This project (2021-25) has resulted in an an interactive and fully searchable digital edition of Alice Thornton’s autobiographical Books, freely accessible here.
The text of all four manuscripts are available to read in both fully modernised and semi-diplomatic versions, either separately or side-by-side. As we are using the widely recognised Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup schema, the edition is fully searchable (for example, users can trace people, places and events across all four Books).
Book One
Add. MS 88897/1
Although we have not digitised the manuscripts, we have provided some sample images from each of them to offer a sense of how the original materials look.
You can currently access our partial release, in both semi-diplomatic and modernised versions. See also our second release of the search function.
Feedback is especially welcome as we work towards our final release in late February 2025; see the icon on the bottom right.
When Alice Thornton died in 1707, she bequeathed ‘three Books of my own Meditations and Transactions of my life, and all the residue of my Papers and Books written with my own hand’ to her daughter, Alice Thornton Comber. In addition to those three manuscript books, there exists another, smaller manuscript known as her Book of Remembrances.
In the introduction to his nineteenth-century edition, Charles C. Jackson refers to all four manuscripts; after this, however, the location of the manuscript books was unclear for many years.
In 1982 and 1994, two manuscripts re-emerged and were sold to a private buyer, Paula Peyraud. These manuscript books were resold in 2009 and are now held at the British Library (BL).
In 2018 and 2019, Cordelia Beattie located the other two manuscripts: one was still in the hands of the Comber family and the other had been in the possession of Durham Cathedral Library (DCL) since 1969 but had been misidentified in the catalogue. Today, both manuscript books form part of the Comber Collection at DCL.
These are the four Books that make up our digital edition.
It has become common to refer to Thornton’s Books as the Book of Remembrances (DCL, GB-0033-CCOM 38), Book 1 (BL, Add. MS 88897/1), Book 2 (DCL, GB-0033-CCOM 7), and Book 3 (BL, Add. MS 88897/2). However, material evidence suggests that the relationship between Thornton’s Books is not straightforwardly sequential. A key issue this project sought to address, using our editorial and markup practice, is why and how these Books are interconnected.
We prefer the following fuller titles, which use descriptions derived from her writings:
However, for ease of reference, we also use abbreviated titles: