Kirilka Stavreva
Department of English
St. Ambrose University
Davenport, IA 52803
stavreva@saunix.sau.edu
In a programmatic article on "Traveling Cultures," James Clifford suggests that the image of the hotel is an obsolete and, moreover, a class- and gender-biased chronotope in postmodern discussions of travel. It is time, he asserts, to start exploring other "travel encounters, sites of intercultural knowledge," such as the motel, the banlieu, the slave ship. These new sites free the concept of travel from its history of autonomous, male, heroic, exploratory, or recreational meanings. Instead, they foreground the interplay, on the one hand, of coercion, discipline, and labor and, on the other, of that exhilaration and community-building which characterize what Clifford terms "traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in traveling"--a mode of travel practiced by women, exiles, slaves, guides, servants, and other groups, who only recently achieved the status of "travelers."
Today I will discuss two additional sites of traveling/dwelling. One is a seventeenth-century Maltese prison, where Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers, members of the Society of Friends, spent three and a half years of constant interrogations and struggle for spiritual dominance with the Italian Inquisition. We know of this site thanks to the editing effort of Daniel Baker, a fellow Quaker who visited the two women in prison and in 1662, two years before their return to England, published their imprisonment account, along with passionate letters to family and friends, hymns and songs composed in prison, and descriptions of their numerous visions. The handy octavo format of Baker's edition seems designed to encourage further traveling of Evans' and Chevers' book, which he titled This is a Short Relation of some of the Cruel Sufferings (for the Truths sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers, in the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta.
Set into circulation by Baker, the Short Relation was expanded in 1663 to include a description of the women's release and return journey. Several other editions were published in the early eighteenth century, but since then, the circulation of Evans' and Chevers' autobiographical narrative was more or less suspended until its inclusion in the Brown University Renaissance Women Online electronic database. I adopted it in my Renaissance Literature class, driven by a desire to initiate a new route of circulation for the Short Relation, and in the process to invite my students to take on an analogous role of travelers/dwellers as members of an editing collective. (The idea of the editing assignment I owe to Susanne Woods, member of the Women Writers Project electronic discussion group.) As editors, I reasoned, my students would create their own site of traveling/dwelling as they reflect on the differences between their historical-cultural locale and that of the mid-seventeenth century Quaker women, and as they find themselves navigating research tasks and research choices, labor and the exhilaration of discovery in an evolving community.
Let me first briefly sketch the seventeenth-century site of traveling/dwelling. In late 1658 or early 1659 Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers were "moved of the Lord" to interrupt their voyage in the footsteps of the Apostle Paul to stop in Malta. There they looked for opportunities to proselytize their experience of salvation, as they had done earlier in their native England: in Salisbury, where they were whipped in the marketplace, and in the Isle of Man, where Katherine was dragged out of her bed by a soldier at the point of a naked sword. In all likelihood, the two Friends viewed Malta as a temporary stop on their missionary voyage, an alien domain where they could dramatize publicly the contrast between their apostolic following of the "Inner Light" and the "unenlightened" souls of the local religious authorities.
But once Katherine and Sarah found themselves imprisoned for an indefinite period of time by the Italian Inquisition, they could no longer afford to view Malta simply as an alien space. Eventually, they would transform the prison, this site of forced displacement, into a home. This is where they consoled, nourished and took care of each other, where they managed their meager financial resources, where they solicited supporters, worked for bread and dignity, and welcomed visiting Friends.
Early in their imprisonment, Katherine fell sick. "My life was smitten," writes she, "and I was in a very great agony, so sweat was as drops of blood." Two forces sustained her. One was her visionary experience of the disease as a reenactment of the three days of Christ's entombment. The other sustaining force was Sarah, who though confined to her own cell, cooked for Katherine and faithfully washed her bedclothes.
Katherine's and Sarah's site of traveling/dwelling was kept clean of those foods which they considered dangerous. Both of them fasted for months. The fast seems to have been provoked by a conversation in which the Inquisitor's Chamberlain offered to buy their hats when, "a year and seven weeks" after the imprisonment, Katherine's and Sarah's money almost ran out. They had insisted on paying their expenses while in prison. Katherine reports that the fast began as an act of obedience to the call of the Lord, but it was obviously an effective way for the two Friends to assert themselves and their "house" as independent of the economy of the Inquisition prison.
Another means of turning the Maltese prison into a home involved raising money for daily expenses. Like fasting, working for wages was an important means of maintaining the domestic economy and of community building. At the urge of one of the friars, Katherine and Sarah began to knit for a daily wage of "nine or ten grains . . . that is three half pence." In addition to providing independent income, the women's labor enlarged the number of their supporters in prison, who would later secretly provide them with ink and paper, and deliver their notes to one another. Katherine explains: "We did knit stockings, and gave them to them that we made serviceable to us, and did make Garments for the poor prisoners, and mended their clothes which had need, and were most helpful to them all" (33). Neither she nor Sarah conceived of knitting and sewing as prison labor, but rather, as a liberating activity through which they asserted the independence of their "house." Like the labor of writing and preaching (Sarah actually preached out of her prison cell, which faced a chancery), manual labor for these two women consolidated the spiritual and material dimensions of the home as a place of mutual caretaking and independence from the charity of enemies.
However, for Katherine and Sarah, home in the Inquisition prison was never a safe haven, a familiar and secure place. Rather, it was a place where they discovered an alien culture and belief system, as well as a place of reflection and re-conceptualization of their own selves and community. "Home" in the Inquisition was thus part of being "upon the way." It provided a vantage point, from which the two women could observe their own physical and spiritual journey guided by the Inner Light.
In a strangely analogous way, editing the Short Relation turned my Renaissance Literature classroom into a site of traveling/dwelling. What was our point of departure? Early in the semester, the class began practicing strategies of collective reading. Students formed panels of 4-5 members in which they read each other's commonplace books and discussed issues and forms which were especially baffling to them as late twentieth-century readers, or alternatively, aspects of these historical readings that they related to. Developing strategies and habits of collective reading and research, the panels were then responsible for one of the overview sessions that followed each cycle of the syllabus. By the time the students reached the editing project at the end of the semester, they were experienced in negotiating daily tasks as they worked together in research- and interpretative communities. As an in-class exercise, they also tried their hand at editing a short text from the RWO database, Johanna Cartwright's Petition of the Jewes.
Starting the editing of the Short Relation, these time-travelers found themselves facing an unfamiliar territory: the unedited text by Evans and Chevers, finally available to students who don't have access to research libraries. They found models and encouragement in the cluster of relevant essays in the RWO database, which provide preliminary charts of this territory, but do not overdetermine student exploration. At their fingertips, the students also had an assortment of electronic editing tools. Keyed in to the course webpage were database essays contextualizing the Short Relation and other writings by Quaker women, as well as relevant topical essays, an electronic edition of the King James Bible, and the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database. I encouraged the students not to limit themselves to the computer screen, but to also use conventional editing tools, such as the OED and assorted Bible dictionaries and concordances in the reference collection of the library. The destination was clear: a "chart" of their own of the Short Relation, which would render it accessible to future St. Ambrose students. As one of the students explained this work to a visiting lecturer, "We do translations in this class. I mean, interpretations."
As the class figured out in the course of discussing (should I say fighting over) their editing choices, "translating" the Short Relation involved negotiating sometimes conflicting responsibilities to the future readers of their edition and to the two women authors. The students' initial impulse was to smooth over the hurdle of weird-looking spelling and punctuation, but they thought twice about such normalizing and even about the degree of annotating after reading Katherine Evans' stern warning to the future translator of one of her missives: "Whosoever shall interpret this Paper before the Lord Inquisitor, (so called) I charge thee in the Name of the living God, as thou wilt answer before his dreadful presence, to interpret it word for word, as it is written, without adding or diminishing" (32). After all, how comfortably do you "correct" a text which systematically capitalizes all words related to the writing process, such as Pen, Paper, Ink? Obviously, its authors were not only highly literate, but had a veneration for writing matters, as their choices of capitalization and punctuation signified.
As the students pondered fonts, punctuation, and spelling, they engaged in discussions of the writers' historical-cultural locale and its differences from the editors' contemporary cultural moment. They discovered, for example, that the capitalization of words like Sisters, Brethren, Husband, and Friends revealed a spiritual aspect of relationships which today we tend to view as exclusively emotional or secular. For the members of the Society of Friends, the students reasoned, these were words of the same rank as Light and Conscience. A fight over the capitalization of religious and secular offices was resolved in favor of capitalizing. The students decided that the early Quakers may have refused to bow to authority, but that in deciding to capitalize offices, Katherine and Sarah were bringing out their own courage to challenge Friars and Magistrates alike.
The editors were also acutely aware of their responsibilities to the future college-age readers of the Short Relation. They annotated and explained Biblical citations, glossed historical references, archaic words and unfamiliar word usages, systematized apostrophes and spelling, provided illustrations, charted a map of Katherine's and Sarah's missionary voyage, and developed a series of introductory essays to bridge the cultural and historical distance between the authors and today's college readers.
What was the effect of this constant shifting back and forth between past and present? Certainly, a better understanding of a distant cultural-historical site, but also a degree of empathy for its inhabitants that lecture and discussion seldom yields. Pondering editing choices transformed the classroom into a temporary stopping place in the "voyage" of historical discovery, a site of intercultural knowledge connecting the past and the present. But most importantly, carrying on the editing process of the Short Relation which was started in the RWO database provided an opportunity for my students to present to a peer group of future readers their newly found identity as an authoritative interpretive collective. In a fascinating article on Quaker women's travel narratives, Susan Wiseman has noted the significance of nonconformist travel for "the structuring of narrative and myth for consumption by [the Quaker] interpretive community" (154). Editing with the RWO provided my students with an analogous means of communal self-definition.
Clifford, James. "Travelling Cultures." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 96-116.
Evans, Katherine and Sarah Chevers. This is a short Relation Of some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truth's sake) of Katharine Evans & Sarah Chevers, In the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta. London, 1662. Renaissance Women Online. Providence, RI: Brown University Women Writers Project, 1999. http://www.wwp.brown.edu.
Wiseman, Susan. "Read Within: Gender, Cultural Difference and Quaker Women's Travel Narratives." Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing. Ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill. Keele: Keele University Press. 153-171.