Scholarship

Pulter studies only began in the late twentieth century, when the manuscript containing her writing came to light at the University of Leeds Library as part of an institutional indexing of the manuscript verse held in the Brotherton Collection. Mark Robson’s involvement in this project brought the manuscript to light and led to his early publications on Pulter, including her biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

In the late 1990s, Elizabeth Clarke helped foster research on Pulter and added her manuscript to the Perdita Project, a crucial database of early modern women’s manuscript writing which was officially launched in 2005. Around the same time, Sarah C. E. Ross’s dissertation research developed into several articles on Pulter and editions of selections from her manuscript, followed more recently by substantial studies in Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain and an anthology, Women Poets of the Civil War (co-edited with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann).

Editions of selections from Pulter’s verse began to appear in printed anthologies as early as 2001, but an edition of her work as a whole did not appear in print until 2014, with Alice Eardley’s edition of her complete poetry and prose, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. Eardley has also contributed substantially to the development of scholarship on Pulter in various articles as well as in the extensive introduction to her edition. Another edition of the complete verse, complemented by an in-depth introduction, may be found in Stefan Graham Christian’s 2012 dissertation. The University of Leeds has made the manuscript publicly accessible via high-resolution images.

The following list of publications will be updated periodically. We seek to provide a complete inventory of items that directly and substantially respond to her work. The most recent items are presented first; within each year, works are arranged alphabetically by author surname. We welcome suggestions for making the list as comprehensive as possible.

2020

  • Dolan, Frances E. “Hester Pulter’s Renaissance,” English Literary Renaissance 50, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 32-39. https://doi.org/10.1086/706216
  • Rayner, Emma. “Monumental Female Melancholy in John Webster and Hester Pulter,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 60, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 67-89.
  • Rinkevich, Matthew. "Remaining: John Donne's Decaying Corpses and Hester Pulter's Dissolving Bodies," Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660. PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2020. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (available upon request).
  • Waller, Gary. “The Female Baroque in Court and Country,” The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam University Press (2020): 163-203, especially 192-99.
  • Zoch, Amanda. “Rewriting the Lying-In: Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, and the Felt Mortality of Pregnancy,” Early Modern Women, 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 3-25.

2019

  • Connolly, Ruth. “Hester Pulter’s Childbirth Poetics.” Women’s Writing, 26, no. 3 (2019): 282-303.
  • Snively, Samantha. “’We give a being to another world’: Recipes, World-making Labors, and Early Modern Science in Cavendish and Pulter.” Making Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century England: Recipes, Writing, and Experimentation. PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2019. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (available upon request).
  • Zoch, Amanda. “‘sad mother’s fears’: Felt Mortality in Poetic Representations of Child Loss and the Lying-In.” Pregnant Self-Fashioning: The Narrative Management of Maternity in Early Modern Drama and Women’s Writing. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2018. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (available upon request).

2018

  • Britland, Karen. “Conspiring with ‘Friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green.” The Review of English Studies, 69, no. 292 (2018): 832-54.
  • Hall, Louisa. “Hester Pulter’s Brave New Worlds.” Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton, edited by John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon, 171–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  • Mahadin, Tamara. “‘For I No Liberty Expect to See’: Astronomical Imagery and the Definition of the Self in Hester Pulter’s Elegiac Poetry.” Master’s thesis, Mississippi State University, 2018. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (10792361).
  • Ross, Sarah C. E. and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, eds. “Hester Pulter.” Women Poets of the Civil War. 89–148. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018.
  • Wall, Wendy. “Female Authorship.” In The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates, 128–40. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018.
  • Zhang, Rachel. “Crafting Un-Fortune: Rape, Romance, and Resistance in Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda.” Early Modern Women 12, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 76–98.

2017

  • Eardley, Alice. “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 80, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 345–59.
  • Sperrazza, Whitney. “Perverse Intimacies: Poetic Form and the Early Modern Female Body.” Master’s thesis, Indiana University, 2017. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (10642480).

2016

  • Padaratz, Pricilla. “‘But oh, I could it not refine’: Lady Hester Pulter’s Textual Alchemy.” Master’s thesis, University of Ottawa, 2016.
  • Smith, Katherine Jo. “Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson and Andrew Marvell: Elegy and Retreat as Female-voiced Complaint,” chapter in “Ovidian Female-Voiced Complaint Poetry in Early Modern England.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2016. 111–55.

2015

  • Dunn, Rachel. “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book.” The Seventeenth Century, 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73.
  • Ross, Sarah C. E. “‘This Kingdoms Loss’: Hester Pulter’s Elegies and Emblems.” In Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain, 135–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

2014

  • Eardley, Alice. “‘I Haue Not Time to Point Yr Booke … Which I Desire You Yourselfe to Doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse.” In The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014.
  • Hall, Louisa. “Forms of Release: The Escape Poetry of Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2014.
  • Jacobs, Nicole A. “Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda and the Conventions of Sexual Violence.” APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture 7 (2014): Genres & Cultures.
  • Pulter, Hester. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. Edited by Alice Eardley. Toronto: Iter and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014.

2013

  • Higginbotham, Jennifer. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence, 25–6. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

2012

  • Christian, Stefan Graham. “The Poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678): An Annotated Edition.” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2012. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (3545910).
  • Eardley, Alice. “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 52, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 117–41.
  • Henderson, Diana E. “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth- Century England.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, Vol. 35, no. 1, Special issue / Numéro spécial: Gendering Time and Space in Early Modern England (2012), 139-165.
  • Smulders, Claire. “‘I to Solitude Am Still Confind’: Confinement and Resistance in Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry.” Master’s thesis, Leiden University, 2014.

2010

  • Eardley, Alice. “Lady Hester Pulter’s Date of Birth.” Notes and Queries, 57, no. 4 (December 2010): 498–501.
  • Herman, Peter. “Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape.” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 1208–46.

2009

  • Clarke, Elizabeth. “Women in Church and in Devotional Spaces.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers, 110–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Nevitt, Marcus. “The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651).” The Seventeenth Century, 24, no. 2 (2009): 287–304.

2008

  • Eardley, Alice. “An Edition of Lady Hester Pulter’s Book of ‘Emblemes’.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2008. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (U519295).
  • Eardley, Alice. “‘Saturn (whose aspects soe sads my soule)’: Lady Hester Pulter’s Feminine Melancholic Genius.” In New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 2002–2006, edited by Michael Denbo, 239–54. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 2008.
  • Ezell, Margaret J. M. ‘‘The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History.” English Literary Renaissance, 38, no. 2 (May 2008): 331–55.
  • Hutton, Sarah. ‘‘Hester Pulter (c. 1596–1678): A Woman Poet and the New Astronomy.’’ Etudes Epistemes 14 (2008): 77–87.

2007

  • Chedgzoy, Kate. “‘Shedding Teares for England’s Loss’: Women’s Writing and the Memory of War.” In Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700, 144–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

2006

  • Brady, Andrea. “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War.” The Journal of Military History, 70, no. 1 (January 2006): 9–30.
  • Coussens, Catherine. “‘Virtue’s Commonwealth’: Gendering the Royalist Cultural Rebellion in the English Interregnum (1649-1660).” Cankaya Universitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakultesi, Journal of Arts and Sciences, 6 (2006): 19–31.

2005

  • Archer, Jayne. ‘‘‘A Perfect Circle?’: Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter.’’ Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 1–14.
  • Clarke, Elizabeth. “Hester Pulter’s ‘Poems Breathed Forth by the Nobel Hadassas’: Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32.” In Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, general eds. Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright, 111–27. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
  • Clarke, Elizabeth. ‘‘Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.’’ Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 1–3.
  • Robson, Mark. ‘‘Reading Hester Pulter Reading.’’ Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 1–12.
  • Ross, Sarah. ‘‘Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics.’’ Literature Compass 2 (December 2005).

2004

  • Robson, Mark. “Pulter [née Ley], Lady Hester.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

2003

  • Clarke, Danielle. “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts.” Text, 15 (2003): 187–209.
  • Ross, Sarah. “Lady Hester Pulter, ‘The Unfortunate Florinda,’(c. 1660).” In Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700, edited by Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, 302-4. New York: Routledge, 2003.
  • Ross, Sarah. “‘Then if Your Husbands Rant it High and Game’ (1640–1665).” In Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700, edited by Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, 389–91. New York: Routledge, 2003.

2001

  • Stevenson, Jane and Peter Davidson, eds. “Hester Pulter, née Lee.” In Early Modern Women Poets, 1520–1700: An Anthology, 187–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

2000

  • Robson, Mark. “Swansongs: Reading Voice in the Poetry of Lady Hester Pulter.” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9 (2000): 238–56.
  • Ross, Sarah C. E. “Women and Religious Verse in English Manuscript Culture c1600–1688: Lady Anne Southwell, Lady Hester Pulter and Katherine Austen.” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2000. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (U140819).
  • Wilcox, Helen. “‘My Hart Is Full, My Soul Dos Ouer Flow’: Women’s Devotional Poetry in Seventeenth-Century England.” Huntington Library Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2000): 447–66.

1999

  • Davidson, Peter. “Green Thoughts, Marvell’s Gardens: Clues to Two Curious Puzzles.” Times Literary Supplement, 5044 (3 December 1999): 14–15.