From Little Gidding to Virginia: the seventeenth century Ferrar family in the Atlantic colonial context

This article explores the significance of the seventeenth-century Ferrar family’s involvement in Atlantic colonialism, and their interest in compiling natural histories of the various flora and fauna in the Virginia colony, particularly the silkworm. I argue that the Ferrars’ involvement in colonial enterprises, in particular the Virginia Company, was underpinned by a theology which centred upon the idea of recovering man’s original dominion over the earth, bestowed by God upon Adam in Eden, but lost in the Fall. The Ferrars’ commitment to this theology of repairing the post-lapsarian world enables us to integrate our understanding of the family’s colonial interests with their religiosity. There was no disjunction between the worldliness of the family’s commercial and colonial dealings with the Virginia Company, and the ascetic period of retreat at Little Gidding. This article contributes to a broader scholarly effort to understand the development of seventeenth-century Anglicanism in a colonial context.