This Ugly Sow (Emblem 30)

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This Ugly Sow (Emblem 30)

Poem 95

Original Source

Hester Pulter, Poems breathed forth by the nobel Hadassas, University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32

Versions

  • Facsimile of manuscript: Photographs provided by University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection

  • Transcription of manuscript: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Elemental edition: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Amplified edition: By Bruce Boehrer.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

  • Created by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
  • Encoded by Katherine Poland, Matthew Taylor, Elizabeth Chou, and Emily Andrey, Northwestern University
  • Website designed by Sergei Kalugin, Northwestern University
  • IT project consultation by Josh Honn, Northwestern University
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X (Close panel)Notes: Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Line number 15

 Physical note

“s” written over another letter
Line number 24

 Physical note

caret inverted
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Transcription

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder
[Emblem 30]
This Ugly Sow
(Emblem 30)
Emblem 30
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
To complement the modernized elemental edition of this poem, this amplified edition presents a fully diplomatic version of the text. The manuscript’s original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, and superscripts have all been preserved. When these generate noteworthy interpretive issues (as for instance in line 2), I have flagged them in the textual glosses. I have settled indeterminate letter forms according to my best judgment in light of the manuscript’s general practice.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Pigs, boars, and hogs do not fare well in Pulter’s moral zoo. As in Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34) [Poem 99] where grunting, earth-bound pigs are unfavorably compared to heavenly turtledoves, Pulter here contrasts the filth of pigs to the purity of ermines. Citing proverbial, biblical, and mythological sources, Pulter explores the pig’s refusal to remain pure even when cleansed: like the dog who slurps up his own vomit, the pig almost cannot resist falling back into muddy cycles of immorality. Pulter interprets the ermine’s legendary willingness to sacrifice herself rather than have her fur tainted in Christian terms: her whiteness is precious because washed by Christ’s blood. The poem is formally innovative by dividing into two sections, each composed of two stanzas of triplets followed by a 6-line stanza of couplets. While the narrator seems to be guiding readers from a position of moral confidence, the ending couplet transforms into a plea that makes her complicit in the struggle to avoid being swine-like in the mire of life.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Pulter structures this emblem quite simply around Mary Douglas’s classic distinction between purity and danger: forms of cleanliness and filth, both physical and moral, literal and figurative. For Douglas, this distinction “protects the local consensus on how the world is organized” by “reduc[ing] intellectual and social disorder.”
Gloss Note
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), xi.
1
In this spirit, Pulter renders the opposed conditions of virtuous purity and vicious filth through the person and behavior of two iconic animals.
The ugly sow of the poem’s opening line of course represents the qualities of uncleanness and dangerous impurity, drawing in the process upon a rich history of pig symbolism grounded in both classical and biblical sources. Prominent biblical antecedents include the pearl-scorning swine of Matthew 7.6, the prodigal son’s porcine companions in Luke 15.15, and the Gadarene swine of Mark 5.1-12. But Pulter’s real inspiration here derives from the classical tradition instead, in a way that conflates separate strands of that tradition. The sow’s pedigree—descending from the boar that killed Adonis—ties her to a story about two competing forms of venery: sexual lust and blood-lust. But the sow’s behavior—returning to her wallow despite experiencing a higher standard of cleanliness—rehearses different tropes altogether. One of these appears in the seventeenth emblem of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614; see Image 1 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where Combe (translating the earlier work of Guillaume de la Perrière) laments, “The dirty Swine delights more in the mire, / Then in sweete balmes that are of costly price. / Some men there likewise be, that do desire, / Rather then vertue for to follow vice.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), sig. B6v.
2
Similarly, a cognate trope descends from Plutarch’s Moralia (c. 100 CE) through Giambattista Gelli’s Circe (1549) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and beyond.
Gloss Note
See Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia, 15 vols., trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold (Cambridge, US: Harvard UP, 1957), 12.311-533; Giambattista Gelli, The Circe of Signor Giovanni Battista Gelli, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1702); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12, The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Didge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
3
The key figure in this lineage is one Gryllus, a companion of Odysseus who, transformed into a hog by Circe, refuses to revert to his human form, preferring instead to abide in animality. The emblem “In Grillum” from Pierre Cousteau’s Pegma (1555; see Image 2 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) makes the obvious point, with Odysseus asking his porcine companion, “What ill-omened fate has so terrified you that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to return to the office of a man? Once pleasure holds you in its shameful grip, it freely exercises control over you.”
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Petri Costalii Pegma (Lyon, 1555), 176: “Qui tibi Grilli feri stomachum movere parentes? / Quae te sors miseris terruit oscinibus / Ut te immunda iuvent foedi vestigia porci / Et renuas iterum munus obire viri? / Quem semel in turpi retinet ditione voluptas, / Huius vel gratis utitur imperiis: / Et quo plus demens eget assertore patrono, / Hoc mage blanda sui vindicis ora fugit” (What bestial parents have so angered you, o Gryllus? What chance has so terrified you with birds of ill omen that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to resume the office of a man? Once pleasure holds one in its shameful power, it freely exercises its control: and the more a madman needs a patron as his defender, the more he flies his protector’s persuasive words).
4
Pulter’s emblem assimilates this material to the tale of Venus and Adonis.
In appropriating this material, Pulter notably re-genders the mythic swine upon whom she draws, both the boar who killed Adonis and Odysseus’ companion Gryllus. This transformation is not entirely new; Lanteaume de Romieu’s French translation of Cousteau’s Pegma, for instance, refers to Gryllus as “[une] truye immunde”—a filthy sow.
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Le Pegme de Pierre Coustau, trans. Lanteaume de Romieu (Lyon, 1560), 224.
5
But in Pulter’s case the change may suggest that she sees women as the particular target of her moral instruction. In any event, Pulter’s trans-gendering mirrors the similar reversals that Milton introduces to the Circe-myth in his Masque Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), another reworking of classical material in the service of moral, and particularly sexual, instruction.
As for the animal Pulter chooses to embody purity, it may be less commonly familiar than the pig, but its symbolic associations run deep. The ermine’s nearly-immaculate winter coat—pure white save for a tuft of black fur on the tip of its tail—had gained currency by the Middle Ages as a marker of virtue appropriated to various kinds of aristocratic symbolism. Of the many royal portraits employing this imagery, we may single out the Ermine Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1585; see Image 3 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where the beast in question, sporting a gold crown-shaped collar, signifies both sexual and political purity. More importantly for the behavior described by Pulter, Leonardo da Vinci claims “[t]he ermine . . . is so fastidious that he will allow himself to be caught by hunters before he will take refuge in a muddy spot.”
Gloss Note
Oliver Evans, “Selections from the Bestiary of Leonardo da Vinci,” Journal of American Folklore 64.254 (Oct.-Dec., 1951), 395.
6
Leonardo considers this behavior under the rubric of “Moderation,” but for Henry Peacham the animal’s fastidiousness assumes the same broad moral quality it does for Pulter. In his emblems (see Image 4 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) Peacham thus laments of the ermine, “Me thinkes even now, I see a number blush, / To hear a beast, by nature should haue care, / To keepe his skinne, themselues not care a rush, / With how much filth, their minds bespotted are.”
Gloss Note
Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), 75.
7
For Mary Douglas, purity rituals help to underpin consensus as to the world’s design, and they do so by reducing ambiguity to a minimum. However, markers of purity can themselves be subject to ambiguity, as is the case with both of the animal-figures Pulter employs in this emblem. Regarding swine, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demonstrated how dominant associations with filth and pollution coexist alongside a subordinate register of meaning in which the same animals figure as emblems of “good order” and “utilitie and profit.”
Gloss Note
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 40, 45.
8
In the case of the ermine, something similar occurs as well: its dominant affiliations with chastity and cleanliness can yield to a secondary and opposed set of meanings. Thus Olaus Magnus describes the ermine as a “luxurious” creature, with luxury (from Latin luxuria, or lust) here flatly reversing the traditional associations with chastity.
Gloss Note
Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals (London, 1658), Book 18, p. 186.
9
In the visual record, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (1489-91; see Image 5 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) arguably draws on such reversals; its subject, Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, was pregnant in 1489, near the time of the portrait’s creation. The existence of these opposed meanings helps to foreground the very manufactured nature of the reality to which they refer. In Pulter’s emblem, however, the dominant associations of swine with filth and ermines with purity go unchallenged.
In both the sow and the ermine, Pulter thus found a congenial and well-established form of moral representation that had already made its way into earlier emblem books. Her transformation of this material confirms her dynamic engagement with the emblem tradition as a whole.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
30This Ugly Sow descended of that Bore
This ugly sow, descended of
Gloss Note
the boar that killed Adonis when he was hunting; Venus, Adonis’s lover, had warned him not to engage in this deadly sport.
that boar
This Ugly Sow descended of that Bore
2
Which Epitragius, Lovers intrales Tore
Which
Gloss Note
Aphrodite Epitragia (“riding on a she-goat”) was another name for Venus, goddess of love, reputedly derived from a story in which Theseus sacrificed a goat to her and it changed genders.
Epitragia’s
lover’s entrails tore,
Which
Critical Note
Aphrodite Epitragia, also known as Aphrodite Pandemos, appears in Plato’s Symposium as the goddess of erotic pleasure, the counterpart of Aphrodite Urania, the “Heavenly” Aphrodite (Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb [Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 1996], 180d, p. 109). In her sensual form, the goddess connects appropriately both with the tale of Venus and Adonis and the “Ugly Sow” of Pulter’s emblem. The peculiar spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of “Epitragius, Lovers intrales” seem to signal a gender-change (masculine -us replacing feminine -a) similar to the broader reversal that translates Adonis’ boar into Pulter’s sow.
Epitragius
, Lovers intrales Tore
3
Whoſe death the Queen of Love did Soe deplore
Whose death the
Gloss Note
Venus, or Aphrodite
queen of love
did so
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
:
Whose death the Queen of Love did soe deplore
4
This lothſome Beast beſmear’d w:th dirt & blood
This loathsome beast, besmeared with dirt and blood,
This loathsome Beast besmear’d wth dirt & blood
5
Being newly waſh’d in Yonder Cristall flood
Being newly washed in yonder crystal flood,
Being newly wash’d in Yonder Cristall flood
6
Yet now you See Shee’s wallowing in the Mud
Yet now you see she’s wallowing in the mud.
Yet now you See Shee’s wallowing in the Mud
7
Soe penitence and pennance, Some noe more
So penitence and penance, some no more
Soe penitence and penance, some noe more
8
Doe valew, then to Sin on A new Score
Do value than to sin on a new
Gloss Note
account or reckoning
score
.
Doe valew, then to sin on A new
Gloss Note
The metaphor comes fitly from the tavern, where a score is “The row of chalk marks on a door, or of strokes on a slate, which in rural alehouses serves to record the quantity of liquor consumed on credit by a regular frequenter” (OED “Score” sb. 10).
score
9
Thus like the dog they to their vomit turn
Thus
Gloss Note
proverbial. “But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:22). See also “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).
like the dog they to their vomit turn
,
Critical Note
In scripture, the dog appears, like the pig, as an animal emblem of impurity. The two can be paired, as in 2 Peter 22.16: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire”; or Matthew 8.6: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Also see Proverbs 26.11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, So a fool returneth to his folly.”
Thus like the dog they to their vomit turn
10
Licking that ffilth up which they Seem’d to Spurn
Licking that filth up which they seemed to spurn;
Licking that ffilth up which they Seem’d to Spurn
11
But thoſe which loathingly their Sins deplore
But those which loathingly their sins deplore,
But those which loathingly their Sins deplore
12
Beeing Cleans’d if poſſible will Sin noe more
Being cleansed, if possible will sin no more.
Beeing Cleans’d if possible will Sin noe more
13
But as the Ermine (which you See purſued
But as
Gloss Note
animal in the weasel family known for its white coat; an emblem of purity
the ermine
(which you see pursued
But as the Ermine which you see pursued
14
By thoſe which long to have their chaps imbru’de
By
Gloss Note
hunting dogs who long to bite the ermine, having their jaws (“chaps) “imbrued” (stained) with blood.
those which long to have their chaps imbrued
By
Critical Note
Hunting par force with dogs—a standard aristocratic practice in medieval and early modern Europe—receives no notice in the Bible, but here it extends the symbolism of Pulter’s earlier references to dogs and hunting. While hunting par force had many proponents, by the seventeenth century it had also gained outspoken detractors who, like Sir Thomas More, viewed the “blood-lust” of the hunt as “below the dignity of free men” (Utopia, trans. Paul Turner [London: Penguin, 2003], 76). Pulter’s allusions to hunting seem to share this hostility.
those which long to have their chaps imbru’de
15
In innocent blood) by Nature
Physical Note
“s” written over another letter
is
indu’de
In innocent blood) by Nature is
Gloss Note
invested; endowed
endued
Th’innocent blood, by Nature is indu’de
16
With Such a loathing of impuritie
With such a loathing of impurity,
With such a
Gloss Note
In addition to the habits of cleanliness described here, the ermine was also credited with eating only a single meal a day, thereby illustrating the virtue of abstemiousness.
loathing of impuritie
17
Rather then o’re a dirty place Shee’l flie
Rather than o’er a dirty place
Gloss Note
the ermine will flee
she’ll fly
,
Rather then o’re a dirtie place shee’l flie
18
Sheel Yield unto her Curſed foes and die
Gloss Note
The ermine was legendary for being willing to die rather than have her pure white fur blemished.
She’ll yield unto her cursed foes and die
.
Sheel Yield unto her Cursed foes and die
19
Soe Shee that knows her Self to bee Gods Child
So she that knows herself to be God’s child
Soe shee that knows her self to bee Gods Child
20
Will die A Thouſand deaths e’re bee defild
Will die a thousand deaths
Gloss Note
before
ere
be defiled.
Will die A Thousand deaths er’e bee defild
21
Shee knows her Saviours guiltles blood did flow
She knows
Gloss Note
Christ sacrificed himself in being crucified.
her Savior’s guiltless blood did flow
Shee knows her Saviours guiltless blood did flow
22
To waſh her sinfull Soul as white as Snow
To wash her sinful soul as white as snow.
To wash her Sinfull Soul as white as Snow
23
Then Ermin like let my Sad Soul expire
Then ermine-like let my sad soul expire,
Then Ermin like let my Sad Soul expire
24
Physical Note
caret inverted
Whivlst
others Hoglike tumble in the Mire.
Whilst others hog-like tumble in the
Gloss Note
mud; state of degradation
mire
.
Whilst others Hoglike tumble in the Mire.
ascending straight line
X (Close panel)Notes: Elemental Edition

 Editorial note

The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

 Headnote

Pigs, boars, and hogs do not fare well in Pulter’s moral zoo. As in Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34) [Poem 99] where grunting, earth-bound pigs are unfavorably compared to heavenly turtledoves, Pulter here contrasts the filth of pigs to the purity of ermines. Citing proverbial, biblical, and mythological sources, Pulter explores the pig’s refusal to remain pure even when cleansed: like the dog who slurps up his own vomit, the pig almost cannot resist falling back into muddy cycles of immorality. Pulter interprets the ermine’s legendary willingness to sacrifice herself rather than have her fur tainted in Christian terms: her whiteness is precious because washed by Christ’s blood. The poem is formally innovative by dividing into two sections, each composed of two stanzas of triplets followed by a 6-line stanza of couplets. While the narrator seems to be guiding readers from a position of moral confidence, the ending couplet transforms into a plea that makes her complicit in the struggle to avoid being swine-like in the mire of life.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

the boar that killed Adonis when he was hunting; Venus, Adonis’s lover, had warned him not to engage in this deadly sport.
Line number 2

 Gloss note

Aphrodite Epitragia (“riding on a she-goat”) was another name for Venus, goddess of love, reputedly derived from a story in which Theseus sacrificed a goat to her and it changed genders.
Line number 3

 Gloss note

Venus, or Aphrodite
Line number 3

 Gloss note

lament
Line number 8

 Gloss note

account or reckoning
Line number 9

 Gloss note

proverbial. “But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:22). See also “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).
Line number 13

 Gloss note

animal in the weasel family known for its white coat; an emblem of purity
Line number 14

 Gloss note

hunting dogs who long to bite the ermine, having their jaws (“chaps) “imbrued” (stained) with blood.
Line number 15

 Gloss note

invested; endowed
Line number 17

 Gloss note

the ermine will flee
Line number 18

 Gloss note

The ermine was legendary for being willing to die rather than have her pure white fur blemished.
Line number 20

 Gloss note

before
Line number 21

 Gloss note

Christ sacrificed himself in being crucified.
Line number 24

 Gloss note

mud; state of degradation
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder
[Emblem 30]
This Ugly Sow
(Emblem 30)
Emblem 30
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
To complement the modernized elemental edition of this poem, this amplified edition presents a fully diplomatic version of the text. The manuscript’s original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, and superscripts have all been preserved. When these generate noteworthy interpretive issues (as for instance in line 2), I have flagged them in the textual glosses. I have settled indeterminate letter forms according to my best judgment in light of the manuscript’s general practice.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Pigs, boars, and hogs do not fare well in Pulter’s moral zoo. As in Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34) [Poem 99] where grunting, earth-bound pigs are unfavorably compared to heavenly turtledoves, Pulter here contrasts the filth of pigs to the purity of ermines. Citing proverbial, biblical, and mythological sources, Pulter explores the pig’s refusal to remain pure even when cleansed: like the dog who slurps up his own vomit, the pig almost cannot resist falling back into muddy cycles of immorality. Pulter interprets the ermine’s legendary willingness to sacrifice herself rather than have her fur tainted in Christian terms: her whiteness is precious because washed by Christ’s blood. The poem is formally innovative by dividing into two sections, each composed of two stanzas of triplets followed by a 6-line stanza of couplets. While the narrator seems to be guiding readers from a position of moral confidence, the ending couplet transforms into a plea that makes her complicit in the struggle to avoid being swine-like in the mire of life.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Pulter structures this emblem quite simply around Mary Douglas’s classic distinction between purity and danger: forms of cleanliness and filth, both physical and moral, literal and figurative. For Douglas, this distinction “protects the local consensus on how the world is organized” by “reduc[ing] intellectual and social disorder.”
Gloss Note
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), xi.
1
In this spirit, Pulter renders the opposed conditions of virtuous purity and vicious filth through the person and behavior of two iconic animals.
The ugly sow of the poem’s opening line of course represents the qualities of uncleanness and dangerous impurity, drawing in the process upon a rich history of pig symbolism grounded in both classical and biblical sources. Prominent biblical antecedents include the pearl-scorning swine of Matthew 7.6, the prodigal son’s porcine companions in Luke 15.15, and the Gadarene swine of Mark 5.1-12. But Pulter’s real inspiration here derives from the classical tradition instead, in a way that conflates separate strands of that tradition. The sow’s pedigree—descending from the boar that killed Adonis—ties her to a story about two competing forms of venery: sexual lust and blood-lust. But the sow’s behavior—returning to her wallow despite experiencing a higher standard of cleanliness—rehearses different tropes altogether. One of these appears in the seventeenth emblem of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614; see Image 1 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where Combe (translating the earlier work of Guillaume de la Perrière) laments, “The dirty Swine delights more in the mire, / Then in sweete balmes that are of costly price. / Some men there likewise be, that do desire, / Rather then vertue for to follow vice.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), sig. B6v.
2
Similarly, a cognate trope descends from Plutarch’s Moralia (c. 100 CE) through Giambattista Gelli’s Circe (1549) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and beyond.
Gloss Note
See Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia, 15 vols., trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold (Cambridge, US: Harvard UP, 1957), 12.311-533; Giambattista Gelli, The Circe of Signor Giovanni Battista Gelli, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1702); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12, The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Didge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
3
The key figure in this lineage is one Gryllus, a companion of Odysseus who, transformed into a hog by Circe, refuses to revert to his human form, preferring instead to abide in animality. The emblem “In Grillum” from Pierre Cousteau’s Pegma (1555; see Image 2 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) makes the obvious point, with Odysseus asking his porcine companion, “What ill-omened fate has so terrified you that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to return to the office of a man? Once pleasure holds you in its shameful grip, it freely exercises control over you.”
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Petri Costalii Pegma (Lyon, 1555), 176: “Qui tibi Grilli feri stomachum movere parentes? / Quae te sors miseris terruit oscinibus / Ut te immunda iuvent foedi vestigia porci / Et renuas iterum munus obire viri? / Quem semel in turpi retinet ditione voluptas, / Huius vel gratis utitur imperiis: / Et quo plus demens eget assertore patrono, / Hoc mage blanda sui vindicis ora fugit” (What bestial parents have so angered you, o Gryllus? What chance has so terrified you with birds of ill omen that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to resume the office of a man? Once pleasure holds one in its shameful power, it freely exercises its control: and the more a madman needs a patron as his defender, the more he flies his protector’s persuasive words).
4
Pulter’s emblem assimilates this material to the tale of Venus and Adonis.
In appropriating this material, Pulter notably re-genders the mythic swine upon whom she draws, both the boar who killed Adonis and Odysseus’ companion Gryllus. This transformation is not entirely new; Lanteaume de Romieu’s French translation of Cousteau’s Pegma, for instance, refers to Gryllus as “[une] truye immunde”—a filthy sow.
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Le Pegme de Pierre Coustau, trans. Lanteaume de Romieu (Lyon, 1560), 224.
5
But in Pulter’s case the change may suggest that she sees women as the particular target of her moral instruction. In any event, Pulter’s trans-gendering mirrors the similar reversals that Milton introduces to the Circe-myth in his Masque Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), another reworking of classical material in the service of moral, and particularly sexual, instruction.
As for the animal Pulter chooses to embody purity, it may be less commonly familiar than the pig, but its symbolic associations run deep. The ermine’s nearly-immaculate winter coat—pure white save for a tuft of black fur on the tip of its tail—had gained currency by the Middle Ages as a marker of virtue appropriated to various kinds of aristocratic symbolism. Of the many royal portraits employing this imagery, we may single out the Ermine Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1585; see Image 3 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where the beast in question, sporting a gold crown-shaped collar, signifies both sexual and political purity. More importantly for the behavior described by Pulter, Leonardo da Vinci claims “[t]he ermine . . . is so fastidious that he will allow himself to be caught by hunters before he will take refuge in a muddy spot.”
Gloss Note
Oliver Evans, “Selections from the Bestiary of Leonardo da Vinci,” Journal of American Folklore 64.254 (Oct.-Dec., 1951), 395.
6
Leonardo considers this behavior under the rubric of “Moderation,” but for Henry Peacham the animal’s fastidiousness assumes the same broad moral quality it does for Pulter. In his emblems (see Image 4 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) Peacham thus laments of the ermine, “Me thinkes even now, I see a number blush, / To hear a beast, by nature should haue care, / To keepe his skinne, themselues not care a rush, / With how much filth, their minds bespotted are.”
Gloss Note
Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), 75.
7
For Mary Douglas, purity rituals help to underpin consensus as to the world’s design, and they do so by reducing ambiguity to a minimum. However, markers of purity can themselves be subject to ambiguity, as is the case with both of the animal-figures Pulter employs in this emblem. Regarding swine, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demonstrated how dominant associations with filth and pollution coexist alongside a subordinate register of meaning in which the same animals figure as emblems of “good order” and “utilitie and profit.”
Gloss Note
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 40, 45.
8
In the case of the ermine, something similar occurs as well: its dominant affiliations with chastity and cleanliness can yield to a secondary and opposed set of meanings. Thus Olaus Magnus describes the ermine as a “luxurious” creature, with luxury (from Latin luxuria, or lust) here flatly reversing the traditional associations with chastity.
Gloss Note
Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals (London, 1658), Book 18, p. 186.
9
In the visual record, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (1489-91; see Image 5 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) arguably draws on such reversals; its subject, Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, was pregnant in 1489, near the time of the portrait’s creation. The existence of these opposed meanings helps to foreground the very manufactured nature of the reality to which they refer. In Pulter’s emblem, however, the dominant associations of swine with filth and ermines with purity go unchallenged.
In both the sow and the ermine, Pulter thus found a congenial and well-established form of moral representation that had already made its way into earlier emblem books. Her transformation of this material confirms her dynamic engagement with the emblem tradition as a whole.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
30This Ugly Sow descended of that Bore
This ugly sow, descended of
Gloss Note
the boar that killed Adonis when he was hunting; Venus, Adonis’s lover, had warned him not to engage in this deadly sport.
that boar
This Ugly Sow descended of that Bore
2
Which Epitragius, Lovers intrales Tore
Which
Gloss Note
Aphrodite Epitragia (“riding on a she-goat”) was another name for Venus, goddess of love, reputedly derived from a story in which Theseus sacrificed a goat to her and it changed genders.
Epitragia’s
lover’s entrails tore,
Which
Critical Note
Aphrodite Epitragia, also known as Aphrodite Pandemos, appears in Plato’s Symposium as the goddess of erotic pleasure, the counterpart of Aphrodite Urania, the “Heavenly” Aphrodite (Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb [Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 1996], 180d, p. 109). In her sensual form, the goddess connects appropriately both with the tale of Venus and Adonis and the “Ugly Sow” of Pulter’s emblem. The peculiar spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of “Epitragius, Lovers intrales” seem to signal a gender-change (masculine -us replacing feminine -a) similar to the broader reversal that translates Adonis’ boar into Pulter’s sow.
Epitragius
, Lovers intrales Tore
3
Whoſe death the Queen of Love did Soe deplore
Whose death the
Gloss Note
Venus, or Aphrodite
queen of love
did so
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
:
Whose death the Queen of Love did soe deplore
4
This lothſome Beast beſmear’d w:th dirt & blood
This loathsome beast, besmeared with dirt and blood,
This loathsome Beast besmear’d wth dirt & blood
5
Being newly waſh’d in Yonder Cristall flood
Being newly washed in yonder crystal flood,
Being newly wash’d in Yonder Cristall flood
6
Yet now you See Shee’s wallowing in the Mud
Yet now you see she’s wallowing in the mud.
Yet now you See Shee’s wallowing in the Mud
7
Soe penitence and pennance, Some noe more
So penitence and penance, some no more
Soe penitence and penance, some noe more
8
Doe valew, then to Sin on A new Score
Do value than to sin on a new
Gloss Note
account or reckoning
score
.
Doe valew, then to sin on A new
Gloss Note
The metaphor comes fitly from the tavern, where a score is “The row of chalk marks on a door, or of strokes on a slate, which in rural alehouses serves to record the quantity of liquor consumed on credit by a regular frequenter” (OED “Score” sb. 10).
score
9
Thus like the dog they to their vomit turn
Thus
Gloss Note
proverbial. “But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:22). See also “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).
like the dog they to their vomit turn
,
Critical Note
In scripture, the dog appears, like the pig, as an animal emblem of impurity. The two can be paired, as in 2 Peter 22.16: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire”; or Matthew 8.6: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Also see Proverbs 26.11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, So a fool returneth to his folly.”
Thus like the dog they to their vomit turn
10
Licking that ffilth up which they Seem’d to Spurn
Licking that filth up which they seemed to spurn;
Licking that ffilth up which they Seem’d to Spurn
11
But thoſe which loathingly their Sins deplore
But those which loathingly their sins deplore,
But those which loathingly their Sins deplore
12
Beeing Cleans’d if poſſible will Sin noe more
Being cleansed, if possible will sin no more.
Beeing Cleans’d if possible will Sin noe more
13
But as the Ermine (which you See purſued
But as
Gloss Note
animal in the weasel family known for its white coat; an emblem of purity
the ermine
(which you see pursued
But as the Ermine which you see pursued
14
By thoſe which long to have their chaps imbru’de
By
Gloss Note
hunting dogs who long to bite the ermine, having their jaws (“chaps) “imbrued” (stained) with blood.
those which long to have their chaps imbrued
By
Critical Note
Hunting par force with dogs—a standard aristocratic practice in medieval and early modern Europe—receives no notice in the Bible, but here it extends the symbolism of Pulter’s earlier references to dogs and hunting. While hunting par force had many proponents, by the seventeenth century it had also gained outspoken detractors who, like Sir Thomas More, viewed the “blood-lust” of the hunt as “below the dignity of free men” (Utopia, trans. Paul Turner [London: Penguin, 2003], 76). Pulter’s allusions to hunting seem to share this hostility.
those which long to have their chaps imbru’de
15
In innocent blood) by Nature
Physical Note
“s” written over another letter
is
indu’de
In innocent blood) by Nature is
Gloss Note
invested; endowed
endued
Th’innocent blood, by Nature is indu’de
16
With Such a loathing of impuritie
With such a loathing of impurity,
With such a
Gloss Note
In addition to the habits of cleanliness described here, the ermine was also credited with eating only a single meal a day, thereby illustrating the virtue of abstemiousness.
loathing of impuritie
17
Rather then o’re a dirty place Shee’l flie
Rather than o’er a dirty place
Gloss Note
the ermine will flee
she’ll fly
,
Rather then o’re a dirtie place shee’l flie
18
Sheel Yield unto her Curſed foes and die
Gloss Note
The ermine was legendary for being willing to die rather than have her pure white fur blemished.
She’ll yield unto her cursed foes and die
.
Sheel Yield unto her Cursed foes and die
19
Soe Shee that knows her Self to bee Gods Child
So she that knows herself to be God’s child
Soe shee that knows her self to bee Gods Child
20
Will die A Thouſand deaths e’re bee defild
Will die a thousand deaths
Gloss Note
before
ere
be defiled.
Will die A Thousand deaths er’e bee defild
21
Shee knows her Saviours guiltles blood did flow
She knows
Gloss Note
Christ sacrificed himself in being crucified.
her Savior’s guiltless blood did flow
Shee knows her Saviours guiltless blood did flow
22
To waſh her sinfull Soul as white as Snow
To wash her sinful soul as white as snow.
To wash her Sinfull Soul as white as Snow
23
Then Ermin like let my Sad Soul expire
Then ermine-like let my sad soul expire,
Then Ermin like let my Sad Soul expire
24
Physical Note
caret inverted
Whivlst
others Hoglike tumble in the Mire.
Whilst others hog-like tumble in the
Gloss Note
mud; state of degradation
mire
.
Whilst others Hoglike tumble in the Mire.
ascending straight line
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

To complement the modernized elemental edition of this poem, this amplified edition presents a fully diplomatic version of the text. The manuscript’s original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, and superscripts have all been preserved. When these generate noteworthy interpretive issues (as for instance in line 2), I have flagged them in the textual glosses. I have settled indeterminate letter forms according to my best judgment in light of the manuscript’s general practice.

 Headnote

Pulter structures this emblem quite simply around Mary Douglas’s classic distinction between purity and danger: forms of cleanliness and filth, both physical and moral, literal and figurative. For Douglas, this distinction “protects the local consensus on how the world is organized” by “reduc[ing] intellectual and social disorder.”
Gloss Note
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), xi.
1
In this spirit, Pulter renders the opposed conditions of virtuous purity and vicious filth through the person and behavior of two iconic animals.
The ugly sow of the poem’s opening line of course represents the qualities of uncleanness and dangerous impurity, drawing in the process upon a rich history of pig symbolism grounded in both classical and biblical sources. Prominent biblical antecedents include the pearl-scorning swine of Matthew 7.6, the prodigal son’s porcine companions in Luke 15.15, and the Gadarene swine of Mark 5.1-12. But Pulter’s real inspiration here derives from the classical tradition instead, in a way that conflates separate strands of that tradition. The sow’s pedigree—descending from the boar that killed Adonis—ties her to a story about two competing forms of venery: sexual lust and blood-lust. But the sow’s behavior—returning to her wallow despite experiencing a higher standard of cleanliness—rehearses different tropes altogether. One of these appears in the seventeenth emblem of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614; see Image 1 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where Combe (translating the earlier work of Guillaume de la Perrière) laments, “The dirty Swine delights more in the mire, / Then in sweete balmes that are of costly price. / Some men there likewise be, that do desire, / Rather then vertue for to follow vice.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), sig. B6v.
2
Similarly, a cognate trope descends from Plutarch’s Moralia (c. 100 CE) through Giambattista Gelli’s Circe (1549) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and beyond.
Gloss Note
See Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia, 15 vols., trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold (Cambridge, US: Harvard UP, 1957), 12.311-533; Giambattista Gelli, The Circe of Signor Giovanni Battista Gelli, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1702); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12, The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Didge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
3
The key figure in this lineage is one Gryllus, a companion of Odysseus who, transformed into a hog by Circe, refuses to revert to his human form, preferring instead to abide in animality. The emblem “In Grillum” from Pierre Cousteau’s Pegma (1555; see Image 2 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) makes the obvious point, with Odysseus asking his porcine companion, “What ill-omened fate has so terrified you that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to return to the office of a man? Once pleasure holds you in its shameful grip, it freely exercises control over you.”
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Petri Costalii Pegma (Lyon, 1555), 176: “Qui tibi Grilli feri stomachum movere parentes? / Quae te sors miseris terruit oscinibus / Ut te immunda iuvent foedi vestigia porci / Et renuas iterum munus obire viri? / Quem semel in turpi retinet ditione voluptas, / Huius vel gratis utitur imperiis: / Et quo plus demens eget assertore patrono, / Hoc mage blanda sui vindicis ora fugit” (What bestial parents have so angered you, o Gryllus? What chance has so terrified you with birds of ill omen that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to resume the office of a man? Once pleasure holds one in its shameful power, it freely exercises its control: and the more a madman needs a patron as his defender, the more he flies his protector’s persuasive words).
4
Pulter’s emblem assimilates this material to the tale of Venus and Adonis.
In appropriating this material, Pulter notably re-genders the mythic swine upon whom she draws, both the boar who killed Adonis and Odysseus’ companion Gryllus. This transformation is not entirely new; Lanteaume de Romieu’s French translation of Cousteau’s Pegma, for instance, refers to Gryllus as “[une] truye immunde”—a filthy sow.
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Le Pegme de Pierre Coustau, trans. Lanteaume de Romieu (Lyon, 1560), 224.
5
But in Pulter’s case the change may suggest that she sees women as the particular target of her moral instruction. In any event, Pulter’s trans-gendering mirrors the similar reversals that Milton introduces to the Circe-myth in his Masque Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), another reworking of classical material in the service of moral, and particularly sexual, instruction.
As for the animal Pulter chooses to embody purity, it may be less commonly familiar than the pig, but its symbolic associations run deep. The ermine’s nearly-immaculate winter coat—pure white save for a tuft of black fur on the tip of its tail—had gained currency by the Middle Ages as a marker of virtue appropriated to various kinds of aristocratic symbolism. Of the many royal portraits employing this imagery, we may single out the Ermine Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1585; see Image 3 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where the beast in question, sporting a gold crown-shaped collar, signifies both sexual and political purity. More importantly for the behavior described by Pulter, Leonardo da Vinci claims “[t]he ermine . . . is so fastidious that he will allow himself to be caught by hunters before he will take refuge in a muddy spot.”
Gloss Note
Oliver Evans, “Selections from the Bestiary of Leonardo da Vinci,” Journal of American Folklore 64.254 (Oct.-Dec., 1951), 395.
6
Leonardo considers this behavior under the rubric of “Moderation,” but for Henry Peacham the animal’s fastidiousness assumes the same broad moral quality it does for Pulter. In his emblems (see Image 4 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) Peacham thus laments of the ermine, “Me thinkes even now, I see a number blush, / To hear a beast, by nature should haue care, / To keepe his skinne, themselues not care a rush, / With how much filth, their minds bespotted are.”
Gloss Note
Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), 75.
7
For Mary Douglas, purity rituals help to underpin consensus as to the world’s design, and they do so by reducing ambiguity to a minimum. However, markers of purity can themselves be subject to ambiguity, as is the case with both of the animal-figures Pulter employs in this emblem. Regarding swine, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demonstrated how dominant associations with filth and pollution coexist alongside a subordinate register of meaning in which the same animals figure as emblems of “good order” and “utilitie and profit.”
Gloss Note
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 40, 45.
8
In the case of the ermine, something similar occurs as well: its dominant affiliations with chastity and cleanliness can yield to a secondary and opposed set of meanings. Thus Olaus Magnus describes the ermine as a “luxurious” creature, with luxury (from Latin luxuria, or lust) here flatly reversing the traditional associations with chastity.
Gloss Note
Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals (London, 1658), Book 18, p. 186.
9
In the visual record, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (1489-91; see Image 5 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) arguably draws on such reversals; its subject, Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, was pregnant in 1489, near the time of the portrait’s creation. The existence of these opposed meanings helps to foreground the very manufactured nature of the reality to which they refer. In Pulter’s emblem, however, the dominant associations of swine with filth and ermines with purity go unchallenged.
In both the sow and the ermine, Pulter thus found a congenial and well-established form of moral representation that had already made its way into earlier emblem books. Her transformation of this material confirms her dynamic engagement with the emblem tradition as a whole.
Line number 2

 Critical note

Aphrodite Epitragia, also known as Aphrodite Pandemos, appears in Plato’s Symposium as the goddess of erotic pleasure, the counterpart of Aphrodite Urania, the “Heavenly” Aphrodite (Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb [Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 1996], 180d, p. 109). In her sensual form, the goddess connects appropriately both with the tale of Venus and Adonis and the “Ugly Sow” of Pulter’s emblem. The peculiar spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of “Epitragius, Lovers intrales” seem to signal a gender-change (masculine -us replacing feminine -a) similar to the broader reversal that translates Adonis’ boar into Pulter’s sow.
Line number 8

 Gloss note

The metaphor comes fitly from the tavern, where a score is “The row of chalk marks on a door, or of strokes on a slate, which in rural alehouses serves to record the quantity of liquor consumed on credit by a regular frequenter” (OED “Score” sb. 10).
Line number 9

 Critical note

In scripture, the dog appears, like the pig, as an animal emblem of impurity. The two can be paired, as in 2 Peter 22.16: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire”; or Matthew 8.6: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Also see Proverbs 26.11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, So a fool returneth to his folly.”
Line number 14

 Critical note

Hunting par force with dogs—a standard aristocratic practice in medieval and early modern Europe—receives no notice in the Bible, but here it extends the symbolism of Pulter’s earlier references to dogs and hunting. While hunting par force had many proponents, by the seventeenth century it had also gained outspoken detractors who, like Sir Thomas More, viewed the “blood-lust” of the hunt as “below the dignity of free men” (Utopia, trans. Paul Turner [London: Penguin, 2003], 76). Pulter’s allusions to hunting seem to share this hostility.
Line number 16

 Gloss note

In addition to the habits of cleanliness described here, the ermine was also credited with eating only a single meal a day, thereby illustrating the virtue of abstemiousness.
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X (Close panel)Amplified Edition
Amplified Edition

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[Emblem 30]
This Ugly Sow
(Emblem 30)
Emblem 30
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Bruce Boehrer
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

— Bruce Boehrer
To complement the modernized elemental edition of this poem, this amplified edition presents a fully diplomatic version of the text. The manuscript’s original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, and superscripts have all been preserved. When these generate noteworthy interpretive issues (as for instance in line 2), I have flagged them in the textual glosses. I have settled indeterminate letter forms according to my best judgment in light of the manuscript’s general practice.

— Bruce Boehrer
Pigs, boars, and hogs do not fare well in Pulter’s moral zoo. As in Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34) [Poem 99] where grunting, earth-bound pigs are unfavorably compared to heavenly turtledoves, Pulter here contrasts the filth of pigs to the purity of ermines. Citing proverbial, biblical, and mythological sources, Pulter explores the pig’s refusal to remain pure even when cleansed: like the dog who slurps up his own vomit, the pig almost cannot resist falling back into muddy cycles of immorality. Pulter interprets the ermine’s legendary willingness to sacrifice herself rather than have her fur tainted in Christian terms: her whiteness is precious because washed by Christ’s blood. The poem is formally innovative by dividing into two sections, each composed of two stanzas of triplets followed by a 6-line stanza of couplets. While the narrator seems to be guiding readers from a position of moral confidence, the ending couplet transforms into a plea that makes her complicit in the struggle to avoid being swine-like in the mire of life.

— Bruce Boehrer
Pulter structures this emblem quite simply around Mary Douglas’s classic distinction between purity and danger: forms of cleanliness and filth, both physical and moral, literal and figurative. For Douglas, this distinction “protects the local consensus on how the world is organized” by “reduc[ing] intellectual and social disorder.”
Gloss Note
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), xi.
1
In this spirit, Pulter renders the opposed conditions of virtuous purity and vicious filth through the person and behavior of two iconic animals.
The ugly sow of the poem’s opening line of course represents the qualities of uncleanness and dangerous impurity, drawing in the process upon a rich history of pig symbolism grounded in both classical and biblical sources. Prominent biblical antecedents include the pearl-scorning swine of Matthew 7.6, the prodigal son’s porcine companions in Luke 15.15, and the Gadarene swine of Mark 5.1-12. But Pulter’s real inspiration here derives from the classical tradition instead, in a way that conflates separate strands of that tradition. The sow’s pedigree—descending from the boar that killed Adonis—ties her to a story about two competing forms of venery: sexual lust and blood-lust. But the sow’s behavior—returning to her wallow despite experiencing a higher standard of cleanliness—rehearses different tropes altogether. One of these appears in the seventeenth emblem of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614; see Image 1 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where Combe (translating the earlier work of Guillaume de la Perrière) laments, “The dirty Swine delights more in the mire, / Then in sweete balmes that are of costly price. / Some men there likewise be, that do desire, / Rather then vertue for to follow vice.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), sig. B6v.
2
Similarly, a cognate trope descends from Plutarch’s Moralia (c. 100 CE) through Giambattista Gelli’s Circe (1549) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and beyond.
Gloss Note
See Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia, 15 vols., trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold (Cambridge, US: Harvard UP, 1957), 12.311-533; Giambattista Gelli, The Circe of Signor Giovanni Battista Gelli, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1702); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12, The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Didge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
3
The key figure in this lineage is one Gryllus, a companion of Odysseus who, transformed into a hog by Circe, refuses to revert to his human form, preferring instead to abide in animality. The emblem “In Grillum” from Pierre Cousteau’s Pegma (1555; see Image 2 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) makes the obvious point, with Odysseus asking his porcine companion, “What ill-omened fate has so terrified you that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to return to the office of a man? Once pleasure holds you in its shameful grip, it freely exercises control over you.”
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Petri Costalii Pegma (Lyon, 1555), 176: “Qui tibi Grilli feri stomachum movere parentes? / Quae te sors miseris terruit oscinibus / Ut te immunda iuvent foedi vestigia porci / Et renuas iterum munus obire viri? / Quem semel in turpi retinet ditione voluptas, / Huius vel gratis utitur imperiis: / Et quo plus demens eget assertore patrono, / Hoc mage blanda sui vindicis ora fugit” (What bestial parents have so angered you, o Gryllus? What chance has so terrified you with birds of ill omen that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to resume the office of a man? Once pleasure holds one in its shameful power, it freely exercises its control: and the more a madman needs a patron as his defender, the more he flies his protector’s persuasive words).
4
Pulter’s emblem assimilates this material to the tale of Venus and Adonis.
In appropriating this material, Pulter notably re-genders the mythic swine upon whom she draws, both the boar who killed Adonis and Odysseus’ companion Gryllus. This transformation is not entirely new; Lanteaume de Romieu’s French translation of Cousteau’s Pegma, for instance, refers to Gryllus as “[une] truye immunde”—a filthy sow.
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Le Pegme de Pierre Coustau, trans. Lanteaume de Romieu (Lyon, 1560), 224.
5
But in Pulter’s case the change may suggest that she sees women as the particular target of her moral instruction. In any event, Pulter’s trans-gendering mirrors the similar reversals that Milton introduces to the Circe-myth in his Masque Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), another reworking of classical material in the service of moral, and particularly sexual, instruction.
As for the animal Pulter chooses to embody purity, it may be less commonly familiar than the pig, but its symbolic associations run deep. The ermine’s nearly-immaculate winter coat—pure white save for a tuft of black fur on the tip of its tail—had gained currency by the Middle Ages as a marker of virtue appropriated to various kinds of aristocratic symbolism. Of the many royal portraits employing this imagery, we may single out the Ermine Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1585; see Image 3 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where the beast in question, sporting a gold crown-shaped collar, signifies both sexual and political purity. More importantly for the behavior described by Pulter, Leonardo da Vinci claims “[t]he ermine . . . is so fastidious that he will allow himself to be caught by hunters before he will take refuge in a muddy spot.”
Gloss Note
Oliver Evans, “Selections from the Bestiary of Leonardo da Vinci,” Journal of American Folklore 64.254 (Oct.-Dec., 1951), 395.
6
Leonardo considers this behavior under the rubric of “Moderation,” but for Henry Peacham the animal’s fastidiousness assumes the same broad moral quality it does for Pulter. In his emblems (see Image 4 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) Peacham thus laments of the ermine, “Me thinkes even now, I see a number blush, / To hear a beast, by nature should haue care, / To keepe his skinne, themselues not care a rush, / With how much filth, their minds bespotted are.”
Gloss Note
Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), 75.
7
For Mary Douglas, purity rituals help to underpin consensus as to the world’s design, and they do so by reducing ambiguity to a minimum. However, markers of purity can themselves be subject to ambiguity, as is the case with both of the animal-figures Pulter employs in this emblem. Regarding swine, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demonstrated how dominant associations with filth and pollution coexist alongside a subordinate register of meaning in which the same animals figure as emblems of “good order” and “utilitie and profit.”
Gloss Note
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 40, 45.
8
In the case of the ermine, something similar occurs as well: its dominant affiliations with chastity and cleanliness can yield to a secondary and opposed set of meanings. Thus Olaus Magnus describes the ermine as a “luxurious” creature, with luxury (from Latin luxuria, or lust) here flatly reversing the traditional associations with chastity.
Gloss Note
Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals (London, 1658), Book 18, p. 186.
9
In the visual record, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (1489-91; see Image 5 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) arguably draws on such reversals; its subject, Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, was pregnant in 1489, near the time of the portrait’s creation. The existence of these opposed meanings helps to foreground the very manufactured nature of the reality to which they refer. In Pulter’s emblem, however, the dominant associations of swine with filth and ermines with purity go unchallenged.
In both the sow and the ermine, Pulter thus found a congenial and well-established form of moral representation that had already made its way into earlier emblem books. Her transformation of this material confirms her dynamic engagement with the emblem tradition as a whole.


— Bruce Boehrer
1
30This Ugly Sow descended of that Bore
This ugly sow, descended of
Gloss Note
the boar that killed Adonis when he was hunting; Venus, Adonis’s lover, had warned him not to engage in this deadly sport.
that boar
This Ugly Sow descended of that Bore
2
Which Epitragius, Lovers intrales Tore
Which
Gloss Note
Aphrodite Epitragia (“riding on a she-goat”) was another name for Venus, goddess of love, reputedly derived from a story in which Theseus sacrificed a goat to her and it changed genders.
Epitragia’s
lover’s entrails tore,
Which
Critical Note
Aphrodite Epitragia, also known as Aphrodite Pandemos, appears in Plato’s Symposium as the goddess of erotic pleasure, the counterpart of Aphrodite Urania, the “Heavenly” Aphrodite (Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb [Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 1996], 180d, p. 109). In her sensual form, the goddess connects appropriately both with the tale of Venus and Adonis and the “Ugly Sow” of Pulter’s emblem. The peculiar spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of “Epitragius, Lovers intrales” seem to signal a gender-change (masculine -us replacing feminine -a) similar to the broader reversal that translates Adonis’ boar into Pulter’s sow.
Epitragius
, Lovers intrales Tore
3
Whoſe death the Queen of Love did Soe deplore
Whose death the
Gloss Note
Venus, or Aphrodite
queen of love
did so
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
:
Whose death the Queen of Love did soe deplore
4
This lothſome Beast beſmear’d w:th dirt & blood
This loathsome beast, besmeared with dirt and blood,
This loathsome Beast besmear’d wth dirt & blood
5
Being newly waſh’d in Yonder Cristall flood
Being newly washed in yonder crystal flood,
Being newly wash’d in Yonder Cristall flood
6
Yet now you See Shee’s wallowing in the Mud
Yet now you see she’s wallowing in the mud.
Yet now you See Shee’s wallowing in the Mud
7
Soe penitence and pennance, Some noe more
So penitence and penance, some no more
Soe penitence and penance, some noe more
8
Doe valew, then to Sin on A new Score
Do value than to sin on a new
Gloss Note
account or reckoning
score
.
Doe valew, then to sin on A new
Gloss Note
The metaphor comes fitly from the tavern, where a score is “The row of chalk marks on a door, or of strokes on a slate, which in rural alehouses serves to record the quantity of liquor consumed on credit by a regular frequenter” (OED “Score” sb. 10).
score
9
Thus like the dog they to their vomit turn
Thus
Gloss Note
proverbial. “But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:22). See also “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).
like the dog they to their vomit turn
,
Critical Note
In scripture, the dog appears, like the pig, as an animal emblem of impurity. The two can be paired, as in 2 Peter 22.16: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire”; or Matthew 8.6: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Also see Proverbs 26.11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, So a fool returneth to his folly.”
Thus like the dog they to their vomit turn
10
Licking that ffilth up which they Seem’d to Spurn
Licking that filth up which they seemed to spurn;
Licking that ffilth up which they Seem’d to Spurn
11
But thoſe which loathingly their Sins deplore
But those which loathingly their sins deplore,
But those which loathingly their Sins deplore
12
Beeing Cleans’d if poſſible will Sin noe more
Being cleansed, if possible will sin no more.
Beeing Cleans’d if possible will Sin noe more
13
But as the Ermine (which you See purſued
But as
Gloss Note
animal in the weasel family known for its white coat; an emblem of purity
the ermine
(which you see pursued
But as the Ermine which you see pursued
14
By thoſe which long to have their chaps imbru’de
By
Gloss Note
hunting dogs who long to bite the ermine, having their jaws (“chaps) “imbrued” (stained) with blood.
those which long to have their chaps imbrued
By
Critical Note
Hunting par force with dogs—a standard aristocratic practice in medieval and early modern Europe—receives no notice in the Bible, but here it extends the symbolism of Pulter’s earlier references to dogs and hunting. While hunting par force had many proponents, by the seventeenth century it had also gained outspoken detractors who, like Sir Thomas More, viewed the “blood-lust” of the hunt as “below the dignity of free men” (Utopia, trans. Paul Turner [London: Penguin, 2003], 76). Pulter’s allusions to hunting seem to share this hostility.
those which long to have their chaps imbru’de
15
In innocent blood) by Nature
Physical Note
“s” written over another letter
is
indu’de
In innocent blood) by Nature is
Gloss Note
invested; endowed
endued
Th’innocent blood, by Nature is indu’de
16
With Such a loathing of impuritie
With such a loathing of impurity,
With such a
Gloss Note
In addition to the habits of cleanliness described here, the ermine was also credited with eating only a single meal a day, thereby illustrating the virtue of abstemiousness.
loathing of impuritie
17
Rather then o’re a dirty place Shee’l flie
Rather than o’er a dirty place
Gloss Note
the ermine will flee
she’ll fly
,
Rather then o’re a dirtie place shee’l flie
18
Sheel Yield unto her Curſed foes and die
Gloss Note
The ermine was legendary for being willing to die rather than have her pure white fur blemished.
She’ll yield unto her cursed foes and die
.
Sheel Yield unto her Cursed foes and die
19
Soe Shee that knows her Self to bee Gods Child
So she that knows herself to be God’s child
Soe shee that knows her self to bee Gods Child
20
Will die A Thouſand deaths e’re bee defild
Will die a thousand deaths
Gloss Note
before
ere
be defiled.
Will die A Thousand deaths er’e bee defild
21
Shee knows her Saviours guiltles blood did flow
She knows
Gloss Note
Christ sacrificed himself in being crucified.
her Savior’s guiltless blood did flow
Shee knows her Saviours guiltless blood did flow
22
To waſh her sinfull Soul as white as Snow
To wash her sinful soul as white as snow.
To wash her Sinfull Soul as white as Snow
23
Then Ermin like let my Sad Soul expire
Then ermine-like let my sad soul expire,
Then Ermin like let my Sad Soul expire
24
Physical Note
caret inverted
Whivlst
others Hoglike tumble in the Mire.
Whilst others hog-like tumble in the
Gloss Note
mud; state of degradation
mire
.
Whilst others Hoglike tumble in the Mire.
ascending straight line
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Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Elemental Edition

 Editorial note

The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.
Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

To complement the modernized elemental edition of this poem, this amplified edition presents a fully diplomatic version of the text. The manuscript’s original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, and superscripts have all been preserved. When these generate noteworthy interpretive issues (as for instance in line 2), I have flagged them in the textual glosses. I have settled indeterminate letter forms according to my best judgment in light of the manuscript’s general practice.
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

Pigs, boars, and hogs do not fare well in Pulter’s moral zoo. As in Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34) [Poem 99] where grunting, earth-bound pigs are unfavorably compared to heavenly turtledoves, Pulter here contrasts the filth of pigs to the purity of ermines. Citing proverbial, biblical, and mythological sources, Pulter explores the pig’s refusal to remain pure even when cleansed: like the dog who slurps up his own vomit, the pig almost cannot resist falling back into muddy cycles of immorality. Pulter interprets the ermine’s legendary willingness to sacrifice herself rather than have her fur tainted in Christian terms: her whiteness is precious because washed by Christ’s blood. The poem is formally innovative by dividing into two sections, each composed of two stanzas of triplets followed by a 6-line stanza of couplets. While the narrator seems to be guiding readers from a position of moral confidence, the ending couplet transforms into a plea that makes her complicit in the struggle to avoid being swine-like in the mire of life.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

Pulter structures this emblem quite simply around Mary Douglas’s classic distinction between purity and danger: forms of cleanliness and filth, both physical and moral, literal and figurative. For Douglas, this distinction “protects the local consensus on how the world is organized” by “reduc[ing] intellectual and social disorder.”
Gloss Note
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), xi.
1
In this spirit, Pulter renders the opposed conditions of virtuous purity and vicious filth through the person and behavior of two iconic animals.
The ugly sow of the poem’s opening line of course represents the qualities of uncleanness and dangerous impurity, drawing in the process upon a rich history of pig symbolism grounded in both classical and biblical sources. Prominent biblical antecedents include the pearl-scorning swine of Matthew 7.6, the prodigal son’s porcine companions in Luke 15.15, and the Gadarene swine of Mark 5.1-12. But Pulter’s real inspiration here derives from the classical tradition instead, in a way that conflates separate strands of that tradition. The sow’s pedigree—descending from the boar that killed Adonis—ties her to a story about two competing forms of venery: sexual lust and blood-lust. But the sow’s behavior—returning to her wallow despite experiencing a higher standard of cleanliness—rehearses different tropes altogether. One of these appears in the seventeenth emblem of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614; see Image 1 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where Combe (translating the earlier work of Guillaume de la Perrière) laments, “The dirty Swine delights more in the mire, / Then in sweete balmes that are of costly price. / Some men there likewise be, that do desire, / Rather then vertue for to follow vice.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), sig. B6v.
2
Similarly, a cognate trope descends from Plutarch’s Moralia (c. 100 CE) through Giambattista Gelli’s Circe (1549) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and beyond.
Gloss Note
See Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia, 15 vols., trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold (Cambridge, US: Harvard UP, 1957), 12.311-533; Giambattista Gelli, The Circe of Signor Giovanni Battista Gelli, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1702); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12, The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Didge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
3
The key figure in this lineage is one Gryllus, a companion of Odysseus who, transformed into a hog by Circe, refuses to revert to his human form, preferring instead to abide in animality. The emblem “In Grillum” from Pierre Cousteau’s Pegma (1555; see Image 2 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) makes the obvious point, with Odysseus asking his porcine companion, “What ill-omened fate has so terrified you that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to return to the office of a man? Once pleasure holds you in its shameful grip, it freely exercises control over you.”
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Petri Costalii Pegma (Lyon, 1555), 176: “Qui tibi Grilli feri stomachum movere parentes? / Quae te sors miseris terruit oscinibus / Ut te immunda iuvent foedi vestigia porci / Et renuas iterum munus obire viri? / Quem semel in turpi retinet ditione voluptas, / Huius vel gratis utitur imperiis: / Et quo plus demens eget assertore patrono, / Hoc mage blanda sui vindicis ora fugit” (What bestial parents have so angered you, o Gryllus? What chance has so terrified you with birds of ill omen that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to resume the office of a man? Once pleasure holds one in its shameful power, it freely exercises its control: and the more a madman needs a patron as his defender, the more he flies his protector’s persuasive words).
4
Pulter’s emblem assimilates this material to the tale of Venus and Adonis.
In appropriating this material, Pulter notably re-genders the mythic swine upon whom she draws, both the boar who killed Adonis and Odysseus’ companion Gryllus. This transformation is not entirely new; Lanteaume de Romieu’s French translation of Cousteau’s Pegma, for instance, refers to Gryllus as “[une] truye immunde”—a filthy sow.
Gloss Note
Pierre Cousteau, Le Pegme de Pierre Coustau, trans. Lanteaume de Romieu (Lyon, 1560), 224.
5
But in Pulter’s case the change may suggest that she sees women as the particular target of her moral instruction. In any event, Pulter’s trans-gendering mirrors the similar reversals that Milton introduces to the Circe-myth in his Masque Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), another reworking of classical material in the service of moral, and particularly sexual, instruction.
As for the animal Pulter chooses to embody purity, it may be less commonly familiar than the pig, but its symbolic associations run deep. The ermine’s nearly-immaculate winter coat—pure white save for a tuft of black fur on the tip of its tail—had gained currency by the Middle Ages as a marker of virtue appropriated to various kinds of aristocratic symbolism. Of the many royal portraits employing this imagery, we may single out the Ermine Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1585; see Image 3 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where the beast in question, sporting a gold crown-shaped collar, signifies both sexual and political purity. More importantly for the behavior described by Pulter, Leonardo da Vinci claims “[t]he ermine . . . is so fastidious that he will allow himself to be caught by hunters before he will take refuge in a muddy spot.”
Gloss Note
Oliver Evans, “Selections from the Bestiary of Leonardo da Vinci,” Journal of American Folklore 64.254 (Oct.-Dec., 1951), 395.
6
Leonardo considers this behavior under the rubric of “Moderation,” but for Henry Peacham the animal’s fastidiousness assumes the same broad moral quality it does for Pulter. In his emblems (see Image 4 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) Peacham thus laments of the ermine, “Me thinkes even now, I see a number blush, / To hear a beast, by nature should haue care, / To keepe his skinne, themselues not care a rush, / With how much filth, their minds bespotted are.”
Gloss Note
Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), 75.
7
For Mary Douglas, purity rituals help to underpin consensus as to the world’s design, and they do so by reducing ambiguity to a minimum. However, markers of purity can themselves be subject to ambiguity, as is the case with both of the animal-figures Pulter employs in this emblem. Regarding swine, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demonstrated how dominant associations with filth and pollution coexist alongside a subordinate register of meaning in which the same animals figure as emblems of “good order” and “utilitie and profit.”
Gloss Note
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 40, 45.
8
In the case of the ermine, something similar occurs as well: its dominant affiliations with chastity and cleanliness can yield to a secondary and opposed set of meanings. Thus Olaus Magnus describes the ermine as a “luxurious” creature, with luxury (from Latin luxuria, or lust) here flatly reversing the traditional associations with chastity.
Gloss Note
Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals (London, 1658), Book 18, p. 186.
9
In the visual record, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (1489-91; see Image 5 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) arguably draws on such reversals; its subject, Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, was pregnant in 1489, near the time of the portrait’s creation. The existence of these opposed meanings helps to foreground the very manufactured nature of the reality to which they refer. In Pulter’s emblem, however, the dominant associations of swine with filth and ermines with purity go unchallenged.
In both the sow and the ermine, Pulter thus found a congenial and well-established form of moral representation that had already made its way into earlier emblem books. Her transformation of this material confirms her dynamic engagement with the emblem tradition as a whole.
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

the boar that killed Adonis when he was hunting; Venus, Adonis’s lover, had warned him not to engage in this deadly sport.
Elemental Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

Aphrodite Epitragia (“riding on a she-goat”) was another name for Venus, goddess of love, reputedly derived from a story in which Theseus sacrificed a goat to her and it changed genders.
Amplified Edition
Line number 2

 Critical note

Aphrodite Epitragia, also known as Aphrodite Pandemos, appears in Plato’s Symposium as the goddess of erotic pleasure, the counterpart of Aphrodite Urania, the “Heavenly” Aphrodite (Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb [Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 1996], 180d, p. 109). In her sensual form, the goddess connects appropriately both with the tale of Venus and Adonis and the “Ugly Sow” of Pulter’s emblem. The peculiar spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of “Epitragius, Lovers intrales” seem to signal a gender-change (masculine -us replacing feminine -a) similar to the broader reversal that translates Adonis’ boar into Pulter’s sow.
Elemental Edition
Line number 3

 Gloss note

Venus, or Aphrodite
Elemental Edition
Line number 3

 Gloss note

lament
Elemental Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

account or reckoning
Amplified Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

The metaphor comes fitly from the tavern, where a score is “The row of chalk marks on a door, or of strokes on a slate, which in rural alehouses serves to record the quantity of liquor consumed on credit by a regular frequenter” (OED “Score” sb. 10).
Elemental Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

proverbial. “But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:22). See also “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).
Amplified Edition
Line number 9

 Critical note

In scripture, the dog appears, like the pig, as an animal emblem of impurity. The two can be paired, as in 2 Peter 22.16: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire”; or Matthew 8.6: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Also see Proverbs 26.11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, So a fool returneth to his folly.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 13

 Gloss note

animal in the weasel family known for its white coat; an emblem of purity
Elemental Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

hunting dogs who long to bite the ermine, having their jaws (“chaps) “imbrued” (stained) with blood.
Amplified Edition
Line number 14

 Critical note

Hunting par force with dogs—a standard aristocratic practice in medieval and early modern Europe—receives no notice in the Bible, but here it extends the symbolism of Pulter’s earlier references to dogs and hunting. While hunting par force had many proponents, by the seventeenth century it had also gained outspoken detractors who, like Sir Thomas More, viewed the “blood-lust” of the hunt as “below the dignity of free men” (Utopia, trans. Paul Turner [London: Penguin, 2003], 76). Pulter’s allusions to hunting seem to share this hostility.
Transcription
Line number 15

 Physical note

“s” written over another letter
Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

invested; endowed
Amplified Edition
Line number 16

 Gloss note

In addition to the habits of cleanliness described here, the ermine was also credited with eating only a single meal a day, thereby illustrating the virtue of abstemiousness.
Elemental Edition
Line number 17

 Gloss note

the ermine will flee
Elemental Edition
Line number 18

 Gloss note

The ermine was legendary for being willing to die rather than have her pure white fur blemished.
Elemental Edition
Line number 20

 Gloss note

before
Elemental Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

Christ sacrificed himself in being crucified.
Transcription
Line number 24

 Physical note

caret inverted
Elemental Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

mud; state of degradation
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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