‘Again and again the words spoke.’ Photo: Book cover of Passion and Partings: The dying sayings of early Quakers by Jane Mace
Passion and Partings: The dying sayings of early Quakers, by Jane Mace
Author: Jane Mace. Review by Judith Roads
This is an extraordinary little book that defies classification. Piety Promoted was a collection of volumes from the seventeenth century, full of ‘the dying sayings of many of the people called Quakers’. Jane Mace has with great care put together a sample of these words to enable us to look into Quaker social history from a new angle.
To my mind, the best of the book is when the author links those earlier Friends to us today, helping us see our spiritual forebears in new and unexpected ways. She leads us deeper into language, and concepts unfamiliar to us, in a way that ensures we won’t get lost or mired in despair. At the same time we are brought short by the picture of privation and suffering endured by Friends at an extraordinary period. Reading some of the sayings made me wonder if some Friends were hallucinating.
Mace divides up the material into six sections: ‘Sayings’, ‘Authorship’, ‘Sufferings’, ‘Connections’, ‘Partings’, ‘Meanings’. She seasons them with scholarly background information. What does she mean, for instance, by ‘Connections’? This refers to the way these centuries-old words resonate with us now. The author says, ‘For me, they remind me of roots I barely knew I had. The excitement remains in imagining how early Friends might have listened to them being read aloud together. But I have also come to appreciate the opposite: namely, the comfort and strength to be had in silent, solitary reading’. She goes on to admit that working on the manuscript led her on occasion to fall into dark times of gloom, wondering if others would find the Sayings just plain boring. But again and again the words spoke to her. She describes herself as ‘Picking up the physical volume from the table, usually early morning or late at night, holding the weight of it in my hand turning the page and becoming immersed again – in silence’.
Her own unique take on the material has been to make links along the process of the recording: from the dying Friend, to the Friend who transcribed and edited the sayings, to the original collections’ editors, the early Quaker readership, Jane as the present-day interpreter, and you and me as readers. A series of reflections adds another layer to the already profound richness. There are a few factual errors and typos but nothing serious.
I have tried to visualise the reader who might appreciate this gift. I think of present-day Friends who have not previously encountered the social world of early Quakers beyond some well-known passages in Quaker faith & practice. Or enquirers who may have heard of early Quakers, say, through the tapestry in Kendal and are only now discovering actual living Quakers. Non-Quakers with an interest in early modern religious life in England will also profit from a read, as well as researchers for whom this is a rich resource. Ancient voices live on.
