Alice Thornton’s Books

This book is the first dedicated study of Alice Thornton (1626–1707) and her life writings, offering unprecedented insights into how one early modern woman revised and reshaped her life story over 40 years, using newly accessible manuscripts and archival sources.

Readers will gain fresh perspectives on Thornton’s writings through a comprehensive collection of fifteen chapters that utilize a new digital edition and previously unexplored archival materials. It puts Thornton in the context of seventeenth-century North Yorkshire, England, Ireland and North America by looking at a diverse range of themes such as religion, law, colonialism, the environment, health care, memory, emotion, marriage, and family. The collection provides fresh insights on previously discussed areas, introduces new avenues for research, and reassesses Thornton’s life and significance.

This book is ideal for students, teachers, and researchers of early modern literature and history, particularly those interested in women’s writings, seventeenth-century studies, and digital humanities. It provides valuable insights for anyone studying gender, autobiography, and cultural and social history in the early modern period.

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.