A 17th-century coloured map of the kingdom of Ireland with images of six people in coloured clothes on the far left in boxes.

#otd 21 April 1682 Thornton wrote a letter to her sister-in-law expressing concern about her brother Christopher Wandesford’s estate in Ireland and offering reassurance: ‘I am sure there never was anything done in its purchase but what was most just and upright by my dear father’.

A painting we have used in past posts! @hagenilda.bsky.social

Includes an essay on Thornton by Anu Korhonen: 'Alice Thornton’s torments: Experiencing pain in seventeenth-century England'. #EarlyModern

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal | Vol 20, No 2

Our spring 2026 issue is out! Featuring four articles, the annual Conversations on Early Modern Women and Race, three exhibition reviews, and twenty-five book reviews www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/emw/curr... #EarlyModern

#CFP for #earlymodern folks! @hannah-historian.bsky.social and I are putting together a special edition of the Journal of Epistolary Studies on "Letters as Paratexts in the Early Modern World"!

Image: Hospital of St. Nicholas, near Richmond,
Yorkshire in The Gentleman's Magazine, and Historical
Chronicle, Volume 94, Part 1 - E. Cave, Feb. 1824, p.
112. Wikimedia commons.

An early 19th-century drawing of a building called St Nicholas in Richmond, Yorkshire; it was a medieval hospital.

17 April 1660 #OTD Alice Thornton’s 6th
child, William, was born and baptised. Thornton was
staying with her aunt and uncle, the Nortons, at St
Nicholas, Richmond. St Nicholas is the oldest
continuously inhabited house in Richmond, #Yorkshire. #EarlyModern 🗃️

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised. As recent studies have emphasised the gradual nature of this shift, this paper zooms in on the pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in a large body of English letters written between 1450 and 1700. Did fifteenth century people appeal to God more often than seventeenth century people did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularisation of time proceed at the same pace across all communities, despite their differences in religious practice? We address these questions by querying nearly 5000 early modern letters for divine appeals and systematically annotating them for variables like human and divine agency, temporal orientation and domain of life. Our results indicate that while the more formulaic divine appeals found in the opening and closing sections of letters were growing less popular over time, the ones in the letter bodies fluctuated in particular with the religious denominations of the letter writers. The observed rise in mentions of divine entities in the first half of the seventeenth century is mainly caused by a small group of puritan letter writers whose involvement in the civil wars throughout the 1640 made their lives particularly perilous. The other letter writers in the corpus, by contrast, displayed progressively lower rates of divine appeals as time went by, a finding that is in line with previous research that saw the early modern period as one characterised by the increasing secularisation of future thought as well as a shift from religious practice to religious faith.

Early modern letters are full of phrases like “God willing” or “By God’s grace.” Sara Budts’ analysis of 5,000 letters shows these weren’t clichés but ways to navigate faith, agency, and uncertainty. From 1450–1700, people balanced divine will with human action in shifting ways.

Thornton doesn't write much about her life post 1669 so the @thorntonsbooks.bsky.social project team enjoyed this court case about her sheep being stolen. Calvert (who ‘cared not for his Mrs’) offered them to some men he had been drinking with in return for a proportion of the sale. #EarlyModern

Image: North Riding Quarter Sessions, Thirsk, 10 April 1678; NYCRO, ZKW. #EarlyModern

Photo of a 17th-century sheep stealing case from the North Yorkshire quarter sessions.

10 April 1678 #OTD Alice Thornton brought a case at the quarter sessions in Thirsk against her former servant, John Calvert, for stealing sheep. In late 1677 Thornton had owned 32 ‘fat’ sheep (i.e., ready for slaughter) but they all mysteriously disappeared from the meadow near her house. 🗃️ 📜

George's death is told as an #Easter story in @thorntonsbooks.bsky.social. He and his younger brother, Christopher, repaired their relationship on Easter eve, before taking communion together on Easter Sunday. George then died on Easter Monday which Thornton refers to as Black Monday. #EarlyModern 🗃️

Photo: Memorial to the Wandesfords, including George, at St Michael's, Kirklington. (c) Suzanne Trill, 2022.

Photo of a memorial plaque to the Wandesfords, including George Wandesford at the top, at St Michael's, Kirklington.

3 April 1651 #OTD Alice’s brother, George Wandesford, was buried in St Michael’s Church, Kirklington. His body was brought from Catterick ‘by coach to Kirklington in the company of all the gentry in that part of Yorkshire with a greater lamentation and sorrow’ (Book 1). #EarlyModern 🗃️

3 Funerals and a Wedding? A Seventeenth-century Woman’s Reasons for Writing | GENDER.ED From grieving the loss of her mother to wanting to provide for her three fatherless children, Alice Thornton’s manuscript books reveal one woman’s perspective on life, death and the law in seventeenth...

Today is the last day of #WomensHistoryMonth. Our final post is by @cordeliabeattie.bsky.social, this time reflecting on Alice Thornton's reasons for writing.

www.gender.ed.ac.uk/blog/2025/3-...

Image: St John's Church by Roger Templeman. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo of an early 19th-century church with grass in the foreground.

30 March 1651 #OTD Alice received the sacrament in Hipswell Chapel with her mother, Alice Wandesford, and two brothers, George and Christopher, as it was Easter Sunday. That chapel no longer survives but some of its stone was reused when St John's, Hipswell was built in the early 19th century.

Alice Thornton wrote about this.

I wrote about Alice writing about it 😜

#EarlyModernists

thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/posts/blog/2...

Loved working with Debbie on this play. The first audience @beinghumanfest.bsky.social asked for more Anne Danby and she delivered! #EarlyModern

Women's History Month 2024, 3: Alice Thornton and Anne Danby on Stage Blog article - 14 March 2024

For #WomensHistoryMonth we are resharing some of our past posts on Alice Thornton. Next up is @debsca.bsky.social on Alice Thornton’s relationship (on stage) with her niece-by-marriage, Anne Danby.

thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/posts/blog/2...

A 17thC painting of a wintry scene with large trees on the left and some buildings on the right. One person is on horesback, others on foot and there are some dogs in the foreground.

28 March 1699 #OTD Alice Thornton wrote to her son-in-law, Thomas Comber, at Durham Cathedral, thanking him for letting his wife, Alice, visit her at East Newton. She advised Comber not to make the same journey in the wintry weather. How's the weather looking where you are today?
#EarlyModern 🗃️

Samuel Pepys had significant professional and social connections to transatlantic slavery in the years covered by his diary and afterwards, mediated by his involvement with two English slave-trading companies – the Royal African Company and the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa. He also owned and sold at least two enslaved people in London in the 1670s and 1680s. This article uses previously neglected manuscript evidence to reassess Pepys’s involvement in enslavement and his status as an enslaver. It emphasizes three themes: the relationship between Pepys’s official connections to the African companies and his private ownership of enslaved people; the development of his involvement in slavery within his extensive social and professional networks; and Pepys’s own agency in curating his official and personal archives to shape and limit our knowledge of his slave ownership. In doing so, it considers how the consciously expressed professional and ethical priorities of administrators and slave-owners like Pepys shaped the complex archival traces of slavery in England and erased the experiences and voices of enslaved people.

📣Out now on #firstview

Michael Edwards @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social on 'Samuel Pepys, the African Companies, and the Archives of Slavery, 1660–1689'

#Archives #Letters #Diary #History 17thc 🗃️

👉Read open access: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Women's History Month 2024, 5: Journeying with Anne Clifford and Alice Thornton Blog article - 28 March 2024

For #WomensHistoryMonth we are resharing some of our past posts on Alice Thornton. Next up is Jessica Malay, comparing Thornton with Lady Anne Clifford. #EarlyModern 🗃️

thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/posts/blog/2...

Society or the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender 2026 Awards Nominations The Society seeks nominations for awards for English-language scholarly work on women and gender in the early modern period (ca. 1450-1750) published/completed between June 2023 and May 2026. Items pr...

Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender welcomes award nominations for the 2026 Book Awards, Editions Award(s) & Collaborative Project Award

For more info &/or to nominate a work, see
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Deadline: May 25, 2026

Former project postdoc @sharonhoward.bsky.social has created a new interactive map of places mentioned by Thornton in our tagged events. Not just North Yorkshire! #DigiHums #Tei #DataViz

Want to see the places discussed by Alice Thornton? Sharon Howard has you sorted! #DataViz #EarlyModern 🗃️

A new interactive map for @thorntonsbooks.bsky.social in #WomensHistoryMonth - I mapped all the places mentioned by Alice in Event narratives.
thornton-play-books.github.io/play-books/eve…

Women's History Month 2024, 2: Alice Thornton and Our Imagined Alice Thorntons Blog article - 8 March 2024

For #WomensHistoryMonth we are resharing some of our past posts on Alice Thornton. Next up is @eleanorthom.bsky.social on the missing portraits of Alice Thornton and how we imagine her.
thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/posts/blog/2...

Image: frontispiece to Thomas Comber, A Companion to the Temple (1676), part II. Public domain, via archive.org