A Sea of the Seed’s Sufferings, Through which runs a River of Rich Rejoycing.

£3,800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

ESTC records seven locations in the UK (the Library of the Religious Society of Friends apparently has six copies); thirteen copies in the USA; but other than the present copy, the last copy at auction recorded on Rare Book Hub was in 1968 at Sotheby’s . A series of astonishing poems by the early Irish Quaker missionary John Perrot, largely written from a prison for mad men in Rome and whilst quarantined in a leper colony at Venice. This collection of verses forms an allegorical tale of Perrot’s experiences in captivity as well as his understanding of and unshakeable belief in Quaker theology, and notably contributed to a rift amongst the Quaker community due to its unusual style and loose adherence to gender norms. Perrot’s ODNB entry, by Nigel Smith, describes the present work as, “an extra-ordinary series of contemplations and songs in a variety of poetic forms, totalling some 1448 lines … a significant and unusual example of radical religious writing [which shows] that Perrot was well read and familiar with poetic technique, and in its sublimation of his experiences of torture and abuse into a spiritual allegory built out of natural imagery (especially about the sea), the work bears some comparison with Milton’s Paradise Lost”. Elsewhere, in his book chapter “John Perrot and the Quaker Epic”, Smith adds that “during the course of the poem, Perrot is able to express his own sense of gradual regeneration, his sense of the enormity of God in the natural world, and, in an unu

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