The Maternal Closet Of Alice Thornton

`It pleased my most gratious God to haue compassion on me & give me strength to conceaue againe about a quarter of a yeare after my recouery of the most desperate & dangerous sicknesse, wherein I was brought soe weake that my speech was taken from me, not being able to call for any helpe, but euen as though I were expiring for many houers together, & affterwards, not able for many weekes to turne my weary bones in bed nor helpe my selfe in the least, but loe behold the goodnesse of God pleased to raise me up, giueing me a new life, & new conception, hopes of a renewing comfort for the sweete infant he tooke from me before`.

Alice Thornton's accounts of pregnancy and childbirth supply powerful personal testimony from the early modern period. Many other women of the seventeenth century penned their thoughts surrounding their experiences of childbirth; such women include Elizabeth Walker (1623-1690), who bore eleven children and recorded each delivery in her manuscri pt; also, Elizabeth Freke (1642-1714), suffered periods of ill health and had miscarriages: these records consequently highlight the hazard women faced during childbirth, and emphasise dangers to children as well. Recent studies have examined Thornton's narrative in terms of her piety and religious observation. In this chapter, I will highlight how these religious observations are partly formed due to a necessary religious obligation, but also partly as a place where she is able to express her feelings in her own words. I aim to show in this chapter the danger of modernising an early modern text, by contrasting my own transcri ptions from Thornton's manuscri pt with transcri ptions from Charles Jackson, the editor of Thornton's work in 1895. The second volume of the manuscri pt largely presents a mother's account of her traumas in childbirth and bereavement over the loss of her children, and may be consciously responding to the prescri ptive literature of the period, but this will be analysed in a later chapter. The first chapter examined how sixteenth-century writers exploited women's apprehensions during childbirth in order to regulate maternal behaviour, and they achieved this by making women believe that they need to be dependent upon God's mercy. This chapter will continue to re-evaluate Thornton's rhetoric to see ways in which she did not, at times, adhere to the teachings of sixteenth-century literatures. Paul Delany asserts that women: 'expressed many pious sentiments in their autobiographies but rarely adopted a consistently and exclusively religious point of view, or wrote within any particular convention of religious autobiography'. This point could be applied to Thornton's writing- her language suggests that she did not consistently follow the traditional concept of religious writing, since her manuscri pt deals with prayers as well as everyday recording of various deliverances. Chapter Two will also examine Thornton's descri ption of her relationship with God, which evidently demonstrates a woman's battle with her faith that is subject to change (depending on the survival of her children).