"The Lord hath joined us together, and wo be to them that should part us": Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers as Traveling Friends

Evans and Cheevers at Malta

In 1658, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, two Quaker preachers whose previous missionary travels had taken them to Scotland, Ireland, and all over England, left London for Alexandria and Istanbul. Traveling together, part of their purpose was to follow Paul's travels, but they also hoped to meet with and to convert the Sultan. When the women arrived at Malta en route to Turkey and Alexandria, they began distributing Quaker literature, and interrupted a Catholic Mass. As a result of their preaching, Evans and Cheevers very quickly came to the attention of Catholic authorities on Malta. They were summoned to the English consul's residence, where they were interrogated by the Catholic authorities. Several weeks after their preliminary interrogation, the consul, James Watts, whom the women called Judas, turned Evans and Cheevers over to the Inquisition, where they were confined to a tiny, airless cell without access to light, water, or regular supplies of food. They were also frequently deprived writing materials.

Despite these privations, Evans and Cheevers wrote a lengthy narrative, as well as numerous hymns, prayers, and letters to family members and Quaker Friends during their captivity, which would last three years. Several of these documents were smuggled out of the country by Daniel Baker, a fellow Quaker and ship's captain moored at Malta. Baker visited Evans and Cheevers in prison and tried to negotiate for their release. When he could not secure their liberty, he arranged for the publication of their writings on his return to England.¹ The circular, fragmentary, and repetitive quality of the narratives suggests that the various documents were written and published in haste, with little editorial intervention.²

During the women's captivity, inquisitors and captives—each equally convinced of the rectitude and exclusivity of their path to God—attempted to convert each other. In addition to Evans and Cheevers's steadfast faith, their writings were a constant source of conflict between them and their inquisitors, who attempted to deprive the women of writing materials, and who circumscribed their literary activities on numerous occasions. The battle between Evans and Cheevers and the Inquisition was staged, therefore, at least in part over access to pen and paper. Indeed, both writerly and spiritual authority are at issue here, and stand in contested relation to one another. Furthermore, both writerly and spiritual authority are intimately linked to early modern understandings of female authorship and self-representation.

Primarily, Evans and Cheevers's writings recount their interactions with the Catholic Church and demonstrate their steadfast faith in the face of numerous attempts to convince them to recant and convert to Catholicism. In their writings, however, the women also articulated their relationship to each other. During their captivity, Evans and Cheevers provided each other with ongoing spiritual and material support, remaining unified in their faith despite their eventual physical separation. Their mutual support and indivisibility—as well as their own articulation of their relationship as a marriage—has been variously portrayed as an example of early modern women's negotiation of property relations, an instance of early feminist theology, an example of "Quaker literary style," and evidence of early modern "lesbianism."³ In their lives and writings, I argue, Evans and Cheevers negotiate complex, interrelated networks of early modern and Quaker ideologies of F/friendship, marriage, collaborative authorship, and missionary travel.⁴ Further, each of these relations is eroticized, but that eroticism defies easy translation into a modern, identarian rendering of sexuality. My reading of Evans and Cheevers's various writings suggests that any interpretation that either denies the sexual possibilities of early modern women's friendships or that offers an easy assumption that all eroticism must be sexual, and in this case lesbian, is rendered moot by an understanding of Quaker F/friendship. As I discuss later, Quaker F/friendship hinges on an understanding of oneness in the body of Christ and is therefore an embodied friendship that is always also sexualized, although not necessarily sexual in modern terms.

When Evans and Cheevers...