A big thank you to everyone who came to the Ferrar Conference and Exhibition here at Magdalene College, to all the speakers who generously shared their knowledge and research into the Ferrar family, Little Gidding and the Virginia Company, and to all the Magdalene College staff who looked after us.
Professor Alison Shell (UCL) gives a key-note lecture at the Ferrar Conference, introduced by Professor James Raven (Essex University and Magdalene College, Cambridge)
The conference marked the completion of the project to conseve the Ferrar prints, and the arrival of our beautiful, custom-made oak units in which to house them.
Oak units commissioned to house the Ferrar papers and prints, made by Ed Garrett-Jones and the generous gift of the Friends of the Pepys Library and Historic Collections, Magdalene College
The legacy of this highly successful conference will partly be in the work which it inspires; and we are looking forward to seeing how the conference and the improved scholarly access to the Ferrar Papers in the Old Library achieved by the conservation project will contribute to Seventeenth-Century studies.
The other legacy will be a bibliographic project, headed up by the Pepys Librarian, Dr M E J Hughes, to widen access to up-to-date scholarly materials relating to the Ferrar collection at Magdalene, including as a shared database to allow researches to see — and add to — what we know about each of the (neary 1,000) individual items.
For more information on the Ferrar papers, contact pepyslibrary@magd.cam.ac.uk
An unexpected result of the conference — two members of the extensive, modern Ferrar family, Susanna and Richard, meet for the first time at the Conference Exhibition
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