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

这个项目将对爱丽丝·旺德斯福德·桑顿于1707年遗赠给女儿的四本《我的生活》进行编辑，并将其放到网上。桑顿是前爱尔兰上议院议员的女儿，她嫁给了北约克郡的一名下层贵族。其中三本手稿是在1875年为Surtees Society（致力于英格兰东北部的历史）编辑的，并因其对17世纪英国内战、瘟疫和高婴儿死亡率的生活的深刻见解而被广泛阅读。然而，尽管桑顿的手稿多次追溯了她生活中的事件，1875年的版本通过按时间顺序排列条目，从三卷原稿中创造了一个单一的叙述。这样一来，桑顿对她的人生故事的原始安排就模糊了，一些重要的材料也被省略了。几十年来，手稿的下落无人知晓。2009年，大英图书馆获得了她生平的第一本书和第三本书，但第二卷却下落不明。2019年，科迪莉亚·贝蒂（Cordelia Beattie）在达勒姆大教堂图书馆找到了这本书，她最近还在什罗普郡一座排屋的一个箱子里找到了一本较小的《记忆之书》，这本书也在桑顿手中。现在所有的原始手稿都已经找到了，我们终于能够“取消编辑”维多利亚时代的版本，并询问这是如何改变对桑顿生活和文本的批判性理解的，特别是这对早期现代历史和生活写作的更广泛领域有什么影响。虽然桑顿绝不是近代早期英国唯一一位写自己生活的女性，但她的书提供了一个非常丰富的例子，说明一个低于贵族阶层的女性是如何写自己生活的。事实上，她制作了不止一个版本，这使她更加与众不同。尽管很多男性日记作者（比如佩皮斯）都精心整理了自己的文章，但这样的证据似乎并不存在于早期现代女性作家身上。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，以便尽可能广泛地接触到读者；在全球大流行病限制了旅行和图书馆的使用之际，这种形式的获取的重要性得到了突出。该项目的数字化方面意味着，除了使每个文本完整可用外，还可以搜索关键人物、地点和事件，这将使其对从医疗保健到英国内战等一系列历史问题感兴趣的人非常有用。编码意味着我们将能够展示不同手稿的内容是如何变化的，以及桑顿是如何利用其他资料，尤其是圣经，来写她的生活的。总的来说，这些因素将使我们更好地欣赏桑顿作为一位早期现代作家。DSE还将有助于数字人文学科中现有的关于编辑方法的辩论，并允许未来的学者开发我们数据集的替代方法。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，促使人们对当今关于性别、宗教、科学和地方的观念及其与遥远过去的关系进行批判性反思。例如，大教堂前院长的岳母爱丽丝·桑顿（Alice Thornton）的著作，可以鼓励人们反思英国国教中女性角色的更悠久历史。我们的项目合作伙伴，达勒姆大教堂，也提出要举办一场与桑顿有关的手稿展览，并为现代观众带来了桑顿的话语。总而言之，该项目试图将爱丽丝·桑顿从19世纪的棱镜中拯救出来，长期以来，人们一直通过这个棱镜来看待她，并为21世纪的观众再现她。

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.