Barbara Blaugdone: Stopped by No One, Not Even a Wolf-Dog

For this week, I wanted to pursue another primary source voice in the form of Barbara Blaugdone, a Quaker woman who lived in Bristol and was a schoolteacher there (Mack 191). Blaugdone wrote an autobiographical account of her life in 1691, titled, “An Account of the Travels, Sufferings, & Persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone.” The text is comparable to the testimony given by Elizabeth Stirredge in terms of the age of the writers- both Stirredge and Blaugdone were both in the last stages of life when writing their experiences on paper. However, as her title indicates, Blaugdone perhaps established her writing more so in the sufferings aspect of experience that the scholar Catie Gill refers to as one of the four main categories of expression in Quaker women’s writings. Phyllis Mack additionally classifies Blaugdone’s text as a portrayal of “extreme asceticism,” something Stirredge’s account does not entail. I believe Blaugdone’s writing will add to the other writings I have looked at, as well as broaden viewpoints in my paper.

Hence, here are some interesting points from Blaugdone’s account. In the beginning, the author summarizes her experience with suffering, “People were so offended with it, when I went into their Publick Places and Steeple-houses to speak, that they took away their Children from me, so that I lost almost all my Imployment; and they kept me in Prison a quarter of a Year at a time” (Blaugdone 275). This fits Gill’s assessment that “when women were taken into custody it was regularly the result of preaching to a resistant crowd” (Gill 43). Nonetheless, Blaugdone conveys a sense that she did little to shy away from the public preaching that landed her in prison no less than three months a year. Although possibly an embellishment of the punishment meted out regularly to her, specific tales of prison in her account leave no doubt that Blaugdone was imprisoned in multiple instances for her public behavior. In the various travels described, she continuously highlights the trouble she encounters wherever she goes, whether simply antagonistic feelings towards her actions or more dangerously, risks to her life. In one instance, her speaking to the Priest of a town caused her to be expelled from the local inn and forced to sleep in a pig trough, if she notes that it was clean (Blaugdone 278). Another encounter depicts her attempt to speak to long-held friends of the nobility, an Earl and Lady of Bathes, who less than desiring to hear her preachings had their “Wolf-Dog” try to scare her away. The scary protector of the house did not deter Barbara as the “Power of the Lord smote the dog” and the Countess had to listen in the end (Blaugdone 277). Some of her worst experiences were in Ireland, as her travel and preaching there produced accusations of witchcraft, as well as a butcher swearing to “cleave [her] Head in twain” (Blaugdone 281). Overall, Barbara’s account leaves a sense of the varied trials that the author went through in the name of God and for the Quaker movement. Persistence becomes the narrative of her travels and trials. Therefore, her account will be firstly useful to an examination of how Quaker women remained in the public sphere, in spite of counteractions taken against them. Additionally, her account provides such a unique variety of experience, as I have slightly highlighted above, that it will prove advantageous to how Quaker women manifested their spirituality in the daily proceedings of the seventeenth-century.

 

Blaugdone, Barbara. "An Account of the Travels, Sufferings, & Persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone." Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women's Writings, 1650-1700. Edited by Mary Garman. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1996.

Gill, Catie. Women in the Seventeenth-century Quaker Community: a Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650-1700. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.

 

Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.