ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the initial millenarian vision of global and universal conversion that is mirrored in the spatial semantics of the journals. It explores how they subsequently began to limit their activities to areas that promised success and how they increasingly used and profited from transdenominational networks. The Quaker missions to Europe were eclipsed by Society of Friends’ efforts to expand across the Atlantic and by its contribution to establishing a “Protestant Empire.” The hierarchy of Quaker meetings in Europe only existed for a short while. If missionaries’ pronouncements on places and spaces increasingly varied in accordance with networking opportunities, descriptions of distance also changed over time. In the 1690s, Truth’s triumphant progression was no longer evident in distance. English and continental Quakers sought to overcome distance in their declarations of mutual fellowship, responsibility, and solidarity. The chapter concludes by contrasting missionaries’ spatial semantics with more common contemporary conceptions of the relationship between religion and space in early modern Europe.
