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

这个项目将编辑并在线提供爱丽丝·旺德斯福德·桑顿在1707年遗赠给她女儿的四本书“我的生活”。桑顿是爱尔兰一位前副勋爵的女儿，她嫁给了北约克郡一位出身较低的绅士。其中三本手稿于1875年为瑟蒂斯学会（致力于英格兰东北部的历史）编辑，并因其对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，尽管桑顿的手稿多次追溯她的生活事件，但1875年版通过将条目按时间顺序排列，从三卷原始卷中创建了一个单一的叙述。在这样做桑顿的原始安排，她的生活故事是模糊和一些重要的材料被省略。这些手稿的下落几十年来无人知晓。2009年，大英图书馆获得了其中的两本书，即她生命中的第一本和第三本，但第二卷仍然下落不明。2019年，它被Cordelia Beattie追溯到达勒姆大教堂图书馆，她最近还在什罗普郡的一个排屋的箱子里找到了一本较小的“回忆之书”，也在桑顿的手中。现在，所有的原始手稿已经找到，我们终于能够“取消编辑”维多利亚版本，并询问这如何改变了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什么影响。虽然桑顿绝不是现代早期英国唯一一位写下自己生活的女性，但她的书提供了一个非常丰富的例子，说明一个贵族以下的女性是如何做到的。事实上，她制作了不止一个版本，这使她更加与众不同。尽管长期以来，许多男性日记作者这一项目将编辑所有四本书，并在网上以数字学术版的形式免费提供，以便尽可能多地接触到读者;在旅行和利用图书馆的机会因一场全球性流行病而减少的时候，这种形式的利用的重要性得到了强调。该项目的数字化意味着，除了完整地提供每一个文本外，还可以搜索关键人物、地点和事件，这将有助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。编码意味着我们将能够展示不同手稿之间的内容变化，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个早期现代作家。DSE还将为数字人文学科中现有的编辑方法辩论做出贡献，并允许未来的学者为我们的数据集开发替代方法。问题的主题仍然是今天的浓厚兴趣，我们的目标是通过在达勒姆大教堂的一系列公开讲座，与当地历史团体和我们网站上的博客文章，促进对当今性别，宗教，科学和地方的思想及其与遥远的过去的关系的批判性反思。例如，大教堂前院长的岳母爱丽丝·桑顿的著作可以鼓励人们反思妇女在英国教会中的作用的更长历史。我们的项目合作伙伴，达勒姆大教堂，还提出主办一个展览桑顿相关的手稿和一个女人发挥其中桑顿的话带来了生活的现代观众。总之，该项目旨在拯救爱丽丝桑顿从十九世纪的棱镜，通过她一直在观察和重新呈现她的二十一世纪的观众。

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.