My fascination with the Ferrars is an interest which has endured since I first read the last of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets—to which he gave the title ‘Little Gidding’. Being something of an Eliotman, I set out to learn what this place was which he had described and why it had such significance for him. It was not long before I was deep in Alan Maycock's biography of Nicholas Ferrar, son of the strong-willed old lady who in 1625 established a retreat for herself and her family at the manor of Little Gidding in a remote section of Huntingdonshire. It was from this biography that I learned of the existence of four manuscript volumes in which were recorded the conversations of ‘The Little Academy’, a discussion group formed by members of the Ferrar family to instruct both themselves and their audience in matters moral and intellectual.