Alice Thornton’s Books

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.

• Table of ContentsList of ContributorsAcknowledgementsAcronyms and AbbreviationsList of FiguresIntroduction. Alice Thornton’s Books: Rediscovery and ReassessmentCordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill and Joanne EdgeEditing: Then and NowChapter 1. Nineteenth-Century Editions of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the First Publication of Alice Thornton’s Autobiography (1875)Paul SalzmanChapter 2. Alice Thornton’s Books and Digital EditingSharon HowardAutobiographical Forms: Religion and RecollectionChapter 3. Alice Thornton and the Church of England: Discerning the DivineJessica L. MalayChapter 4. ‘Meditations and Transactions of My Life’: Meditation and Life WritingSuzanne TrillChapter 5. Time, Space and Embodied MemoryElspeth GrahamInterpreting Signs: Mind and BodyChapter 6. Providence’s Poems: Dream Texts and InterpretationSue WisemanChapter 7. Health, Illness and MedicineJoanne EdgeInterpersonal Relations: Family and FriendsChapter 8. Alice Thornton’s Familial LettersJulie A. EckerleChapter 9. Ruined and Scorned: Failed Friendships and EnmitiesNaomi PullinLegal Negotiations: Law and the LandChapter 10. ‘This grand concern of my life’: Marriage, Property and the LawCordelia BeattieChapter 11. Alice Thornton's TreescapesSarah ShieldsColonial Encounters: Politics and the EnvironmentChapter 12. Alice Thornton and the Irish Rebellion of 1641Naomi McAreaveyChapter 13. Climate and ColonisationPatricia PhillippyAfterword Elaine HobbyAppendix ‘A List of Alice Thornton’s Known Letters’Julie A. EckerleIndex