Raymond Anselment, Editor
My First Booke depicts the life of a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century. The image Thornton fashions of a woman devoted to God and family evolves from the conventional format of the deliverance memoir into a rhetorically sophisticated defense of her life in response to rumored scandal, creating in the process a distinctive sense of identity. This edition is “a valuable addition to the discussion of how early modern people experienced and negotiated grief, loss, and illness” (Joe Eldridge Carney). It “is not just important to scholars of early modern history and literature; it is essential” (Catherine Loomis).
