MARY WARD
From an engraving in The Life of Mary Ward, by Mary Elizabeth Chambers of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin
The Institute finally received the sanction of the pope and was successful in various countries. But Miss Ward's efforts to establish it in England in 1638 met with so much hostility that she was obliged to carry on her work secretly and by subterfuge, changing the location of her little band of followers from time to time as suspicion centered upon them. The Institute was finally broken up by the Puritans in 1642. Little is known of the actual work of the school. The members of the Institute were always so anxious and harried that there could have been no really systematic instruction except in the articles of faith. There are in the Convent of the Institute at Augsburg fifty large oil paintings dating from the seventeenth century, and representing events in its history. In these pictures Mary Ward's life is seen to be one of dramatic interest from her childhood to her death. And her personality is one of compelling charm. She was a heroine and a pioneer, an executive of first-rate ability, an extremely acute woman of business, and yet without loss of the graces and amenities of human intercourse. The St. Omer school shows genius. Within the limits of her church she was promulgating ideas the full fruition of which would not come for many years. She believed that sound mental training would establish women in their faith, and that women, if given opportunity and education, would prove to have powers not generally ascribed to them. To establish a school on this basis was an enterprise bolder, more original, and more hazardous than was the opening of the first colleges for women in America.
Another religious school was that known as Little Gidding,[84] founded by Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637). The life of Ferrar is one of great interest. He was a man of wide experience. He had known academic life at Cambridge, he had traveled in Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain, he had conducted extensive business enterprises in connection with the Virginia Company, and had taken an important place in political life as a member of Parliament. But while still under forty he turned definitely to a life of religious sequestration. He and his mother bought the Manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire in 1624 and there they set up the new establishment. He was joined by his brother John with his wife and three children, and by Mrs. Collet, his favorite sister, with her husband and sixteen children. To the children of these two families were added such children of the neighboring gentry as cared to come. In this household the girls were carefully educated. They had one master in Music, one in Arithmetic and Writing, one in English and Latin. They formed themselves into a little society called "The Academy" which had regular meetings for discussion of topics set for them. They took fanciful names, and had many quaint and elaborate little formalities. The topics discussed by "Patient" and "Cheerful" and "Moderator" and "Visitor," and even by little four-year-old "Humble," were nearly always religious or ethical, and the purpose of the discussions was always moral improvement. So strong was the religious element, so rigid were the forms of fasting, feasting, and worshiping, that the school came under suspicion as a Protestant nunnery. In 1641 it was attacked in a pamphlet entitled The Armenian Nunnery, or a Brief Description and Relation of the newly erected Monasticall Place called the Armenian Nunnery at Little Gidding.
The school at Little Gidding has had its fame as a religious organization perpetuated in Mr. Shorthouse's John Inglesant, but it is even more famous in the annals of fine book-binding. It was the belief of Nicholas Ferrar that every one should be taught some hand-work, and he determined upon book-binding as a part of the regular school work at Little Gidding. Dr. Jebb says that "a Cambridge book-binder's daughter that bound rarely" was procured as an instructor. She came, he says, either from the University printers themselves or from some Cambridge bindery which they patronized where she herself had been trained. She brought some of her own stamps with her, and some of her own ideas as to how they should be arranged.
Even this activity was the handmaid of religion, and was, indeed, probably undertaken primarily in order to preserve the concordances of the four gospels so carefully worked out by Nicholas Ferrar. The girls learned to do all the mechanical parts with extreme nicety, joining the many tiny slips and putting in the illustrative engravings with great deftness. The name of the binder is not usually given in the book, but there is one exception. A book bound by the youngest of the workers bears the inscription:
Thanks be to God.
Done at Little Gidding. Anno Domino 1640
by Virginia Ferrar, an. 12.[85]
The curious little "histories" composed by "The Academy" were written out in three manuscript volumes and bound. They have been lately acquired by the British Museum. "The volumes measure 13½ x 9 inches and are bound in black morocco, with a small double gold line running along the edge, finished with a little ornamental spray at each corner." The Concordances were more sumptuous. The Bibliographica gives full-page colored illustrations of these fine bindings and says of them:
The beautiful effect which Mary Collet, who seems to have done much of the binding herself, was able to produce by different arrangements of the stamps I have described shows that she was undoubtedly a lady of much taste and originality ... and it may fairly be considered that the velvet-bound volumes, of great size, gorgeous in color and rich in decoration, which were eventually produced under her supervision, must take the highest rank among amateur decorative book-bindings.