The Four Books By Alice Thornton

Digital Edition

Over the course of the project (2021-25), this project will publish an interactive and fully searchable digital edition of Alice Thornton’s autobiographical Books which will be freely accessible here.

The text of all four manuscripts will be available to read in both fully modernised and semi-diplomatic versions, either separately or side-by-side. As we are using the widely recognised Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup schema, the edition will be fully searchable (for example, users will be able to trace people, places and events across all four Books).

Photograph of the original front of book, very used scuffed faded covers, showcasing charm and elegance

Book of Remembrances

Durham Cathedral Library,
GB-0033-CCOM 38
Read the edition
Book information

Photograph of the original front of book, very used scuffed faded covers, showcasing charm and elegance

Book One

British Library,
Add. MS 88897/1
Read the edition
Book information

Photograph of the original front of book, very used scuffed faded covers, showcasing charm and elegance

Book Two

Durham Cathedral Library,
GB-0033-CCOM 7
Read the edition
Book information

Photograph of the original front of book, very used scuffed faded covers, showcasing charm and elegance

Book Three

British Library,
Add. MS 88897/2
Read the edition
Book information

Although we are not digitising the manuscripts, we will provide some sample images from each of them to offer a sense of how the original materials look.

You can now access our partial release, in both semi-diplomatic and modernised versions. See also our second release of the search function.

We would appreciate all feedback so please click on the button at the bottom right or email us - alicethorntonsbooks at gmail dot com - to let us know your thoughts.

Background

When Alice Thornton died in 1707, she bequeathed ‘three Books of my own Meditations and Transactions of my life, and all the residue of my Papers and Books written with my own hand’ to her daughter, Alice Thornton Comber. In addition to those three manuscript books, there exists another, smaller manuscript known as her Book of Remembrances.

In the introduction to his nineteenth-century edition, Charles C. Jackson refers to all four manuscripts; after this, however, the location of the manuscript books was unclear for many years.

In 1982 and 1994, two manuscripts re-emerged and were sold to a private buyer, Paula Peyraud. These manuscript books were resold in 2009 and are now held at the British Library (BL).

In 2018 and 2019, Cordelia Beattie located the other two manuscripts: one was still in the hands of the Comber family and the other had been in the possession of Durham Cathedral Library (DCL) since 1969 but had been misidentified in the catalogue. Today, both manuscript books form part of the Comber Collection at DCL.

These are the four Books that we are in the process of preparing for our digital edition.

It has become common to refer to Thornton’s Books as the Book of Remembrances (DCL, GB-0033-CCOM 38), Book 1 (BL, Add. MS 88897/1), Book 2 (DCL, GB-0033-CCOM 7), and Book 3 (BL, Add. MS 88897/2). However, material evidence suggests that the relationship between Thornton’s Books is not straightforwardly sequential. A key issue this project seeks to address is why and how these Books are interconnected.

Our editorial and markup practice aims to make this possible. We prefer the following fuller titles, which use descriptions derived from her writings:

  • Book of Remembrances
  • Book 1: The First Book of My Life
  • Book 2: The First Book of My Widowed Condition
  • Book 3: The Second Book of My Widowed Condition

However, for ease of reference, we will also use abbreviated titles:

  • Book Rem
  • Book 1
  • Book 2
  • Book 3

Citing this web page:

Cordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill, Joanne Edge, Sharon Howard. 'The Four Books By Alice Thornton'. Alice Thornton's Books. Accessed .
https://thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/books/
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