Last Thursday 18th April, I attended a session at the University of Edinburgh’s Festival of Cultural Heritage Research 2024 entitled Discovery and digitisation: Alice Thornton’s life and books (1626-1707).

Prior to this date I knew nothing of Alice Thornton, let alone the project by colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, Kings College London, and Durham Cathedral to create an online digital edition of all four of her autobiographical manuscripts from the seventeenth century. In fact, I only learnt Thornton’s name from the festival programme just two days before the session. However, I was very keen to find out more as soon as I recognised parallels with this research and Edinburgh Napier University’s Platform to platform project (P2P):

Both projects:

• are AHRC-funded
• make accessible hand-written (now) historic records through their digitisation
• focus on the writing of women
• represent more than straightforward digitisation projects

In addition, they both involve an element of performance. In the case of Alice Thornton, there is a one-woman play by Debbie Cannon, and for P2P the podcast series of Lorna Lloyd’s Diary of the war.

The event was held in St Cecilia’s Hall (the same venue that we used for the second of the RIVAL project sessions in December 2019). We had a huge room for a small group discussion led by Professor Cordelia Beattie (PI), Professor Suzanne Trill (Co-I), and Dr Eleanor Thom.

I enjoyed learning about the processes involved in turning Thornton’s seventeenth-century manuscripts into a faithful open-access Digital Scholarly Edition, and the extent to which the output of this activity changes understandings of the cultural significance of Thornton’s writing. I was glad to have recently read The restless republic, which I bought at the Edinburgh Book Festival last year. This helped me understand Thornton’s ‘place’ in the political context of the English civil war.

The audience members also had the opportunity to listen to extracts of The remarkable deliverances of Alice Thornton. and to have a go at writing with rudimentary ink pens on ‘manuscript’ paper. Along the way I learnt about diplomatic and semi-diplomatic transcription (we unknowingly used the diplomatic version in P2P), Lady Day dating, knowledge exchange theatre, and Eleanor Thom‘s latest novel Connective tissue.

Afterwards I chatted over lunch with fellow attendee Muqiao Yue, a student of the history of art at the University of Edinburgh. She kindly drew a portrait for me in my notebook (see the slideshow of photos below).

I was so glad to have attended this fascinating session, grateful to all those who organised and presented it. For further information about the project as a whole, please see the project website at https://thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/.

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