Collected Tracts, Volume I: The Rome Mission
John Perrot (d. 1665) — the Irish Friend who walked into Rome to convert the Pope — recounts the Inquisition, the madhouse, and the whip, and pours out from his cell some of the most extraordinary mystical writing of early Quakerism. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references, and an editorial introduction that tells the whole story, including the hat controversy that followed.
- His own Narrative of the Inquisition and Rome's prison of madmen, 1658–1661
- Eleven works of 1660–1663: the Visitation of Love to the Turk, the prison epistles, and the verse cycle A Sea of the Seed's Sufferings
- EPUB format
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Free Original Early English Books Online (Internet Archive)About This Edition
In the summer of 1658 John Perrot walked into Rome with his companion John Luffe intending to speak face to face with Pope Alexander VII. Within days both men were in the hands of the Roman Inquisition. Luffe never came out. Perrot — whose fervor read to his examiners as lunacy — spent some three years in the Pazzarella, the prison of madmen, where the treatment for madness was the whip. From that cell he wrote his way through the whole ordeal, and this volume gathers what he wrote.
Here is his own spare, astonished Narrative of the irons, the tortures, and the temptations; the epistles of counsel smuggled out to Friends everywhere, bond or free; Beams of Eternal Brightness, addressed “to be spread over India, and all nations of the earth”; the Visitation of Love to the Great Turk and the scattered Jews from the mission’s outward journey; the defiant Propositions to the Pope sent back to Rome after his release; and A Sea of the Seed’s Sufferings, the cycle of poems he composed in the Venice Lazzaretto on the voyage home — among the earliest bodies of Quaker verse.
The editorial introduction tells the whole story honestly: the astonishing courage of the Rome mission, and the hat controversy that followed his return, when the same unyielding inwardness that had carried him through the madhouse set him against George Fox and divided the young Society of Friends. This Friends Illuminated edition presents Perrot’s text in carefully modernized English — his verse with lines and rhymes untouched — with scripture and historical references linked throughout, translated from the hand-keyed transcriptions of the original 1660–1663 London printings.