Hester Pulter Research Articles

“My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble”: Hester Pulter’s Apostrophe to the Soul

Abstract The poems of Hester Pulter (1605–1678) provide insight into the religion and politics of a woman writing through the English Civil Wars and Republic. This paper focuses on Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul and on her abstention from employing disciplinary metaphors that so often characterise devotional poetry. In merging the devotional apostrophe to the soul with complaint, Pulter effectively jettisons the penitential aspects of these approaches, creating a hybrid form in which her body provides comfort to her grieving soul. Pulter thus creates a form of devotional poem that relies on an aesthetics of comfort instead of discipline. By utilising the affordances of the apostrophe – its ability to bring the speaker and its addressee into a relation with one another – Pulter enacts a spiritual unification and in so doing makes implicit claims about the emotional and spiritual efficacy of poetry.

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Hester Pulter's Psalmic Poems

AbstractThis essay examines the use of psalm structures, rhetoric, and poetics in the devotional poetry of Hester Pulter, a mid‐seventeenth‐century Royalist manuscript poet. Scholarship has shown the adaptability of the voice of the psalms, how it is amendable to both an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ simultaneously. Pulter takes advantage of this flexibility: although these poems generally express the spiritual woes and longings of a lone speaker, Pulter's use of recognizable psalm patterns and motifs situates her poetry within a broader community that engages with the psalms through corporate worship. Pulter thus melds her own distinctive (Royalist) poetic voice with a psalm framework recognizable to any protestant reader, whatever their political orientation. Writing psalmic poems gives Pulter not only a means of expressing her private devotions in an acceptable religious form, but it also allows her to invoke an audience for her poems, an audience that may in turn blend their own voices with the voice of this lone Royalist woman.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Jaime Goodrich (bio) The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn Gary Waller Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105, cloth. Over the past fifty years, scholarship on early modern women writers has grown exponentially as critics have discovered, edited, and analyzed a significant corpus of previously unknown works. Gary Waller was an early pioneer in this field, and he continues to break new ground with a new book that applies Julia Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque to key texts by early modern female authors. In the first two chapters, Waller lays the groundwork for the rest of his study by conceptualizing the Baroque. Admitting that it is difficult to define this term, Waller focuses on five key "Baroque tendencies" (20, his emphasis), as follows: 1.) "fictionalizing" (29), or narrative multiplicity; 2.) "le pli" (31), or acts of folding that move into infinity; 3.) paradoxical juxtapositions of hyperbole and melancholy; 4.) kitsch, with its emphasis on duplication; 5.) "plateauing" (31), or the indefinite postponement of climax. The second chapter then turns to Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque, itself based on Teresa of Avila, in order to redress the lack of scholarly attention to the role of gender in the Baroque. Surveying different early modern exemplars of femininity (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Petrarchan mistress), Waller poses a key question: "Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women,…how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an 'owned' source of meaning" (66)? He finds an answer in Kristeva's theory of the semiotic mode, in which a feminine subconscious erupts through patriarchal language. The remainder of the monograph analyzes the ways that various Englishwomen rebelled against patriarchal domination through writings that display Baroque characteristics. Chapter three covers the Catholic female Baroque, by way of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. In the next chapter, [End Page 218] Waller turns to the Protestant Baroque with a discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. Chapter five considers works by women associated with the court, with special attention to the role of masques and country house drama: Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Hester Pulter. The next chapter is the strongest in the book, providing a compelling and fascinating analysis of labyrinths, narrative multiplicity, plateaus, and folds in Wroth's Urania. Finally, chapter seven considers how Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn moved beyond the Baroque toward the Enlightenment. The project of situating English literature—and especially works by women writers—in relation to the Baroque is an intriguing and timely one, particularly since scholars such as James E. Kelly have recently begun to consider the role of Englishwomen on the continent (English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet the very indeterminacy of the Baroque becomes problematic, as this key term is frequently paired with qualifiers that are never defined. Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalms are "emergent or incipient Baroque" (121), Anne Bradstreet's poetry is "'accidentally' Baroque" (150), Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's dramas are "at least 'pale' Baroque" (186), and Aphra Behn's Love Letters is "clearly if superficially Baroque" (268). As variants of the Baroque proliferate, the concept itself takes on a multiplicity that is aptly ironic and may leave readers wondering what, if anything, truly constitutes the Baroque. Furthermore, the inclusion of authors whose works are "accidentally," "pale," "incipient," or "superficially" Baroque serves as a distraction from the more successful analysis of writers such as Wroth and the women of Little Gidding. Indeed, what unites all of the writers covered in this book is not their connection to stylistic traits of the Baroque but rather to the Kristevan female Baroque described in chapter two. As Waller observes in the postscript, "in the Baroque…women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of 'intimate revolt,' discovering many means by which paternal realms might...

The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter's Poem, “Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646”

ABSTRACT Hester Pulter's poem about a young woman's suicide after the death of her lover in battle has been described by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall and a representation of an event that “sounds like a cross between melodrama and a news bulletin”. Drawing on Hilary Maddicott's work on the death of Margaret Lemon in Oxford, this article highlights a number of contemporary literary and newsbook sources that describe such a suicide. Pulter's poem, rather than condemning its young woman for her actions (as the parliamentarian newsbooks condemn Lemon for hers), unconventionally celebrates its subject's self-destruction by comparing her to a list of heroic lovers from the classical past. This process of comparison builds through the poem, as the young woman and her soldier are repeatedly compared to each other, to their king, to other famous loving couples and, implicitly, to Christ, until the repeated layering of different gendered characteristics on to their literary bodies ultimately disrupts binary significations. That is, in the poem, the intensive comparison of hetero-earthly love both to Christ's love and to mythological and historical instances of loving sacrifice comes to destabilize gender positions and to make a space for queer desire.

Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith

Reviewed by: Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith Diana Barnes Ross, Sarah C. E., Rosalind Smith, eds Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ( Early Modern Literature in History), London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; hardback; pp. 370; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €99.00; ISBN 9783030429454. Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics is an exciting new collection of fifteen essays on early modern women's complaint which represents a welcome extension of current scholarship on early modern women's engagement with complaint, one of the most pervasive literary modes in English writing in print and manuscript over the years 1550–1700. Much scholarship to date has identified Ovid's Heroides as the locus classicus for early modern complaint, but Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith, the editors of this collection, argue that the mode is far more capacious. The volume traces the genealogy of female complaint through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, legal, and philosophical discourses, and its critical reception and recent representation in digital scholarly resources. For early modern writers, Ovid's verse epistles voiced by heroines addressing the heroes who raped, entrapped, and abandoned them, paired with some replies, thematized the potentials of women's writing to overturn the priorities of hegemonic discourses. Although a number of early [End Page 253] modern women writers, including Isabella Whitney, cite this tradition, Ovid's Heroides was a troublesome legacy owing to its licentious subject matter and its male-authored ventriloquy of women's complaint. As Early Modern Women's Complaint shows, the Heroides was just one element in early modern women's complaint. The essays are organized in four chronologically ordered sections, followed by an afterword. Part I, 'Sixteenth Century', comprises four chapters. Susan M. Felch contends that Anne Lock deployed prophetic and penitential complaint to instruct her readers and thus advance Calvinist Reform over the 1540s to 1590s. Micheline White outlines Katherine Parr's evolving use of religious complaint to lament on behalf of her husband, Henry VIII, in Psalms and Prayers (1544), and later, writing as the dowager queen, to urge for Protestant reform in Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner (1547). Tricia A. McElroy analyses the prevalence of female-voiced complaint in Scottish political propaganda of the 1560s and 1570s, when the ideal of wifely virtue was fraught following the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. Lindsay Ann Reid examines Isabella Whitney's adaptation of autobiographical affect derived from Ovid's Tristia rather than his Heroides to articulate careerist poetic ambitions in The Copy of a Letter (1566–67) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). Part II, 'Seventeenth Century', includes four chapters. In the first, Emily Shortslef investigates Mary Cary's use of complaint to embrace anti-Stoic inconstancy in her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Paul Salzman examines how Mary Wroth employs the 'dirty pain' (p. 142) generated by complaint to 'bridge between the personal and political' (p. 138) in her manuscript play Love's Victory and in the second part of her romance Urania. Danielle Clarke tracks the 'interpellation of complaint (p. 158) indebted to Du Bartas through the writing of Aemilia Lanyer, Anne, Lady Southwell, and Lucy Hutchinson. Sarah C. E. Ross challenges the association between Ovidian complaint and 'isolation, distortion, and deception' (p. 186), demonstrating how Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and John Milton use the Ovidian figure of Echo to construct female community within pastoral complaint. Part III, 'Restoration', contains three chapters. Gillian Wright considers Aphra Behn's complaint 'Oenone to Paris', in John Dryden's collection Ovid's Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680), to redirect critical attention from Dryden's theorization of translation towards the ideological and political implications of Restoration complaint. Whereas Dryden expressed 'clear signs of unease with royal sexual self-indulgence' (p. 210), Behn 'dramatiz[ed] conflicts between power and sexuality' (p. 219). Susan Wiseman extends the discussion of complaint to North America with a fascinating account of how Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) is 'deeply mulched with the matter of complaint' (p. 233), adapting 'experiential testimony and...

Unconventional Experiments: Teaching Early Modern Women Writers

Abstract: This article discusses an approach to teaching early modern women's writing that uses book history and formalism as its main tools. It argues that digital editions of the poetry of Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish enable new ways to study these works. Paul Salzman's Wroth edition places different versions of the same poem (including digitized images of the holograph manuscript) side by side, which shows how a misreading of her first sonnet occurred. The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making is producing multiple editions of Hester Pulter's 120 poems, plus additional "curations" that bring contextual materials, including poems by male writers, into dialogue with the poems. Close readings of Pulter's poems demonstrate a poet of formal sophistication. Liza Blake's edition of Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies highlights material issues by offering detailed textual notes that compare the three very different printed versions. Her digital edition also suggests pathways for formalist analysis, such as proposing Cavendish as a metaphysical poet, as does the work of Lara Dodds, which suggests we embrace Cavendish's supposed "bad writing." After a brief analysis of Cavendish's generically experimental Sociable Letters , this article turns to a recent example of recovery research in the discovery of Dorothy Calthorpe's manuscripts and ends by suggesting future trends in the field. These include analyzing known works from multiple perspectives and studying a wider range of sources that more accurately reflects early modern conceptions of authorship.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Elaine Hobby THE FEMALE BAROQUE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERARY CULTURE: FROM MARY SIDNEY TO APHRA BEHN, by Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 290 pp. $125.23 hardback; $125.32 ebook. There is much to celebrate in Gary Waller's new book The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, which I read with constant interest, even fascination. As its title indicates, the study refuses the common fragmentation of the early modern period into pre- and post-civil wars and ranges from the poetry, plays, and fiction of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth to that of Margaret Cavendish (and her stepdaughters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley) and Aphra Behn. Along the way—and clearly planned from the start as integral to the argument—are writings by figures less well-known in mainstream literary studies, including the English nuns, Gertrude More and Mary Ward. There is also briefer mention of several mid-seventeenth-century prophets—Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fell, Sarah Wight, Elinor Channel—and some discussion of two New World figures, Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson, as well as the extraordinary verse of Hester Pulter (unknown until its discovery in manuscript in the 1990s) and the "scissoring" activities of the women of Little Gidding as they produced their Bible concordances (pp. 138-47). Folded into the argument are discussions of the structures of Petrarchism and reference to Baroque artists including Artemisia Gentileschi. The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is informed, then, by the wide-ranging activities of those engaged in the collective endeavor since the 1970s to recover past women's creativity. Waller repeatedly draws explicit attention to the importance of the "powerful community of scholars" who have, like him, taken part in the endeavor, and he firmly—and correctly, I hope—asserts that "their work has permanently altered how we picture the period" (p. 10). Given the rich findings of the recovery efforts, no single work of this length could take account of all its possible sources. Waller makes his selection through a theoretical model that he sets out in some detail in his first two chapters, approaching the period's writings through Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of the "semiotic" erupting through the "symbolic." Throughout the book, it is Kristeva who is most often referred to as an authority (see, for example, pp. 9, 12-14, 30-31, 66-69, 80-81, 90-92, 221-22, 249-50, 278-80) [End Page 395] and whose writings are most numerous in his bibliographies. As Waller elaborates his theoretical framework, other perspectives are also merged with the Kristevan one—Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" (pp. 20, 115, 152) and Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation" most importantly (pp. 24, 168)—as he seeks to "go beyond [the] autobiographical reductionism" that he thinks readings of Wroth, in particular, have been limited by (p. 221). For this reader, the endeavor to not be overly focused on biographical frameworks is only partially successful. As I read, despite the great attractions of the writings presented and the most welcome unfussy clarity of the book's style, I was repeatedly frustrated by Waller's drive to find in his writers the Baroque sub-categories that he defines (drawing on José Antonio Maravall) as "fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch, and plateauing" (pp. 10, 17). The first and last of these, especially, seem to prompt Waller to the biographical speculation that he warns against. The theoretical model also seems to have led Waller to select for analysis a disproportionate number of authors where control, editing, or direction from a man or men is at issue: Catholic authorities for Ward and More, Hutchinson's persecutors, the Little Gidding women, and the rather odd selection of civil war prophets, who include such manipulated figures as Channel and Wight without any mention of their dozens of sisters who did not encounter equivalent obstacles. It might be that—allowing for the liberal use of such variants as "pale Baroque," "emergent...

Hester Pulter's Devotional Complaints: "Then will I hallelujahs ever sing"

Hester Pulter's poetry engages deeply in the mode of complaint, the amplified, open-ended expression of woe that marks the Ovidian-inflected poetry of Spenser, Drayton, Shakespeare, and others. Pulter's Civil War political lyrics are taking a central place in critical literature on women writers of female-voiced complaint, but her poetry draws attention to another lacuna in discussions of the mode: the exploration of religious versions of early modern complaint. This article reads Pulter's devotional lyrics in relation to their poetic models and precedents, especially the Sidney Psalms and the devotional lyrics of George Herbert. It seeks simultaneously to explore Pulter's devotional lyrics as complaints, and to trace the affective function of complaint in the mid-seventeenth century devotional lyric, in which complaint so often gives way—or is actively turned—to praise. Pulter's devotional complaints, it argues, correlate closely to those of George Herbert, whose influences are verbal, formal, and affective. Extending Herbert's sense of "Complaining" in his lyric of that name, and his imagery of winged ascent and heavenly song, Pulter's devotional lyrics move repeatedly through an affective fall and flight, and from the virtuosic amplification of woe to the anticipation of "heavenly lays" without end.

In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter's Maternal Elegies

Hester Pulter's elegies for her twenty-year-old daughter Jane (ca. 1645) represent a mother's grief as excessive and expansive. Attention to the materiality of Pulter's manuscript reveals the importance of one of her main motifs—the circle—to her processes of grief and poetic composition. Her Jane poems expose the limitations of cultural ideas about moderate mourning and embrace a gendered style of grieving and parenting that Pulter calls "indulgent," as they insist that maternal elegies can be both emotional and intellectual. Pulter's manuscript shows evidence of her own "indulgent" return to the subject of Jane's death and allows us to read one of her elegies in two stages of its composition. In "Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, J. P.," a nine-line addition transforms a poem about individual loss into a royalist lament. Pulter's Jane elegies are especially salient examples of the way her poems frequently echo and expand upon one another as they play with literary allusion and demonstrate the centrality of recycling and revisiting to her authorial process.

Monumental Female Melancholy in John Webster and Hester Pulter

Monumental Female Melancholy in John Webster and Hester Pulter

Hester Pulter's Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism

Hester Pulter's Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism

Hester Pulter's Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution

Hester Pulter's Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution

Playing Football with the Stars: Hester Pulter Rethinks the Metaphysical Astronomy Poem

Playing Football with the Stars: Hester Pulter Rethinks the Metaphysical Astronomy Poem

Hester Pulter's Dunghill Poetics

Hester Pulter frequently mentions dunghills, often using the word as an adjective to describe the earth. The dunghill might not appear to require much glossing, but its seventeenth-century meanings were more nuanced—literally, layered—than we might expect. While some of Pulter's contemporaries used "dunghill" to describe what we might call a dump—the final destination of garbage—they most often used the words "dunghill" and "muckheap" to describe repositories where organic matter of various kinds was gathered and transformed into compost to enrich soil. In the seventeenth century, this kind of dunghill—a matrix as well as a grave—was revalued and promoted as part of a larger reconsideration of waste as resource. The generative dunghill models Pulter's poetic process (recombining, ruminating, and revising) as well as the accretive and collaborative process that is the online edition called The Pulter Project. Seeing the dunghill as a creative process challenges divisions between elite poetry and agricultural labor, figural and literal, and even this life and the next. This essay's inquiry into the material history and figural resonances of the dunghill aspires not just to deepen our understanding of one of Pulter's keywords but also to interrogate the principles behind glossing and assembling "curations" for the online Pulter Project.

Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green

Conspiring with ‘friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green

“THEN IBIS CAME”: LADY HESTER PULTER’S UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT IN ITS SOCIO-POLITICAL AND NORMATIVE CONTEXT

Abstract:This article focuses on the manuscript of Lady Hester Pulter, a bundle containing 130 sheets found in 1996 in Leeds by Mark Robson, containing two series of poems and another 30 pages of a romance. The main objective of this paper is to set forth the reasons spurring the writer not to disclose her literary work, by mapping out the cultural and socio-political milieu of her time. To this end, it first addresses various laws that were enacted to exert control over literature, such as the banning of plays, and decrees governing printed works; and pointing out some decisions of a political nature, such as the 1649 banishing of monarchists from the city. In this way Hester Pulter’s creative legacy is placed in its context during the 1640s and 1650s, when political divisions radicalised, splitting the country into two factions at loggerheads, divided by severe ideological tension. Also examined are some family-related factors that may have persuaded the poet to keep her work secret, within the home and away from cultural and intellectual circles.

"Shut up in a Countrey Grange": The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter's Poetry and Prose and Women's Literary History

Recent scholarly emphasis on the public nature of manuscript circulation has highlighted the important contributions women made to a wide range of literary, intellectual, and social discourses. Against this backdrop, BC MS Lt q 32, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (compiled ca. 1660) poses something of a problem. During Hester Pulter's lifetime, it did not circulate beyond her immediate family. After her death, it remained within the household; it was annotated by an eighteenth-century reader but never printed. The anomalous history of BC MS Lt q 32 makes it a useful test case of our ideas of women's authorship and manuscript authorship in general. It reveals how histories of publication affect our understanding of women writers and how patterns of preservation shape our approach to literary studies.

Lady Hester Pulter’s Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. Alice Eardley, ed.

<i>Lady Hester Pulter’s Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda</i>. Alice Eardley, ed.

Breaking a tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book

The emblem book genre has long been dismissed as unworthy of serious critical study. But the recently discovered mid-seventeenth century manuscript of Hester Pulter, and the generic existential crisis figured therein, imply otherwise. A vehement royalist, Pulter suggests that the events of the English civil wars have broken established emblem form by defying analogy in their horror; according to her, emblems cannot continue as they were after the deposition and regicide of Charles I. Yet, rather than succumbing along with the monarchy, Pulter’s emblems formally reimagine emblem structure, adopting a new devotionalism at odds with conventional emblem form. Thus, even while Pulter’s poems register political crisis, they prepare for a political order beyond that of the Commonwealth and demonstrate emblems’ ability to comment upon their own contemporary world.