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 A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references, and an editorial introduction that tells the whole story, including the hat controversy that followed.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
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read5.9 hours
- Length84,338 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 5.9 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 5.9 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 4.7 hours to 8 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 77,003 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 7,335 words |
| Total | 84,338 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 7,335 of the 84,338 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
4.7 hours and 8 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 5.9 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 241–337 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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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.
