Major Grant Awarded to Create Innovative Digital Edition of Thornton Manuscripts
A major AHRC grant has been awarded to Dr Cordelia Beattie and Dr Suzanne Trill for their project ‘Alice Thornton’s Books: Remembrances of a Woman’s Life in the Seventeenth Century’.
Working in partnership with Durham Cathedral, the project team will be creating a full searchable open-access digital edition of the four manuscript volumes left by Alice Wandesford Thornton (1626-1707). Describing her life during the British civil wars, these books provide rich insights into the life and experience of a 17th Century woman. Presumed missing for over a century, one of these manuscripts was located in 2019 by Dr Beattie in Durham Cathedral.
Understanding the value of being able to read and analyse the volumes alongside one another, Dr Beattie and Dr Trill carried out a pilot project, supported by the Centre for Data, Culture & Society, to explore the potential of a digital edition. The digital edition will allow the project team to cross reference, highlight and present passages alongside one another, revealing the rich intertextual weaving of experiences and episodes between the manuscripts. This innovative edition will enable scholars to carry out more in-depth analysis of Thornton’s texts and understand more fully the structure and organising principles of her writing. Using TEI-XML, the project team will mark up and annotate the texts, providing well-structured textual data that can continue to be built upon in future.
As well as the digital edition of Thornton’s work, the project will produce a range of outputs including lectures, publications, an exhibit and a play, based on Thornton’s writings.