Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century

'Alice Thornton's Books' is a collaborative research project which will enhance understanding of the lives and works of early modern women. Alice Wandesford Thornton (1626-1707) is unusual in having written four different versions of her autobiography. Collectively, her manuscript books offer an extraordinarily rich insight into life in seventeenth-century England and Ireland, especially for the gentry in Yorkshire, at a time of civil war and plague.

We will edit all four books and, working with King’s Digital Lab, make them freely available on the web as interactive and fully searchable editions. We will also show how the content changes between the different books. With our project partner, Durham Cathedral, we will put on a series of events, including public lectures, a display of Thornton related manuscripts, and a one-woman play in which Thornton's words are brought to life for a modern audience.