1st Edition
Alice Thornton’s Books Reassessing the Life Writings of a Seventeenth-Century Woman
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Acronyms and Abbreviations
List of Figures
Introduction. Alice Thornton’s Books: Rediscovery and Reassessment
Cordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill and Joanne Edge
Editing: Then and Now
Chapter 1. Nineteenth-Century Editions of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the First Publication of Alice Thornton’s Autobiography (1875)
Paul Salzman
Chapter 2. Alice Thornton’s Books and Digital Editing
Sharon Howard
Autobiographical Forms: Religion and Recollection
Chapter 3. Alice Thornton and the Church of England: Discerning the Divine
Jessica L. Malay
Chapter 4. ‘Meditations and Transactions of My Life’: Meditation and Life Writing
Suzanne Trill
Chapter 5. Time, Space and Embodied Memory
Elspeth Graham
Interpreting Signs: Mind and Body
Chapter 6. Providence’s Poems: Dream Texts and Interpretation
Sue Wiseman
Chapter 7. Health, Illness and Medicine
Joanne Edge
Interpersonal Relations: Family and Friends
Chapter 8. Alice Thornton’s Familial Letters
Julie A. Eckerle
Chapter 9. Ruined and Scorned: Failed Friendships and Enmities
Naomi Pullin
Legal Negotiations: Law and the Land
Chapter 10. ‘This grand concern of my life’: Marriage, Property and the Law
Cordelia Beattie
Chapter 11. Alice Thornton's Treescapes
Sarah Shields
Colonial Encounters: Politics and the Environment
Chapter 12. Alice Thornton and the Irish Rebellion of 1641
Naomi McAreavey
Chapter 13. Climate and Colonisation
Patricia Phillippy
Afterword
Elaine Hobby
Appendix
‘A List of Alice Thornton’s Known Letters’
Julie A. Eckerle
Index
Biography
Cordelia Beattie is Professor of Women’s and Gender History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has published widely on premodern women in Britain and Europe. She is the co-editor of Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century (2025).
Suzanne Trill is Professor of Seventeenth-century Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is editor of Anne, Lady Halkett, A True Account of My Life and Selected Meditations (2022) and a section co-editor (‘Restoration’) for the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2025–26).
Joanne Edge is a palaeographer, scholarly editor and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern medicine. Her first book, Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain, was published in 2024. She is currently preparing a monograph on bewitchment in Richard Napier's (1559–1634) astrological casebooks.
