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.

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsAcknowledgementsList of Acronyms and AbbreviationsIntroduction: Alice Thornton’s Books: Rediscovery and ReassessmentCORDELIA BEATTIE, SUZANNE TRILL AND JOANNE EDGEPART IEditing: Then and Now1. Nineteenth-Century Editions of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the First Publication of Alice Thornton’s Autobiography (1875)PAUL SALZMAN2. Alice Thornton’s Books and Digital EditingSHARON HOWARDPART IIAutobiographical Forms: Religion and Recollection3. Alice Thornton and the Church of England: Discerning the Divine in Early Modern AutobiographyJESSICA L. MALAY4. ‘Meditations and Transactions of My Life’: Meditation and Life Writing in Alice Thornton’s BooksSUZANNE TRILL5. Time, Space and Embodied Memory in Alice Thornton’s Books ELSPETH GRAHAMPART IIIInterpreting Signs: Mind and Body6. Providence’s Poems: Alice Thornton’s Dream Texts and InterpretationSUE WISEMAN7. Health, Illness and Medicine in Alice Thornton’s BooksJOANNE EDGEPART IVInterpersonal Relations: Family and Friends8. Alice Thornton’s Familial LettersJULIE A. ECKERLE9. Ruined and Scorned: Failed Friendships and Enmities in Alice Thornton’s Books NAOMI PULLINPART VLegal Negotiations: Law and the Land10. ‘This grand concern of my life’: Marriage, Property and the Law in Alice Thornton’s BooksCORDELIA BEATTIE11. Alice Thornton's TreescapesSARAH SHIELDSPART VIColonial Encounters: Politics and the Environment12. Alice Thornton and the Irish Rebellion of 1641NAOMI MCAREAVEY13. Climate and Colonization in Alice Thornton’s BooksPATRICIA PHILLIPPYAfterwordELAINE HOBBYAppendix: A List of Alice Thornton’s Known LettersJULIE A. ECKERLEIndex