New Release: First 100 Pages of All Four Books Now Available

News article published by Suzanne Trill on 28 June 2024  TEIdigital editionmanuscripts

As we head into the final six months of the project, we are marking this milestone by sharing the first one hundred pages of all four of Alice Thornton’s books so you can begin to explore her life and writing in greater detail.

As the image above illustrates, simply placing the initial pages of all four volumes side-by-side displays some notable differences between these volumes. While the Book of Remembrances opens with a clearly defined title page, Book 1 and Book 2 commence with devotional materials of different kinds. Book 1 opens with a lengthy quotation from Bishop Joseph Hall’s Meditations and Vows (1626), and Book 2 with another lengthy citation; this time from Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1639).

And, if you click on the camera icon on the first page of Book 3, you will see that it is identified by Thornton’s monogram, the date of her husband’s death, and a later attribution note that reads: ‘A manuscript written by my dear grandmother, Mrs Thornton’.

While these may seem like minor details, when added to other material factors - such as the size of the volumes, the paper used and the time of writing – this information helps us to answer our original research questions, especially the second: ‘why did Thornton write four different autobiographical texts?’.

Over the course of the next six months, we will share more of our thoughts on this and other topics; however, we would also love to hear your theories, so please do look at the latest release and let us know what you think on our socials or via the feedback button.