Alice Thornton's Books

Reassessing the Life Writings of a Seventeenth-Century Woman
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-90-485-6253-4
Verlag: Pallas Publications

Buch, Englisch, 296 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World

This book is the first dedicated study of Alice Thornton (1626–1707) and her life writings, offering unprecedented insights into how one early modern woman revised and reshaped her life story over 40 years, using newly accessible manuscripts and archival sources.

Readers will gain fresh perspectives on Thornton’s writings through a comprehensive collection of fifteen chapters that utilize a new digital edition and previously unexplored archival materials. It puts Thornton in the context of seventeenth-century North Yorkshire, England, Ireland and North America by looking at a diverse range of themes such as religion, law, colonialism, the environment, health care, memory, emotion, marriage, and family. The collection provides fresh insights on previously discussed areas, introduces new avenues for research, and reassesses Thornton’s life and significance.

This book is ideal for students, teachers, and researchers of early modern literature and history, particularly those interested in women’s writings, seventeenth-century studies, and digital humanities. It provides valuable insights for anyone studying gender, autobiography, and cultural and social history in the early modern period.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Beattie, Cordelia

Trill, Suzanne

Edge, Joanne

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Biographien & Autobiographien: Historisch, Politisch, Militärisch
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Acronyms and Abbreviations

List of Figures

Introduction. Alice Thornton’s Books: Rediscovery and Reassessment

Cordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill and Joanne Edge

Editing: Then and Now

Chapter 1. Nineteenth-Century Editions of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the First Publication of Alice Thornton’s Autobiography (1875)

Paul Salzman

Chapter 2. Alice Thornton’s Books and Digital Editing

Sharon Howard

Autobiographical Forms: Religion and Recollection

Chapter 3. Alice Thornton and the Church of England: Discerning the Divine

Jessica L. Malay

Chapter 4. ‘Meditations and Transactions of My Life’: Meditation and Life Writing

Suzanne Trill

Chapter 5. Time, Space and Embodied Memory

Elspeth Graham

Interpreting Signs: Mind and Body

Chapter 6. Providence’s Poems: Dream Texts and Interpretation

Sue Wiseman

Chapter 7. Health, Illness and Medicine

Joanne Edge

Interpersonal Relations: Family and Friends

Chapter 8. Alice Thornton’s Familial Letters

Julie A. Eckerle

Chapter 9. Ruined and Scorned: Failed Friendships and Enmities

Naomi Pullin

Legal Negotiations: Law and the Land

Chapter 10. ‘This grand concern of my life’: Marriage, Property and the Law

Cordelia Beattie

Chapter 11. Alice Thornton's Treescapes

Sarah Shields

Colonial Encounters: Politics and the Environment

Chapter 12. Alice Thornton and the Irish Rebellion of 1641

Naomi McAreavey

Chapter 13. Climate and Colonisation

Patricia Phillippy

Afterword

Elaine Hobby

Appendix

‘A List of Alice Thornton’s Known Letters’

Julie A. Eckerle

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Cordelia Beattie is Professor of Women’s and Gender History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has published widely on premodern women in Britain and Europe. She is the co-editor of Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century (2025).

Suzanne Trill is Professor of Seventeenth-century Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is editor of Anne, Lady Halkett, A True Account of My Life and Selected Meditations (2022) and a section co-editor (‘Restoration’) for the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2025–26).

Joanne Edge is a palaeographer, scholarly editor and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern medicine. Her first book, Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain, was published in 2024. She is currently preparing a monograph on bewitchment in Richard Napier's (1559–1634) astrological casebooks.