Community Conversations and Events

Blog article published by Eleanor Thom on 14 December 2023  events

As the year draws to a close, it’s darker and chillier in Edinburgh, and it’s a good time to get together with your community and spread a bit of warmth. The Alice Thornton Books team has spent the last couple of months doing exactly this, sharing our research with members of the public in Durham and in Edinburgh, where the response from audiences has been very cheering.

As we look forward to more updates from Alice Thornton’s Books in 2024, we want to highlight some of the conversations we’ve had with fans, followers and the seventeenth-century curious at several recent events.

Durham

Defying Storm Babet, in mid-October the team travelled to Durham Cathedral for our much anticipated four-day series of events. This included a lecture by Cordelia Beattie on the first night, two performances of the new version of Debbie Cannon’s one-woman play, ‘The Remarkable Deliverances of Alice Thornton’, a two-day exhibition of two of Alice Thornton’s original manuscripts alongside additional documents relating to Thornton’s life, and a lecture on the final night by Suzanne Trill. Throughout the weekend, the rain was referred to as ‘biblical’ by those arriving at the cathedral but, after braving the journey, audiences were very enthusiastic. The team enjoyed meeting a couple of descendants of Alice Thornton, but most of those we met were encountering Alice Thornton for the first time. There was great appreciation for Debbie Cannon’s performance of Thornton and Anne Danby in the play, as well as praise for Cannon’s dramatic revision of the script. Several members of the audience commented on the events in Thornton’s life being engaging and relatable, ‘like a 17th-century Eastenders’, or ‘something from a Netflix drama’.

We would love to have more conversations in the North of England in 2024, either in person or online. If you are community group with a connection to the places where Alice Thornton lived, please get in touch. We’d love to arrange a talk for you.

Being Human Cafe

One month after our Durham events, we were delighted to collaborate with the Friends of Starbank Park in North Edinburgh. This wonderful city park and its team of volunteers helped us host a sell-out Alice Thornton Café as part of the Being Human Festival 2023. Just weeks before our event, the park was listed as one of the city’s top locations for an Autumn walk, and visitors were greeted with piles of golden leaves, hot drinks and a table full of cakes and muffins.

Indoors, Jo Edge and Cordelia Beattie gave three short talks on the medicinal plants that Alice Thornton used, some of which may have grown locally, and they were asked lots of questions.

Crafts were available all day including making bird feeders with pine cones, making scented pouches with flowers and herbs that would have been known to Alice Thornton, and writing with dip-ink on pages of a similar size to the ones we see used in Thornton’s books. Some people chose to write their own deliverances from death. Others composed poems about the season or drew pictures.

Outdoors throughout the day, Janet McArthur of Friends of Starbank Park led guided walks between the beds and trees to look for remedies and poisons that would have been known to seventeenth-century herbalists. The whole day was well attended by local people of all ages.

A Collaboration with Illustrators and Writers

Towards the end of November, Cordelia, Suzanne and Jo had a lively discussion with a local writers group connected to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, held at the University. The community writers have been working with our Engagement and Impact Officer, Eleanor Thom, who also tutors the group for the book festival’s Citizen project. The writers have recorded their own autobiographical collection of 150-word close scrapes with death, an idea they got from Thornton’s seventeenth-century deliverances from death. The team gave a short talk contextualising Alice Thornton’s life and the possible influences on her writing. They also discussed thematic links between the modern mishaps the writers had chosen to record and the moments Alice Thornton wrote about.

One week later, Cordelia joined the group again at Evolution House, where Edinburgh International Book Festival had arranged a collaboration with a group of illustration students at Edinburgh College of Art. The Citizen writers’ modern deliverances from death have all been individually illustrated by the students. Look out for updates on a possible exhibition next year, to include both modern and seventeenth-century writers and illustrations.

Looking Ahead to 2024

As we move into a new year, stay tuned for updates on additional pages being added to our partial release. If you are reading our digital edition over the holidays, we’d love to have some feedback on how you are using the information, and your comments on our website.