An early modern domestic and spiritual memoir, My First Booke of My Life depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626 1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century. Her memoir documents her perspective on the Irish rebellion and English civil war as well as on a plethora of domestic dangers and difficulties: from her reluctant marriage, which sought to rescue the sequestered family estate and clear her brother s name, to financial crises, to the illnesses and deaths of several family members and six children, to...