Speaker: Julie Miller
Exactly three hundred years ago Saffron Walden Quaker Mary Farmer led a group of Essex women Quakers on a three-month journey of religious ministry from Essex to Friedrichstadt on the River Eider in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. They travelled by boat and on foot through Holland and the Low Countries visiting Quaker meetings as they went. As they travelled Mary Farmer wrote a journal recording all her adventures along the way. Her journal tells us of how they met various people, were helped by supporters or suffered hardships such as sleeping in barns, enduring fierce storms and even got chased by pirates in the North Sea. In her party were two women from Manningtree who were possibly one of the earliest recorded same sex partnerships in the Quaker community.
Using Mary Farmer’s travel journal stored at the Essex Record Office and documents from the Friends’ Library in London, and the Albert Slomann library in Colchester, University of Essex PhD student and museum Curator Julie Miller will tell the story of Mary Farmer and her women’s mission to the non-conformist enclave at Friedrichstadt, visiting the beleaguered Quaker community who left Friedrichstadt a year later heading for America, never to return. At a time when women were not expected to preach and were far more likely to be found in the home than travelling the muddy roads of northern Europe, Mary Farmer and her Quaker women are a fascinating case study of non-conformity in every sense of the word.
Please visit https://www.essexrecordoffice.co.uk/visit-us/ for details of our nearest public car parks.
