Explore the Centre's range of research activities Current research projects Alice Thornton's Books 'Alice Thornton's Books' is a collaborative research project which will enhance understanding of the lives and works of early modern women. While by no means the only seventeenth-century woman to write her own life story, Thornton is unusual in having written four different versions of her autobiography. Collectively, her books offer an extraordinarily rich insight into gentry life in seventeenth-century Yorkshire, at a time of civil war and plague. This AHRC-funded research project, in partnership with Durham Cathedral, will create an online digital edition of all four of Alice Thornton’s autobiographical manuscripts. To date our knowledge of Thornton’s life has largely been dependent on a nineteenth-century edition by Charles C. Jackson that selected materials from some of those manuscripts to produce a single, chronological narrative of her life. By contrast, our edition will make the full text of all four manuscripts freely available for the first time. This will allow users to compare and contrast her versions of events and examine how she revised her story. In the process of creating this digital edition, we aim to answer three key questions: How do Thornton’s texts complicate current scholarship on early modern life-writing, particularly its gendered nature? Why did Thornton write four different autobiographical texts? How do they relate to each other and what might this reveal about their timing, process of composition and audience? How does Thornton’s engagement with contemporary legal, medical, political, and religious discourses enhance understanding of early modern women in Britain and Ireland? The project team Cordelia Beattie Suzanne Trill Project website Alice Thornton's Books A Viking in the Sun: Harald Hardrada, the Mediterranean, and the Nordic World, between the late Viking Age and the Eve of the Crusades This multi-year international and interdisciplinary project focuses on the status of the Norwegian Harald “Hardrada” Sigurdsson as probably the best-documented frontiers-crosser extraordinaire of the early eleventh century. It uses his experiences and encounters, as well as their legacies, as a case study for a wide-ranging exploration of the Mediterranean and its links to the Nordic World in the intensively liminal period between the late Viking Age and the eve of the crusades. Thematically, the project sits at the crossroads of diverse academic fields such History, Archaeology, and Literature, and between Nordic Studies, Mediterranean Studies (with a strong emphasis on Byzantine and Islamic studies), and Western European Studies. The project also includes a strong performative and creative element, which will serve to interrogate the subject matter imaginatively, but also for public engagement and impact purposes, and for experimenting in ways to integrate academic research and the creative industries. We plan to organise several thematic symposia that will take place especially but not uniquely along the trail of Harald’s travels or in locations connected to him. The project team Gianluca Raccagni Project website A Viking in the Sun Priests in a Post-imperial World, c. 900-1050 This joint UK-German project (AHRC & DFG) investigates systematically for the first time the life-worlds of ordinary local priests in this long tenth century. These priests are currently the ‘dark matter’ of the early medieval church in this period. They represented the bulk of its personnel, and acted as the key brokers between the general lay populace who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population and the educated elites and cultural leaders. If we want to understand the nature of post-Carolingian cultural and social change, and to set the elite politics of the period into a proper context, then we must understand these local priests: their economic standing, what they knew, what standards they were set, how they fitted into their local societies – and how all these things changed. By combining different methodologies tailored to a range of bodies of evidence to research the variation and change in the life-worlds of these priests primarily in the lands of the successor states to Carolingian Francia (approximately modern-day Germany, France and Belgium), and by drawing on the expertise of a team that brings together the distinctive UK and German historiographical traditions, this project throws an entirely new light on the dynamics of the long tenth century, and thus on a crucial moment of transition in European history. The project team Charles West Steffen Patzold Alice Hicklin Bastiaan Waagmeester Project website Priests in the Post-imperial World This article was published on 2024-08-01
