My First Booke of My Life

Introduction

xvii Introduction “About March 25 1669,” Alice Thornton would later note, “I was writing of my first Booke of my life to enter the sad sicknesses & death of my deare husband together with all those afflictions befell me that yeare with the remarks of Gods dealing with my selfe, Husband, & Children till my WiddowedCondittion .”1Bothhereandinasimilarreferencetothemanuscript Thorntonstressesthateversinceherchildhoodshehadwrittenabout“what God had done for me”; after she married, the observations about her life and the merciful deliverances were intended for her family and relations.2 When before the end of the year Thornton shared her writing with others, shedidso“tosattisfyallmyfreindsofmyLifeandConuersationthatitwas not such as my deadly Enymyes sugested.”3 Thornton would later extensively revise the account that begins with recollections of childhood and ends with the death of her husband,4 and she would also write two additional manuscripts that deal with “the first yeare of my Widdowed condittion .”5Theholographrevisionof“myfirstBooke”nowintheBritishLibrary standsapartfromthesetwoothermanuscriptsandmeritsattentioninitself as a carefully conceived and memorably sustained domestic and spiritual account of an early modern woman and her struggles to fulfill herself as a dutifuldaughter,wife,andmother.Thedecisioninthenineteenth-century Surtees edition, The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, to abstract and combine parts of this revision and the two other manuscripts dealing with the first year of widowhood into a chronological narrative is limited.6 By including little more than half of the revised “first Booke,” that editor notablyexcludesmanyoftheprayers ,considerablenarrativeaboutthejoysand sorrowsofmotherhoodandmarriage,andmuchofthenarrativeofthecrisis that occasioned the need to circulate a defense of herself as a devoted mother and wife. Alice Thornton’s contribution to early modern women’s writing and the complex sense of self she fashions are appreciated anew in this first edition of the complete “first Booke of my Life.”7 xviii • Introduction The distinctiveness and complexity of this version of her life reflect in part generic expectations. Both manuscripts of the years before widowhood describe the chronology of her life in terms of remembrances and “remarkabledeliuerances.”Recollectionsofthisnatureareaspiritualexercise advocated by John Beadle in The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (1656), who sees life as a “continued deliverance”: “It is good to set down every affliction we have met with in our time, and to observe Gods carriagetowardsusinthem,withthebenefitwereceivefromthem.”8 Testament to divine mercy is for Thornton an expression of gratitude and praise. She ends her prefatory explanation of the duty to remember in “my first Booke” with the hope that her subsequent remembrances will be a means of rehearsing the thankfulness that may one day be expressed in eternal “Haleluias of praise & thankesgiueings.” She also hopes in this preface that God will “furnish” her heart with “deepe thoughts” and “sinceremeditations ”thatcomplementthegratitudewithwhichsheacknowledges his “inconceauable goodness” and her unworthiness. Remembrancesentitledinthismanuscript“MeditationVpon”orsimply “Vpon” underscore the relationship between “Gods gracious dealings”9 and the practice of occasional meditation. Unlike the spiritual exercise of formal meditation, commonly described in the seventeenth century as set, solemn, or deliberate, in the occasional meditation “there may be much use, no rule.”10 Often central to the distinction is immediacy and evenspontaneity.Themeditation“calledextemporall,occasionall,orsudden ,” in the view of seventeenth-century proponents, is “occasioned by such things, as by the prouidence of God does offer themselues to our senses.”11 The fourth section in James Harrington’s Horæ Consecratæ, or Spiritual Pastime (1682) recognizes in its title the suitability of this genre as “A Pillar of Praise, or Occasional Meditations upon many Remarkable Mercies and Deliverances vouchsafed by the Lord, to the Author and his nearest Relations.”12 Others valued the occasional meditation as a “sharp spur, and strong provocation, to prayer and praise.”13 “My first Booke” is especially noteworthy in the prayers, praise, and thanksgiving integral to the deliverances that Thornton records. But the recollection of providential blessings, the occasional meditations , and the lengthy prayers and thanksgivings are ultimately an apologia that expands her initial understanding of duty as creating an obliga- Introduction • xix tion not only to God but to herself and family.Inherentinthedeliverance genre is an implicit self-emphasis. At a moment of great change in her life following the death of her husband, Thornton seeks personal and spiritual purpose. Remembrances of divine favor and meditations on their significance may well have eased her loss, lessening the isolation of grief. AlthoughThorntonneverexplicitlyseekstheassurancethatsheisamong the elect destined to salvation, the admission of dependency and unworthiness in her meditations and prayers paradoxically affirms the prospect of salvation. God’s inexpressible goodness, she testifies, has given her the opportunity and time to work toward eternal fulfillment...