Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding

By Robert Braun

NICHOLAS FERRAR OF LITTLE GIDDINGST Laurence Tract No. 10The English Church was greatly impoverished in the 1530s by the destruction of the monasteries and convents of England by King Henry VIII, and it was not until the nineteenth century that various communities were again founded and attracted vocations to the religious life. However in the 1630s Nicholas Ferrar, an English courtier, businessman, deacon and man of prayer, founded a community in a deserted hamlet in Lincolnshire, which set out to preserve the family ideal in a monastic setting. Together with his mother, brother, sister and numerous nephews and nieces, the Ferrar family took over the deserted manor house and ruined church at Little Gidding, where their ministry of prayer, works of mercy and various scholarly pursuits made them the talk of the English Church; sometimes lauded, but often slandered as papists in an increasingly protestant Anglican nation.This latest study in the St Laurence Tract Series charts the life of the Rev. Nicholas Ferrar, sometime gentleman-in-waiting in the household of the Stuart kings, and pioneer and benefactor of the Virginia Company, which was responsible for transferring England's laws, language and religion to the New World, helping to lay the foundations of what would become the United States of America. The round-the-clock devotional life of the Ferrar family, their patronage by King Charles the Martyr (Charles I), and the crafting of their famous biblical harmonies or concordances that today remain treasures of the British Library and Harvard University libraries, is examined in this study, as is the tragic destruction of the community by puritan and parliamentary soldiers after the death of its founder. Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding represent a tenuous but fascinating link between the medieval monasteries of England and modern Anglican religious communities.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1523637366
• ISBN13: 9781523637362
• Release Date: June 2016
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 40 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"