THE GOOD OLD WAY REVISITED: The Ferrar Family of Little Gidding c.1625-1637 Kate E. Riley, BA (Hons) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia, School of Humanities, Discipline of History, 2007. ABSTRACT The Good Old Way Revisited: The Ferrar Family of Little Gidding c.1625-1637 The Ferrars are remembered as exemplars of Anglican piety. The London merchant family quit the city in 1625 and moved to the isolated manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. There they pursued a life of corporate devotion, supervised by the head of the household, Nicholas Ferrar, until he died in December 1637. To date, the life of the pious deacon Nicholas Ferrar has been the focus of histories of Little Gidding, which are conventionally hagiographical and give little consideration to the experiences of other members of the family, not least the many women in the household. Further, customary representations of the Ferrars have tended to remove them from their seventeenth-century context. Countering the biographical trend that has obscured many details of their communal life, this thesis provides a new, critical reading of the family’s years at Little Gidding while Nicholas Ferrar was alive. It examines the Ferrars in terms of their own time, as far as possible using contemporary documents instead of later accounts and confessional mythology. It shows that, while certain aspects of life at Little Gidding were unusual, on the whole the family was less exceptional than traditional histories have implied; certainly the family was not so unified and unworldly as the idealised images have suggested. Moreover, the Ferrars were actively engaged in making those images, for immediate effect and for posterity. The Ferrars’ identities, corporate and individual, and their largely textual practices of self-fashioning are central to the study. Other key concerns are the Ferrars’ moral and religious ideals and practices, gender in the family, and intra-familial relationships. Evidence for the thesis is drawn from family documents dating from the early years of the seventeenth century to the time of Nicholas Ferrar’s death. The statements and actions captured in them illustrate the energy the Ferrars expended in conforming to their spiritual ideals at Little Gidding, enforcing the pursuit of their programme intensively, and at times defensively, as they negotiated their new circumstances. Contemporary materials of this sort challenge and complement the evidence recorded in the Life of Nicholas Ferrar, written by his brother John in the mid-1650s, which has typically served uncontested as the basis for histories of the Ferrars. Part One of the thesis provides a revised historical perspective on the Ferrars. The apologetic Anglican historiography is interrogated first, followed by an extensive, new i account of the nature of everyday life at Little Gidding based on a range of sources as yet underutilised. The practical organisation and functioning of the household are addressed in connection with the principles that informed its structure and routines. Discussion then turns to religion at Little Gidding, a subject which has received little explicit attention despite more than 350 years’ worth of literature proclaiming the family’s exceptional holiness. Part Two concentrates on the written remains of the processes of gendered, spiritualised socialisation and identity formation within the family. The Little Academy is considered first: in this unique dialogue circle, young women discussed morally edifying historical tales, offering them a textually-mediated experience of the world and working to reinforce conventional gender roles and religious values. The final three chapters pertain to the copious and little-studied family correspondence. A chapter that develops a theory of the functions of the family correspondence network is followed by one studying the affective relationships that the celibate sisters Mary and Anna Collet maintained through their letters with their unmarried uncle and spiritual mentor, Nicholas Ferrar. These chapters consider the identities as single people that all three developed through these relationships, within the maritally-focused framework of the Protestant family. The last chapter also concerns the lives of the unmarried, examining the relationships of single male adults and their roles in the family, focusing on the friendship of Nicholas Ferrar and his cousin Arthur Woodnoth. The thesis closes by reflecting on the fact that returning the Ferrars to their seventeenth-century context reveals their multi-faceted nature, comprising ideals and identities sometimes incongruous with one another, and certainly unaccounted for in the traditional narratives. It thus demonstrates the importance of the overall project of reconceiving the Ferrars’ history, which forms an original contribution to the study of the social, cultural and religious history of early seventeenth-century England. ii CONTENTS Abstract i Contents iii Acknowledgements iv Editorial note v Genealogical table vi Introduction 1 PART ONE: Revising the history of the Ferrars 1 His brother’s Life: 13 the biography of Nicholas Ferrar and the Anglican historiography of Little Gidding 2 Life at Little Gidding: 41 household order and routine 3 “The Way of Little Gidding”: 87 religious beliefs and practices PART TWO: Texts, identities and relationships 4 The Little Academy: 119 moral exempla, gender and performance in the education of young women 5 Ferrar Letters: 143 letter-writing and the seventeenth-century family 6 Spiritualised relationships: 169 Anna Collet, Nicholas Ferrar and Mary Collet 7 Unmarried men: 187 Nicholas Ferrar and Arthur Woodnoth Reflection 219 Ferrar identities: multiplicity, adaptation, reinvention Appendices 229 Bibliography 233 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who have helped me to bring this thesis to completion. First and foremost, I thank Prof. Patricia Crawford, who has provided unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement from the beginning of the project. She has shared her incomparable knowledge of the people of seventeenth-century England and their histories freely and I thank her for the privilege of working under her guidance. Thank you too to Prof. Philippa Maddern, who has offered energy, stimulating criticism, and original perspectives to which I would have been blind without her suggestion. Thank you both for persevering generously in the face of great personal adversities. To Prof. Chris Wortham, thank you for the seed of the project, and for graciously watching over my first dissertation and keeping an eye on things since then. Thank you to the people of History at UWA for their collegiality and for teaching me about their trade. And thanks to MEMS and English for letting me flout disciplinary borders from time to time. In particular, thanks to A/Profs Sue Broomhall, Yasmin Haskell, Andrew Lynch and Richard Read, Dr Stephanie Tarbin and Prof. Bob White for helpful discussions, advice and pleasant diversions. Thanks to members of the ARC Beyond the Family research team for including me in the fold over the years. Thanks to the ARC Network for Early European Research, especially the local stalwarts. Beyond UWA, I am very obliged for their time and consideration to Prof. Christopher Haigh, Dr Vanessa Harding, Prof. Ludmilla Jordanova, Prof. Anne Laurence, Prof. Diarmaid McCulloch, Prof. John Morrill, Prof. Pam Sharpe, Dr Naomi Tadmor, Dr Peter Thompson, and Prof. Charles Zika. Thank you too to the many colleagues and friends across Australia and abroad who the thesis revealed. I acknowledge with gratitude the Hackett Student Fund at UWA for the Hackett Postgraduate Scholarship that sustained my doctoral study, and for the provision of travel funding, the UWA School of Humanities, the UWA Graduate Research School, and the ARC Network for Early European Research. Thank you to the staff of the various libraries and archives consulted during the research, above all Dr Toby Burrows and the staff of the Scholars’ Centre at the Reid Library. To the friends and fellow postgraduates who have made the experience so much more than an academic exercise, thank you: Meg, Andrew, Sarah, Nic, Joanne, Marg, Luke, Fiona, Lesley, Karen, Tama, Emily, Oli, Ali, Lisa, Graeme, Leith, Bob, Marianne, Shane, Megan and the rest of the rabble. Special thanks and love to Harriet and Sarah, who were indispensable and very good-humoured during the final stages. I’m lucky to have you. Thanks also to my silent supporters, to Sue, and the ghosts in my clockwork: I know who you are. To Mum, Dad, Tom and Harriet, I am, every day, grateful, happy, dumbfounded, and myself, because of you. iv EDITORIAL NOTE Other than passages from John Ferrar’s Life of Nicholas Ferrar, which are quoted from the modern-spelling version published in Muir and White’s Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar1, the original spelling of quotations from seventeenth-century documents is given, except for modern alphabetic substitutions of ‘j’ for ‘i’, ‘v’ for ‘u’, etc. Pagination for Muir and White refers to the independent 1996 volume (i-xxii + 144pp.), rather than to its sequence in the Proceedings of the Leeds Historical and Literary Society (Literary and Historical Section, Vol. XXIV, Part IV, pp.263-428). Contractions have been expanded silently. The spelling of proper names is standardised, according to the forms that occur most frequently in the seventeenth-century documents, in particular: Ferrar