Project Symposium: Toward a Reassessment of Alice Thornton's 'Books'

News article published by Suzanne Trill on 12 July 2023  eventspublications

As promised in our application for AHRC funding, the Alice Thornton’s Books team have organised a symposium that will take place over the next two days, 12 and 13 July 2023, in Edinburgh.

For this gathering, we have invited a group of international scholars with specific expertise in different fields and disciplines. Last summer, we gave our participants access to our draft semi-diplomatic transcriptions of all four of the Thornton manuscripts so that we could all produce papers for pre-circulation.

After the symposium, these papers will be revised for publication in an edited volume, entitled Alice Thornton’s Life-Writings: Reassessing a Seventeenth-Century Woman’s Manuscript Books, which will be published in open access format by Amsterdam University Press in 2025.

The image, from the Book of Remembrances, describes a rather different gathering in which Thornton records her delight as she and her family can celebrate the Lord’s Supper at their new home in East Newton (August 1662).