The BBC gave us a history of the world in 100 objects—a heuristic that can easily be scaled up or down.

So: could we get to know Hester Pulter in just fifteen things? That seems almost too easy; but what if each of those things had to revolve around the number fifteen?

Here's what that might look like:

1.

At age fifteen, Hester Ley married Arthur Pulter and took his surname. Sometime afterward, she began her life at his country estate, Broadfield, which she refers to in a number of poems (such asTo My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield38).

Pulter’s home, Broadfield, as depicted in Henry Chauncy’s The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (1700), plate between pp. 72-3. Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0.

2.

Over the course of almost a quarter of a century, Pulter gave birth to fifteen children.

Detail of Pulter’s family tree, on loose paper with her manuscript. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich.

In two poems, Pulter laments the death of seven of her offspring: O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul28 and The Invocation of the Elements, The Longest Night in the Year, 165541.

Still more were to die before she did: all but two children predeceased her.

3.

Two of Pulter’s poems declare themselves to have been written around the pregnancy and birth of her fifteenth child: Universal Dissolution, Made When I Was with Child, of my 15th Child, my Son, John, I Being, Everyone Thought, in a Consumption, 16486 and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John45.

In the manuscript, the title of the latter continues: “this being my 15th child; I being so weak, that in ten days and nights I never moved my head one jot from my pillow, out of which great weakness, my gracious God restored me, that I still live to magnify his mercy.” Pulter lived thirty more years (or two fifteens, if you’re counting).

4.

1595 or 1596 is the year to which some scholars first dated Pulter’s birth when they were working with her rediscovered manuscript in the last years of the twentieth century. They were responding to the long title of one poem: Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow66, which continues in the manuscript: “May 1667, I Being Seventy-One Years Old.”

The full title of Pulter’s 66th poem (fol. 88v).

In the manuscript, this poem is not in Pulter’s hand, nor in the main scribal hand (whose work Pulter appears to have proofread and at times corrected); it is therefore entirely possible that a scribal error crept in somewhere: perhaps “1667” should read “1677,” e.g., or “Seventy-One” should read “Sixty-One.” It is likely that the same error in this poem’s title also generated erroneous calculations (possibly in the same hand) in the volume’s front matter:

Detail of one of the title pages in Pulter’s manuscript (fol. 1r).

Subsequent studies have led scholars to agree on June 8, 1605 as Pulter’s date of birth.

5.

While the birth date of her mother, Mary Petty or Pettie, is not known, Pulter’s father, James Ley, was born in 1550. Pulter refers to her father’s prominence in the court of King James I of England in one emblem poem, The Oyster and the Mouse113. Ley also served the next monarch, Charles I, whom Pulter celebrates and mourns in many of her poems, such as On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder8.

James Ley, 1st Earl of Marlborough (1550–1629), National Portrait Gallery. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

6.

The genealogy of Pulter’s family by marriage has been traced to the 15th century. A handwritten genealogy on a loose leaf of paper that accompanies her manuscript volume tells us that one John Pulter died in 1421 and was buried in Hitchin Church. Hitchin is in Hertfordshire, the same county that Hester Pulter inhabited three hundred years later, after she married John’s descendant, Arthur (his great-great-great-great-great-grandson).

Detail of genealogy on loose paper accompanying Pulter’s manuscript: “John Pulter. obit Feb 1428 … Buried in Hitchin Church.” Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich.

Bonus: The village of Hitchin (associated with several early generations of Pulters) is only about 15 miles from Hester Pulter’s home, Broadfield, in Hertfordshire.

Hitchin, left and Broadfield, right in detail of plate facing page 1 of Henry Chauncy’s The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (1700). Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0.

On her father’s side, the genealogy of Pulter’s birth family has been traced as far back as the thirteenth century.

7.

Events from 1615 provide context for what the world was like during Pulter’s childhood. Wikipedia provides an array of facts about what happened in this year:

• England sent its first ambassador to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir.
• A Jesuit priest was hanged and drawn (disembowelled) in Glasgow for refusing allegiance to King James VI of Scotland (who, as King James I of England, was Pulter’s father’s boss).
• 31 Spanish Basque whalers were killed in Iceland.
• A Japanese samurai visited the Pope in Rome to seek a trade treaty between Japan and Mexico.
• Johannes Kepler published a response to Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons (which Pulter refers to in more than one poem, such as A Solitary Complaint54).
• The only son of Pocahontas and her English husband was born, as was one of the accused Salem witches.

8.

In 1531, Andrea Alciato’s book, Emblemata, kickstarted the European craze for a poetic genre, the emblem, to which Pulter contributed dozens of original examples in the second substantial section of her verse collection.

Internal title page of second section of Pulter’s verse, called “The sighes of a sad soul Emblematically breathed forth by the noble Hadassah” or (more simply) “Emblemes.”

Emblems tended to offer vivid (and often visual, as well as verbal) exemplars of moral lessons, such as that offered by Pulter in This Fell Catablepe98: “let none think of death with so much terror, / For by this emblem they may see their error.”

9.

Pulter’s fifteenth emblem, The Cruel Tiger81, features a tiger, a lark, a flying fish, some biblical figures, and a lesson on pride, which Pulter concludes “destroys both angel, man and beast” (line 24).

Detail, after Adriaen Collaert, after Jan Collaert (II), after Jan van der Straet, Vossen, ram, luipaard en tijger, anonymous, 1635-1660. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Public Domain.

10.

This is an image of folio 15, the fifteenth leaf in Pulter’s manuscript. In a citation, it would appear thus: fol. 15r (with the “r” standing for “recto,” a reference to the “right” side of the page in a two-page spread). This leaf features the end of the poem entitled On those Two Unparalleled Friends, Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas, Who Were Shot to Death at Colchester7.

11.

And this is the reverse of folio 15; it is also called the “verso,” and in a citation would appear thus: fol. 15v. It presents the start of a poem entitled On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder8.

12.

Pulter’s fifteenth poem is the second of two elegies in a row about her beloved king, Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649 during England’s civil wars. In the manuscript, the poem is labelled “On the Same,” in reference to the prior poem called On the Horrid Murder of that Incomparable Prince14.

The executioner after the beheading of Charles I of England, 1649, Houghton Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

13.

Pulter alludes to Corinthians 15:51-2 in Aurora [2]37, among other poems, when she imagines the end of the world:

In the King James translation of the Bible, the passage reads: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” Pulter’s fascination with material transformation and her fate in the universe are epitomized in these verses.

14.

The poem Old Aeschylus96 refers to how the biblical Hezekiah’s tears “a pardon did obtain for fifteen years” (line 16); in the manuscript, however, the scribe originally wrote “fourteen” before a correcting hand (probably Pulter’s) crossed that out and added “fifteen” above it. This is one of many moments in the manuscript that suggests that Pulter read the fair copy with care.

Detail from Pulter’s Old Aeschylus96.

15.

November 15, 2018, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making is launched.