"My first Booke of my Life:" The Apology of a Seventeenth-Century Gentry Woman

Abstract

Alice Thornton's seventeenth-century remembrances are not limited to a conventional record of God's deliverances and mercies; two of her manuscripts, in particular, provide a unique opportunity to explore an early modern self-representation of a Yorkshire gentry woman who transforms domestic and religious memoir into a consciously crafted defense of her social and spiritual identity. "My first Booke of my Life," a version of her autobiography begun in the first months of her widowhood, expands an earlier "booke of remembrances" in response to slanderous rumors surrounding the marriage of her daughter. A comparison of the two manuscript lives reveals in the transformation her rhetorical vindication, an apology of a life defined in terms of God, family, marriage, and motherhood.