and discovery (“bringing back the excitement of the New World to England”), Andrew Hadfield conversely responds to the wealth of recent scholarship on variant forms of overseas travel, exploration and early colonial conquest by arguing that there was less political and economic enthusiasm for, and investment in, such ventures than is commonly supposed: “[t]he Elizabethans were probably not as globally inclined as we often think they were”, he suggests.12

  • 13 Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge Universi (...)

8My own aim in this article is not to explore the meanings or extent of mobility, travel, itinerancy or unrootedness as distinct phenomena in themselves. Like Andrew McRae in his Literature and Domestic Travel, I am interested in “early modern struggles to make sense of mobility […] per se” rather than its particular forms;13 I consciously blur a range of different forms of mobility, reflecting the ideational slippages across different forms of geographic movement that I will suggest prevailed in the period. Nor do I want to adjudicate between differing estimations of the acceptance or fear of mobility. Rather, I want to pick up on the idea, present to some extent in all of the texts that I explore, of an imaginative or psychological hold, both fear-inducing and attractive, that the idea of being variously mobile, unsettled, or itinerant had in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. My concern will be with a range of either conflicted or newly-configured subjectivities produced in relation to a desire for mobility – geographic, social and political – that co-exists with internalisations or projections of a broad cultural anxiety about travel, vagrancy, or wandering unfixity. In particular, I will suggest that a simultaneous uneasiness about mobility, inherited from central Protestant texts, and a compelling desire for travel and mobility came to co-exist for many mid-seventeenth-century nonconformists and sectaries. It is variants and consequences of the imaginative and spiritual conflict produced by this tension that ultimately interest me in this article.

Trials, travails and travels: three accounts

  • 14 “A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr John Bunyan [...]”, in John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Ch (...)
  • 15 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 94-95. The long title of the 1592/3 Act is: For the preven (...)
  • 16 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 100, p. 102.
  • 17 Cf. Keith Wrightson, “The ‘Decline of Neighbourliness’ Revisited” in Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woo (...)
  • 18 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 104.

9An even more widely known text than Trapnel’s Report and Plea, Bunyan’s account of his arrest (November 1660), trial and further imprisonment (1661), provides another – if more oblique – reminder of how many forms of transgression, potentially criminality, could come in the early modern period to be associated with violation of the ties of “livings” and locatedness.14 While Bunyan was, in actuality, indicted under the 1592 Religion Act for having “devilishly and perniciously abstained from church to hear divine service” and having held “several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom”,15 his account of his arrest and trial also suggests underlying concerns deriving from the immediate context of the Restoration Settlement. The focus of the Justices in their disputes with Bunyan is on acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer, the authority to preach, and the (il)legality of holding “private meetings”. Yet the Justices’ questions and admonishments bring underlying issues of relation to place to the surface of their interchanges: Justice Cobb uses the address “neighbour Bunyan” and speaks of the possibility of Bunyan doing “as much good as [he] can, in a neighbourly way, without having such meetings”,16 so stressing the ties of shared locality;17 the more openly hostile Justice Keelin (Kelynge) spells out the penalties, including banishment (“beyond the seas into Spain, or Constantinople, or some other remote part of the world”, as Justice Cobb then puts it),18 for being found guilty under the old Elizabethan Act. Justice Keelin formally gives his judgment at the end of Bunyan’s initial trial:

  • 19 Ibid., p. 99.

Then, he said, hear your judgement. You must be had back again to prison, and there lie for three months following; at three months’ end, if you do not submit to go to church to hear divine service, and leave your preaching, you must be banished [out of?] the realm: and if after such a day as shall be appointed you to be gone, you shall be found in this realm, etc., or to be found to come over again without special licence from the King, etc., you must stretch by the neck for it, I tell you plainly; and so he bid my jailor have me away.19

  • 20 Ibid., p. 129.

10The Justices themselves, as W. R. Owens has pointed out, were all “local landowners who, as Royalists, had been fined and sequestered during the years of the Interregnum”. In particular, “Sir John Kelynge of Southill […] had been imprisoned by Parliament in 1642”.20 Matters of restriction or freedom of movement, dispossession or possession of lands and property, transportation or entitlement to residence within the nation-state, as well as ties to locality are inscribed into the subtext of this account almost as strongly as the overtly described issues of political and religious allegiance.

11Similarly, the immediate legislative concerns of the Restoration authorities with a range of forms of settlement – religious and locational – might be recognized as colouring this retrospective account, just as they inform all of Bunyan's prison writings. It is Bunyan's wife's intervention in the initial court proceedings, that emphasizes most strongly the familial and economic consequences of Bunyan’s imminent imprisonment:

  • 21 Ibid., p.107.

Woman: My lord, said she, he dares not leave preaching, as long as he can speak.
Twis: See here, what should we talk any more about such a fellow? Must he do what he lists? He is a breaker of the peace.
Woman: […] My lord, I have four small children that cannot help themselves, of which one is blind, and have nothing to live upon, but the charity of good people.
[...]
Twis: But Judge Twisdon told her, that she made poverty her cloak; and said, moreover, that he understood I was maintained better by running up and down a-preaching, than by following my calling.
Hale: What is his calling? said Judge Hale.
Answer: Then some of the company that stood by said, A tinker, my lord.
Woman: Yes, said she, and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised, and cannot have justice.21

  • 22 The Poor Relief Act 1662 (14 Car 2, c 12), or An Act for the better Releife of the Poore of this Ki (...)
  • 23 See David L. Wykes, “Introduction: Parliament and Dissent from the Restoration to the Twentieth Cen (...)
  • 24 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 98; p. 129, n. 35.

12As described here, the dispute becomes one over Bunyan’s calling and socio-economic position: whether he is a preacher (with a vocation from God) or a tinker (a calling as an inherited occupation) and, implicitly, the ways in which these callings are both predicated on differing forms of itinerancy. This introduces indirect reference to broader concerns about mobile nonconformist preaching. The soon-to-be-passed 1662 Act “for the better Reliefe of the Poore of this Kingdom”, regularly known as the Settlement Act or Settlement and Removal Act, responded to urgent concern over impoverished rootlessness, reacting to the long-term source of unease I have already mentioned, but now increased by the continued presence, through the 1650s, of displaced and injured soldiers in the aftermath of the Civil Wars as well as itinerant sectaries.22 Together with the 1662 Act of Uniformity which formed the basis of the Restoration religious settlement – re-establishing an episcopal state church, clearly prescribing doctrinal tenets and conformity to the Book of Common Prayer – the Settlement Act brought to a close the relative freedoms of nonconformists during the Commonwealth and served as a tool for the constraint of unlicensed and itinerant preachers.23 Through the combined imports of these different Acts, a conjuncture of issues of illicit movement from place to place by the poor, routinely identified as rogues and vagabonds, with nonconformist activity (itinerancy and holding meetings) seems to have been produced in the minds of enforcing authorities. Bunyan’s report that, in response to one of his arguments over scriptural interpretation at his trial, “Justice Keelin called this pedlar’s French”, a term usually referring to the “jargon of rogues and thieves”, is just one instance of this.24 Bunyan’s account, then, of his trial and imprisonment, structured through his record of such combative dialogues, is – like Trapnel’s Report and Plea – consciously oppositional. In it, we again see how mobility becomes the ground of difference in a contest between conformity and non-conformity that are articulated with adversarial clarity.

  • 25 The manuscript of Richard Norwood’s Journal is held in the Bermuda Archives. It was first published (...)
  • 26 As, for instance, through inclusion in Stachniewski’s and Pacheco’s collection, John Bunyan with Ot (...)
  • 27 For a more extensive exploration of Norwood’s Diary as a work of memory than I make here, see Katha (...)
  • 28 Cf. Katharine Hodgkin, “Childhood and Loss”.
  • 29 The Journal of Richard Norwood, p. 11.
  • 30 Ibid., p. 11, p. 14.

13If Trapnel’s and Bunyan’s narratives polarise values relating to mobility in this way, The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda exemplifies the manifestation of conflicting attitudes and desires as they could be internalised, producing an account of an oscillating life course.25 Here, different epistemic, cultural, economic and religious values, rather than being distributed between politico-religious opponents, constitute instead a riven interiority that is played out both through changing vocational choices and as the matter of personal spiritual travail. It is this last aspect, the retrospective account of his spiritual progression that runs through the text, that has led to Norwood’s Journal having sometimes been identified in recent decades as belonging firmly in the genre of spiritual confession.26 But as the complex patterns of temporality and locational displacement (produced in part by repetitions, deletions, digressions and chronological wanderings evident in the original manuscript of Norwood’s text) reveal, this is also a narrative that is concerned with an attempt to reconcile matters of familial economic misfortune and personal educational disappointments through the work of memory. The narrative strives to come to terms with these life events in themselves as well as to integrate them within a spiritual paradigm.27 Norwood, recognised as a significant mathematician (his importance was affirmed by Isaac Newton), wrote his life story when he was forty-nine, anxiously concerned that he was beginning to forget, through age, his own life history and the working of God’s grace through it.28 His account, seeking to fix his personal memories, offers an unusually vivid account of his secular life and the implication of his traverses through different social, economic and associated cultural milieus in order to mark the workings of grace even in the most spiritually unpropitious moments, rather than focussing on his spiritual path alone. He details instances of the severity of his parents towards him and describes (with some continuing resentment) his father’s slide down the socio-economic scale from gentility, perhaps “through his unskillfulness” in farming, occasioning “very great losses in sheep and otherwise”.29 The consequence of these economic losses was a series of moves for Norwood’s father and all the family: first to Berkhampstead, “where [his father] lived two years upon his means in a very fair house at great charge” but without any income; then a further relocation to Stony Stratford, a town “much given over to deboistness, to swaggering, brawling and fighting, to swearing and drunkenness”.30 For Norwood, these socio-geographic moves, along with a series of educational disappointments and humiliations at school (in one deleted passage he recounts how a schoolmaster told his father he was not capable of benefitting from much education; at another moment he describes how he had been promised a scholarship that was then given to another pupil) prove formative. He takes on the behaviours of those belonging to his new cultural and economic environments, making vocational choices that involve differing forms of itinerancy or mobility. He tells us:

  • 31 Ibid., p. 6.

At Stratford when I was near 15 years of age being drawn in by other young men of the town, I acted a woman’s part in a stage play; I was so much affected with that practice, that had not the Lord prevented it, I should have chosen it before any other course of life.31

14Having avoided the morally and spiritually errant, and actually mobile, life of stage-players, he reports that shortly afterwards,

  • 32 Ibid., p. 14.

I came to London where I was bound apprentice to a fishmonger [...] His house being often frequented by mariners I heard them sometimes discourse of their sea-affairs and of the art of navigation, wherewith I was so much affected that I was most earnestly bent to understand the art which seemed to me to reach [as it] were to heaven, and to see the World [...]32

15The intellectual attraction of learning “the art of navigation” and the promised excitements of world-wide travel lead him to embark on a “course of life” at sea. But Norwood’s maritime vocation, although ultimately pursued long-term, is full of anxiety and doubt. Its physical dangers produce fear and turnings away from it, as do spiritual fears and repentances. He is alternately compelled to travel and to resist travel’s attractions. And, in his account of his early life, geographic mobility and social mobility are particularly strongly linked.

16More explicitly, then, than many spiritual confessions, Norwood’s overall account records a series of socio-geographic and intellectual separations between godly and ungodly cultures. We see, enacted through the emotional and occupational patterns of his remembered life, how a particular spirituality associated with Protestantism occurs as a reconfiguration of competing cultural forces, manifested not as externalised political oppositions but through internalised psychological negotiations and vocational choices. The leitmotif of mobility produced by Norwood’s exposure to conflicting cultures, each predicated on a different form of itinerancy or travel, and culminating in his retrospective reconfiguration of actual relocations and travels as a metaphoric journey of spiritual travails, encapsulates the heightened intensity that co-existing paradigms of the opportunities of mobility and a sense of its iniquitous terrors might have for the seventeenth century godly.

  • 33 There are two different manuscript versions of Dionys Fitzherbert’s text: her original autograph ve (...)
  • 34 On Fitzherbert’s autobiographical writing, also see: Katharine Hodgkin, “Dionys Fitzherbert and the (...)
  • 35 K. Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin, op. cit., p. 177.
  • 36 Ibid.. The particular importance of obedience in accepting parents’ choices of marriage partner is (...)
  • 37 K. Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin, op. cit., 177.
  • 38 Katharine Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin, op. cit., p. 179.

17Enacted not in the wide world of the mariner, but in the female world of the domestic, Dionys Fitzherbert’s manuscript autobiography provides a rather different narrative of mobility-predicated trials and travails – not legal as Trapnel’s and Bunyan’s, nor vocational as Norwood’s, but purely spiritual and bodily.33 Fitzherbert was born into an Oxfordshire gentry family in about 1580. In the early years of the seventeenth century, she wrote an account – without any pre-existing model of such an autobiographical form to shape her work – detailing her family life and relationships as she grew up, her spiritual development and first calling and, most dramatically, her descent into what she terms a “distraction”, or spiritual, physical and mental crisis that she experienced in her late twenties.34 Tracing back her path into “distraction” and “dissolution”, Fitzherbert identifies a series of causal events and decisions. She tells us that “My first calling was by a long and grievous sickness, being near the age of fourteen”; the bodily experience of crisis brings about a spiritual turning point. Subsequently, she tells us, “[f]or many years after my calling I lived in my father's house, where I showed indeed my calling was not in vain”.35 But a change in these circumstances, her being sent away from her home into another household, initiated a period of emotional and spiritual unsettling. She reveals, “I lived from home a year with a kinswoman of my father, by reason he took displeasure against me, about a gentleman he would have had me marry and I could by no means affect”.36 Later, after returning home for a period, she moved into another household: “[a]nd then (which I think was preparative to my fall) [I] went to live with my Lady H., being a papist, yet as then going to church [...]”.37 Yet another move took her “to my Lady L., where I was both beloved and happy […] And here was the beginning of my folly, in that I could not endure her often checks, which bred in me a gadding humour to be gone”.38 Her restlessness increased; she found it increasingly difficult to remain in any of several households that she temporarily joined. Eventually, she succumbed to her “distraction”, which, as she describes it, was characterised by intense episodes of hallucination and delusion when she did not recognise members of her own family (she thought they had come to kill her), believed her doctor was the master of the heavens, and ate coal.

  • 39 Felicity Nussbaum, “ ‘By these words I was sustained’: Bunyan’s Grace Abounding”, ELH, 49.1, Spring (...)

18Throughout, there is a recurrence of periods of tension in which Fitzherbert presents both acceptance of, and resistance (her own or by implication through others) to, forms of authority: her father, the ladies she serves, and the Anglican church. (Her narrative accounts are addressed “To the glorious and renounced Church of England our deare Mother” and surrounded by metatextual materials: letters to church figures and anti-papist polemics.) Conflicts between her unusual independence in rejecting her father’s chosen suitor and her familial love; between her own calling and commitment to the doctrines of the state church and her affection for the recusant Lady H.; and between her fondness for Lady L., but her resentment of her scoldings, produce a pattern of wayward compliance, reminiscent of that “disobedient dependence” that Felicity Nussbaum once identified in Bunynan’s Grace Abounding.39 In conjunction with this, Fitzherbert’s narrative, as it moves towards the point of crisis, comes to be characterised by a rhythm of unsettled belonging giving way to an impulsion towards restless movement. Her term for this restlessness, “a gadding humour”, associated as it is here with a precursor state to madness or “distraction”, brings together ideas about disordered spiritual, psychological, social, geographic, and embodied mobility that might be associated with a specifically Protestant imaginary.

Gaddings

  • 40 L. Woodbridge, op. cit., p. 81. She cites, Simon Fish, A Supplication for the Beggars, London, ca., (...)

19Linda Woodbridge, in a sometimes-corresponding line of argument to my own, has suggested that, “the discourse of vagrancy was integral to the Protestant project in England”, basing her claim on a reading of Simon Fish’s A Supplication of Beggars (ca. 1529) which applies the terms “ ‘beggars and vagabonds,’ to the Roman Catholic clergy”.40 But it is the eloquent little word, “gadding”, as used by Fitzherbert in describing a warning symptom of her decline into “distraction”, rather than a further consideration of the history of vagrancy, that moves me from a legal, political and autobiographical concern with itinerancy and vagabondage to a broader imaginative fascination with errant wandering and ways in which the co-existing desire for mobility and the heightened terrors of itinerancy could become internalised. Tracking the appearance of the word “gadding” itself in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed texts offers one route into thinking further about the imaginative hold that irregular mobility could have on collective imaginations and ways in which the concept of mobility itself might produce a more general category-blurring unease.

  • 41 My findings here refer to a database I compiled between 2000 and 2005 of all uses of the word “gad” (...)
  • 42 See, for instance: Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles comprising 1 The d (...)
  • 43 John Bannister, An antidotarie chyrurgicall containing great varietie and choice of all sorts of me (...)
  • 44 John Foxe, The Pope confuted The holy and apostolique Church confuting the Pope. The first action. (...)
  • 45 John Foxe, The Pope confuted, The Second Action, 51, EEBO document image 55.
  • 46 John Fielde, A caueat for Parsons Hovvlet concerning his vntimely flighte, London, printed by Rober (...)

20From a database of appearances of this word in print between 1570 and 1680, it becomes clear that it is part of an everyday vocabulary, used across the political and social spectrum.41 And an overview of the word’s use produces several further general observations. “Gadding” is rarely used neutrally: only a few instances occur, such as in an early natural-historical poem on bees or in Holinshed’s chronicles.42 But it occurs as a pejorative term – for movement of many sorts – in contexts as different as those of high religio-political policy and the domestic or familial where it is associated with personal self-awareness of moral or spiritual flaws. Frequently used in medical texts, it describes, as John Banister puts it in 1589, “the maligne gadding and the descending of humours”, or any internal disordering of the body or malign disease: the metastasis of tumours or the spread of infection.43 It is associated with illness as corporeal instability and change. And in accordance with Linda Woodbridge's linking of Protestantism with fears of vagrancy, the idea of gadding is associated both with denunciations of Roman Catholic practices of pilgrimage (the sacred as a geographic site, rather than as an inner state of grace) and other forms of errant Roman Catholic mobility. In his The Pope Confuted, John Foxe, for instance, asks, What [are] your other demande[s] then? [...] That we should pro[s]trate our [s]elves before pictures and images? That wee should gadde on pilgrimage to stockes and stoanes? the holy scriptures do call you from nothing more earnestly [...]”.44 And he demands fro[m] what au[n]cie[n]t brood were broached [...] their absolu[t]ions, pardons, [pa]pish buls, romish stations, continual gaddings to the apostles [...] dedication of temples, shry[v]ing of saincts, con[j]uring [...] of salt & water [...]”.45 Or, John Fielde, in describing the plots against Elizabeth I on behalf of the Roman Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, writes, “Who had [...] their Seminaristes and landleapers to gadde from place to place, and from country to countrye, and from gentlemans house to gentlemans house to shedde the seede of [...] papistes”?46

  • 47 In, for example: Robert Greene, Arbasto The anatomie of fortune [...], London, printed by J. Charle (...)
  • 48 Philippe de Mornay, A vvoorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion, written in French (...)
  • 49 John Norden, A sinfull mans solace most sweete and comfortable, London, [printed] by Richard Iones, (...)
  • 50 John Milton, Of prelatical episcopacy, and vvhither it may be deduc’d from the apostolical times by (...)
  • 51 Richard Baxter, Directions and perswasions to a sound conversion for prevention of that deceit and (...)
  • 52 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013; 2015 pa (...)
  • 53 Thomas Bentley, The sixt lampe of virginitie conteining a mirrour for maidens and matrons: or, the (...)
  • 54 William Slatyer, The compleat Christian, and compleat armour and armoury of a Christian, fitting hi (...)

21But most commonly, “gad” is used in association with the words “wanton” (wanton gadding) or “astray” (gadding astray) and while it refers primarily to physical wandering – it is a favourite word of that most exuberant and physically graphic of dramatists and prose writers, Robert Greene, famous for his coney-catching pamphlets, while Gervase Babington chastises those taken up with “carding, dising, & tabling, bowling, and cocking, stage plaies and summer games, whether gadding to this ale or yt, to this bearebaiting & that bullbaiting” or “ungodly gadding [...] to Churchales” – it is also used to denote any unfocussed thought, moral sensibility or behaviour.47 Philippe de Mornay, criticising Platonists, writes of how, “[...] their owne braynes [...] gad out into a thousand imaginations”.48 The cartographer and chorographer, John Norden, significantly uses the term, in his dialogues between the sinful man and Solace in A sinfull mans solace in, perhaps, implicit critique of his own geographic interests and publications: the sinful man confesses, “I doe repent my gaddyng longe astray”, and Solace decries “gad[ding] abroade to wantonnesses”, referring both to actual travels and spiritual error.49 John Milton in his Of Prelatical Episcopacy warns of the intellectual folly of using classical, rather than biblical, authority in relation to the issue of bishops: “while we leave the Bible to gadde after [...] traditions of the ancients, we heare the ancients themselvs confessing, that what knowledge they had in this point was such as they had gather’d from the Bible”.50 And Richard Baxter is critical of “gadding from one opinion to another” and the errors of those whose “[t]houghts are gadding abroad the world, and stragling after every trifle [...]”, just as Thomas Rogers castigates “speaking vainlie” and “gadding idelie”, identifying unruly speech with frivolous physical rushing around.51 The spiritual or emotional busyness implied by “gadding” emerges as the antithetical state to that spiritual quietness sought by all Protestants. Alex Ryrie, in his examination of what Being Protestant meant affectively, intellectually, and in practice, shows how the elusive quality of stillness, “described in spiritual terms, as peace of conscience”, was constantly and urgently sought after (partly as assurance of grace or salvation) and how “enduring peace was longed and prayed for”.52 Gadding propensities represent the failure of this quest. And very often, perhaps inevitably, “gadding” is an explicitly gendered term. Examples abound of the association of women with gadding. Amongst these, we find Thomas Bentley writing of the “ […] woman that gaddeth from hir owne house [...]” or the “[…] wicked woman [with] libertie to gadde abroad at her will”;53 or William Slatyer castigating the woman with “usurping dominion” over her husband who uses “unreverence, unquietnesse, causing trouble, and griefe to him, or [who is] a crosse, and not a helpe to him, or [is] idle at home, or gadding abroad”.54

  • 55 R. Hakluyt, Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent: Collected an (...)
  • 56 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie faithfully gathered (...)
  • 57 Martin Luther, A commentarie or exposition vppon the twoo Epistles generall of Sainct Peter, and th (...)

22In general, gadding represents a lack of settlement in place or mind that is symptomatically: disordered, unruly, hectic, frazzled, busy, unquiet, frivolous, malign. Through use of this word, physical and geographic movement, mental busyness and bodily disorder come to be associated with one another. Characteristically, in fact, the appearance of the word “gadding” signals a slippage between the physical and the emotional, the behavioural and the moral or spiritual. And in tracking use of this word, a remarkably clear pattern emerges in relation to its frequency of use: there are peaks in print appearance of the word in the late 1570s and 1580s; and then in the 1650s and early 1660s. These correlate with periods of particularly strong anxiety about vagrancy, consciousness of mobility and legislation against illicit domestic itinerancy. The 1650s, the period of the Commonwealth, sees major shift in political organisation but, as I have observed, it is also marked by the fall-out of the Civil Wars of the 1640s: large numbers of displaced people, especially discharged soldiers, and the activities of a variety of dissenting groups (such as the Fifth Monarchists with whom I began). The 1580s is likewise a decade of political and religious uncertainties: international war between Protestant and Roman Catholics nations; domestic eruptions of radical Protestant dissent, particularly the Brownist movement, but also of increasingly fierce legislation against recusants. It is also the decade of, to use Hadfield’s words again, “bringing back [...] to England the excitement” of voyages of discovery, or of mobility on the grand scale: Francis Drake returned to Plymouth from his voyage of circumnavigation on the Golden Hind in September 1580, while in 1582 Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America was published.55 Yet this is, too, the decade when Calvinist doctrine of double predestination begins to be established as Anglican orthodoxy (further, if ambiguously, confirmed in 1595 by Archbishops Whitgift's pronouncements in the Lambeth Articles.) So, an imaginative mindscape characterised by mobility, expansion and the category changes associated with the new knowledges produced by travel can be seen to have occurred in tension with the implementation of religious doctrine associated with Calvinism. And it is in 1583 that a six hundred and eighty five page translation by Arthur Golding of Calvin’s sermons on Deuteronomy were published in London.56 While the words of my title quotation for this article, “licencious gaddyng abroade”, associating unconstrained mobility with moral and spiritual waywardness, are taken from the 1582 English translation of Martin Luther’s A commentarie or exposition vppon the twoo Epistles generall of Sainct Peter,57 perhaps suggesting a fundamental association of an anti-gadding sensibility with Protestant thought, it is in this translation of Calvin’s sermons that we find the greatest density of uses of the words “gad” or “gadding” in the whole period between 1570 and 1680. The exceptional regularity with which the word appears (every seventeen pages, on average) might suggest, indeed, that this text can be considered some sort of originating focal point of a particular sensibility based on suspicion of restlessness that prevails, in tension with the appeals of mobility, for the next century.

  • 58 All biographical information on Calvin is from: Wulfert de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin, tran (...)

23Brief attention to the context of Calvin’s own preaching might, by way of both background and contrast, serve to draw out the particular significance of this English translation and its apparently curious emphasis on the ills of gadding. From 1549 onwards, Calvin had established a practice in Geneva of preaching on the New Testament every Sunday, while on all other days of the week, he preached on the Old Testament.58 In particular, beginning on 20th March 1555, he preached two hundred and twenty sermons on Deuteronomy (more than on any other book of the Bible, except Isaiah on which he produced three hundred and forty-three sermons). The clear importance of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses and the second giving of the Law, to contemporary Protestant Reformers is elucidated in his likening of the Old Testament Jews of Moses’ time to himself and his contemporaries:

  • 59 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, p. 2, EEBO documen (...)

Thus we see in effect, what the ground worke of this Booke is: that is to wit, that God hauing erst alreadie giuen his law to the people of Israel, and warranted it as much as was requisite: vouchsafed because of their hard hartednesse & sturbornesse, to giue a larger declaration therof, than Moses had put in writing as yet. And hee hath not only opened the meaning of the Law, but also exhorted the people to keepe it better than they had done before, vpbraiding them with their lewdnesse in that they had beene so vnrulie and so ill disposed, to receiue the instruction of their maker and redeemer at the first time. Nowe, all the thinges that wee see in this people, belong vnto vs. And would GOD wee resembled not the Iewes in any thing, I meane as in these pointes. But if euer there were too much hardenesse of hearte in them, howe much more is it to bee founde in vs nowadayes?59

  • 60 Cf. Elspeth Graham, “ ‘Lewd, Profane Swaggerers’ and Charismatic Preachers: John Bunyan and George (...)

24Since a prime function of all religious structures is the separation of the pure from the impure; the sacred from the profane; good from wrongdoing; salvation from perdition, return to the Mosaic code and reinterpretation of it (especially in the retrospective light of the New Testament) is clearly crucial to the whole Reformation enterprise.60 Re-visiting the Mosaic code is at the theological core of re-visioning, re-ordering all separations of the sacred from the impure that are necessarily involved in re-forming Christianity, through various stages of separation from Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. In this context, the frequency of pejorative use of the words “gad” and “gadding” in the English translation of Calvin’s sermons on Deuteronomy directly confirms that to be in the realm of the Protestant sacred is to be settled in body and spirit. Stillness in, and of, person and spirit is central to grace and to the lives of the truly faithful remnant. Yet if we compare Calvin’s original French with Arthur Golding’s translation, it becomes evident that there is a peculiarly English emphasis to this. Golding's translation is, in the main part, very close to the original: it is quite literal. But the translation of the word “gad” is exceptional: there is no single French word that translates into the English “gad” or has a correlative verbal force. We find, for instance, in the English translation:

  • 61 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, “On Wednesday the (...)

[…] his heart laid open vnto vs: yet are we locked vp on our part, and we giue him no entrance, but rather wee be gadding and ful of vanitie, and we be so farre off from being touched with the doctrine, and from receiuing it to holde our selues wholly to it, & to set our minds vpon it, and to be setled in right obedience to it; that rather the cleane contrarie is to be seene. (My italics).61

  • 62 John Calvin, Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, 58 vols, Edouard Cunitz, Johann-Wilhelm Ba (...)
  • 63 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, “On Wednesday the (...)
  • 64 John Calvin, Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. 25, p. 677.
  • 65 The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that gad is a possible backformation from vagabond.

25The equivalent “gadding” phrase in Calvin’s French original reads, “[…] nous sommes volages, et pleins de vanite […]”.62 Or similarly, the English, “Wel may men coakes themselves for a time, and beare themselves on hand that all the world fauoreth them: but in the end, god will make their enterprises to vanish away, so they shall be all confounded. And why? Because they ranne gadding about, and kept not the right way” (my italics),63 derives from the French: ‘ […] Et pourquoi? D’autant qu'ils sont esgarez et qu’ils n’ont pas tenu le droit chemin.”64 Through these and the further examples that it would be possible to proliferate, it becomes apparent that there is a cluster of French verbs and adjectives which are rendered into variant forms of the single English verb, “gad”. While the French originals, such as “esgarer” (to be led astray), “s’esgarer” (to become lost) or the adjective “volage” (fickle, faithless or perhaps flighty), might contain a metaphorically embedded sense of movement, it is a weak sense of movement, distanced as a long-established metaphor, made abstract. The verbal force of the English monosyllabic “gad”, with its two hard consonants, and its (and its variants) connotation of wilfully frivolous and restless activity, and its possible etymological back-formation from vagabond, is absent.65

26This disparity perhaps reflects the differing historical contexts to Calvin’s preaching in Geneva in the 1550s and that of England as an island nation-state in the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century. The establishment, out of local and Europe-wide conflict, of Geneva as a sixteenth century Protestant centre from the 1530s onwards, with Calvin as its spiritual leader meant that Protestant refugees were welcomed (by Calvin’s church, if not with the same enthusiasm by the city authorities) from across Europe. This wave of religio-political migration necessarily produced new forms of policy-making and new organisational and administrative structures. Amongst the initiatives developed in Geneva to support immigrants, was that of the deacons who cared for the French-speaking poor, including French Protestant refugees, who appointed Denis Raguenier in 1549 as a stenographer to note down Calvin’s sermons in shorthand as he preached. These were then printed and the deacons used the proceeds to fund poor relief and to support the influx of refugees. The relationship between the preached sermon as event, involving a dynamic interaction between preacher and congregation, and the fixed words of the print sermon becomes, through this, a further element to be deployed in Protestantism’s negotiations of the opposed impulses towards fixity and fluidity or mobility.

27John Foxe firmly attributed the spread of reformed religion to the enablement of print. In his Acts and Monuments, he stresses its democratising capacity: “through the light of printing, the world beginneth nowe to have eyes to see, and heades to judge”. More emphatically, he adds,

  • 66 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, London, imprinted by Iohn Daye, dwellyng ouer Aldersgate beneath S. (...)

By this printing, as by the gift of tongues, and as by the singular organe of the holy Ghost, the doctrine of the Gospell soundeth to all nations and countreys under heaven: and what God revealeth to one man, is dispersed to many and what is known in one nation, is opened to all.66

  • 67 A. Cambers, Godly Reading, p. 3.
  • 68 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing. English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590-1640, Cambridge, Cambr (...)

28But scholarly understanding of the spread of Protestantism is no longer linked to the advent of print in such a direct fashion, in spite of the importance that early Protestants themselves gave to it. Print culture and the process of reading itself are now seen as more interactive and complex than they once were. While Protestants gave enormous significance to books, and in particular the Bible, they, as Andrew Cambers puts it, “used their books, dog-earing pages, underlining passages and writing in their margins”.67 And orality retained its force as a dominant mode of communication. Not only were books read aloud, recuperating them into the traditions of oral practice, but prime importance was attributed to preaching, as Arnold Hunt has suggested.68 The Devonshire preacher, Richard Carpenter, summed this up in declaring in a sermon in 1616:

  • 69 Richard Carpenter, A Pastoral Charge, Faithfully Given and Discharged at the Triennial Visitation o (...)

This is our worke [...] as a conduit pipes of grace to convey to the thirsty soules of our hearers, the living water of God’s word, and to the mesaraicall veynes in the body naturall, through which the spirituall foode must passe, whereby the members of Christes body mysticall are to be nourished up into everlasting life. This is our worke.69

  • 70 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, Stanford Unive (...)
  • 71 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, 2 vols., Philadelphia, Presby (...)
  • 72 See Debora Kuller Shuger, “Sacred Rhetoric in the Renaissance”, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.), Renaiss (...)
  • 73 Wulfert de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin, Louisville and London, Westminster John Knox Press, (...)

29Preaching participates in what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has called a “culture of presence”, producing “presence effects” rather than a “culture of representation” with attendant “meaning effects”.70 It is fully embodied and communicates in the moment, unlike a representational print culture, where the reader’s understanding of meaning is detached from the instant of authorial origin. For Calvin himself, preaching is liturgically and theologically essential. He writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there is not to be doubted, a church exists”.71 And the effect of his personal charisma (in a non-theological sense) as a preacher was clearly critical in his establishment of Geneva as a Protestant centre.72 The performativity of the preached sermon as an event and the shared experience of listening to his sermons crucially created a sense of belonging amongst those whose enforced mobility as refugees had brought them – often impoverished and grieving for loss of community, although resolute in belief – to Geneva. But his sermons have a second life, too, as printed texts exploited as commodities.73

30The preached word becomes available as a form of charitable consumerism. So, poor relief, and the issues of migration that lie behind them, have quite different dynamics and meanings from those in the English context. In Calvin’s Geneva, migration as historical process and as an idea, underpins the establishment of community and furthers his mission; in Protestant England, a conjuncture of associations between itinerancy or travel and Roman Catholic practices of pilgrimage and seditious networking; the perceived criminality of the poor; the unbalanced humours of illness; and spiritual inconstancy produces an overall notion of unregulated and unrighteous mobility that serves as the Other of Protestant inwardness and spiritual stillness. Yet, as I have aimed to show through exploration of several Protestant autobiographical writings, the exhortation to stillness at the core of English Protestantism is conflicted. It co-exists with an equally emphatic, contrary desire for travel and mobility that prevailed throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century, created by actual necessities of economic migration, or by developing technologies of travel, and that manifests itself in the formation of new subjectivities where individual agency and the right to roam or travel replaced place-bound fixity. And in particular, this desire was especially compelling for many mid-seventeenth-century sectaries (as my opening discussion of Trapnel and Bunyan suggested).

Mobility and fixity; preaching, prophesying and print

  • 74 Ironically, it was, reputedly, the bodily rigours of excessive preaching that were the eventual cau (...)

31From a glance at the history of publication of Calvin’s thought, a distinction becomes evident between the spoken word of preaching and his theology. The preached sermon is a performative and interactive event, crucial to Calvin’s mission of building a cohesive reformed community; his theology is consciously created for print as a legacy (he worked intensely on his expanded version of The Institutes while he was ill and feared he was dying) and as a fixed statement of doctrine. The act of preaching, it is clear, is not secondary to the production of doctrinal texts, but through its direct interaction with his congregation, is fundamentally important as the lived embodiment of doctrine.74 But nor is print secondary to the oral and the aurally experienced. Rather, the relationship between print and forms of community embodied in speaking and hearing the word of God becomes a third element in the dialectical exchanges between Protestantism’s desire for stillness and fixity on the one hand and an urge towards fluidity and mobility, or what, in the English context, might be described as “gadding”, on the other. The Genevan context, then, allows for a relatively clear differentiation between the uses of print media and oral forms, and a functional exploitation of print as a vehicle for sustaining the community economically and for consolidating doctrinal transmission. The English context, however, underpinned by an anxious relationship to issues of domestic mobility and poor relief, exploits print media rather differently to effect a range of more complex textual negotiations between itinerancy and fixity.

  • 75 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the vvorld and the religions obserued in al (...)
  • 76 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue bookes. The first, contayning the voyages and peregri (...)
  • 77 Thomasin Westcott, English Post-Reformation Protestant Pilgrimage: Texts and Contexts, unpublished (...)

32The particular role of English print publication as a mediating agent between stillness and mobility, holding fear of, and fascination with, travel in a precarious tension, might be instanced by the popular published collection of the Calvinist minister, Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrims, a multi-volume compilation of writings on “Peregrinations”, “Discoveries”, and “Voyages”', first published in 1613.75 Purchas’s parish in Eastwood, Essex included Leigh-on-Sea, a maritime town; Purchas his Pilgrims is a compilation of the accounts of the voyages made by the seamen who constituted Purchas’ seaport congregation. (A later 1625 edition also included, along with these, accounts from a large collection of manuscripts that Purchas had inherited from Richard Hakluyt.)76 And in its prefatory and paratextual materials, it magnifies that tension related to all forms of geographic movement that is at the centre of English Calvinism. The very title, Purchas His Pilgrims, in its anachronistic and contentious reference to pilgrimage, seems to suggest a highly un-Protestant notion of journeying to a specific location (the Holy Land or a shrine) as a mode of religious devotion that depends on perception of the site of the sacred as external and locationally distant. Yet, in spite of unease at the notion of pilgrimage, as Thomasin Westcott has suggested, both the idea and the practice of pilgrimage have a residual presence in seventeenth-century Protestant England, although detached from their Roman Catholic doctrinal significance.77 Purchas himself attempts to circumvent the difficulties that his title produces by a substitution of scientific or natural-historical discovery for apprehension of the sacred in the notion of pilgrimage. But the anxiety produced by this manoeuvre results in the convolutions of syntax and reference suggested by his introductory matter as he attempts to reconcile theological and secular epistemologies:

  • 78 S. Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue books, 1625, “To the Reader”, p. 5.

33Wisdome is said to be the Science of things Divine and humane. Divine things are either naturall or supernaturall [...] they are spiritually (with a spirituall Eye) discerned [...] the proper subject of Theologie, and not the peculiar argument of this Worke; which notwithstanding being the labour of a professed Divine, doth not abhorre from the same; but occasionally every where by Annotations, and in some parts professedly by speciall Discourses, insinuateth both Historie and Mystery of Godlinesse, the right use of History, and all other Learning.78

34Both the anxieties present here, and an attempt to control them, are then further suggested by the frontispiece to Volume 1 of the 1625 version. [Fig.1] This, with its dense proliferation of visual images, has at its base an engraved portrait of Purchas as author. The portrait is flanked by maps of the world, visual depictions of a scientific equipment, biblical characters, contemporary explorers and reference to God’s word. At the top, a panel illustrating the idea of pilgrimage shows a jostling mix of discourses, emphasising the moment of arrival at the end of pilgrimage or holy war; but the busyness and the connotations – of both this panel and the whole illustration – are held temporarily in stasis by the symmetries of the overall design and the authorial and interpretative control of Purchas himself. The content of the mariners’ texts may narrate voyages, and the illustrations may depict aspects of navigation and pilgrimage or crusade, but the underpinning authorial or editorial figure of Purchas anchors them in stillness.

  • 79 Ibid., Ch. VI, I.i.74, marginal note, EEBO document image 56.

35Another, related, manoeuvre in his metatextual materials serves to distance Purchas himself from the “Pilgrimages” and the accounts of flamboyant mobility that make up the core text: he verbally separates his own world as compiler of a print text from the contents of that text, commenting, “Even I, which have writte so much of travellers & travells, never travelled 200. miles from Thaxted in Essex, where I was borne.”.79 It is his role as an author that enables him to establish himself as a still centre, a static point that is consciously distanced from the stories of maritime mobility. An implicit distinction is created between narrative content and the authorial process through such verbal and visual manoeuvres. And it is forms of material textuality produced by the print medium itself which allow for the complex pattern of alignments and separations that are generated through the juxtaposition of knowledge production by an immobile author-editor, presiding over the text as a whole, with the sailors’ experiential narratives of mobility that make up the textual content.

Fig 1. Frontispiece to the 1625 edition of Purchas his Pilgrims

©The 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop, Maryland, USA

36Purchas’s “pilgrims” themselves, through their accounts (a word combining reference to both a narrative form and to a mariner’s navigational records), contribute to the formation of a travel genre that is established more distinctly later in this period. If, in time, ideas of spiritual travails and of physical travel will emerge as belonging to quite separate genres, for Purchas, they are anxiously entwined. And in some regards, Purchas’s text may appear strikingly similar to Bunyan’s later The Pilgrim's Progress: Purchas avows of his pilgrims, “God hath prepared for them a city”. The frontispiece illustration of this city similarly prefigures later depictions of Bunyan’s Celestial City and the visual illustration of the town of Mansoul in Bunyan’s The Holy War. [Fig. 3] Most strikingly, however, we see in the patterns of alignment and splitting produced by the print form of Purchas his Pilgrims, a variant of the negotiations that are manifest in the narrative strategies of Norwood’s Diary and in the textual separation between Norwood’s published mathematical and navigational works and his manuscript spiritual and autobiographical “account”. In instances such as these, the possibilities of category separation between the impulse to travel or the new knowledges associated with marine voyaging and exploration, and the stillness required and desired as integral to Calvinist spirituality, can be negotiated through the technical opportunities of print forms and their structures as distinct from oral or manuscript modes.

Fig. 2. Panel from the frontispiece to the 1625 version of Purchase his Pilgrims

©The 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop, Maryland, USA

37 From the anxious category manoeuvres of a mainstream Calvinist such as Purchas, let me turn now to a final consideration of a group of texts by nonconformist preachers and writers and their rather different exploitations of the imaginatively and generically conflicted issue of mobility. For Bunyan, as for Calvin, print publication could replace his prime relationship with his congregation when he was separated from them. But we also see how the different print genres adopted by Bunyan produce different negotiations of itinerancy that extend beyond Calvin’s differing recourses to the spoken word as a fluid, living enactment of spiritual engagement with his community and his fixing of his spiritual legacy in print. As Andrew McRae has said of Bunyan’s writings:

  • 80 A. McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, op. cit., p. 117.

His own autobiography, Grace Abounding, is somewhat surprising in its locatedness. Indeed it demonstrates rather that what he coyly refers to as “my calling”, his work as a tinker, bore little relation to the aimless wandering of Elizabethan paranoia. While his occupation inevitably drew him into “the country”, as though following familiar territorial circuits, the narrative depicts a life firmly centred within Bedford.80

38Yet Grace Abounding, obeying the generic demands of the spiritual conversion narrative, actually marks a change of calling: from tinker to preacher. And in focussing on this spiritual journey of his own, it is perhaps not surprising that he creates a stillness at its centre, that very locatedness in place that McRae notes. While for Bunyan there is a political compulsion to advocate the right to mobility of the poor (however distinct his own itinerancy might be from theirs), there is also a generic sophistication to his writings that allows him to negotiate the anxieties of travel and mobility in textually complex ways. The allegorical texts The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Holy War, for instance, situate themselves firmly through their openings in specific genres – the dream narrative and the imaginative proto-travel narrative – before setting out on their allegorical story-telling. The pull-out illustrated frontispiece to the 1682 edition of The Holy War, [Fig. 3] in its depiction of a translucent or palimpsestic body through which human corporeality, human spirituality and metropolitan place are conflated, provides a curiously fantastical version of Bunyan’s allegorical mode. It reproduces, with visual literalism, the verbal descriptions Bunyan gives of his narrator's travels and of his arrival at the town of Mansoul:

In my Travels, as I walked through many Regions and Countries, it was my chance to happen into that famous Continent of Universe; a very large and spacious Country it is. It lieth between the two Poles, and just amidst the four points of the Heavens. It is a place well watered, and richly adorned with Hills and Valleys, bravely situate; and for the most part (at least where I was) very fruitful, also well peopled, and a very sweet Air.

39Then:

  • 81 John Bunyan, The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest, Oxford, Clarendon, 1980, p. 1; (...)

Now, there is in this gallant Country of Universe a fair and delicate Town, a Corporation, called Mansoul: a Town for its Building so curious, for its Situation so commodious, for its Priviledges so advantageous; (I mean with reference to its Original) that I may say of it, as was said before, of the Continent in which it is placed, There is not its equal under the whole Heaven. […] This famous Town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out at which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the Walls: to wit, Impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor forced, but by the will and leave of those within. The names of the Gates were these, Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate, Nose-gate, and Feel-gate.81

40The illustration pictorially represents the way allegory operates through a layering of meanings, but equally it reveals how physical travel for Bunyan typically leads to a fixed destination, figured through the stasis of place or as the embodied human soul. Conflict, mobility and travail – both physical and spiritual – are articulated in relation to a desired resting place, a home, through Bunyan’s varied articulations of mobility and stillness. And the particular dynamic between mobility and stillness in each of his texts is bound up with his imaginative manipulations of the particular demands of different literary forms.

Fig. 3: “The Towne of Mansoul”, John Bunyan, The Holy War, pull-out illustration facing page 1.

© British Library Board. Shelfmark: C.59.a.8

41It is in his prefatory “Author’s Apology For His Book”, that Bunyan most famously confronts the problem of allegory generally and worries at the particular allegorical status of The Pilgrim’s Progress, explaining its private and almost involuntary production:

  • 82 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. From this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wh (...)

And thus it was: I writing of the Way
And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-Day,
Fell suddenly into an Allegory
About their Journey, and the way to Glory,
[...]
Nor did I intend
But to divert my self in doing this[.]
82

  • 83 J. Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, op. cit., p. 2.

42He anxiously defends his use of an allegorical journey form, asking, “May I not write in such a stile as this? / In such a method too”.83 While his comparable address “To the Reader” in The Holy War is less defensive, it is equally self-aware – even playful – in relation to the demands and effects of different genres:

  • 84 J. Bunyan, The Holy War, op. cit., p. 1.

’Tis strange to me, that they that love to tell
Things done of old, yea, and that do excel
Their equals in Histriology,
Speak not of Mansoul’s wars...
[...]
Of Stories, I well know there’s diverse sorts,
Some foreign, some domestick, and reports
Are thereof made as fancy leads the Writers[.]
84

43If, as is regularly recognised, Bunyan’s writing bears the traces of its origins in oral forms, it also reveals his understanding of the ways in which written forms are shaped by generic convention and that this produces the textual form itself as a site of negotiation of crucial concepts. His texts of mobility control negative associations through his assertion of the generic demands of those texts. Mobility becomes a writerly rather than a simply geographic or religio-political issue. Bunyan’s overall relationship – embracing both endorsement and resistance – to a culture of stillness, then, is complex and varied, subtly bringing together at different moments, and in different forms, the socio-political, the locational, the spiritual and the textual.

44Unsurprisingly, it is in Quaker writings that we see the most emphatic resistance to the anxieties surrounding mobility. In their habitual manner, Quakers – among the most consciously radical and oppositional of sectaries – invert Calvinist doctrines on mobility (as they do in relation to almost all Calvinist doctrines.) They valorise the prohibited term: for them, gadding acquires a positive value. Hilary Hinds sums up the centrality of mobility to Quakerism and the function of George Fox’s Journal in establishing this:

  • 85 Hilary Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Manchester and New York, Manchester University P (...)

The early Quaker ministry was a travelling ministry, a movement set in motion by the endlessly mobile figure at its centre, George Fox. The Journal is as much a travel log as it is a spiritual memoir, a conversion narrative, a record of sufferings or the history of a dissenting sect. After the opening section sets out the fundamental tenets of the Quaker interpretation of Christianity, the Journal’s narrative is thereafter heavily weighted towards the detailing of Fox’s journeys, initially from the midlands into the north of England, then into London, the south and west, Wales and Scotland, and later to Barbados, America and northern Europe.85

  • 86 For a fuller explanation of my understanding of the nature of Quaker subjectivity, see Elspeth Grah (...)
  • 87 On the Quaker tendency to conflate the workings of the Inner Light in individual Friends and biblic (...)

45Fox’s compulsive and apparently anxiety-free travelling marks, even more strongly than Trapnel’s or Bunyan’s political oppositions to the demand for fixity, a new articulation of subjectivity informed by mobility. Early Quaker doctrine, with its predication on a belief in the workings of the inner spirit, forms of prophesying, its egalitarianism and individualism, is essentially oppositional in all its aspects, locating itself constantly at the moment of resistant detachment from established social and doctrinal norms. But this is pre-eminently enacted not doctrinally but through the Quaker subject who, by means of a succession of moments of access to the inner light, is recurrently situated at this very instant of separation from orthodoxy and correspondingly at the threshold of new category formations. Friends seemingly sought out opposition in order enable this moment of separation and refashioning to occur and recur as a form of stuttering reiteration of a personally and communally formative moment. In other words, if Quaker doctrine situates itself at the moment of category re-formation, individual Friends constantly reform themselves at the brink of identity: they live at the edge of a de-integration of selfhood (sometimes manifest and embodied as quaking or in prophetic utterance) and its reconstitution as a vehicle of the indwelling spirit.86 It is the moment of revelation itself that is one of stillness – the stillness of Quaker practice of silently opening oneself to the Spirit. What follows is their compulsion to travel as a means of constantly transgressing boundaries of place, of belonging, of land and livings, of all those traditional markers and guy ropes of identity, so reproducing, again and again, the conditions for category- and self-reformation. The collective spiritual reformation sought by Calvin in returning to the second giving of the Mosaic code, occurs for Quakers through individual dismantlings and reconfigurations of subjectivity. In this, the Inner Light works both through the individual and through the biblical texts, also informed by the Inner Light, so that they become conflated within the being of these seventeenth-century English men and women. The Bible and Quaker subjects merge as dwelling places of the Spirit or Inner Light in many Friends’ writings.87

46The particular and characteristic relationship of Quakers to place derives from this. Although a Quaker such as Fox itemises the places he visits, his attention is never to the place itself. If these are travel writings, they are ones that are curiously devoid of reference to landscape or any particularity of geographic location. There is, in fact, a tendency towards, oxymoronically, a positive non-recognition of actual places; location instead is replaced by either an imaginatively-held biblical map (as in the case of Quakers who travel overseas but who barely mention the fact they are, for instance, in the Caribbean) or place produced simply as the habitation of Friends, or as the site of spiritual conflict with opponents. Almost randomly chosen passages from Fox’s Journal might serve to instance this characteristic dynamic:

  • 88 George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith, London, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 159-60.

and from thence I passed through the countries till I came to Reading and there were a few that had been convinced and on the first day in George Lamboll’s orchard almost all the whole town came together and there came two of Judge fell's daughters to me [...]
After this I passed to London, where I stayed awhile, and had large meetings; then went into Essex, and came to Cogshall [...]
88

47and:

  • 89 Ibid., p. 161.

On the Sixth-day before I had a meeting near Colchester, where the Independent teachers came and many professors [...]89

48Or:

  • 90 Ibid.

As I went through Colchester, I went to visit James Parnell in prison; but the cruel gaoler would hardly let us come in or stay with him [...]
There the gaoler’s wife threatened to have his blood and there they did destroy him, as before is mentioned (as in the book of his life and death may be more fully seen).
90

  • 91 Ibid., p. 249.

49The spiritual, along with reference to particular Friends and their role in the ministry, replaces the physical – so the spiritual journey comes to be enacted through actual physical travelling whereby geographic place is transformed into spiritually significant location. Or, at other moments, identifications of place may produce it as the stage for what could be seen as spiritual theatre. In his accounts of 1658, for instance, Fox describes how “we came from thence to another market town where Edward Billing and his wife quartered: and many soldiers lay there: so we came to an inn and there desired that we may have a meeting that we might preach the everlasting gospel among them”. He recounts how the town magistrates consequently set up an alternative meeting “in malice”. Fox resists direct confrontation with the magistrates, but suggests the group of Friends “could go to the public cross in the marketplace”, taking advantage of its being market day and so busy with crowds of people. He then describes how, “Alexander Parker went atop of the cross with a Bible in his hand and declared the truth amongst the soldiers and market people but the Scotch being dark carnal people never heeded it nor hardly took notice of it”. It ultimately falls to Fox himself to attract attention through a performance that spectacularly competes with the other, normal activities of the venue. He records, “And at last I was moved of the Lord God to stand up at the cross and commanded to declare with a loud voice the everlasting truth and the day of the Lord that was coming upon all sin and wickedness [...]”.91 Fox’s mobility, as evidenced by episodes such as this, takes the form of a spiritual and performative journeying, exploiting place as a theatre of oppositional enlightenment. The discursive 'presence effect' of Calvinist preaching is reconfigured into a more resolutely locational, spontaneous enactment of the presence of the Spirit.

50But Fox’s account in his Journal of his mobility, although always concerned to name and record the activities of other Friends, reveals, at the same time, the solitariness of his ceaseless walking or riding across England. The act of walking itself becomes a mobile enactment of emotional and spiritual suffering. He writes, for example, of a formatively unsettling encounter with his cousin, “a professor”, when he was nineteen years old, where he is challenged over beer-drinking and payment for it:

  • 92 Ibid., p. 5.

I went away and when I had done, what business I had to do, I returned home: but did not go to bed that night, or could not sleep; but sometimes walked up and down, and sometimes prayed, and cried to the Lord, who said unto me; “Thou seest how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth; and thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be as a stranger to all.”92

  • 93 Ibid., p. 8.
  • 94 Hilary Hinds, “Going Nowhere: The Stranger and the Pilgrim in the Journal of George Fox”, in Quaker (...)

51Like Bunyan’s Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Fox’s itinerancy leads him to “brake off all familiarity with young and old” following this episode. Through his description of his early wanderings, and his oscillations between familial duty and belonging, and obedience to the Lord’s command to estrange himself from all, he stresses how, “in great sorrows and troubles [...] he walked many nights by [himself]”.93 It is from this beginning that, in the words of Hilary Hinds, “Fox’s own constitutional itinerancy arises”. Such a dynamic between enduring restlessness and “the peaceful stillness of the Quaker perception of godliness,” comes to be constantly re-configured “through his life as a ‘stranger in the earth’”.94 The isolation and loneliness of Fox’s essentially mobile mission is conveyed with affective power. Mobility evokes not so much place, but estrangement from place and life on “the earth”.

  • 95 A. McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, op. cit., p. 114-15.
  • 96 For the modern reader, of course, the uncertainties surrounding Fox’s original journal – whether th (...)

52While Fox’s persistent wanderings across the earth enact his solitary and multi-faceted detachments from family, established doctrines and the actualities of place, the print record of Fox’s compulsive mobility in his Journal antithetically foregrounds the spatial and geographic in its structure. This may not be a travel narrative concerned with geographic and physical discovery, but it is an account of travel that, at the same time as it asserts Fox's isolation, serves to identify networks of Friends and in so doing maps the world, and most particularly, England. As MacRae, again, has suggested, Fox’s print Journal might be seen to cohere around a strong sense of nationhood.95 If his gadding is occasioned by the demands of ministry (of preaching, of prophesying, of talking – above all talking – to Friends), it acts equally to unsettle political, social and religious categories, as well as the categories of inside and outside, self and other, that order any regular experience of selfhood. But, in a further move, through the textual representation of these travels, he reconfigures these unsettled categories by verbally mapping an imagined nationhood that embodies this new subjectivity. But, even if we agree with Hinds’s perception of Fox’s Journal as a travel log, or with MacRae’s suggestion that it is informed by a new sense of nationhood, the relation to place that Fox articulates remains an ambivalent one. It both recognises the materiality of location but at the same time transforms place into multiplicity of sites of the enactment of the purely spiritual. Place is simultaneously actualised and transcended. And, if for Fox (and for Quakers generally), arriving in a new place may be the occasion of visions, and perhaps an ecstasy of access to the Inner Light, it can also signify the taking on of a new manifestation of subjectivity and locational belonging that is always determinedly non-geographic and non-chorographical. Paradoxically, Quaker mobility embodies precisely the need of Friends to be constantly in flux, to live at the moment of simultaneous formation of a new subjectivity and a moment of disintegration, and to experience estranged solitariness. But this becomes through the recording – the print fixing – of travels, a re-formation not only of selfhood but of community and perhaps even of nation. The text itself, in this way, while recording mobility, may provide a further point of stillness, belonging or fixity and a means of easing anxiety. And in this, there is a further split that occurs in Quaker writings: between the records of what was experienced by Friends as the content of their texts and the overall patterns of movement that may be seen by the texts’ readers. It is through the reader’s eyes that Fox’s Journal and other Quaker writings constitute a form of mapping.96

The end(s) of gadding

  • 97 Quoted by Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things, Durham, U.S. and London, 201 (...)

53Through the rather gadding journey across series of Protestant texts of different forms and spiritual persuasions that I have followed in this article, I have aimed to suggest how the early modern period is highly invested in both controlling and embracing a range of forms of mobility. The issue for early modern people was not, the texts I have been considering suggest, simply one of good or bad forms of mobility. Rather, mobility appears in many guises as a confused, conflicted, uneasy state. But if it is anxiety-producing, it is also generative. It works through imaginative internalisation to inhibit but also, through a series of strategies deployed to separate and realign aspects of mobility and stillness, to create. Issues of mobility occur at the intersection of a range of practices and conceptual domains: legal, socio-economic, spiritual, epistemic, writerly. Understanding its significance as a broad concept becomes ultimately not a matter of associating it with a single strand of historical process, whether that is the poor law, social mobility, the development of a notion of Englishness, or with new subjectivities, although it is bound up with all of these. It is, rather, a concept that is profoundly implicated in the broad transition to modernity that the period can be seen to evidence. Notions of mobility occur at the intersections between almost all forms of thought in the seventeenth century. Physical mobility is associated with epistemological change: locational shifts produce intellectual category re-formations. And the particular dynamics of English Protestantism lend themselves to its becoming a crucial site for the negotiation of mobility’s meanings. So many urgent political, spiritual, economic tensions are played out on this site that mobility in itself becomes a core preoccupation of English Protestant thought of the period. Indeed, even beyond the crucial role of English Protestantism in offering a ground for negotiation of new pulls towards social and geographic mobility, concern with movement is so pervasive in seventeenth century records of all sorts that it is not surprising, perhaps, to find that a very different thinker from those whose writings I have been considering here, the natural and political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, could suggest in the mid-century: “life [is] but matter in motion”.97

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Notes

* Acknowledgment: with particular thanks to Hilary Hinds and Katharine Hodgkin for many, many years of conversations about seventeenth-century spiritual writings. I am especially indebted to them both, as well as to Timothy Ashplant, for all their inspiration, help and support. I should also like to thank the British Library for permission to reproduce their image of “The Towne of Mansoul” from John Bunyan’s The Holy War (1682). Sadly, it appears that the illustrated title page to the 1625 edition of Purchas His Pilgrims has been removed from all major research libraries’ copies of this book. I am enormously grateful to Tom Edsall at The 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop, Maryland, USA for his kindness and generosity in providing me with a photograph of this illustration and for permission to reproduce it here.

1 Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea in Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, Helen Wilcox (eds.), Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, London and New York, Routledge, 1989, p. 80-81; (originally, London, Imprinted for Thomas Brewster, 1654).

2 Cf. Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 43.

3 Trapnel had, initially, been reluctant to travel to Cornwall, but ultimately became persuaded of the journey’s necessity. Two Fifth Monarchists had been among the signatories on Charles I’s death warrant, but disappointment over a failure to produce a sympathetic government in the run up to Cromwell’s Lord Protectorship had already led to a revision of their strategies for bringing about a properly godly rule in accordance with their millenarian beliefs. Cornwall was considered a Fifth Monarchist stronghold: Langdon, the MP for Cornwall in the Barebones Parliament of 1653, was Trapnel’s supporter and sponsor. See John Cramsie, British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2015, p. 305-306; and Rachel Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writing in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680, New York and London, Ashgate, 2015, p. 55.

4 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, London, Longman, Green and Co, 1912, p. 273.

5 The term “history from below” is particularly associated with A. L. Morton in his A People’s History of England, London, Victor Gollancz, 1938, and those of his contemporaries and successors who aim to write history from the viewpoint of ordinary people rather than elites.

6 Paul Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598-1664”, The Economic History Review, Second Series, XXVII, August 1974, p. 360-379, here p. 360. Online: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1974.tb01968.x Accessed 14th July 2018.

7 A. L. Beier, Masterless Men. The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, London and New York, Methuen, 1985; Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2001; Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled. The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

8 L. Woodbridge, op. cit., p. 16.

9 P. Fumerton, op. cit., p. 4-5.

10 Mark Brayshay, “Waits, Musicians, Bearwards and Players: The Inter-Urban Road Travel and Performances of Itinerant Entertainers in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England”, Journal of Historical Geography, 31, 2005, p. 430-458, here p. 431.

11 Dorain Gerhold, Carriers and Coachmasters. Trade and Travel before the Turnpikes, Chichester, Phillimore & Co, 2005, p. xi.

12 Andrew Hadfield, “The Benefits of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel before Empire”, in A Companion to the Global Renaissance. English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, Jyotsna G. Singh (ed.), Malden, Oxford and Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 101-113, here p. 101. For an example of current thought on “how mobility in the great age of travel and discovery shaped English perceptions of human identity based on cultural identification and difference”, see the University of Liverpool’s European Research Council funded TIDE project: http://www.tideproject.uk/. Accessed 12th August 2018.

13 Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 7.

14 “A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr John Bunyan [...]”, in John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. and intro. by W. R. Owens, London, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 85-110. All references to Bunyan’s trial and imprisonment or to Grace Abounding itself, are to this edition.

15 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 94-95. The long title of the 1592/3 Act is: For the preventing and avoiding of such great inconveniencies and perils as might happen and grow by the wicked and dangerous practices of seditious sectaries and disloyal persons (35 Eliz 1, c 1). See also: Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 24.

16 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 100, p. 102.

17 Cf. Keith Wrightson, “The ‘Decline of Neighbourliness’ Revisited” in Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woolf, (eds.), Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 19-49. Wrightson argues that although the word “neighbourliness” could have a wide application, “The general implication of most uses of the word [...] was that neighbours were in the first instance those with whom one associated regularly within an immediate locality” (p. 23).

18 J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 104.

19 Ibid., p. 99.

20 Ibid., p. 129.

21 Ibid., p.107.

22 The Poor Relief Act 1662 (14 Car 2, c 12), or An Act for the better Releife of the Poore of this Kingdom, is also known as the Settlement Act or the Settlement and Removal Act. In John Raithby (ed.), Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628-80 (s.l. 1819), p. 401-405. Available online: British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp401-405. Accessed 14th July 2018.

23 See David L. Wykes, “Introduction: Parliament and Dissent from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century”, Parliamentary History, Special Edition, 24.1, Feb 2005, p. 1-26; here p. 1-2.

24 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, op. cit., p. 98; p. 129, n. 35.

25 The manuscript of Richard Norwood’s Journal is held in the Bermuda Archives. It was first published as The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda, Wesley Frank Cravan and Walter B. Hayward (eds.), New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945. It is also extracted as Richard Norwood, Confessions, in John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (eds.), John Bunyan with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1998. My references are to Cravan’s and Hayward’s edition.

26 As, for instance, through inclusion in Stachniewski’s and Pacheco’s collection, John Bunyan with Other Spiritual Autobiographies.

27 For a more extensive exploration of Norwood’s Diary as a work of memory than I make here, see Katharine Hodgkin, “Childhood and Loss in Early Modern Life Writing” in Parergon, 33. 2, 2016, p. 115-134.

28 Cf. Katharine Hodgkin, “Childhood and Loss”.

29 The Journal of Richard Norwood, p. 11.

30 Ibid., p. 11, p. 14.

31 Ibid., p. 6.

32 Ibid., p. 14.

33 There are two different manuscript versions of Dionys Fitzherbert’s text: her original autograph version, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. e Mus. 169, and two somewhat altered scribal copies, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 154 and London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS. Sion E47. For edited parallel transcriptions of both versions, see Katharine Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England. The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010.

34 On Fitzherbert’s autobiographical writing, also see: Katharine Hodgkin, “Dionys Fitzherbert and the Anatomy of Madness”, in Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill (eds.), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, Keele, Keele University Press, 1996, p. 62-92; and Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self”' in Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 209-233.

35 K. Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin, op. cit., p. 177.

36 Ibid.. The particular importance of obedience in accepting parents’ choices of marriage partner is stressed in almost all domestic conduct manuals. See, for instance, William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie: or a Short Survey of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Familie, according to the Scripture, trans. T. Pickering, London, 1609, p. 147.

37 K. Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin, op. cit., 177.

38 Katharine Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin, op. cit., p. 179.

39 Felicity Nussbaum, “ ‘By these words I was sustained’: Bunyan’s Grace Abounding”, ELH, 49.1, Spring 1982, p.18-34, here p. 23. Nussbaum quotes Richard Sennett, Authority, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1980, p. 36.

40 L. Woodbridge, op. cit., p. 81. She cites, Simon Fish, A Supplication for the Beggars, London, ca., 1529, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, London, Early English Text Society, 1871.

41 My findings here refer to a database I compiled between 2000 and 2005 of all uses of the word “gad” and its variants (excluding those with a quite different referent, for instance the tribes of Gad or the type of sword called a gad) between 1570 and 1680, from Early English Books Online (EEBO).

42 See, for instance: Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles comprising 1 The description and historie of England, 2 The description and historie of Ireland, London, printed [by Henry Denham]?, 1580; Tailboys Dymoke, Caltha poetarum: or The bumble bee. Composed by T. Cutvvode Esquyre, London, printed by Thomas Creede, for Richard Oliue, 1599.

43 John Bannister, An antidotarie chyrurgicall containing great varietie and choice of all sorts of medicines that commonly fal into the chyrurgions vse, London, printed by Thomas Orwin for Thomas Man, 1589.

44 John Foxe, The Pope confuted The holy and apostolique Church confuting the Pope. The first action. Translated out of Latine into English, by Iames Bell, London, printed by Thomas Dawson, for Richard Sergier, 1580, The Second Action, 69, EEBO document image 73.

45 John Foxe, The Pope confuted, The Second Action, 51, EEBO document image 55.

46 John Fielde, A caueat for Parsons Hovvlet concerning his vntimely flighte, London, printed by Robert VValdegraue, for Thomas Man, & Toby Smith, 1581, EEBO document images 47, 48.

47 In, for example: Robert Greene, Arbasto The anatomie of fortune [...], London, printed by J. Charlewood for H. Iackson, dwelling in Fleetstreete, beneath the Conduite, at the signe of Saint Iohn Euangelist, 1589; Robert Greene, Greenes neuer too late. Or, A powder of experience, London, Printed by Thomas Orwin for N[icholas] L[ing] and Iohn Busbie, 1590; Robert Greene, A disputation, betweene a hee conny-catcher, and a shee conny-catcher whether a theefe or a whoore, is most hurtfull in cousonage, to the common-wealth, London, [printed] by A. I[effes] for T. G[ubbin], 1592; Gervase Babington, A very fruitfull exposition of the Commaundements by way of questions and answeres, London, 1583, p.190, EEBO document image 120, p. 200, document image 125.

48 Philippe de Mornay, A vvoorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion, written in French. and at his request finished by Arthur Golding, London, imprinted [by [John Charlewood and] George Robinson] for Thomas Cadman, 1587, p. 166, EEBO document image 98. This text has the same translator as Calvin’s sermons on Deuteronomy, discussed later.

49 John Norden, A sinfull mans solace most sweete and comfortable, London, [printed] by Richard Iones, 1585, & “The Fryday, or fifth dayes co~fere~ce, between Solace, and the sinful man”, p. 112, EEBO document image 117; “The Saturdaye, or sixth Dayes Conference”, p. 125, document image 131.

50 John Milton, Of prelatical episcopacy, and vvhither it may be deduc’d from the apostolical times by vertue of those testimonies which are alledg’d to that purpose in some late treatises one whereof goes under the name of Iames, Arch-bishop of Armagh, London, printed by R. O. & G. D. for Thomas Underhill, 1641, p. 7, EEBO document image 5.

51 Richard Baxter, Directions and perswasions to a sound conversion for prevention of that deceit and damnation of souls, London: Printed by A.M. for Nevil Simmons and by N. Ekins [...], 1658, Preface, EEBO document image 3, p. 107, document image 62; Thomas Rogers, Of the imitation of Christ, three, both for wisedome, and godlines, most excellent bookes; made 170. yeeres since by one Thomas of Kempis, London, 1616, Chap. 20. “Of solitarines, and silence”, p. 41, EEBO document image 44.

52 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013; 2015 paperback edn., p. 83.

53 Thomas Bentley, The sixt lampe of virginitie conteining a mirrour for maidens and matrons: or, the seuerall duties and office of all sorts of women in their vocation out of Gods word [...], London, 1582, “The office and duetie of Maisters, and Maistresses, or Dames towardes their seruantes and maides”, p. 50, EEBO document image 27, p. 93, document image 48.

54 William Slatyer, The compleat Christian, and compleat armour and armoury of a Christian, fitting him with all necessary furniture for that his holy profession, London, printed for the author, 1643, p. 362, EEBO document image 190.

55 R. Hakluyt, Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent: Collected and Published by Richard Hakluyt, ed. J. Jones, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511695711.002.

56 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie faithfully gathered word for word as he preached them in open pulpet; together with a preface of the ministers of the Church of Geneua, and an admonishment made by the deacons there. Translated out of French by Arthur Golding, London, printed by Henry Middleton for George Bishop, 1583.

For Arthur Golding's career as a translator, see John Considine, “Golding, Arthur (1535/6–1606)” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, print version: 2004, online version: 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10908. Accessed 1st March 2019. Golding is perhaps best known for his translation of Ovid’s metamorphoses, used by Shakespeare. But as his ODNB entry remarks, “[h]is work on Ovid is an anomaly in Golding’s career: all his other translations were of religious or factual works.” He was a major translator of Luther’s and Calvin’s writings as well as those of other key Protestant figures. John Considine notes, “[h]is translations of prose works amount in all to about five and a half million words.”

57 Martin Luther, A commentarie or exposition vppon the twoo Epistles generall of Sainct Peter, and that of Sainct Jude, London, imprinted [by John Kingston] for Abraham Veale dwellyng in Paules Church-yard at the signe of the La[m]be, 1581, EEBO document image 75.

58 All biographical information on Calvin is from: Wulfert de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin, trans. Lyle D. Bierma, Louisville and London, 2008, p. 93-100.

59 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, p. 2, EEBO document image 8.

60 Cf. Elspeth Graham, “ ‘Lewd, Profane Swaggerers’ and Charismatic Preachers: John Bunyan and George Fox”, in Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd and Alasdair MacDonald (eds.), Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, Amsterdam, VU University Press, 1996, p. 307-318, 315; Elspeth Graham, “ ‘Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad’: the Suffering of the Self in Autobiographical Tradition” in Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (eds.), Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000, p. 197-214, esp. p. 205-207.

61 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, “On Wednesday the xx. of March. 1555. The first Sermon vpon the first Chapter”, p. 3, document image 8.

62 John Calvin, Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, 58 vols, Edouard Cunitz, Johann-Wilhelm Baum, Eduard Reuss, Wilhelm Eugen, Brunsvigae, C.A.Schwetschke (eds.), 1863, vol. 25, p. 609.

63 The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, “On Wednesday the xvij. of April. 1555. The seuenth Sermon vpon the first Chapter”, p. 37, document image 25.

64 John Calvin, Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. 25, p. 677.

65 The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that gad is a possible backformation from vagabond.

66 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, London, imprinted by Iohn Daye, dwellyng ouer Aldersgate beneath S. Martins, 1583, p. 707-8. Quoted by Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading. Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 1-2.

67 A. Cambers, Godly Reading, p. 3.

68 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing. English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590-1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 1-18.

69 Richard Carpenter, A Pastoral Charge, Faithfully Given and Discharged at the Triennial Visitation of the Lord Bishop of Exeter, London, Printed by Edvvard Griffin for Francis Constable, 1616, D5v. Quoted in Hunt, The Art of Hearing, p. 9.

70 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 2.

71 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, 2 vols., Philadelphia, Presbyterian Publishing, 1960, [Iv: iv:9], p. 1023. Quoted by Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 4.

72 See Debora Kuller Shuger, “Sacred Rhetoric in the Renaissance”, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance Rhetoric, Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1993, p. 121-42. She argues, “By the late sixteenth century it seems to have been recognized that scared rhetoric remained the sole surviving [occasion] for serious public oratory...leaving the sermon as the only living form of rhetorical praxis” (p. 121-22). Through tracing different rhetorical positions in different forms of English Protestantism, she suggests that by the late seventeenth century, “the emergence of Anglican rationalism seems to have sparked a reversal among its opponents, so that the defense of grandeur and passion [...] belongs to the dissenting community” (p. 138). Her perceptions about different forms of scared rhetoric and ways in which some forms were understood particularly to operate through the senses and emotions rather than the intellect, further illuminate both my general comments about Calvinist preaching and my later argument about ways in which Quakers might be “moved of the spirit” through the affective power of language.

73 Wulfert de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin, Louisville and London, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, p. 94.

74 Ironically, it was, reputedly, the bodily rigours of excessive preaching that were the eventual cause of Calvin’s death.

75 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the vvorld and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present In foure partes, London, printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1613.

76 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue bookes. The first, contayning the voyages and peregrinations made by ancient kings, patriarkes, apostles, philosophers, and others, to and thorow the remoter parts of the knowne world: enquiries also of languages and religions, especially of the moderne diuersified professions of Christianitie. The second, a description of all the circum-nauigations of the globe. The third, nauigations and voyages of English-men, alongst the coasts of Africa [...] The fourth, English voyages beyond the East Indies, to the ilands of Iapan, China, Cauchinchina, the Philippinae with others [...] The fifth, nauigations, voyages, traffiques, discoueries, of the English nation in the easterne parts of the world [...] The first part, London, [imprinted] for Henry Fetherstone, 1625.

77 Thomasin Westcott, English Post-Reformation Protestant Pilgrimage: Texts and Contexts, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Middlesex, 2014. See also, Paris O’Donnell, “Pilgrimage or ‘anti-pilgrimage’? Uses of mementoes and relics in English and Scottish narratives of travel to Jerusalem, 1596–1632”, Studies in Travel Writing, 13:2, 2009, p. 125-139, DOI: 10.1080/13645140902857232.

78 S. Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue books, 1625, “To the Reader”, p. 5.

79 Ibid., Ch. VI, I.i.74, marginal note, EEBO document image 56.

80 A. McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, op. cit., p. 117.

81 John Bunyan, The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest, Oxford, Clarendon, 1980, p. 1; p. 2; p. 4.

82 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. From this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, second edition revised by Roger Sharrock, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1960, p. 1.

83 J. Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, op. cit., p. 2.

84 J. Bunyan, The Holy War, op. cit., p. 1.

85 Hilary Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2011, p. 100.

86 For a fuller explanation of my understanding of the nature of Quaker subjectivity, see Elspeth Graham, “Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad”, art. cit.

87 On the Quaker tendency to conflate the workings of the Inner Light in individual Friends and biblical text, see Phyllis Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism”, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds.), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 434-459. DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_28; and E. Graham, “Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad”, art. cit., p. 207-211 on the textual operations by which Quaker subject could become a “living text.”

88 George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith, London, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 159-60.

89 Ibid., p. 161.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid., p. 249.

92 Ibid., p. 5.

93 Ibid., p. 8.

94 Hilary Hinds, “Going Nowhere: The Stranger and the Pilgrim in the Journal of George Fox”, in Quaker Studies 20.1, 2015, p. 84-102. This article provides a compelling and much more thorough analysis of matters of mobility and stillness in Fox’s Journal than I am able to give here.

95 A. McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, op. cit., p. 114-15.

96 For the modern reader, of course, the uncertainties surrounding Fox’s original journal – whether there was a now-lost manuscript version of the Journal that pre-existed the first print version of 1694 (actually compiled from the “Spence manuscript”, an account dictated by Fox to his stepson-in-law Thomas Lower in ?1675–8 and containing letters from Fox and other Quakers, written in a variety of hands and interspersed through the text) – compound the sense of a need for alertness to this distinction between lived experience and text as map. There is then a further reminder of this instability of the Journal as a printed text that is produced by the unusually extreme variability of modern editions. On the textual history of Fox’s Journal, see Henry J. Cadbury. “The Editio Princeps of Fox’s Journal”, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 53, 1972, p. 197-218. Hilary Hinds provides a summary of issues relating to the copy texts and editions of the Journal, “A note on references to Fox’s Journal”, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, p. x-xi. See also Lancaster University’s Early Quaker Project website, The Journeys of George Fox, 1652-53. See how the early Quakers in the North West interacted with their environment (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/quakers/01_quakers_home.html) and pages on the texts of the Journal (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/quakers/versions3.html).

97 Quoted by Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things, Durham, U.S. and London, 2010, p. 55. Her reference is to Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth, London, 1839, I, part. ii, p. 8, 10.

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Elspeth Graham, « “Licencious gaddyng abroade”: A Conflicted Imaginary of Mobility in Early Modern English Protestant Writings  »Études Épistémè [En ligne], 35 | 2019, mis en ligne le 10 juillet 2019, consulté le 28 mars 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/4554 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.4554

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Elspeth Graham

Elspeth Graham is professor of early modern English literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has written on seventeenth-century religious radicalism; women's writings; human/non-human animal relationships (especially horses and fish); aristocratic cultures (her most recent book, co-edited with Peter Edwards, is Authority, Authorship and Aristocratic Identity in Seventeenth-Century England: William and Margaret Cavendish, 1st Duke of and Duchess of Newcastle, and their Political, Social and Cultural Circle.) Much of her current work concerns “play cultures” and the surprising existence of a purpose-built playhouse in the 1590s, in the small town of Prescot, near Liverpool and the related Shakespeare North project to build a commemorative theatre in Prescot. Her book on the theatre, The Elizabethan Playhouse in Prescot, Lancashire will be published in 2020 to coincide with the opening of the theatre.

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