Ransome 2011

Ransome, Joyce. The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding. Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011.

"The Ferrars were a musical family and as members of the household gathered round their mistress, she led them in singing psalms together as they worked. She also heard her children read aloud from the Bible and also from Foxe's Actes and Monuments and other worthy volumes." (27)

while Ferrar was in Europe:

• he visited churchs and "set about collecting examples of divine providence and miracles, evidence of God's active intervention in His creation, the sorts of stories he subsequently collected for his family to use" (33)
• no mention of him buying books or prints, though that is often repeated in his biographies (34)
• in Leipzig, acquired the skill of 'artificial memory' (35)
• evidence he "knew of at least some of the charitable Italian institutions created to care for and to educate children. One of the works he had by 1634 translated but was refused permission to publish was Ludovico Carbone's Dello Ammaestramento de' Figliuoli nella Dottrina Christiana, which Ferrar rendered as 'Of the Christian Education of children'." (39)

at Little Gidding, "tenants delivered provisions (eggs, butter, cheese, meat and bread) but the nieces supervised the dairy and the cows that provided the family's milk as well as the baking of the special manchet breat. This arrangement not only trained the nieces but relieved their mother and grandmother of these tasks. The nieces were also skilled needlewomen and dispensed medical ministrations to the local villagers."

the estate yielded an annual income of between 400 and 500

"As the many conduct manuals of the period made plain, a household needed the skills of both a man and a woman for its smooth functioning. Little Gidding had such a partnership but in the unconventional form of a widowed mother and her unmarried son." (51)

royal opposition to private chapels became clear in 1629; Ferrar tried to counter the appearance that the Little Gidding chapel (a parish church, with the entire parish as the household) was private (64)

"Reading, as would be appropriate for a household that was a 'school of religion', featured prominently in many of its shared activities. How much of that reading was done by individuals in private is unclear from the accounts that survive. Ferrar himself obviously devoted much of his time when hew as at Gidding to study and probably encouraged at least his namesake nephew, whom he educated wholly at home, to do the same. For the most part, however, reading seems to have been very much as a social as well as an educational activity and one fundamental to Ferrar's method of interactive instruction for all ages." (65)

children read stories during meals; those stories were then abstracted by an adult and transcribed by the children into a book; the children were quizzed on the stories; at each main meal children recited stories from memory (65)

"The women of the family would also have had opportunity during the day for similar consultation and indeed might have read to one another as they sat together in the Great Chamber around old Mary Ferrar. Certainly the social ambience for reading and family devotions for which John Rastrick later yearned was very much present at Little Gidding." (65)

how was filled with clocks/timepieces in every room to reinforce the metaphor of the mind as a clock or watch; bells summoned participants (66)

Ferrar's manuscript "The Duties of Man and Woman" included a section on "Duties Peculiar to Woman" "enjoining Pauline obedience to husbands" (66)

burst of interest in Harmonies during the Reformation; "The hope behind them was that an integrated narrative would make the gospel messge clearer and easier for preachers to expound and readers to remember and understand. Harmonies thus were preeminently teaching tools and as such would have an obvious appeal to someone entrusted with educating a household." (67)

difficulty in making Harmonies: how to avoid repetition? -- illustrations (68)

• model in Cornelius Jansen's Concordia Evangelica (1549), possibly Robert Hill's summary of Jansen's harmony (1596) (68)

Mary Collet Ferrar became known to Nicholas as his "sister"; "This curious transformation of the relationship of uncle and niece into one of brother and sister included John as well as Nicholas and Hester and probably Margaret as well as Mary and Anna." (74)

• see Quilligan 2005 to connect to incest and agency for women

Mary solely in charge of many things; Anna, not (76)

"He [Ferrar] also looked beyond the immediate household, seeking to bind Woodnoth and others who were united 'in heart' though not 'in cohabitation' with the family at Gidding into what he called a 'Web of Friendship'." (80)

Ferrar -- committed to "voluntary choice and commitment as essential to a genuine sense of community" (103); believed that particulars, not general intentions, mattered most (106)

• Bathsheba disrupted this system (109)

Little Gidding as an example to the world

• "Realising that success in such an ambitious ministry depended on participants who embraced its particuar projects voluntarily, Ferrar insisted on explicit promises, often in writing, from those taking part. Willing members of the household and of the web of friendship thereby made themsevles a committed and purposeful community." (110)