Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century

艾丽丝·桑顿的书：十七世纪女性一生的回忆

• 批准号: AH/V012738/1
• 负责人: Cordelia Beattie
• 金额: $ 103.1万
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FV012738%2F1
• 关键词: Alice; Thornton; Books; Remembrances; Woman

This project will edit and make available online the four books of 'my life' that Alice Wandesford Thornton bequeathed to her daughter in 1707. Thornton was the daughter of a former Lord Deputy of Ireland and she married a member of the lesser gentry in North Yorkshire. Three of the manuscript books were edited in 1875, for the Surtees Society (dedicated to the history of north east England), and have been read widely for their insight into life in seventeenth-century England with its civil war, plague and high infant mortality rate. However, while Thornton's manuscripts retrace the events of her life multiple times, the 1875 edition created a single narrative from the three original volumes by placing the entries in chronological order. In so doing Thornton's original arrangement of her life story was obscured and some significant material was omitted. The whereabouts of the manuscripts was unknown for many decades. In 2009 two of the texts, the first and third books of her life, were acquired by the British Library but the second volume remained untraced. In 2019 it was traced to Durham Cathedral Library by Cordelia Beattie, who had also recently located a smaller 'Book of Remembrances,' also in Thornton's hand, in a chest in a terraced house in Shropshire. Now that all the original manuscripts have been located, we are finally able to 'unedit' the Victorian edition and to ask both how this alters critical understanding of Thornton's life and texts in particular and what implications this has for the broader fields of early modern history and life-writing. While by no means the only woman to write her life in early modern England, Thornton's books offer an extraordinarily rich example of how a woman below the ranks of the nobility did so. The fact that she produced more than one version of it makes her even more exceptional. Although it has long been established that many male diarists (such as Pepys) curated their texts, such evidence does not appear to survive for early modern women writers.This project will edit all four books and make them freely available on the web in a Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE) so as to reach the widest possible audience; the importance of this form of access has been highlighted at a time in which travel and library access has been curtailed by a global pandemic. The digital aspect of this project means that, as well as making each text available in its entirety, searches for key people, places and events are enabled, which will make it useful to those interested in an array of historical issues ranging from healthcare to the British civil wars. The encoding means that we will be able to show how the content changes between the different manuscript books and how Thornton drew on other sources, especially the Bible, to write about her life. Collectively, these factors will enable us to better appreciate Thornton as an early modern writer. The DSE will also contribute to existing debates on editorial methods within the Digital Humanities and allow future scholars to develop alternative approaches to our dataset. The topics at issue are still of keen interest today and we aim to prompt critical reflection on present-day ideas of gender, religion, science and place and their relationship with the distant past through a series of public lectures at Durham Cathedral, talks to local history groups and blog posts on our website. For example, the writings of Alice Thornton, mother-in-law of a former Dean of the Cathedral, can encourage reflection on the longer history of women's role in the Church of England. Our project partner, Durham Cathedral, has also offered to host an exhibition of Thornton related manuscripts and a one-woman play in which Thornton's words are brought to life for a modern audience. In sum, the project seeks to rescue Alice Thornton from the nineteenth-century prism through which she has long been viewed and re-present her for a twenty-first century audience.

该项目将编辑并在网上提供爱丽丝·旺德斯福德·桑顿 (Alice Wandesford Thornton) 于 1707 年遗赠给女儿的四本书《我的生活》。桑顿是爱尔兰前副大臣的女儿，她嫁给了北约克郡的一位小贵族。其中三本手稿书于 1875 年为苏蒂斯协会（Surtees Society）（致力于英格兰东北部的历史）编辑，因其对 17 世纪英格兰内战、瘟疫和高婴儿死亡率的生活的洞察而被广泛阅读。然而，虽然桑顿的手稿多次回顾了她的生活事件，但 1875 年的版本通过按时间顺序排列条目，从三卷原稿中创建了一个单一的叙述。这样一来，桑顿对她人生故事的最初安排就被掩盖了，一些重要的材料也被省略了。几十年来，这些手稿的下落一直无人知晓。 2009 年，大英图书馆获得了她一生中的第一本书和第三本书，但第二卷仍然下落不明。 2019 年，科迪莉亚·贝蒂 (Cordelia Beattie) 追踪到了达勒姆大教堂图书馆，她最近还在什罗普郡一栋联排别墅的箱子里发现了一本较小的《纪念册》，该书也在桑顿手中。既然所有原始手稿都已找到，我们终于能够“编辑”维多利亚版本，并询问这如何改变对桑顿的生活和文本的批判性理解，特别是这对早期现代历史和生活写作的更广泛领域有何影响。虽然桑顿绝不是唯一一位在近代早期的英国书写自己生活的女性，但桑顿的书提供了一个极其丰富的例子，展示了贵族以下的女性如何做到这一点。事实上，她制作了不止一个版本，这一事实使她更加与众不同。尽管早已确定许多男性日记作家（如佩皮斯）策划了他们的文本，但对于早期现代女性作家来说，这样的证据似乎并不存在。该项目将编辑所有四本书，并以数字学术版（DSE）的形式在网络上免费提供，以便覆盖尽可能广泛的受众；在旅行和图书馆访问因全球大流行而受到限制的时期，这种形式的访问的重要性就凸显出来了。该项目的数字化意味着，除了完整地提供每个文本之外，还可以搜索关键人物、地点和事件，这对于那些对从医疗保健到英国内战等一系列历史问题感兴趣的人来说非常有用。编码意味着我们将能够展示不同手稿书籍之间的内容如何变化，以及桑顿如何利用其他来源，特别是圣经，来写她的生活。总的来说，这些因素将使我们能够更好地欣赏桑顿作为一位早期现代作家。 DSE 还将为数字人文领域内编辑方法的现有争论做出贡献，并允许未来的学者开发我们的数据集的替代方法。这些话题在今天仍然引起人们的广泛兴趣，我们的目标是通过在达勒姆大教堂举行的一系列公开讲座、与当地历史团体的对话以及我们网站上的博客文章，促使人们对当今的性别、宗教、科学和地方观念及其与遥远的过去的关系进行批判性反思。例如，前大教堂院长的岳母爱丽丝·桑顿（Alice Thornton）的著作可以鼓励人们反思英国教会中女性角色的悠久历史。我们的项目合作伙伴达勒姆大教堂还主动提出举办桑顿相关手稿展览和一场独女戏剧，其中桑顿的话语被生动地呈现给现代观众。总而言之，该项目旨在将爱丽丝·桑顿从十九世纪的棱镜中拯救出来，并将她重新呈现给二十一世纪的观众。