About the Project

About Our Research Project

This AHRC-funded research project (Ref: AH/V012738/1), in partnership with Durham Cathedral, has created an online digital edition of all four of Alice Thornton’s autobiographical Books as its main output. To date, our knowledge of Thornton’s life has largely been dependent on a nineteenth-century edition by Charles C. Jackson that selected materials from some of those manuscript Books to produce a single, chronological narrative of her life.

By contrast, our edition makes the full text of all four manuscripts freely available for the first time. This allows users to compare and contrast her versions of events and examine how she revised her story.

Over the course of this project, we kept in mind three key questions:

1. How do Thornton’s Books complicate current scholarship on early modern life-writing, particularly its gendered nature?
2. Why did Thornton write four different autobiographical Books? How do they relate to each other and what might this reveal about their timing, process of composition and audience?
3. How does Thornton’s engagement with contemporary legal, medical, political, and religious discourses enhance understanding of early modern women in Britain and Ireland?

About Our Edition

For more information on our principles and practices, please read our Guidelines. For a full list of the works cited in our Edition notes please see our Bibliography.

Guidelines    Bibliography

The Project Team

‘Alice Thornton’s Books’ brought together historians, literary scholars and digital analysts and research software engineers from the University of Edinburgh and King's Digital Lab (KDL) at King's College, London.

Research Team

Cordelia Beattie
Principal Investigator

Suzanne Trill
Co-Investigator

Joanne Edge
Postdoctoral Researcher

Sharon Howard
Postdoctoral Researcher

KDL Solution Development Team

Paul Caton
Senior Research Software Analyst

Mary Chester-Kadwell
Senior Research Software Engineer

Ginestra Ferraro
Senior Research Software UI/UX Designer

Geoffroy Noël
Senior Research Software Engineer

Tiffany Ong
Senior Research Software UI/UX Designer

Priyal Shah
Research Software UI/UX Designer

The Project Advisory Board

The project has benefited from the collective wisdom of the following individuals who made up our advisory board:

Prof. Catherine Clarke, Director of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community, Institute of Historical Research

Dr Alison Cullingford, Head of Libraries and Collections, Durham Cathedral

Prof. Elspeth Graham, Professor Emerita, Liverpool John Moores University

Andrew Gray, Research Access Archivist, Durham University

Prof. Elaine Hobby, Professor Emerita of 17th-Century Studies, Loughborough University

Prof. Lauren Kassell, Professor of History of Science, the European University Institute

Dr Anouk Lang, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, University of Edinburgh

Prof. Jessica Malay, Professor Emerita of English Renaissance Literature, University of Huddersfield

Dr William Wyeth, Properties Historian, English Heritage.

The board met in hybrid form on five occasions to review our progress. Sadly Prof. Raymond Anselment, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Connecticut, editor of My First Booke of My Life: Alice Thornton (2014), died not long after our first meeting.