Project postdoctoral fellow Dr Jo Edge will give a paper at 'Writing the Self in Pain: Historial Perspectives', a two-day conference hosted by the Experiencing Agony project team at the University of Helsinki, Finland, 24–25 October 2024.
The paper is titled 'Alice Thornton and the Memory of Emotional Pain'. An abstract is below.
Alice Thornton (1626–1707) produced four autobiographical books, which wrote and rewrote her life. All four books focus to some degree on deliverances – the times God spared her from danger or death. Therefore, all four books (labelled by the Alice Thornton’s Books project as Books 1, 2, 3, and Book Rem) contain rich accounts of illness. Until the Thornton’s Books project, scholars have tended to work with the Surtees Society’s 1875 composite edition of Thornton (which uses Book 1 as its base with limited material from other books) and Anselment’s 2014 edition of Book 1. This paper will therefore focus on hereto-unavailable material in Book 2 and Book 3 – written as late as the 1680s and 1690s – but describing events of the 1650s and 1660s – to think about how Thornton rewrote her emotional pain decades later.
One type of illness recounted in Thornton’s books is that of serious illness caused by sudden shock. In February 1655, Thornton was in bed after giving birth to her second daughter when her maid called her. Her one-year-old daughter, in her cot, was experiencing convulsive fits:
I was lying the next chamber to her and did hear her when she came out of them [i.e., her fits] to give great shrieks and so suddenly that it frightened me extremely, and all the time of this poor child's illness I myself was at death's door by the extreme excess of those, upon the fright and terror that came upon me with so great floods that I was spent and my breath lost, my strength departed from me and I could not speak for fainting and was dispirited. My dear mother and aunt and friends did not expect my life. (Book 2)
Many of Thornton’s descriptions of traumatic illness follow a process: a sudden shock causes a ‘flood’ of humours, leading to fears for her death. This paper will demonstrate that this conception of the inner workings of the body was in line with how early modern doctors – and laypeople – conceived of their bodies and illness. It will also consider how Thornton wrote her emotional pain differently – or not – as an older woman.