The Piper of Hamelin (Emblem 17)

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The Piper of Hamelin (Emblem 17)

Poem 83

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 Thomas Ward.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

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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 13

 Physical note

final “l” appears written over “e”
Line number 20

 Physical note

in left margin: “See the Story / of this Pied Piper/ at Larg in Verstegan / ffolio 85”
Line number 21

 Physical note

“W” appears written over “w”
Line number 26

 Physical note

“s” written over former letter with ascender, possibly “t”
Line number 31

 Physical note

“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Line number 38

 Physical note

perhaps written over earlier letters
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Transcription
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[Emblem 17]
The Piper of Hamelin
(Emblem 17)
Emblem 17
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
For this edition I have chosen to modernize spelling for accessibility, with two exceptions: for the modern place-name “Hamelin” I have retained the manuscript’s “Hamelle” (line 13) as the form that appeared most commonly in printed sources from the seventeenth century, and for “talisman” I have opted for the manuscript’s “Telesma” (line 27) out of respect for a possible irony the more etymologically sensitive spelling of that word might activate. In general, I have added some light punctuation for clarity but have refrained from doing so in instances where such clarity would come at the cost of obscuring an interesting ambiguity (as in the case of line 6). My notes and headnote are informed by the same errant principle I take to be driving the poem’s own – often ironic – relationship to its emblematic subject, highlighting the poem’s shifting moralizing framework by drawing particular attention to repeated and contradictory addresses to the reader, grammatical ambiguities, and features of the material text that threaten (or promise) to lead readers astray. Additionally, I have attempted to place Emblem 17 in the context of other versions of the Pied Piper story in order to show Pulter’s particular engagement with a popular legend just at the moment when it was beginning to emerge into the popular English consciousness through printed sources.
I should say something about an important omission from this edition: to my surprise, given my own scholarly interest in early modern musical discourses, I found I had nothing much to say about the piper’s Orphic powers over the rats and the children in Pulter’s telling. I attribute this omission to the way the poem seems deliberately to avoid the possibility of magical music when it seeks alternative explanations for how the piper performed his feat in lines 24-29. However, readers who are interested in considering the poem in this light (perhaps for a future Amplified Edition) might consult the work of Linda Phyllis Austern, Penelope Gouk, Gary Tomlinson, and others who discuss early modern magical and natural philosophical theories of music’s power over human and animal realms.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
What begins as a poem heralding God’s ability to use animals to punish errant humans dramatically changes into a fable in which animal control is just a commercial venture gone bad. This poem briefly surveys a host of divine plagues, powered by the weapons of mass destruction that are God’s creatures: rabbits, moles, frogs, snakes, insects (even lice!), as well as that most notorious plague beast, the rat—which leads to a retelling of the still-familiar story of the pied piper of Hamelin kidnapping an entire town’s children when the town failed to pay him for clearing the rats. No mere horror story about stranger danger, as it has become for children and parents both today, this is Pulter’s unexpected morality tale about the problems of avarice and the importance of keeping one’s word. Grief for lost children, which Pulter represents so poignantly and personally elsewhere in her poems, is here just punishment for dishonorable action.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Emblem 17 tells the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or Hamelle, as Hester Pulter and her contemporaries tended to say), in which a mysterious stranger lures away the town’s children in order to punish the townspeople for greedily withholding the payment they owe him for ridding the town of rats. In connecting the natural world – specifically vermin – with cosmic or divine justice, the poem recalls several other of Pulter’s emblem poems in which even the lowliest and most contemptible parts of Creation are given a providential purpose. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], for example, narrates how the Bishop of Mainz was consumed by rats as punishment for burning a group of starving peasants during a grain shortage, and gives numerous examples of how “each despiséd reptile or insect / He [i.e. God] can empower, when we his laws neglect.” Along similar lines, Emblem 17 opens with a series of generalization about how God “will not neglect,” or scorn, to use even “reptile[s] or insect[s] / Or basest animal[s]” to inflict total destruction on a disobedient people, and the examples that follow – all taken from a section of Pliny’s Natural History dealing with the “much hurt and dammage [that] hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account” – suggest that we are in for a lecture on how God uses base means to humble the proud.
Gloss Note
C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), p. 212.
1
However, the poem does not make good on its initial promise. Unlike the “contemptible creatures” that bring proud civilizations and tyrannical rulers to their knees, the rats of Hamelle actually end up having nothing to do with divine punishment – or, if they do, the initial sin that incurred such punishment is never identified. The “vermin” are simply introduced as a “rout” afflicting the town, so that, like the townspeople, readers might well “stand in doubt” as to whether the infestation arose from supernatural or merely natural causes. Instead of providing a moral about God’s punishment through base means, the poem abruptly shifts in line 20 with the announcement of a new ostensible moral, for which nothing in the poem so far has prepared us: “The fruits of curséd avarice now see.” Ironically, within this new moralizing frame, the rats serve not as the punishment for sin but, rather, its occasion, when the stingy townspeople notoriously rip off the piper after he has lured the pests to their death in the river Weser. But even this new moral does not fully survive until the end of the poem. Omitting a detail from her source (Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1605]), in which the townspeople’s miserliness is foregrounded when they attempt to offer the piper “far less then hee lookt for,” the poem ends with yet another explicitly moralizing pronouncement – “Now see how breach of promise is accursed” – shifting the focus once again, this time away from the specific vice of avarice and toward the more general sin of bad faith.
Gloss Note
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), p. 85.
2 Having been lured into what initially seemed to be a story about divinely ordained plagues of vermin only to find a quite different moral lesson about avarice and then promise-breaking, readers might end up feeling faintly defrauded of their initial investment in the poem.
As it turns out, the shifting moral frames in Emblem 17 reflect an apparent uncertainty among other seventeenth-century tellers of the tale as to its significance. The version published in James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645), which is framed by an account of “som odd fellows” who “went skulking up and down London-streets, and with Figs and Reasons [i.e. raisins] allur’d little children, and so pourloy’d them away from their parents,” probably comes the closest to the story’s modern associations with literal stranger danger (along with its homophobic undertones).
Gloss Note
James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae (London, 1645), p. 71. For the modern association between child kidnapping and homophobia, see Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 1. Robert Dixon’s Canidia, or, The witches (London, 1683) notably associates the Pied Piper with sexual deviance, listing the “Roguish Clown” who “lo[st] all the Boys in Hammel Town” alongside “Eels and Frogs” that “have no sex” and “Others” who “from between their Legs did speak, / And act many a Haggish feat” (p. 60).
3 Interestingly, Howell reprints a somewhat different version of the story in A German Diet (1653), where it appears in the context of an anti-German oration by one “John Gulielm of Retwitz” and identifies the piper with “the devill” himself.
Gloss Note
James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), pp. 34-35.
4 Similarly, Robert Burton mentions the Hamelle disappearance in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”
Gloss Note
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), p. 68.
5 The piper’s association with diabolical powers pervades a number of seventeenth-century versions. An anonymous anti-Ranter pamphlet, The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (1653), writes the piper out of the story altogether, the children simply “being carried away by the Devil in a flame of fire” after the townspeople, “holding the same Tenents with the Ranters, Shakers, &c. Of our times,” set them upon a hill in a deliberate attempt “to dare and defie the Lord of all spirits.”
Gloss Note
The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (London, 1653), pp. 3-4.
6 While such retellings present the occurrence as a literal example of Satan’s power on earth, Thomas Hodges’s The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (1647) allegorizes the tale in terms of the “pyde piper Haeresie” that might lead “those that are near and deare unto you, you know not whither.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (London, 1647), pp. 36-37.
7 Striking in all of these accounts is their attribution of the children’s disappearance to the piper’s (or devil’s) own sinister nature, rather than presenting it as retribution for the wrong the townspeople commit by not paying him. Indeed, John Gaule’s Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (1652) turns the story into a cautionary tale about “the danger, misery, and ruine of such as have affectedly favoured, or preferred, and superstitiously credited, or consulted Magicall and Astrologicall predictors.”
Gloss Note
John Gaule, Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (London, 1652), pp. 364, 366.
8 If the townspeople’s sin in Pulter’s poem is their “breach of promise” to the piper, in Gaule’s account it is their foolish decision to employ such a “Magicall” charmer in the first place.
The polysemous nature of the Pied Piper story helps to account for its presence in some surprising places, such as William Ramesey’s discourse on parasitic worms, Helminthologia (1668), which explicitly cites Verstegan’s account as an example of the “wonderful permission of GOD to the Rage of the Devil,” who, like the vermicular pest Ramesey discusses, “destroys life and all, where he can.”
Gloss Note
William Ramesey, Helminthologia (London, 1668), p. 66.
9 Verstegan himself presents the Hamelle story not with any kind of moralizing import but, unexpectedly, as part of his discussion of the Saxon diaspora – specifically, as a fanciful explanation (which he ends up dismissing) for why “among the Saxons in Transilvnia” there are some “that have lyke surnames unto divers of the burgers of Hamel.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 87.
10 Appropriately enough, given its theme, Verstegan introduces the story as something that has lured him away from his main topic, “one digression [having] drawn on another.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 85.
11 It is with a similar apology that the tale is prefaced in another unlikely source, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (1615), whose author, George Hakewell, “confess[es]” that he has included it “not so much for the fitnesse, as the strangeness of the story.”
Gloss Note
George Hakewell, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (London, 1615), p. 61.
12 Relieved of the imperative to “fit” the story to any particular end (moralizing, geographical, mag-astro-mantical, or otherwise), perhaps the least surprising context in which the Pied Piper appears in the seventeenth century is in collections of miraculous occurrences such as The Wonders of the Little World (1673) or Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (1683), which simply introduce the event as a “strange Accident.”
Gloss Note
Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (London, 1683), p. 188.
13
Read in the context of these various (and variously explicated) versions, Pulter’s transformation of the Pied Piper legend into an emblem with shifting significances also transforms the genre itself from one of static exposition of a calcified moral into a dynamic meditation on the complex relationships between divine and human justice, avarice and fair trade, labor and exploitation, promise and betrayal, as well as the human and the non-human. Working backwards from what may seem like its overly trite conclusion (“Then keep your word, for better or for worse”), the poem unravels into a promiscuous array of competing possibilities that intermingle and coalesce in unexpected ways, like the mythemes of the legend itself in its various guises. For instance, given early modern associations between avarice and sodomy, Pulter’s tale of a piper luring the “pretty boys” of the town away through the use of some kind of unmentionable means (“what he did, I think no man can say”) potentially emerges as a sublimated form of poetic justice.
Gloss Note
The piper’s queerness is emphasized in several of the early modern versions, which, in addition to emphasizing his flamboyant dress, often describe him with the epithet “odd,” as in Verstegan’s characterization of him as “an od kynd of compagnion” (p. 85). For the connection between avarice and sodomy, see, for example, John Harris, The destruction of sodome (London, 1625), p. 35: “And had couetousnesse a habitation in Sodome? and was filthy auarice a cause of her desolation? then Lord bee mercifull vnto our Land, that hath many a member in it, who out of a couetous desire, haue made a marriage with siluer, and giuen a bill of diuorce to Iesus Christ!” For a larger discussion connecting sodomy more broadly to the misuse of money, particularly through usury and counterfeiting, see Will Fisher, “Queer Money” ELH 66 (1999): 1-23.
14 The poem’s odd (and oddly unnecessary) citation of 1 Samuel 6 as a possible explanation for “how ‘twas done” (along with the five golden mice the Philistines offered Jehovah to mitigate their rodent infestation, they also presented five golden “emerods” to alleviate the divine smiting that was afflicting them “in their secret parts”) probably raises more questions than it answers.
Gloss Note
Even more suggestively, the Latin Vulgate describes the Philistines’ offering as “quinque anos aureos” (“five golden anuses”). For the premodern interpretation of the plagues of 1 Samuel 5-6 specifically in relation to both avarice and “sodomitirie,” see Robert Mills, “Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisées” Speculum 87 (2012): 413-468.
15
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between the rats and divine punishment in Emblem 17 suggests a type of pest that refuses to be controlled either by literal extermination or by providentialist narratives. As Lucinda Cole points out, “given their endless reproducibility and the unpredictable nature of their swarming motion,” rats, mice, and other vermin represented in early modern texts “may actually threaten the ideas of an orderly universe and the regeneration of Nature symbolized by Noah’s Ark,” often resisting neat ontological (and even taxonomic) categorization.
Gloss Note
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 17.
16 Thus, in seventeenth-century depictions of the biblical plagues of Egypt, for example, it is unclear whether “lice, frogs, and swarming things [are] to be read allegorically or literally” and, indeed, whether the story is “about political sovereignty or natural populations.”
Gloss Note
Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 19.
17 Similarly, behind Pulter’s moralizing representation of rats in Emblem 17 may lurk concerns about the real historical presence of rodents in seventeenth-century England (and a future Amplified Edition might fruitfully connect the poem to such on-the-ground conditions).
Ultimately, the poem’s shifting moral framework can have the effect of making Emblem 17 feel like two poems: one about Old-Testament-style divine retribution involving plagues of locusts, frogs, serpents – and, of course, rats – and the other about the all-too-human world of greed, bad faith, and revenge, in which such pests are simply the given facts of life, part of the meaningless chaos of existence. In fact, this doubleness is arguably reflected in a scribal error in Pulter’s manuscript: a neatly-written “18” at the top of folio 102, after the page-break, indicates what its writer evidently mistook for the beginning of a new poem: Emblem 18. Realizing her mistake, the scribe crossed it out; however, by then it was too late: having already continued numbering the next poem (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) as number 19, making the correction would necessarily mean leaving out a number from the total sequence. Like the missing children of Hamelle, Emblem 18 ends up being an absent presence in Pulter’s manuscript: itself an emblem, perhaps, for the material vicissitudes of textual production and circulation that strain against the text’s own pursuit of a world whose meanings are legible in the form of emblems – a world (“Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream”) where betrayal, destruction, and loss are more easily attributable to divine ordination, rather than to the unaccountable and stupid realm of the “strange Accident.”


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
17When God (who is to Mercie most inclin’d)
When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
2
To puniſh or to trie hath once deſign’d
To punish or to
Gloss Note
to subject to trial
try hath once
Gloss Note
marked out, designated; appointed, assigned, destined
designed
Critical Note
The tortuous syntax of the opening lines encourages misreading. Immediately following the prepositional phrase “to mercy,” the infinitive phrases “to punish” and “to try” suggest a parallel between God’s mercy and the punishments and trials he metes out on his people. The humble close-parenthesis is the only thing that separates a God “who is to mercy most inclined” from a God who is “most inclined) / To punish or to try.”
To punish or to try hath once designed
3
A People, each Reptell or inſect
A people, each reptile or insect
A people, each reptile or insect
4
Or baſest Animal will not neglect
Or basest animal
Gloss Note
that is, God will not neglect these creatures
will not neglect,
Or basest animal will not
Gloss Note
That is, God will not scorn to use these base creatures as instruments of punishment. See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], lines 25-26: “For each despiséd reptile or insect / He can empower, when we his laws neglect.” An account of the Bishop of Mainz and his unfortunate encounter with rats appears immediately before a retelling of the Pied Piper story in James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), p. 34.
neglect,
5
But will their Habitation Soe Annoy
But will their habitation so annoy,
But will
Critical Note
The antecedent of “their” is “people” (3), but it could easily be mistaken for “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4), suggesting perhaps a conflation between the human objects and the non-human instruments of punishment. This conflation also foreshadows the way in which humans and animals turn out to be equally susceptible to the alluring sound of the piper’s pipe later in the poem.
their habitation so annoy
6
Without a Countermand they’l all deſtroy
Gloss Note
The sense of the poem’s opening sentence is that, without a divine “countermand” (an order revoking God’s previous command), the creatures he has designated as plagues upon a given people will destroy everything in their path.
Without a countermand, they’ll all destroy.
Critical Note
A lot depends on the placement of the implied “that” completing the “so” of line 5. If it follows “annoy,” then the sense is that the vermin will “all destroy” unless God issues a “countermand” (leaving open the possibility that God could perhaps relent). On the other hand, placing the implied “that” after “countermand” makes God’s decree seem more absolute and unchanging: in this reading, “without a countermand” functions less as a conditional specifying the circumstances (however unlikely) under which the destruction would be less than total, and more as a categorical denial that such a retraction would ever occur: the pests will simply and ruthlessly “so annoy / Without a countermand,” that “they’ll all destroy.” The lack of punctuation in Pulter’s manuscript effectively confronts readers with the same hedging uncertainty that led the townspeople of Hamelle to renege on their payment: a God – or a Piper – who is inclined more to mercy than to punishment and who thus does not always follow through with his threats is also one whose bluff might more safely be called (or so the townspeople think, to their peril).
Without a countermand
Critical Note
This time, the third-person-plural pronoun takes “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4) as its antecedent, but, again, the syntax (as well as the fact that “each” is singular) encourages a misreading that attaches the pronoun to “people” (3), requiring readers to take special care to distinguish between man and beast.
they’ll all destroy.
7
Thus Spain by Rabbits, Moles made Theſaly
Gloss Note
In this and the next five lines, Pulter summarizes Pliny’s Natural History where he writes (in Book 8, Chapter 29) of “what cities and nations have been utterly destroyed by little beasts.” After noting that “much hurt and damage hath been known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” Pliny mentions many of the same creatures and locales as Pulter does. (C. Plinius Secundus The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland [1601]: pp. 192-234, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny8.html).
Thus Spain by rabbits,
Gloss Note
This phrase is completed in the next line: “moles made Thessaly … a desert lie.”
moles made Thessaly,
Critical Note
The section of Pliny’s Natural History from which Pulter draws the examples in lines 7-11 focuses on how “much hurt and dammage hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” recalling the poem’s opening claim about how God “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal will not neglect” in his punishment of disobedient people (C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World, Trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1601], p. 212).
Thus Spain by rabbits, moles made Thessaly,
8
Locusts made Affrica a Deſert lye
Locusts made Africa a desert lie;
Locusts made Africa a desert lie;
9
ffrance ffrogs, Amycle Serpents, did deſtroy
France frogs,
Gloss Note
a city near Sparta in ancient Peloponnesia
Amyclæ serpents, did destroy;
France frogs, Amyclæ serpents, did destroy;
10
fflyes, Lice, and ffrogs, all Egypt did Annoy
Flies, lice, and frogs, all Egypt did annoy;
Flies,
Gloss Note
See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], line 28: “Sulla and Herod by a louse did die.”
lice, and frogs, all Egypt did
Critical Note
The reversal of the order of the rhyming words “annoy”/“destroy” from lines 5-6 sits in ironic counterpoint to the notion of a destruction that is supposed to occur “without a countermand” (6).
annoy;
11
Gyaros Rats, and too too many more
Gloss Note
a Greek island
Gyaros, rats; and too, too many more
Gyaros, rats; and too, too many more
12
Their Sufferings (though not Sins) did then deplore
Their sufferings (though not sins) did then
Gloss Note
lament, mourn, tell with grief
deplore.
Their sufferings
Critical Note
The relegation of “sins” to parentheses mirrors the people’s spiritually negligent failure to “deplore” their sins as the just cause of their divinely ordained “sufferings.”
(though not sins) did then deplore.
13
This made the Town of
Physical Note
final “l” appears written over “e”
Hamell Stand in Doubt
This made the town of
Gloss Note
a market town in Lower Saxony, Germany
Hamelin
Gloss Note
to continue in a state of doubt, or, more likely here, “doubt” in the sense of apprehension or dread
stand in doubt,
Critical Note
The poem never specifies what the citizens of Hamelle did to invite the plague of rats in the first place; oddly, we don’t know what sin the vermin are meant to punish.
This made the town of
Gloss Note
A town in Lower Saxony, Germany, more commonly known from the Pied Piper legend as Hamelin.
Hamelle stand in doubt
14
Cauſe of thoſe vermine they had Such a Rowt
’Cause
Gloss Note
Pulter refers to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the town was infested with a rat plague (or “rout”: a crowd or pack, especially a noisy, disordered, or violent one).
of those vermin they had such a rout.
’Cause of those vermin they had such a rout.
15
They tri’de all ^waies, as poyſons, Traps, and Catts.
They tried all ways,
Gloss Note
such as
as poisons, traps, and cats,
They tried all
Physical Note
The words “waies, as” were added to the line with a caret.
ways, as
Gloss Note
For some of the methods the townspeople might have tried, see Leonard Mascall, A booke of engines and traps to take polcats, buzardes, rattes, mice and all other kindes of vermine and beasts whatsoever, most profitable for all warriners, and such as delight in this kinde of sport and pastime (London, 1590).
poisons, traps, and cats,
16
Yet Still their Houſes pesterd were with Rats
Yet still their houses pestered were with rats.
Yet still their houses pestered were with rats.
17
At last a Piper chance’d to come that way
At last a piper chanced to come that way,
At last a
Critical Note
The poem itself never refers to the piper as “Pied,” although the word does appear in a marginal note referring readers to “the story of this Pied Piper” in Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605). (The page number in the note [85] indicates that Pulter was using one of the first three editions of the book: 1605, 1628, or 1634.) Verstegan explains how the piper earned his popular epithet “for the fantastical cote which hee wore beeing wrought with sundry colours,” another common feature in various tellings of the story that is left out of Pulter’s poem (p. 85).
piper chanced to come that way,
18
With whom they bargaind for a Certain pay
With whom they bargained, for a certain pay,
With whom they bargained, for a certain pay,
19
Their Town of this baſe Loathſom Beaſts to free
Physical Note
In the manuscript’s left margin, just below this poetic summary of the tale, is a reference to her source “See the story of this pied piper at large in Verstegan, folio 85”; see A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), 85.
Their town of these base loathsome beasts to free.
Their town of
Critical Note
The (perhaps unintentionally) ungrammatical singular form, as it appears in the manuscript, may indicate that Pulter is thinking of the rats as a single mass, as in the “rout” of line 14.
this base loathsome beasts to free.
20
Physical Note
in left margin: “See the Story / of this Pied Piper/ at Larg in Verstegan / ffolio 85”
Theffruits of Curſed Avarice now See
The fruits of curséd avarice now see.
Critical Note
This first direct address to the reader moralizes the tale in terms of the townspeople’s greed in withholding payment from the piper.
The fruits of curséd avarice now see.
21
This ffellow pipeing went to
Physical Note
“W” appears written over “w”
Weaſers brim
This fellow piping went to
Gloss Note
a river in Germany
Weser brim,
This fellow piping went to Weser brim,
22
And all the Rats Ran danceing after him
And all the rats ran dancing after him;
And all the rats ran dancing after him;
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23
18Then instantly they Skipt into the Stream
Then instantly they skipped into the stream.
Physical Note
This first line after a page break in the middle of the poem is preceded by a marginal “18” that has been crossed out, indicating that its writer mistook this line as the beginning of a new poem. Since the person numbering the poems had continued with 19 for the next poem in the sequence (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) before realizing the mistake, there is no Emblem 18.
Then instantly they skipped into the stream.
24
Though Some may thinkt a ffiction or A dream
Though some may
Gloss Note
think it
think’t a fiction or a dream,
Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream,
25
Yet true it is for drowning was their ffate
Yet true it is, for drowning was their fate;
Yet true it is, for drowning was their fate;
26
But how
Physical Note
“s” written over former letter with ascender, possibly “t”
t’was don noe Story doth Relate
But how ’twas done, no story doth relate.
But how ’twas done, no story doth relate.
27
ffor whether a Teleſma hee did take
For whether a
Gloss Note
charm
talisman he did take,
For whether a
Critical Note
An object meant to ward off various evils, including pests. Cognate with “talisman,” Pulter’s more unusual spelling reflects the word’s Greek root from τέλεσμα, “payment,” which often appears in the context of religious rites in the sense of “propitiation,” as of a deity – a kind of supernatural “protection money.” This sense of the word is especially ironic given the townspeople’s refusal to pay the piper for ridding the town of rats. Although the accent is on the first syllable in the Greek, Pulter appears to be scanning the word with an accented second syllable. She uses a similar spelling in The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], where the Bishop of Mainz is unsuccessful in his attempt to ward off a rodent swarm either by magical or more this-worldly means: “by Tel’sma or Gun” (line 16). In suggesting that some means other than the sound of the piper’s instrument were responsible for luring away the rats and the children, Pulter may be drawing on Nathaniel Ingeno’s prose romance Bentivoglio and Urania (London, 1660), which asks, “Who knows but the Piper of Halberstade was of this Profession [i.e. a magician], and had some Talismans in his Pocket when he drove the Rats into the River and the Boys into the Hill?” (p. 158).
Telesma he did take,
28
ffive such of Gold The Philiſtin’s did make
Gloss Note
God punishes the Philistines with destruction and hemorrhoids for taking the Ark of Covenant; to be relieved of their sufferings, the Philistines are told to present to God five golden emerods and five golden mice.
Five such of gold the Philistines did make,
Critical Note
In 1 Samuel 5-6, the Philistines of Ashdod are visited with a plague of mice and a plague of “emerods [hemorrhoids, tumors, or boils] in their secret parts” after capturing the Ark of the Covenant. Following the counsel of their priests and diviners, the Philistines return the Ark along with a “trespass offering” of “five golden emerods and five golden mice.” These objects were regarded with some ambivalence by early modern commentators. Arthur Jackson, in his Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament (London, 1646), considers the possibility “that the sending of such absurd and ridiculous gifts with the Ark, as emerods and mice, was suggested by Sathan to their diviners in contempt of God,” and remarks on “what a shame must it needs be to the Philistines to send to the Israelites the images of their secret parts, thus tortured with an ignominious disease” (p. 238). Of particular interest in relation to Pulter’s characterization of these objects as “Telesma” in line 27 is John Chetwynd’s Anthologia historica (London, 1674), which lists the biblical “Images of Emrods and Mice” that “were made by the Astrologers directions and were Telesmatical signes” alongside accounts of other “Telesmatical practices” used to ward off scorpions, crocodiles, flies, serpents, and dormice (pp. 322-25).
Five such of gold the Philistines did make,
29
Or what hee did I think noe man can Say
Or what he did, I think no man can say;
Or what he did, I think no man can say;
30
But when hee came and aſked for his pay
But when he came and askéd for his pay,
But when he came and askéd for his pay,
31
The
Physical Note
“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Burger’s in their Gravitie Refuſ’d
The
Physical Note
“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
burghers in their gravity refused
The burghers in their gravity refused
32
To pay the Same, the Piper thus abuſ’d
To pay the same; the piper, thus abused,
To pay the same; the piper, thus abused,
33
did vow Reveng, they bid him doe his worst
Did vow revenge; they bid him do his worst.
Critical Note
Pulter lifts this language directly from Verstegan: “hee threatened them with revenge; they bad him do his wurst” (p. 66).
Did vow revenge; they bid him do his worst.
34
Now See how Breach of Promiſe is Accurst
Now see how breach of promise is accursed.
Critical Note
Repeating “now see” from line 20, this second direct address to the reader compounds the ostensible moral about “curséd avarice” with a new one about promise-breaking and, in doing so, asks readers to consider the relationship between the two vices.
Now see how breach of promise is accursed.
35
The ffellow Pipeing went away againe
The fellow piping went away again,
The fellow piping went away again,
36
A Hundred and Thirty Children in his Train
A hundred and thirty children in his train;
Critical Note
Pulter follows Verstegan in her account of how many children went missing. Many other early modern English versions of the story also specify the number as 130.
A hundred and thirty children in his train;
37
Into a hill hee led theſe pretty Boys
Into a hill he led these
Critical Note
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
pretty boys,
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Into a hill he led these pretty boys,
38
And thus
Physical Note
perhaps written over earlier letters
their Parents lost their hopes, and Joys,
And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys;
And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys;
39
Which with Sad Hearts they now too late deplore
Which, with sad hearts, they now too late
Gloss Note
lament; tell with grief; mourn; give up as hopeless
deplore,
Which, with sad hearts, they now too late deplore,
40
ffor they nor hee were ever heard of more
For they, nor he, were ever heard of more.
For they, nor he, were ever heard of more.
41
By theſe their grievous Suff’rings you may See
By these, their grievous suff’rings, you may see
By these, their grievous suff’rings,
Critical Note
With this third direct address to the reader (compare lines 20 and 34), and after introducing at least two other possible morals (i.e. God’s use of base creatures to mete out punishment; the evils of avarice), the poem ends by repeating the moral stated in line 34.
you may see
42
that breach of Promiſe puniſhd Sure will bee
That breach of promise punished sure will be.
That breach of promise punished sure will be.
43
Then keep your word for better or for worſ
Then keep your word, for better or for worse,
Then keep your word, for better or for worse,
44
Lest with theſe Saxons you pertake like Curſ
Lest with these
Gloss Note
inhabitants of Saxony, here referring to the people of Hamelin in Lower Saxony
Saxons you partake like curse.
Lest with these Saxons you partake
Critical Note
Given Verstegan’s heavy investment in recovering England’s Saxon identity, it is ironic that Pulter ends her poem warning English readers not to “partake like curse” with their Saxon cousins. For Verstegan and England’s Saxon cultural identity, see Richard W. Clement, “Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent,” Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 19-36.
like curse.
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

What begins as a poem heralding God’s ability to use animals to punish errant humans dramatically changes into a fable in which animal control is just a commercial venture gone bad. This poem briefly surveys a host of divine plagues, powered by the weapons of mass destruction that are God’s creatures: rabbits, moles, frogs, snakes, insects (even lice!), as well as that most notorious plague beast, the rat—which leads to a retelling of the still-familiar story of the pied piper of Hamelin kidnapping an entire town’s children when the town failed to pay him for clearing the rats. No mere horror story about stranger danger, as it has become for children and parents both today, this is Pulter’s unexpected morality tale about the problems of avarice and the importance of keeping one’s word. Grief for lost children, which Pulter represents so poignantly and personally elsewhere in her poems, is here just punishment for dishonorable action.
Line number 2

 Gloss note

to subject to trial
Line number 2

 Gloss note

marked out, designated; appointed, assigned, destined
Line number 4

 Gloss note

that is, God will not neglect these creatures
Line number 6

 Gloss note

The sense of the poem’s opening sentence is that, without a divine “countermand” (an order revoking God’s previous command), the creatures he has designated as plagues upon a given people will destroy everything in their path.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

In this and the next five lines, Pulter summarizes Pliny’s Natural History where he writes (in Book 8, Chapter 29) of “what cities and nations have been utterly destroyed by little beasts.” After noting that “much hurt and damage hath been known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” Pliny mentions many of the same creatures and locales as Pulter does. (C. Plinius Secundus The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland [1601]: pp. 192-234, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny8.html).
Line number 7

 Gloss note

This phrase is completed in the next line: “moles made Thessaly … a desert lie.”
Line number 9

 Gloss note

a city near Sparta in ancient Peloponnesia
Line number 11

 Gloss note

a Greek island
Line number 12

 Gloss note

lament, mourn, tell with grief
Line number 13

 Gloss note

a market town in Lower Saxony, Germany
Line number 13

 Gloss note

to continue in a state of doubt, or, more likely here, “doubt” in the sense of apprehension or dread
Line number 14

 Gloss note

Pulter refers to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the town was infested with a rat plague (or “rout”: a crowd or pack, especially a noisy, disordered, or violent one).
Line number 15

 Gloss note

such as
Line number 19

 Physical note

In the manuscript’s left margin, just below this poetic summary of the tale, is a reference to her source “See the story of this pied piper at large in Verstegan, folio 85”; see A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), 85.
Line number 21

 Gloss note

a river in Germany
Line number 24

 Gloss note

think it
Line number 27

 Gloss note

charm
Line number 28

 Gloss note

God punishes the Philistines with destruction and hemorrhoids for taking the Ark of Covenant; to be relieved of their sufferings, the Philistines are told to present to God five golden emerods and five golden mice.
Line number 31

 Physical note

“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Line number 37

 Critical note

Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Line number 39

 Gloss note

lament; tell with grief; mourn; give up as hopeless
Line number 44

 Gloss note

inhabitants of Saxony, here referring to the people of Hamelin in Lower Saxony
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition
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[Emblem 17]
The Piper of Hamelin
(Emblem 17)
Emblem 17
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
For this edition I have chosen to modernize spelling for accessibility, with two exceptions: for the modern place-name “Hamelin” I have retained the manuscript’s “Hamelle” (line 13) as the form that appeared most commonly in printed sources from the seventeenth century, and for “talisman” I have opted for the manuscript’s “Telesma” (line 27) out of respect for a possible irony the more etymologically sensitive spelling of that word might activate. In general, I have added some light punctuation for clarity but have refrained from doing so in instances where such clarity would come at the cost of obscuring an interesting ambiguity (as in the case of line 6). My notes and headnote are informed by the same errant principle I take to be driving the poem’s own – often ironic – relationship to its emblematic subject, highlighting the poem’s shifting moralizing framework by drawing particular attention to repeated and contradictory addresses to the reader, grammatical ambiguities, and features of the material text that threaten (or promise) to lead readers astray. Additionally, I have attempted to place Emblem 17 in the context of other versions of the Pied Piper story in order to show Pulter’s particular engagement with a popular legend just at the moment when it was beginning to emerge into the popular English consciousness through printed sources.
I should say something about an important omission from this edition: to my surprise, given my own scholarly interest in early modern musical discourses, I found I had nothing much to say about the piper’s Orphic powers over the rats and the children in Pulter’s telling. I attribute this omission to the way the poem seems deliberately to avoid the possibility of magical music when it seeks alternative explanations for how the piper performed his feat in lines 24-29. However, readers who are interested in considering the poem in this light (perhaps for a future Amplified Edition) might consult the work of Linda Phyllis Austern, Penelope Gouk, Gary Tomlinson, and others who discuss early modern magical and natural philosophical theories of music’s power over human and animal realms.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
What begins as a poem heralding God’s ability to use animals to punish errant humans dramatically changes into a fable in which animal control is just a commercial venture gone bad. This poem briefly surveys a host of divine plagues, powered by the weapons of mass destruction that are God’s creatures: rabbits, moles, frogs, snakes, insects (even lice!), as well as that most notorious plague beast, the rat—which leads to a retelling of the still-familiar story of the pied piper of Hamelin kidnapping an entire town’s children when the town failed to pay him for clearing the rats. No mere horror story about stranger danger, as it has become for children and parents both today, this is Pulter’s unexpected morality tale about the problems of avarice and the importance of keeping one’s word. Grief for lost children, which Pulter represents so poignantly and personally elsewhere in her poems, is here just punishment for dishonorable action.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Emblem 17 tells the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or Hamelle, as Hester Pulter and her contemporaries tended to say), in which a mysterious stranger lures away the town’s children in order to punish the townspeople for greedily withholding the payment they owe him for ridding the town of rats. In connecting the natural world – specifically vermin – with cosmic or divine justice, the poem recalls several other of Pulter’s emblem poems in which even the lowliest and most contemptible parts of Creation are given a providential purpose. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], for example, narrates how the Bishop of Mainz was consumed by rats as punishment for burning a group of starving peasants during a grain shortage, and gives numerous examples of how “each despiséd reptile or insect / He [i.e. God] can empower, when we his laws neglect.” Along similar lines, Emblem 17 opens with a series of generalization about how God “will not neglect,” or scorn, to use even “reptile[s] or insect[s] / Or basest animal[s]” to inflict total destruction on a disobedient people, and the examples that follow – all taken from a section of Pliny’s Natural History dealing with the “much hurt and dammage [that] hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account” – suggest that we are in for a lecture on how God uses base means to humble the proud.
Gloss Note
C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), p. 212.
1
However, the poem does not make good on its initial promise. Unlike the “contemptible creatures” that bring proud civilizations and tyrannical rulers to their knees, the rats of Hamelle actually end up having nothing to do with divine punishment – or, if they do, the initial sin that incurred such punishment is never identified. The “vermin” are simply introduced as a “rout” afflicting the town, so that, like the townspeople, readers might well “stand in doubt” as to whether the infestation arose from supernatural or merely natural causes. Instead of providing a moral about God’s punishment through base means, the poem abruptly shifts in line 20 with the announcement of a new ostensible moral, for which nothing in the poem so far has prepared us: “The fruits of curséd avarice now see.” Ironically, within this new moralizing frame, the rats serve not as the punishment for sin but, rather, its occasion, when the stingy townspeople notoriously rip off the piper after he has lured the pests to their death in the river Weser. But even this new moral does not fully survive until the end of the poem. Omitting a detail from her source (Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1605]), in which the townspeople’s miserliness is foregrounded when they attempt to offer the piper “far less then hee lookt for,” the poem ends with yet another explicitly moralizing pronouncement – “Now see how breach of promise is accursed” – shifting the focus once again, this time away from the specific vice of avarice and toward the more general sin of bad faith.
Gloss Note
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), p. 85.
2 Having been lured into what initially seemed to be a story about divinely ordained plagues of vermin only to find a quite different moral lesson about avarice and then promise-breaking, readers might end up feeling faintly defrauded of their initial investment in the poem.
As it turns out, the shifting moral frames in Emblem 17 reflect an apparent uncertainty among other seventeenth-century tellers of the tale as to its significance. The version published in James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645), which is framed by an account of “som odd fellows” who “went skulking up and down London-streets, and with Figs and Reasons [i.e. raisins] allur’d little children, and so pourloy’d them away from their parents,” probably comes the closest to the story’s modern associations with literal stranger danger (along with its homophobic undertones).
Gloss Note
James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae (London, 1645), p. 71. For the modern association between child kidnapping and homophobia, see Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 1. Robert Dixon’s Canidia, or, The witches (London, 1683) notably associates the Pied Piper with sexual deviance, listing the “Roguish Clown” who “lo[st] all the Boys in Hammel Town” alongside “Eels and Frogs” that “have no sex” and “Others” who “from between their Legs did speak, / And act many a Haggish feat” (p. 60).
3 Interestingly, Howell reprints a somewhat different version of the story in A German Diet (1653), where it appears in the context of an anti-German oration by one “John Gulielm of Retwitz” and identifies the piper with “the devill” himself.
Gloss Note
James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), pp. 34-35.
4 Similarly, Robert Burton mentions the Hamelle disappearance in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”
Gloss Note
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), p. 68.
5 The piper’s association with diabolical powers pervades a number of seventeenth-century versions. An anonymous anti-Ranter pamphlet, The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (1653), writes the piper out of the story altogether, the children simply “being carried away by the Devil in a flame of fire” after the townspeople, “holding the same Tenents with the Ranters, Shakers, &c. Of our times,” set them upon a hill in a deliberate attempt “to dare and defie the Lord of all spirits.”
Gloss Note
The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (London, 1653), pp. 3-4.
6 While such retellings present the occurrence as a literal example of Satan’s power on earth, Thomas Hodges’s The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (1647) allegorizes the tale in terms of the “pyde piper Haeresie” that might lead “those that are near and deare unto you, you know not whither.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (London, 1647), pp. 36-37.
7 Striking in all of these accounts is their attribution of the children’s disappearance to the piper’s (or devil’s) own sinister nature, rather than presenting it as retribution for the wrong the townspeople commit by not paying him. Indeed, John Gaule’s Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (1652) turns the story into a cautionary tale about “the danger, misery, and ruine of such as have affectedly favoured, or preferred, and superstitiously credited, or consulted Magicall and Astrologicall predictors.”
Gloss Note
John Gaule, Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (London, 1652), pp. 364, 366.
8 If the townspeople’s sin in Pulter’s poem is their “breach of promise” to the piper, in Gaule’s account it is their foolish decision to employ such a “Magicall” charmer in the first place.
The polysemous nature of the Pied Piper story helps to account for its presence in some surprising places, such as William Ramesey’s discourse on parasitic worms, Helminthologia (1668), which explicitly cites Verstegan’s account as an example of the “wonderful permission of GOD to the Rage of the Devil,” who, like the vermicular pest Ramesey discusses, “destroys life and all, where he can.”
Gloss Note
William Ramesey, Helminthologia (London, 1668), p. 66.
9 Verstegan himself presents the Hamelle story not with any kind of moralizing import but, unexpectedly, as part of his discussion of the Saxon diaspora – specifically, as a fanciful explanation (which he ends up dismissing) for why “among the Saxons in Transilvnia” there are some “that have lyke surnames unto divers of the burgers of Hamel.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 87.
10 Appropriately enough, given its theme, Verstegan introduces the story as something that has lured him away from his main topic, “one digression [having] drawn on another.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 85.
11 It is with a similar apology that the tale is prefaced in another unlikely source, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (1615), whose author, George Hakewell, “confess[es]” that he has included it “not so much for the fitnesse, as the strangeness of the story.”
Gloss Note
George Hakewell, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (London, 1615), p. 61.
12 Relieved of the imperative to “fit” the story to any particular end (moralizing, geographical, mag-astro-mantical, or otherwise), perhaps the least surprising context in which the Pied Piper appears in the seventeenth century is in collections of miraculous occurrences such as The Wonders of the Little World (1673) or Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (1683), which simply introduce the event as a “strange Accident.”
Gloss Note
Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (London, 1683), p. 188.
13
Read in the context of these various (and variously explicated) versions, Pulter’s transformation of the Pied Piper legend into an emblem with shifting significances also transforms the genre itself from one of static exposition of a calcified moral into a dynamic meditation on the complex relationships between divine and human justice, avarice and fair trade, labor and exploitation, promise and betrayal, as well as the human and the non-human. Working backwards from what may seem like its overly trite conclusion (“Then keep your word, for better or for worse”), the poem unravels into a promiscuous array of competing possibilities that intermingle and coalesce in unexpected ways, like the mythemes of the legend itself in its various guises. For instance, given early modern associations between avarice and sodomy, Pulter’s tale of a piper luring the “pretty boys” of the town away through the use of some kind of unmentionable means (“what he did, I think no man can say”) potentially emerges as a sublimated form of poetic justice.
Gloss Note
The piper’s queerness is emphasized in several of the early modern versions, which, in addition to emphasizing his flamboyant dress, often describe him with the epithet “odd,” as in Verstegan’s characterization of him as “an od kynd of compagnion” (p. 85). For the connection between avarice and sodomy, see, for example, John Harris, The destruction of sodome (London, 1625), p. 35: “And had couetousnesse a habitation in Sodome? and was filthy auarice a cause of her desolation? then Lord bee mercifull vnto our Land, that hath many a member in it, who out of a couetous desire, haue made a marriage with siluer, and giuen a bill of diuorce to Iesus Christ!” For a larger discussion connecting sodomy more broadly to the misuse of money, particularly through usury and counterfeiting, see Will Fisher, “Queer Money” ELH 66 (1999): 1-23.
14 The poem’s odd (and oddly unnecessary) citation of 1 Samuel 6 as a possible explanation for “how ‘twas done” (along with the five golden mice the Philistines offered Jehovah to mitigate their rodent infestation, they also presented five golden “emerods” to alleviate the divine smiting that was afflicting them “in their secret parts”) probably raises more questions than it answers.
Gloss Note
Even more suggestively, the Latin Vulgate describes the Philistines’ offering as “quinque anos aureos” (“five golden anuses”). For the premodern interpretation of the plagues of 1 Samuel 5-6 specifically in relation to both avarice and “sodomitirie,” see Robert Mills, “Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisées” Speculum 87 (2012): 413-468.
15
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between the rats and divine punishment in Emblem 17 suggests a type of pest that refuses to be controlled either by literal extermination or by providentialist narratives. As Lucinda Cole points out, “given their endless reproducibility and the unpredictable nature of their swarming motion,” rats, mice, and other vermin represented in early modern texts “may actually threaten the ideas of an orderly universe and the regeneration of Nature symbolized by Noah’s Ark,” often resisting neat ontological (and even taxonomic) categorization.
Gloss Note
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 17.
16 Thus, in seventeenth-century depictions of the biblical plagues of Egypt, for example, it is unclear whether “lice, frogs, and swarming things [are] to be read allegorically or literally” and, indeed, whether the story is “about political sovereignty or natural populations.”
Gloss Note
Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 19.
17 Similarly, behind Pulter’s moralizing representation of rats in Emblem 17 may lurk concerns about the real historical presence of rodents in seventeenth-century England (and a future Amplified Edition might fruitfully connect the poem to such on-the-ground conditions).
Ultimately, the poem’s shifting moral framework can have the effect of making Emblem 17 feel like two poems: one about Old-Testament-style divine retribution involving plagues of locusts, frogs, serpents – and, of course, rats – and the other about the all-too-human world of greed, bad faith, and revenge, in which such pests are simply the given facts of life, part of the meaningless chaos of existence. In fact, this doubleness is arguably reflected in a scribal error in Pulter’s manuscript: a neatly-written “18” at the top of folio 102, after the page-break, indicates what its writer evidently mistook for the beginning of a new poem: Emblem 18. Realizing her mistake, the scribe crossed it out; however, by then it was too late: having already continued numbering the next poem (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) as number 19, making the correction would necessarily mean leaving out a number from the total sequence. Like the missing children of Hamelle, Emblem 18 ends up being an absent presence in Pulter’s manuscript: itself an emblem, perhaps, for the material vicissitudes of textual production and circulation that strain against the text’s own pursuit of a world whose meanings are legible in the form of emblems – a world (“Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream”) where betrayal, destruction, and loss are more easily attributable to divine ordination, rather than to the unaccountable and stupid realm of the “strange Accident.”


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
17When God (who is to Mercie most inclin’d)
When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
2
To puniſh or to trie hath once deſign’d
To punish or to
Gloss Note
to subject to trial
try hath once
Gloss Note
marked out, designated; appointed, assigned, destined
designed
Critical Note
The tortuous syntax of the opening lines encourages misreading. Immediately following the prepositional phrase “to mercy,” the infinitive phrases “to punish” and “to try” suggest a parallel between God’s mercy and the punishments and trials he metes out on his people. The humble close-parenthesis is the only thing that separates a God “who is to mercy most inclined” from a God who is “most inclined) / To punish or to try.”
To punish or to try hath once designed
3
A People, each Reptell or inſect
A people, each reptile or insect
A people, each reptile or insect
4
Or baſest Animal will not neglect
Or basest animal
Gloss Note
that is, God will not neglect these creatures
will not neglect,
Or basest animal will not
Gloss Note
That is, God will not scorn to use these base creatures as instruments of punishment. See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], lines 25-26: “For each despiséd reptile or insect / He can empower, when we his laws neglect.” An account of the Bishop of Mainz and his unfortunate encounter with rats appears immediately before a retelling of the Pied Piper story in James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), p. 34.
neglect,
5
But will their Habitation Soe Annoy
But will their habitation so annoy,
But will
Critical Note
The antecedent of “their” is “people” (3), but it could easily be mistaken for “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4), suggesting perhaps a conflation between the human objects and the non-human instruments of punishment. This conflation also foreshadows the way in which humans and animals turn out to be equally susceptible to the alluring sound of the piper’s pipe later in the poem.
their habitation so annoy
6
Without a Countermand they’l all deſtroy
Gloss Note
The sense of the poem’s opening sentence is that, without a divine “countermand” (an order revoking God’s previous command), the creatures he has designated as plagues upon a given people will destroy everything in their path.
Without a countermand, they’ll all destroy.
Critical Note
A lot depends on the placement of the implied “that” completing the “so” of line 5. If it follows “annoy,” then the sense is that the vermin will “all destroy” unless God issues a “countermand” (leaving open the possibility that God could perhaps relent). On the other hand, placing the implied “that” after “countermand” makes God’s decree seem more absolute and unchanging: in this reading, “without a countermand” functions less as a conditional specifying the circumstances (however unlikely) under which the destruction would be less than total, and more as a categorical denial that such a retraction would ever occur: the pests will simply and ruthlessly “so annoy / Without a countermand,” that “they’ll all destroy.” The lack of punctuation in Pulter’s manuscript effectively confronts readers with the same hedging uncertainty that led the townspeople of Hamelle to renege on their payment: a God – or a Piper – who is inclined more to mercy than to punishment and who thus does not always follow through with his threats is also one whose bluff might more safely be called (or so the townspeople think, to their peril).
Without a countermand
Critical Note
This time, the third-person-plural pronoun takes “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4) as its antecedent, but, again, the syntax (as well as the fact that “each” is singular) encourages a misreading that attaches the pronoun to “people” (3), requiring readers to take special care to distinguish between man and beast.
they’ll all destroy.
7
Thus Spain by Rabbits, Moles made Theſaly
Gloss Note
In this and the next five lines, Pulter summarizes Pliny’s Natural History where he writes (in Book 8, Chapter 29) of “what cities and nations have been utterly destroyed by little beasts.” After noting that “much hurt and damage hath been known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” Pliny mentions many of the same creatures and locales as Pulter does. (C. Plinius Secundus The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland [1601]: pp. 192-234, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny8.html).
Thus Spain by rabbits,
Gloss Note
This phrase is completed in the next line: “moles made Thessaly … a desert lie.”
moles made Thessaly,
Critical Note
The section of Pliny’s Natural History from which Pulter draws the examples in lines 7-11 focuses on how “much hurt and dammage hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” recalling the poem’s opening claim about how God “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal will not neglect” in his punishment of disobedient people (C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World, Trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1601], p. 212).
Thus Spain by rabbits, moles made Thessaly,
8
Locusts made Affrica a Deſert lye
Locusts made Africa a desert lie;
Locusts made Africa a desert lie;
9
ffrance ffrogs, Amycle Serpents, did deſtroy
France frogs,
Gloss Note
a city near Sparta in ancient Peloponnesia
Amyclæ serpents, did destroy;
France frogs, Amyclæ serpents, did destroy;
10
fflyes, Lice, and ffrogs, all Egypt did Annoy
Flies, lice, and frogs, all Egypt did annoy;
Flies,
Gloss Note
See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], line 28: “Sulla and Herod by a louse did die.”
lice, and frogs, all Egypt did
Critical Note
The reversal of the order of the rhyming words “annoy”/“destroy” from lines 5-6 sits in ironic counterpoint to the notion of a destruction that is supposed to occur “without a countermand” (6).
annoy;
11
Gyaros Rats, and too too many more
Gloss Note
a Greek island
Gyaros, rats; and too, too many more
Gyaros, rats; and too, too many more
12
Their Sufferings (though not Sins) did then deplore
Their sufferings (though not sins) did then
Gloss Note
lament, mourn, tell with grief
deplore.
Their sufferings
Critical Note
The relegation of “sins” to parentheses mirrors the people’s spiritually negligent failure to “deplore” their sins as the just cause of their divinely ordained “sufferings.”
(though not sins) did then deplore.
13
This made the Town of
Physical Note
final “l” appears written over “e”
Hamell Stand in Doubt
This made the town of
Gloss Note
a market town in Lower Saxony, Germany
Hamelin
Gloss Note
to continue in a state of doubt, or, more likely here, “doubt” in the sense of apprehension or dread
stand in doubt,
Critical Note
The poem never specifies what the citizens of Hamelle did to invite the plague of rats in the first place; oddly, we don’t know what sin the vermin are meant to punish.
This made the town of
Gloss Note
A town in Lower Saxony, Germany, more commonly known from the Pied Piper legend as Hamelin.
Hamelle stand in doubt
14
Cauſe of thoſe vermine they had Such a Rowt
’Cause
Gloss Note
Pulter refers to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the town was infested with a rat plague (or “rout”: a crowd or pack, especially a noisy, disordered, or violent one).
of those vermin they had such a rout.
’Cause of those vermin they had such a rout.
15
They tri’de all ^waies, as poyſons, Traps, and Catts.
They tried all ways,
Gloss Note
such as
as poisons, traps, and cats,
They tried all
Physical Note
The words “waies, as” were added to the line with a caret.
ways, as
Gloss Note
For some of the methods the townspeople might have tried, see Leonard Mascall, A booke of engines and traps to take polcats, buzardes, rattes, mice and all other kindes of vermine and beasts whatsoever, most profitable for all warriners, and such as delight in this kinde of sport and pastime (London, 1590).
poisons, traps, and cats,
16
Yet Still their Houſes pesterd were with Rats
Yet still their houses pestered were with rats.
Yet still their houses pestered were with rats.
17
At last a Piper chance’d to come that way
At last a piper chanced to come that way,
At last a
Critical Note
The poem itself never refers to the piper as “Pied,” although the word does appear in a marginal note referring readers to “the story of this Pied Piper” in Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605). (The page number in the note [85] indicates that Pulter was using one of the first three editions of the book: 1605, 1628, or 1634.) Verstegan explains how the piper earned his popular epithet “for the fantastical cote which hee wore beeing wrought with sundry colours,” another common feature in various tellings of the story that is left out of Pulter’s poem (p. 85).
piper chanced to come that way,
18
With whom they bargaind for a Certain pay
With whom they bargained, for a certain pay,
With whom they bargained, for a certain pay,
19
Their Town of this baſe Loathſom Beaſts to free
Physical Note
In the manuscript’s left margin, just below this poetic summary of the tale, is a reference to her source “See the story of this pied piper at large in Verstegan, folio 85”; see A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), 85.
Their town of these base loathsome beasts to free.
Their town of
Critical Note
The (perhaps unintentionally) ungrammatical singular form, as it appears in the manuscript, may indicate that Pulter is thinking of the rats as a single mass, as in the “rout” of line 14.
this base loathsome beasts to free.
20
Physical Note
in left margin: “See the Story / of this Pied Piper/ at Larg in Verstegan / ffolio 85”
Theffruits of Curſed Avarice now See
The fruits of curséd avarice now see.
Critical Note
This first direct address to the reader moralizes the tale in terms of the townspeople’s greed in withholding payment from the piper.
The fruits of curséd avarice now see.
21
This ffellow pipeing went to
Physical Note
“W” appears written over “w”
Weaſers brim
This fellow piping went to
Gloss Note
a river in Germany
Weser brim,
This fellow piping went to Weser brim,
22
And all the Rats Ran danceing after him
And all the rats ran dancing after him;
And all the rats ran dancing after him;
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
23
18Then instantly they Skipt into the Stream
Then instantly they skipped into the stream.
Physical Note
This first line after a page break in the middle of the poem is preceded by a marginal “18” that has been crossed out, indicating that its writer mistook this line as the beginning of a new poem. Since the person numbering the poems had continued with 19 for the next poem in the sequence (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) before realizing the mistake, there is no Emblem 18.
Then instantly they skipped into the stream.
24
Though Some may thinkt a ffiction or A dream
Though some may
Gloss Note
think it
think’t a fiction or a dream,
Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream,
25
Yet true it is for drowning was their ffate
Yet true it is, for drowning was their fate;
Yet true it is, for drowning was their fate;
26
But how
Physical Note
“s” written over former letter with ascender, possibly “t”
t’was don noe Story doth Relate
But how ’twas done, no story doth relate.
But how ’twas done, no story doth relate.
27
ffor whether a Teleſma hee did take
For whether a
Gloss Note
charm
talisman he did take,
For whether a
Critical Note
An object meant to ward off various evils, including pests. Cognate with “talisman,” Pulter’s more unusual spelling reflects the word’s Greek root from τέλεσμα, “payment,” which often appears in the context of religious rites in the sense of “propitiation,” as of a deity – a kind of supernatural “protection money.” This sense of the word is especially ironic given the townspeople’s refusal to pay the piper for ridding the town of rats. Although the accent is on the first syllable in the Greek, Pulter appears to be scanning the word with an accented second syllable. She uses a similar spelling in The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], where the Bishop of Mainz is unsuccessful in his attempt to ward off a rodent swarm either by magical or more this-worldly means: “by Tel’sma or Gun” (line 16). In suggesting that some means other than the sound of the piper’s instrument were responsible for luring away the rats and the children, Pulter may be drawing on Nathaniel Ingeno’s prose romance Bentivoglio and Urania (London, 1660), which asks, “Who knows but the Piper of Halberstade was of this Profession [i.e. a magician], and had some Talismans in his Pocket when he drove the Rats into the River and the Boys into the Hill?” (p. 158).
Telesma he did take,
28
ffive such of Gold The Philiſtin’s did make
Gloss Note
God punishes the Philistines with destruction and hemorrhoids for taking the Ark of Covenant; to be relieved of their sufferings, the Philistines are told to present to God five golden emerods and five golden mice.
Five such of gold the Philistines did make,
Critical Note
In 1 Samuel 5-6, the Philistines of Ashdod are visited with a plague of mice and a plague of “emerods [hemorrhoids, tumors, or boils] in their secret parts” after capturing the Ark of the Covenant. Following the counsel of their priests and diviners, the Philistines return the Ark along with a “trespass offering” of “five golden emerods and five golden mice.” These objects were regarded with some ambivalence by early modern commentators. Arthur Jackson, in his Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament (London, 1646), considers the possibility “that the sending of such absurd and ridiculous gifts with the Ark, as emerods and mice, was suggested by Sathan to their diviners in contempt of God,” and remarks on “what a shame must it needs be to the Philistines to send to the Israelites the images of their secret parts, thus tortured with an ignominious disease” (p. 238). Of particular interest in relation to Pulter’s characterization of these objects as “Telesma” in line 27 is John Chetwynd’s Anthologia historica (London, 1674), which lists the biblical “Images of Emrods and Mice” that “were made by the Astrologers directions and were Telesmatical signes” alongside accounts of other “Telesmatical practices” used to ward off scorpions, crocodiles, flies, serpents, and dormice (pp. 322-25).
Five such of gold the Philistines did make,
29
Or what hee did I think noe man can Say
Or what he did, I think no man can say;
Or what he did, I think no man can say;
30
But when hee came and aſked for his pay
But when he came and askéd for his pay,
But when he came and askéd for his pay,
31
The
Physical Note
“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Burger’s in their Gravitie Refuſ’d
The
Physical Note
“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
burghers in their gravity refused
The burghers in their gravity refused
32
To pay the Same, the Piper thus abuſ’d
To pay the same; the piper, thus abused,
To pay the same; the piper, thus abused,
33
did vow Reveng, they bid him doe his worst
Did vow revenge; they bid him do his worst.
Critical Note
Pulter lifts this language directly from Verstegan: “hee threatened them with revenge; they bad him do his wurst” (p. 66).
Did vow revenge; they bid him do his worst.
34
Now See how Breach of Promiſe is Accurst
Now see how breach of promise is accursed.
Critical Note
Repeating “now see” from line 20, this second direct address to the reader compounds the ostensible moral about “curséd avarice” with a new one about promise-breaking and, in doing so, asks readers to consider the relationship between the two vices.
Now see how breach of promise is accursed.
35
The ffellow Pipeing went away againe
The fellow piping went away again,
The fellow piping went away again,
36
A Hundred and Thirty Children in his Train
A hundred and thirty children in his train;
Critical Note
Pulter follows Verstegan in her account of how many children went missing. Many other early modern English versions of the story also specify the number as 130.
A hundred and thirty children in his train;
37
Into a hill hee led theſe pretty Boys
Into a hill he led these
Critical Note
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
pretty boys,
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Into a hill he led these pretty boys,
38
And thus
Physical Note
perhaps written over earlier letters
their Parents lost their hopes, and Joys,
And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys;
And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys;
39
Which with Sad Hearts they now too late deplore
Which, with sad hearts, they now too late
Gloss Note
lament; tell with grief; mourn; give up as hopeless
deplore,
Which, with sad hearts, they now too late deplore,
40
ffor they nor hee were ever heard of more
For they, nor he, were ever heard of more.
For they, nor he, were ever heard of more.
41
By theſe their grievous Suff’rings you may See
By these, their grievous suff’rings, you may see
By these, their grievous suff’rings,
Critical Note
With this third direct address to the reader (compare lines 20 and 34), and after introducing at least two other possible morals (i.e. God’s use of base creatures to mete out punishment; the evils of avarice), the poem ends by repeating the moral stated in line 34.
you may see
42
that breach of Promiſe puniſhd Sure will bee
That breach of promise punished sure will be.
That breach of promise punished sure will be.
43
Then keep your word for better or for worſ
Then keep your word, for better or for worse,
Then keep your word, for better or for worse,
44
Lest with theſe Saxons you pertake like Curſ
Lest with these
Gloss Note
inhabitants of Saxony, here referring to the people of Hamelin in Lower Saxony
Saxons you partake like curse.
Lest with these Saxons you partake
Critical Note
Given Verstegan’s heavy investment in recovering England’s Saxon identity, it is ironic that Pulter ends her poem warning English readers not to “partake like curse” with their Saxon cousins. For Verstegan and England’s Saxon cultural identity, see Richard W. Clement, “Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent,” Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 19-36.
like curse.
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

For this edition I have chosen to modernize spelling for accessibility, with two exceptions: for the modern place-name “Hamelin” I have retained the manuscript’s “Hamelle” (line 13) as the form that appeared most commonly in printed sources from the seventeenth century, and for “talisman” I have opted for the manuscript’s “Telesma” (line 27) out of respect for a possible irony the more etymologically sensitive spelling of that word might activate. In general, I have added some light punctuation for clarity but have refrained from doing so in instances where such clarity would come at the cost of obscuring an interesting ambiguity (as in the case of line 6). My notes and headnote are informed by the same errant principle I take to be driving the poem’s own – often ironic – relationship to its emblematic subject, highlighting the poem’s shifting moralizing framework by drawing particular attention to repeated and contradictory addresses to the reader, grammatical ambiguities, and features of the material text that threaten (or promise) to lead readers astray. Additionally, I have attempted to place Emblem 17 in the context of other versions of the Pied Piper story in order to show Pulter’s particular engagement with a popular legend just at the moment when it was beginning to emerge into the popular English consciousness through printed sources.
I should say something about an important omission from this edition: to my surprise, given my own scholarly interest in early modern musical discourses, I found I had nothing much to say about the piper’s Orphic powers over the rats and the children in Pulter’s telling. I attribute this omission to the way the poem seems deliberately to avoid the possibility of magical music when it seeks alternative explanations for how the piper performed his feat in lines 24-29. However, readers who are interested in considering the poem in this light (perhaps for a future Amplified Edition) might consult the work of Linda Phyllis Austern, Penelope Gouk, Gary Tomlinson, and others who discuss early modern magical and natural philosophical theories of music’s power over human and animal realms.

 Headnote

Emblem 17 tells the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or Hamelle, as Hester Pulter and her contemporaries tended to say), in which a mysterious stranger lures away the town’s children in order to punish the townspeople for greedily withholding the payment they owe him for ridding the town of rats. In connecting the natural world – specifically vermin – with cosmic or divine justice, the poem recalls several other of Pulter’s emblem poems in which even the lowliest and most contemptible parts of Creation are given a providential purpose. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], for example, narrates how the Bishop of Mainz was consumed by rats as punishment for burning a group of starving peasants during a grain shortage, and gives numerous examples of how “each despiséd reptile or insect / He [i.e. God] can empower, when we his laws neglect.” Along similar lines, Emblem 17 opens with a series of generalization about how God “will not neglect,” or scorn, to use even “reptile[s] or insect[s] / Or basest animal[s]” to inflict total destruction on a disobedient people, and the examples that follow – all taken from a section of Pliny’s Natural History dealing with the “much hurt and dammage [that] hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account” – suggest that we are in for a lecture on how God uses base means to humble the proud.
Gloss Note
C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), p. 212.
1
However, the poem does not make good on its initial promise. Unlike the “contemptible creatures” that bring proud civilizations and tyrannical rulers to their knees, the rats of Hamelle actually end up having nothing to do with divine punishment – or, if they do, the initial sin that incurred such punishment is never identified. The “vermin” are simply introduced as a “rout” afflicting the town, so that, like the townspeople, readers might well “stand in doubt” as to whether the infestation arose from supernatural or merely natural causes. Instead of providing a moral about God’s punishment through base means, the poem abruptly shifts in line 20 with the announcement of a new ostensible moral, for which nothing in the poem so far has prepared us: “The fruits of curséd avarice now see.” Ironically, within this new moralizing frame, the rats serve not as the punishment for sin but, rather, its occasion, when the stingy townspeople notoriously rip off the piper after he has lured the pests to their death in the river Weser. But even this new moral does not fully survive until the end of the poem. Omitting a detail from her source (Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1605]), in which the townspeople’s miserliness is foregrounded when they attempt to offer the piper “far less then hee lookt for,” the poem ends with yet another explicitly moralizing pronouncement – “Now see how breach of promise is accursed” – shifting the focus once again, this time away from the specific vice of avarice and toward the more general sin of bad faith.
Gloss Note
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), p. 85.
2 Having been lured into what initially seemed to be a story about divinely ordained plagues of vermin only to find a quite different moral lesson about avarice and then promise-breaking, readers might end up feeling faintly defrauded of their initial investment in the poem.
As it turns out, the shifting moral frames in Emblem 17 reflect an apparent uncertainty among other seventeenth-century tellers of the tale as to its significance. The version published in James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645), which is framed by an account of “som odd fellows” who “went skulking up and down London-streets, and with Figs and Reasons [i.e. raisins] allur’d little children, and so pourloy’d them away from their parents,” probably comes the closest to the story’s modern associations with literal stranger danger (along with its homophobic undertones).
Gloss Note
James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae (London, 1645), p. 71. For the modern association between child kidnapping and homophobia, see Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 1. Robert Dixon’s Canidia, or, The witches (London, 1683) notably associates the Pied Piper with sexual deviance, listing the “Roguish Clown” who “lo[st] all the Boys in Hammel Town” alongside “Eels and Frogs” that “have no sex” and “Others” who “from between their Legs did speak, / And act many a Haggish feat” (p. 60).
3 Interestingly, Howell reprints a somewhat different version of the story in A German Diet (1653), where it appears in the context of an anti-German oration by one “John Gulielm of Retwitz” and identifies the piper with “the devill” himself.
Gloss Note
James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), pp. 34-35.
4 Similarly, Robert Burton mentions the Hamelle disappearance in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”
Gloss Note
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), p. 68.
5 The piper’s association with diabolical powers pervades a number of seventeenth-century versions. An anonymous anti-Ranter pamphlet, The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (1653), writes the piper out of the story altogether, the children simply “being carried away by the Devil in a flame of fire” after the townspeople, “holding the same Tenents with the Ranters, Shakers, &c. Of our times,” set them upon a hill in a deliberate attempt “to dare and defie the Lord of all spirits.”
Gloss Note
The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (London, 1653), pp. 3-4.
6 While such retellings present the occurrence as a literal example of Satan’s power on earth, Thomas Hodges’s The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (1647) allegorizes the tale in terms of the “pyde piper Haeresie” that might lead “those that are near and deare unto you, you know not whither.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (London, 1647), pp. 36-37.
7 Striking in all of these accounts is their attribution of the children’s disappearance to the piper’s (or devil’s) own sinister nature, rather than presenting it as retribution for the wrong the townspeople commit by not paying him. Indeed, John Gaule’s Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (1652) turns the story into a cautionary tale about “the danger, misery, and ruine of such as have affectedly favoured, or preferred, and superstitiously credited, or consulted Magicall and Astrologicall predictors.”
Gloss Note
John Gaule, Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (London, 1652), pp. 364, 366.
8 If the townspeople’s sin in Pulter’s poem is their “breach of promise” to the piper, in Gaule’s account it is their foolish decision to employ such a “Magicall” charmer in the first place.
The polysemous nature of the Pied Piper story helps to account for its presence in some surprising places, such as William Ramesey’s discourse on parasitic worms, Helminthologia (1668), which explicitly cites Verstegan’s account as an example of the “wonderful permission of GOD to the Rage of the Devil,” who, like the vermicular pest Ramesey discusses, “destroys life and all, where he can.”
Gloss Note
William Ramesey, Helminthologia (London, 1668), p. 66.
9 Verstegan himself presents the Hamelle story not with any kind of moralizing import but, unexpectedly, as part of his discussion of the Saxon diaspora – specifically, as a fanciful explanation (which he ends up dismissing) for why “among the Saxons in Transilvnia” there are some “that have lyke surnames unto divers of the burgers of Hamel.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 87.
10 Appropriately enough, given its theme, Verstegan introduces the story as something that has lured him away from his main topic, “one digression [having] drawn on another.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 85.
11 It is with a similar apology that the tale is prefaced in another unlikely source, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (1615), whose author, George Hakewell, “confess[es]” that he has included it “not so much for the fitnesse, as the strangeness of the story.”
Gloss Note
George Hakewell, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (London, 1615), p. 61.
12 Relieved of the imperative to “fit” the story to any particular end (moralizing, geographical, mag-astro-mantical, or otherwise), perhaps the least surprising context in which the Pied Piper appears in the seventeenth century is in collections of miraculous occurrences such as The Wonders of the Little World (1673) or Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (1683), which simply introduce the event as a “strange Accident.”
Gloss Note
Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (London, 1683), p. 188.
13
Read in the context of these various (and variously explicated) versions, Pulter’s transformation of the Pied Piper legend into an emblem with shifting significances also transforms the genre itself from one of static exposition of a calcified moral into a dynamic meditation on the complex relationships between divine and human justice, avarice and fair trade, labor and exploitation, promise and betrayal, as well as the human and the non-human. Working backwards from what may seem like its overly trite conclusion (“Then keep your word, for better or for worse”), the poem unravels into a promiscuous array of competing possibilities that intermingle and coalesce in unexpected ways, like the mythemes of the legend itself in its various guises. For instance, given early modern associations between avarice and sodomy, Pulter’s tale of a piper luring the “pretty boys” of the town away through the use of some kind of unmentionable means (“what he did, I think no man can say”) potentially emerges as a sublimated form of poetic justice.
Gloss Note
The piper’s queerness is emphasized in several of the early modern versions, which, in addition to emphasizing his flamboyant dress, often describe him with the epithet “odd,” as in Verstegan’s characterization of him as “an od kynd of compagnion” (p. 85). For the connection between avarice and sodomy, see, for example, John Harris, The destruction of sodome (London, 1625), p. 35: “And had couetousnesse a habitation in Sodome? and was filthy auarice a cause of her desolation? then Lord bee mercifull vnto our Land, that hath many a member in it, who out of a couetous desire, haue made a marriage with siluer, and giuen a bill of diuorce to Iesus Christ!” For a larger discussion connecting sodomy more broadly to the misuse of money, particularly through usury and counterfeiting, see Will Fisher, “Queer Money” ELH 66 (1999): 1-23.
14 The poem’s odd (and oddly unnecessary) citation of 1 Samuel 6 as a possible explanation for “how ‘twas done” (along with the five golden mice the Philistines offered Jehovah to mitigate their rodent infestation, they also presented five golden “emerods” to alleviate the divine smiting that was afflicting them “in their secret parts”) probably raises more questions than it answers.
Gloss Note
Even more suggestively, the Latin Vulgate describes the Philistines’ offering as “quinque anos aureos” (“five golden anuses”). For the premodern interpretation of the plagues of 1 Samuel 5-6 specifically in relation to both avarice and “sodomitirie,” see Robert Mills, “Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisées” Speculum 87 (2012): 413-468.
15
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between the rats and divine punishment in Emblem 17 suggests a type of pest that refuses to be controlled either by literal extermination or by providentialist narratives. As Lucinda Cole points out, “given their endless reproducibility and the unpredictable nature of their swarming motion,” rats, mice, and other vermin represented in early modern texts “may actually threaten the ideas of an orderly universe and the regeneration of Nature symbolized by Noah’s Ark,” often resisting neat ontological (and even taxonomic) categorization.
Gloss Note
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 17.
16 Thus, in seventeenth-century depictions of the biblical plagues of Egypt, for example, it is unclear whether “lice, frogs, and swarming things [are] to be read allegorically or literally” and, indeed, whether the story is “about political sovereignty or natural populations.”
Gloss Note
Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 19.
17 Similarly, behind Pulter’s moralizing representation of rats in Emblem 17 may lurk concerns about the real historical presence of rodents in seventeenth-century England (and a future Amplified Edition might fruitfully connect the poem to such on-the-ground conditions).
Ultimately, the poem’s shifting moral framework can have the effect of making Emblem 17 feel like two poems: one about Old-Testament-style divine retribution involving plagues of locusts, frogs, serpents – and, of course, rats – and the other about the all-too-human world of greed, bad faith, and revenge, in which such pests are simply the given facts of life, part of the meaningless chaos of existence. In fact, this doubleness is arguably reflected in a scribal error in Pulter’s manuscript: a neatly-written “18” at the top of folio 102, after the page-break, indicates what its writer evidently mistook for the beginning of a new poem: Emblem 18. Realizing her mistake, the scribe crossed it out; however, by then it was too late: having already continued numbering the next poem (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) as number 19, making the correction would necessarily mean leaving out a number from the total sequence. Like the missing children of Hamelle, Emblem 18 ends up being an absent presence in Pulter’s manuscript: itself an emblem, perhaps, for the material vicissitudes of textual production and circulation that strain against the text’s own pursuit of a world whose meanings are legible in the form of emblems – a world (“Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream”) where betrayal, destruction, and loss are more easily attributable to divine ordination, rather than to the unaccountable and stupid realm of the “strange Accident.”
Line number 2

 Critical note

The tortuous syntax of the opening lines encourages misreading. Immediately following the prepositional phrase “to mercy,” the infinitive phrases “to punish” and “to try” suggest a parallel between God’s mercy and the punishments and trials he metes out on his people. The humble close-parenthesis is the only thing that separates a God “who is to mercy most inclined” from a God who is “most inclined) / To punish or to try.”
Line number 4

 Gloss note

That is, God will not scorn to use these base creatures as instruments of punishment. See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], lines 25-26: “For each despiséd reptile or insect / He can empower, when we his laws neglect.” An account of the Bishop of Mainz and his unfortunate encounter with rats appears immediately before a retelling of the Pied Piper story in James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), p. 34.
Line number 5

 Critical note

The antecedent of “their” is “people” (3), but it could easily be mistaken for “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4), suggesting perhaps a conflation between the human objects and the non-human instruments of punishment. This conflation also foreshadows the way in which humans and animals turn out to be equally susceptible to the alluring sound of the piper’s pipe later in the poem.
Line number 6

 Critical note

A lot depends on the placement of the implied “that” completing the “so” of line 5. If it follows “annoy,” then the sense is that the vermin will “all destroy” unless God issues a “countermand” (leaving open the possibility that God could perhaps relent). On the other hand, placing the implied “that” after “countermand” makes God’s decree seem more absolute and unchanging: in this reading, “without a countermand” functions less as a conditional specifying the circumstances (however unlikely) under which the destruction would be less than total, and more as a categorical denial that such a retraction would ever occur: the pests will simply and ruthlessly “so annoy / Without a countermand,” that “they’ll all destroy.” The lack of punctuation in Pulter’s manuscript effectively confronts readers with the same hedging uncertainty that led the townspeople of Hamelle to renege on their payment: a God – or a Piper – who is inclined more to mercy than to punishment and who thus does not always follow through with his threats is also one whose bluff might more safely be called (or so the townspeople think, to their peril).
Line number 6

 Critical note

This time, the third-person-plural pronoun takes “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4) as its antecedent, but, again, the syntax (as well as the fact that “each” is singular) encourages a misreading that attaches the pronoun to “people” (3), requiring readers to take special care to distinguish between man and beast.
Line number 7

 Critical note

The section of Pliny’s Natural History from which Pulter draws the examples in lines 7-11 focuses on how “much hurt and dammage hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” recalling the poem’s opening claim about how God “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal will not neglect” in his punishment of disobedient people (C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World, Trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1601], p. 212).
Line number 10

 Gloss note

See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], line 28: “Sulla and Herod by a louse did die.”
Line number 10

 Critical note

The reversal of the order of the rhyming words “annoy”/“destroy” from lines 5-6 sits in ironic counterpoint to the notion of a destruction that is supposed to occur “without a countermand” (6).
Line number 12

 Critical note

The relegation of “sins” to parentheses mirrors the people’s spiritually negligent failure to “deplore” their sins as the just cause of their divinely ordained “sufferings.”
Line number 13

 Critical note

The poem never specifies what the citizens of Hamelle did to invite the plague of rats in the first place; oddly, we don’t know what sin the vermin are meant to punish.
Line number 13

 Gloss note

A town in Lower Saxony, Germany, more commonly known from the Pied Piper legend as Hamelin.
Line number 15

 Physical note

The words “waies, as” were added to the line with a caret.
Line number 15

 Gloss note

For some of the methods the townspeople might have tried, see Leonard Mascall, A booke of engines and traps to take polcats, buzardes, rattes, mice and all other kindes of vermine and beasts whatsoever, most profitable for all warriners, and such as delight in this kinde of sport and pastime (London, 1590).
Line number 17

 Critical note

The poem itself never refers to the piper as “Pied,” although the word does appear in a marginal note referring readers to “the story of this Pied Piper” in Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605). (The page number in the note [85] indicates that Pulter was using one of the first three editions of the book: 1605, 1628, or 1634.) Verstegan explains how the piper earned his popular epithet “for the fantastical cote which hee wore beeing wrought with sundry colours,” another common feature in various tellings of the story that is left out of Pulter’s poem (p. 85).
Line number 19

 Critical note

The (perhaps unintentionally) ungrammatical singular form, as it appears in the manuscript, may indicate that Pulter is thinking of the rats as a single mass, as in the “rout” of line 14.
Line number 20

 Critical note

This first direct address to the reader moralizes the tale in terms of the townspeople’s greed in withholding payment from the piper.
Line number 23

 Physical note

This first line after a page break in the middle of the poem is preceded by a marginal “18” that has been crossed out, indicating that its writer mistook this line as the beginning of a new poem. Since the person numbering the poems had continued with 19 for the next poem in the sequence (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) before realizing the mistake, there is no Emblem 18.
Line number 27

 Critical note

An object meant to ward off various evils, including pests. Cognate with “talisman,” Pulter’s more unusual spelling reflects the word’s Greek root from τέλεσμα, “payment,” which often appears in the context of religious rites in the sense of “propitiation,” as of a deity – a kind of supernatural “protection money.” This sense of the word is especially ironic given the townspeople’s refusal to pay the piper for ridding the town of rats. Although the accent is on the first syllable in the Greek, Pulter appears to be scanning the word with an accented second syllable. She uses a similar spelling in The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], where the Bishop of Mainz is unsuccessful in his attempt to ward off a rodent swarm either by magical or more this-worldly means: “by Tel’sma or Gun” (line 16). In suggesting that some means other than the sound of the piper’s instrument were responsible for luring away the rats and the children, Pulter may be drawing on Nathaniel Ingeno’s prose romance Bentivoglio and Urania (London, 1660), which asks, “Who knows but the Piper of Halberstade was of this Profession [i.e. a magician], and had some Talismans in his Pocket when he drove the Rats into the River and the Boys into the Hill?” (p. 158).
Line number 28

 Critical note

In 1 Samuel 5-6, the Philistines of Ashdod are visited with a plague of mice and a plague of “emerods [hemorrhoids, tumors, or boils] in their secret parts” after capturing the Ark of the Covenant. Following the counsel of their priests and diviners, the Philistines return the Ark along with a “trespass offering” of “five golden emerods and five golden mice.” These objects were regarded with some ambivalence by early modern commentators. Arthur Jackson, in his Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament (London, 1646), considers the possibility “that the sending of such absurd and ridiculous gifts with the Ark, as emerods and mice, was suggested by Sathan to their diviners in contempt of God,” and remarks on “what a shame must it needs be to the Philistines to send to the Israelites the images of their secret parts, thus tortured with an ignominious disease” (p. 238). Of particular interest in relation to Pulter’s characterization of these objects as “Telesma” in line 27 is John Chetwynd’s Anthologia historica (London, 1674), which lists the biblical “Images of Emrods and Mice” that “were made by the Astrologers directions and were Telesmatical signes” alongside accounts of other “Telesmatical practices” used to ward off scorpions, crocodiles, flies, serpents, and dormice (pp. 322-25).
Line number 33

 Critical note

Pulter lifts this language directly from Verstegan: “hee threatened them with revenge; they bad him do his wurst” (p. 66).
Line number 34

 Critical note

Repeating “now see” from line 20, this second direct address to the reader compounds the ostensible moral about “curséd avarice” with a new one about promise-breaking and, in doing so, asks readers to consider the relationship between the two vices.
Line number 36

 Critical note

Pulter follows Verstegan in her account of how many children went missing. Many other early modern English versions of the story also specify the number as 130.
Line number 37
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Line number 41

 Critical note

With this third direct address to the reader (compare lines 20 and 34), and after introducing at least two other possible morals (i.e. God’s use of base creatures to mete out punishment; the evils of avarice), the poem ends by repeating the moral stated in line 34.
Line number 44

 Critical note

Given Verstegan’s heavy investment in recovering England’s Saxon identity, it is ironic that Pulter ends her poem warning English readers not to “partake like curse” with their Saxon cousins. For Verstegan and England’s Saxon cultural identity, see Richard W. Clement, “Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent,” Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 19-36.
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[Emblem 17]
The Piper of Hamelin
(Emblem 17)
Emblem 17
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.

— Thomas Ward
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.

— Thomas Ward
For this edition I have chosen to modernize spelling for accessibility, with two exceptions: for the modern place-name “Hamelin” I have retained the manuscript’s “Hamelle” (line 13) as the form that appeared most commonly in printed sources from the seventeenth century, and for “talisman” I have opted for the manuscript’s “Telesma” (line 27) out of respect for a possible irony the more etymologically sensitive spelling of that word might activate. In general, I have added some light punctuation for clarity but have refrained from doing so in instances where such clarity would come at the cost of obscuring an interesting ambiguity (as in the case of line 6). My notes and headnote are informed by the same errant principle I take to be driving the poem’s own – often ironic – relationship to its emblematic subject, highlighting the poem’s shifting moralizing framework by drawing particular attention to repeated and contradictory addresses to the reader, grammatical ambiguities, and features of the material text that threaten (or promise) to lead readers astray. Additionally, I have attempted to place Emblem 17 in the context of other versions of the Pied Piper story in order to show Pulter’s particular engagement with a popular legend just at the moment when it was beginning to emerge into the popular English consciousness through printed sources.
I should say something about an important omission from this edition: to my surprise, given my own scholarly interest in early modern musical discourses, I found I had nothing much to say about the piper’s Orphic powers over the rats and the children in Pulter’s telling. I attribute this omission to the way the poem seems deliberately to avoid the possibility of magical music when it seeks alternative explanations for how the piper performed his feat in lines 24-29. However, readers who are interested in considering the poem in this light (perhaps for a future Amplified Edition) might consult the work of Linda Phyllis Austern, Penelope Gouk, Gary Tomlinson, and others who discuss early modern magical and natural philosophical theories of music’s power over human and animal realms.


— Thomas Ward
What begins as a poem heralding God’s ability to use animals to punish errant humans dramatically changes into a fable in which animal control is just a commercial venture gone bad. This poem briefly surveys a host of divine plagues, powered by the weapons of mass destruction that are God’s creatures: rabbits, moles, frogs, snakes, insects (even lice!), as well as that most notorious plague beast, the rat—which leads to a retelling of the still-familiar story of the pied piper of Hamelin kidnapping an entire town’s children when the town failed to pay him for clearing the rats. No mere horror story about stranger danger, as it has become for children and parents both today, this is Pulter’s unexpected morality tale about the problems of avarice and the importance of keeping one’s word. Grief for lost children, which Pulter represents so poignantly and personally elsewhere in her poems, is here just punishment for dishonorable action.

— Thomas Ward
Emblem 17 tells the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or Hamelle, as Hester Pulter and her contemporaries tended to say), in which a mysterious stranger lures away the town’s children in order to punish the townspeople for greedily withholding the payment they owe him for ridding the town of rats. In connecting the natural world – specifically vermin – with cosmic or divine justice, the poem recalls several other of Pulter’s emblem poems in which even the lowliest and most contemptible parts of Creation are given a providential purpose. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], for example, narrates how the Bishop of Mainz was consumed by rats as punishment for burning a group of starving peasants during a grain shortage, and gives numerous examples of how “each despiséd reptile or insect / He [i.e. God] can empower, when we his laws neglect.” Along similar lines, Emblem 17 opens with a series of generalization about how God “will not neglect,” or scorn, to use even “reptile[s] or insect[s] / Or basest animal[s]” to inflict total destruction on a disobedient people, and the examples that follow – all taken from a section of Pliny’s Natural History dealing with the “much hurt and dammage [that] hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account” – suggest that we are in for a lecture on how God uses base means to humble the proud.
Gloss Note
C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), p. 212.
1
However, the poem does not make good on its initial promise. Unlike the “contemptible creatures” that bring proud civilizations and tyrannical rulers to their knees, the rats of Hamelle actually end up having nothing to do with divine punishment – or, if they do, the initial sin that incurred such punishment is never identified. The “vermin” are simply introduced as a “rout” afflicting the town, so that, like the townspeople, readers might well “stand in doubt” as to whether the infestation arose from supernatural or merely natural causes. Instead of providing a moral about God’s punishment through base means, the poem abruptly shifts in line 20 with the announcement of a new ostensible moral, for which nothing in the poem so far has prepared us: “The fruits of curséd avarice now see.” Ironically, within this new moralizing frame, the rats serve not as the punishment for sin but, rather, its occasion, when the stingy townspeople notoriously rip off the piper after he has lured the pests to their death in the river Weser. But even this new moral does not fully survive until the end of the poem. Omitting a detail from her source (Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1605]), in which the townspeople’s miserliness is foregrounded when they attempt to offer the piper “far less then hee lookt for,” the poem ends with yet another explicitly moralizing pronouncement – “Now see how breach of promise is accursed” – shifting the focus once again, this time away from the specific vice of avarice and toward the more general sin of bad faith.
Gloss Note
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), p. 85.
2 Having been lured into what initially seemed to be a story about divinely ordained plagues of vermin only to find a quite different moral lesson about avarice and then promise-breaking, readers might end up feeling faintly defrauded of their initial investment in the poem.
As it turns out, the shifting moral frames in Emblem 17 reflect an apparent uncertainty among other seventeenth-century tellers of the tale as to its significance. The version published in James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645), which is framed by an account of “som odd fellows” who “went skulking up and down London-streets, and with Figs and Reasons [i.e. raisins] allur’d little children, and so pourloy’d them away from their parents,” probably comes the closest to the story’s modern associations with literal stranger danger (along with its homophobic undertones).
Gloss Note
James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae (London, 1645), p. 71. For the modern association between child kidnapping and homophobia, see Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 1. Robert Dixon’s Canidia, or, The witches (London, 1683) notably associates the Pied Piper with sexual deviance, listing the “Roguish Clown” who “lo[st] all the Boys in Hammel Town” alongside “Eels and Frogs” that “have no sex” and “Others” who “from between their Legs did speak, / And act many a Haggish feat” (p. 60).
3 Interestingly, Howell reprints a somewhat different version of the story in A German Diet (1653), where it appears in the context of an anti-German oration by one “John Gulielm of Retwitz” and identifies the piper with “the devill” himself.
Gloss Note
James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), pp. 34-35.
4 Similarly, Robert Burton mentions the Hamelle disappearance in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”
Gloss Note
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), p. 68.
5 The piper’s association with diabolical powers pervades a number of seventeenth-century versions. An anonymous anti-Ranter pamphlet, The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (1653), writes the piper out of the story altogether, the children simply “being carried away by the Devil in a flame of fire” after the townspeople, “holding the same Tenents with the Ranters, Shakers, &c. Of our times,” set them upon a hill in a deliberate attempt “to dare and defie the Lord of all spirits.”
Gloss Note
The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (London, 1653), pp. 3-4.
6 While such retellings present the occurrence as a literal example of Satan’s power on earth, Thomas Hodges’s The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (1647) allegorizes the tale in terms of the “pyde piper Haeresie” that might lead “those that are near and deare unto you, you know not whither.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (London, 1647), pp. 36-37.
7 Striking in all of these accounts is their attribution of the children’s disappearance to the piper’s (or devil’s) own sinister nature, rather than presenting it as retribution for the wrong the townspeople commit by not paying him. Indeed, John Gaule’s Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (1652) turns the story into a cautionary tale about “the danger, misery, and ruine of such as have affectedly favoured, or preferred, and superstitiously credited, or consulted Magicall and Astrologicall predictors.”
Gloss Note
John Gaule, Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (London, 1652), pp. 364, 366.
8 If the townspeople’s sin in Pulter’s poem is their “breach of promise” to the piper, in Gaule’s account it is their foolish decision to employ such a “Magicall” charmer in the first place.
The polysemous nature of the Pied Piper story helps to account for its presence in some surprising places, such as William Ramesey’s discourse on parasitic worms, Helminthologia (1668), which explicitly cites Verstegan’s account as an example of the “wonderful permission of GOD to the Rage of the Devil,” who, like the vermicular pest Ramesey discusses, “destroys life and all, where he can.”
Gloss Note
William Ramesey, Helminthologia (London, 1668), p. 66.
9 Verstegan himself presents the Hamelle story not with any kind of moralizing import but, unexpectedly, as part of his discussion of the Saxon diaspora – specifically, as a fanciful explanation (which he ends up dismissing) for why “among the Saxons in Transilvnia” there are some “that have lyke surnames unto divers of the burgers of Hamel.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 87.
10 Appropriately enough, given its theme, Verstegan introduces the story as something that has lured him away from his main topic, “one digression [having] drawn on another.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 85.
11 It is with a similar apology that the tale is prefaced in another unlikely source, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (1615), whose author, George Hakewell, “confess[es]” that he has included it “not so much for the fitnesse, as the strangeness of the story.”
Gloss Note
George Hakewell, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (London, 1615), p. 61.
12 Relieved of the imperative to “fit” the story to any particular end (moralizing, geographical, mag-astro-mantical, or otherwise), perhaps the least surprising context in which the Pied Piper appears in the seventeenth century is in collections of miraculous occurrences such as The Wonders of the Little World (1673) or Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (1683), which simply introduce the event as a “strange Accident.”
Gloss Note
Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (London, 1683), p. 188.
13
Read in the context of these various (and variously explicated) versions, Pulter’s transformation of the Pied Piper legend into an emblem with shifting significances also transforms the genre itself from one of static exposition of a calcified moral into a dynamic meditation on the complex relationships between divine and human justice, avarice and fair trade, labor and exploitation, promise and betrayal, as well as the human and the non-human. Working backwards from what may seem like its overly trite conclusion (“Then keep your word, for better or for worse”), the poem unravels into a promiscuous array of competing possibilities that intermingle and coalesce in unexpected ways, like the mythemes of the legend itself in its various guises. For instance, given early modern associations between avarice and sodomy, Pulter’s tale of a piper luring the “pretty boys” of the town away through the use of some kind of unmentionable means (“what he did, I think no man can say”) potentially emerges as a sublimated form of poetic justice.
Gloss Note
The piper’s queerness is emphasized in several of the early modern versions, which, in addition to emphasizing his flamboyant dress, often describe him with the epithet “odd,” as in Verstegan’s characterization of him as “an od kynd of compagnion” (p. 85). For the connection between avarice and sodomy, see, for example, John Harris, The destruction of sodome (London, 1625), p. 35: “And had couetousnesse a habitation in Sodome? and was filthy auarice a cause of her desolation? then Lord bee mercifull vnto our Land, that hath many a member in it, who out of a couetous desire, haue made a marriage with siluer, and giuen a bill of diuorce to Iesus Christ!” For a larger discussion connecting sodomy more broadly to the misuse of money, particularly through usury and counterfeiting, see Will Fisher, “Queer Money” ELH 66 (1999): 1-23.
14 The poem’s odd (and oddly unnecessary) citation of 1 Samuel 6 as a possible explanation for “how ‘twas done” (along with the five golden mice the Philistines offered Jehovah to mitigate their rodent infestation, they also presented five golden “emerods” to alleviate the divine smiting that was afflicting them “in their secret parts”) probably raises more questions than it answers.
Gloss Note
Even more suggestively, the Latin Vulgate describes the Philistines’ offering as “quinque anos aureos” (“five golden anuses”). For the premodern interpretation of the plagues of 1 Samuel 5-6 specifically in relation to both avarice and “sodomitirie,” see Robert Mills, “Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisées” Speculum 87 (2012): 413-468.
15
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between the rats and divine punishment in Emblem 17 suggests a type of pest that refuses to be controlled either by literal extermination or by providentialist narratives. As Lucinda Cole points out, “given their endless reproducibility and the unpredictable nature of their swarming motion,” rats, mice, and other vermin represented in early modern texts “may actually threaten the ideas of an orderly universe and the regeneration of Nature symbolized by Noah’s Ark,” often resisting neat ontological (and even taxonomic) categorization.
Gloss Note
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 17.
16 Thus, in seventeenth-century depictions of the biblical plagues of Egypt, for example, it is unclear whether “lice, frogs, and swarming things [are] to be read allegorically or literally” and, indeed, whether the story is “about political sovereignty or natural populations.”
Gloss Note
Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 19.
17 Similarly, behind Pulter’s moralizing representation of rats in Emblem 17 may lurk concerns about the real historical presence of rodents in seventeenth-century England (and a future Amplified Edition might fruitfully connect the poem to such on-the-ground conditions).
Ultimately, the poem’s shifting moral framework can have the effect of making Emblem 17 feel like two poems: one about Old-Testament-style divine retribution involving plagues of locusts, frogs, serpents – and, of course, rats – and the other about the all-too-human world of greed, bad faith, and revenge, in which such pests are simply the given facts of life, part of the meaningless chaos of existence. In fact, this doubleness is arguably reflected in a scribal error in Pulter’s manuscript: a neatly-written “18” at the top of folio 102, after the page-break, indicates what its writer evidently mistook for the beginning of a new poem: Emblem 18. Realizing her mistake, the scribe crossed it out; however, by then it was too late: having already continued numbering the next poem (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) as number 19, making the correction would necessarily mean leaving out a number from the total sequence. Like the missing children of Hamelle, Emblem 18 ends up being an absent presence in Pulter’s manuscript: itself an emblem, perhaps, for the material vicissitudes of textual production and circulation that strain against the text’s own pursuit of a world whose meanings are legible in the form of emblems – a world (“Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream”) where betrayal, destruction, and loss are more easily attributable to divine ordination, rather than to the unaccountable and stupid realm of the “strange Accident.”


— Thomas Ward
1
17When God (who is to Mercie most inclin’d)
When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
When God (who is to mercy most inclined)
2
To puniſh or to trie hath once deſign’d
To punish or to
Gloss Note
to subject to trial
try hath once
Gloss Note
marked out, designated; appointed, assigned, destined
designed
Critical Note
The tortuous syntax of the opening lines encourages misreading. Immediately following the prepositional phrase “to mercy,” the infinitive phrases “to punish” and “to try” suggest a parallel between God’s mercy and the punishments and trials he metes out on his people. The humble close-parenthesis is the only thing that separates a God “who is to mercy most inclined” from a God who is “most inclined) / To punish or to try.”
To punish or to try hath once designed
3
A People, each Reptell or inſect
A people, each reptile or insect
A people, each reptile or insect
4
Or baſest Animal will not neglect
Or basest animal
Gloss Note
that is, God will not neglect these creatures
will not neglect,
Or basest animal will not
Gloss Note
That is, God will not scorn to use these base creatures as instruments of punishment. See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], lines 25-26: “For each despiséd reptile or insect / He can empower, when we his laws neglect.” An account of the Bishop of Mainz and his unfortunate encounter with rats appears immediately before a retelling of the Pied Piper story in James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), p. 34.
neglect,
5
But will their Habitation Soe Annoy
But will their habitation so annoy,
But will
Critical Note
The antecedent of “their” is “people” (3), but it could easily be mistaken for “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4), suggesting perhaps a conflation between the human objects and the non-human instruments of punishment. This conflation also foreshadows the way in which humans and animals turn out to be equally susceptible to the alluring sound of the piper’s pipe later in the poem.
their habitation so annoy
6
Without a Countermand they’l all deſtroy
Gloss Note
The sense of the poem’s opening sentence is that, without a divine “countermand” (an order revoking God’s previous command), the creatures he has designated as plagues upon a given people will destroy everything in their path.
Without a countermand, they’ll all destroy.
Critical Note
A lot depends on the placement of the implied “that” completing the “so” of line 5. If it follows “annoy,” then the sense is that the vermin will “all destroy” unless God issues a “countermand” (leaving open the possibility that God could perhaps relent). On the other hand, placing the implied “that” after “countermand” makes God’s decree seem more absolute and unchanging: in this reading, “without a countermand” functions less as a conditional specifying the circumstances (however unlikely) under which the destruction would be less than total, and more as a categorical denial that such a retraction would ever occur: the pests will simply and ruthlessly “so annoy / Without a countermand,” that “they’ll all destroy.” The lack of punctuation in Pulter’s manuscript effectively confronts readers with the same hedging uncertainty that led the townspeople of Hamelle to renege on their payment: a God – or a Piper – who is inclined more to mercy than to punishment and who thus does not always follow through with his threats is also one whose bluff might more safely be called (or so the townspeople think, to their peril).
Without a countermand
Critical Note
This time, the third-person-plural pronoun takes “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4) as its antecedent, but, again, the syntax (as well as the fact that “each” is singular) encourages a misreading that attaches the pronoun to “people” (3), requiring readers to take special care to distinguish between man and beast.
they’ll all destroy.
7
Thus Spain by Rabbits, Moles made Theſaly
Gloss Note
In this and the next five lines, Pulter summarizes Pliny’s Natural History where he writes (in Book 8, Chapter 29) of “what cities and nations have been utterly destroyed by little beasts.” After noting that “much hurt and damage hath been known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” Pliny mentions many of the same creatures and locales as Pulter does. (C. Plinius Secundus The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland [1601]: pp. 192-234, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny8.html).
Thus Spain by rabbits,
Gloss Note
This phrase is completed in the next line: “moles made Thessaly … a desert lie.”
moles made Thessaly,
Critical Note
The section of Pliny’s Natural History from which Pulter draws the examples in lines 7-11 focuses on how “much hurt and dammage hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” recalling the poem’s opening claim about how God “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal will not neglect” in his punishment of disobedient people (C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World, Trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1601], p. 212).
Thus Spain by rabbits, moles made Thessaly,
8
Locusts made Affrica a Deſert lye
Locusts made Africa a desert lie;
Locusts made Africa a desert lie;
9
ffrance ffrogs, Amycle Serpents, did deſtroy
France frogs,
Gloss Note
a city near Sparta in ancient Peloponnesia
Amyclæ serpents, did destroy;
France frogs, Amyclæ serpents, did destroy;
10
fflyes, Lice, and ffrogs, all Egypt did Annoy
Flies, lice, and frogs, all Egypt did annoy;
Flies,
Gloss Note
See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], line 28: “Sulla and Herod by a louse did die.”
lice, and frogs, all Egypt did
Critical Note
The reversal of the order of the rhyming words “annoy”/“destroy” from lines 5-6 sits in ironic counterpoint to the notion of a destruction that is supposed to occur “without a countermand” (6).
annoy;
11
Gyaros Rats, and too too many more
Gloss Note
a Greek island
Gyaros, rats; and too, too many more
Gyaros, rats; and too, too many more
12
Their Sufferings (though not Sins) did then deplore
Their sufferings (though not sins) did then
Gloss Note
lament, mourn, tell with grief
deplore.
Their sufferings
Critical Note
The relegation of “sins” to parentheses mirrors the people’s spiritually negligent failure to “deplore” their sins as the just cause of their divinely ordained “sufferings.”
(though not sins) did then deplore.
13
This made the Town of
Physical Note
final “l” appears written over “e”
Hamell Stand in Doubt
This made the town of
Gloss Note
a market town in Lower Saxony, Germany
Hamelin
Gloss Note
to continue in a state of doubt, or, more likely here, “doubt” in the sense of apprehension or dread
stand in doubt,
Critical Note
The poem never specifies what the citizens of Hamelle did to invite the plague of rats in the first place; oddly, we don’t know what sin the vermin are meant to punish.
This made the town of
Gloss Note
A town in Lower Saxony, Germany, more commonly known from the Pied Piper legend as Hamelin.
Hamelle stand in doubt
14
Cauſe of thoſe vermine they had Such a Rowt
’Cause
Gloss Note
Pulter refers to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the town was infested with a rat plague (or “rout”: a crowd or pack, especially a noisy, disordered, or violent one).
of those vermin they had such a rout.
’Cause of those vermin they had such a rout.
15
They tri’de all ^waies, as poyſons, Traps, and Catts.
They tried all ways,
Gloss Note
such as
as poisons, traps, and cats,
They tried all
Physical Note
The words “waies, as” were added to the line with a caret.
ways, as
Gloss Note
For some of the methods the townspeople might have tried, see Leonard Mascall, A booke of engines and traps to take polcats, buzardes, rattes, mice and all other kindes of vermine and beasts whatsoever, most profitable for all warriners, and such as delight in this kinde of sport and pastime (London, 1590).
poisons, traps, and cats,
16
Yet Still their Houſes pesterd were with Rats
Yet still their houses pestered were with rats.
Yet still their houses pestered were with rats.
17
At last a Piper chance’d to come that way
At last a piper chanced to come that way,
At last a
Critical Note
The poem itself never refers to the piper as “Pied,” although the word does appear in a marginal note referring readers to “the story of this Pied Piper” in Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605). (The page number in the note [85] indicates that Pulter was using one of the first three editions of the book: 1605, 1628, or 1634.) Verstegan explains how the piper earned his popular epithet “for the fantastical cote which hee wore beeing wrought with sundry colours,” another common feature in various tellings of the story that is left out of Pulter’s poem (p. 85).
piper chanced to come that way,
18
With whom they bargaind for a Certain pay
With whom they bargained, for a certain pay,
With whom they bargained, for a certain pay,
19
Their Town of this baſe Loathſom Beaſts to free
Physical Note
In the manuscript’s left margin, just below this poetic summary of the tale, is a reference to her source “See the story of this pied piper at large in Verstegan, folio 85”; see A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), 85.
Their town of these base loathsome beasts to free.
Their town of
Critical Note
The (perhaps unintentionally) ungrammatical singular form, as it appears in the manuscript, may indicate that Pulter is thinking of the rats as a single mass, as in the “rout” of line 14.
this base loathsome beasts to free.
20
Physical Note
in left margin: “See the Story / of this Pied Piper/ at Larg in Verstegan / ffolio 85”
Theffruits of Curſed Avarice now See
The fruits of curséd avarice now see.
Critical Note
This first direct address to the reader moralizes the tale in terms of the townspeople’s greed in withholding payment from the piper.
The fruits of curséd avarice now see.
21
This ffellow pipeing went to
Physical Note
“W” appears written over “w”
Weaſers brim
This fellow piping went to
Gloss Note
a river in Germany
Weser brim,
This fellow piping went to Weser brim,
22
And all the Rats Ran danceing after him
And all the rats ran dancing after him;
And all the rats ran dancing after him;
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
23
18Then instantly they Skipt into the Stream
Then instantly they skipped into the stream.
Physical Note
This first line after a page break in the middle of the poem is preceded by a marginal “18” that has been crossed out, indicating that its writer mistook this line as the beginning of a new poem. Since the person numbering the poems had continued with 19 for the next poem in the sequence (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) before realizing the mistake, there is no Emblem 18.
Then instantly they skipped into the stream.
24
Though Some may thinkt a ffiction or A dream
Though some may
Gloss Note
think it
think’t a fiction or a dream,
Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream,
25
Yet true it is for drowning was their ffate
Yet true it is, for drowning was their fate;
Yet true it is, for drowning was their fate;
26
But how
Physical Note
“s” written over former letter with ascender, possibly “t”
t’was don noe Story doth Relate
But how ’twas done, no story doth relate.
But how ’twas done, no story doth relate.
27
ffor whether a Teleſma hee did take
For whether a
Gloss Note
charm
talisman he did take,
For whether a
Critical Note
An object meant to ward off various evils, including pests. Cognate with “talisman,” Pulter’s more unusual spelling reflects the word’s Greek root from τέλεσμα, “payment,” which often appears in the context of religious rites in the sense of “propitiation,” as of a deity – a kind of supernatural “protection money.” This sense of the word is especially ironic given the townspeople’s refusal to pay the piper for ridding the town of rats. Although the accent is on the first syllable in the Greek, Pulter appears to be scanning the word with an accented second syllable. She uses a similar spelling in The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], where the Bishop of Mainz is unsuccessful in his attempt to ward off a rodent swarm either by magical or more this-worldly means: “by Tel’sma or Gun” (line 16). In suggesting that some means other than the sound of the piper’s instrument were responsible for luring away the rats and the children, Pulter may be drawing on Nathaniel Ingeno’s prose romance Bentivoglio and Urania (London, 1660), which asks, “Who knows but the Piper of Halberstade was of this Profession [i.e. a magician], and had some Talismans in his Pocket when he drove the Rats into the River and the Boys into the Hill?” (p. 158).
Telesma he did take,
28
ffive such of Gold The Philiſtin’s did make
Gloss Note
God punishes the Philistines with destruction and hemorrhoids for taking the Ark of Covenant; to be relieved of their sufferings, the Philistines are told to present to God five golden emerods and five golden mice.
Five such of gold the Philistines did make,
Critical Note
In 1 Samuel 5-6, the Philistines of Ashdod are visited with a plague of mice and a plague of “emerods [hemorrhoids, tumors, or boils] in their secret parts” after capturing the Ark of the Covenant. Following the counsel of their priests and diviners, the Philistines return the Ark along with a “trespass offering” of “five golden emerods and five golden mice.” These objects were regarded with some ambivalence by early modern commentators. Arthur Jackson, in his Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament (London, 1646), considers the possibility “that the sending of such absurd and ridiculous gifts with the Ark, as emerods and mice, was suggested by Sathan to their diviners in contempt of God,” and remarks on “what a shame must it needs be to the Philistines to send to the Israelites the images of their secret parts, thus tortured with an ignominious disease” (p. 238). Of particular interest in relation to Pulter’s characterization of these objects as “Telesma” in line 27 is John Chetwynd’s Anthologia historica (London, 1674), which lists the biblical “Images of Emrods and Mice” that “were made by the Astrologers directions and were Telesmatical signes” alongside accounts of other “Telesmatical practices” used to ward off scorpions, crocodiles, flies, serpents, and dormice (pp. 322-25).
Five such of gold the Philistines did make,
29
Or what hee did I think noe man can Say
Or what he did, I think no man can say;
Or what he did, I think no man can say;
30
But when hee came and aſked for his pay
But when he came and askéd for his pay,
But when he came and askéd for his pay,
31
The
Physical Note
“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Burger’s in their Gravitie Refuſ’d
The
Physical Note
“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
burghers in their gravity refused
The burghers in their gravity refused
32
To pay the Same, the Piper thus abuſ’d
To pay the same; the piper, thus abused,
To pay the same; the piper, thus abused,
33
did vow Reveng, they bid him doe his worst
Did vow revenge; they bid him do his worst.
Critical Note
Pulter lifts this language directly from Verstegan: “hee threatened them with revenge; they bad him do his wurst” (p. 66).
Did vow revenge; they bid him do his worst.
34
Now See how Breach of Promiſe is Accurst
Now see how breach of promise is accursed.
Critical Note
Repeating “now see” from line 20, this second direct address to the reader compounds the ostensible moral about “curséd avarice” with a new one about promise-breaking and, in doing so, asks readers to consider the relationship between the two vices.
Now see how breach of promise is accursed.
35
The ffellow Pipeing went away againe
The fellow piping went away again,
The fellow piping went away again,
36
A Hundred and Thirty Children in his Train
A hundred and thirty children in his train;
Critical Note
Pulter follows Verstegan in her account of how many children went missing. Many other early modern English versions of the story also specify the number as 130.
A hundred and thirty children in his train;
37
Into a hill hee led theſe pretty Boys
Into a hill he led these
Critical Note
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
pretty boys,
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Into a hill he led these pretty boys,
38
And thus
Physical Note
perhaps written over earlier letters
their Parents lost their hopes, and Joys,
And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys;
And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys;
39
Which with Sad Hearts they now too late deplore
Which, with sad hearts, they now too late
Gloss Note
lament; tell with grief; mourn; give up as hopeless
deplore,
Which, with sad hearts, they now too late deplore,
40
ffor they nor hee were ever heard of more
For they, nor he, were ever heard of more.
For they, nor he, were ever heard of more.
41
By theſe their grievous Suff’rings you may See
By these, their grievous suff’rings, you may see
By these, their grievous suff’rings,
Critical Note
With this third direct address to the reader (compare lines 20 and 34), and after introducing at least two other possible morals (i.e. God’s use of base creatures to mete out punishment; the evils of avarice), the poem ends by repeating the moral stated in line 34.
you may see
42
that breach of Promiſe puniſhd Sure will bee
That breach of promise punished sure will be.
That breach of promise punished sure will be.
43
Then keep your word for better or for worſ
Then keep your word, for better or for worse,
Then keep your word, for better or for worse,
44
Lest with theſe Saxons you pertake like Curſ
Lest with these
Gloss Note
inhabitants of Saxony, here referring to the people of Hamelin in Lower Saxony
Saxons you partake like curse.
Lest with these Saxons you partake
Critical Note
Given Verstegan’s heavy investment in recovering England’s Saxon identity, it is ironic that Pulter ends her poem warning English readers not to “partake like curse” with their Saxon cousins. For Verstegan and England’s Saxon cultural identity, see Richard W. Clement, “Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent,” Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 19-36.
like curse.
X (Close panel) All 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.
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

For this edition I have chosen to modernize spelling for accessibility, with two exceptions: for the modern place-name “Hamelin” I have retained the manuscript’s “Hamelle” (line 13) as the form that appeared most commonly in printed sources from the seventeenth century, and for “talisman” I have opted for the manuscript’s “Telesma” (line 27) out of respect for a possible irony the more etymologically sensitive spelling of that word might activate. In general, I have added some light punctuation for clarity but have refrained from doing so in instances where such clarity would come at the cost of obscuring an interesting ambiguity (as in the case of line 6). My notes and headnote are informed by the same errant principle I take to be driving the poem’s own – often ironic – relationship to its emblematic subject, highlighting the poem’s shifting moralizing framework by drawing particular attention to repeated and contradictory addresses to the reader, grammatical ambiguities, and features of the material text that threaten (or promise) to lead readers astray. Additionally, I have attempted to place Emblem 17 in the context of other versions of the Pied Piper story in order to show Pulter’s particular engagement with a popular legend just at the moment when it was beginning to emerge into the popular English consciousness through printed sources.
I should say something about an important omission from this edition: to my surprise, given my own scholarly interest in early modern musical discourses, I found I had nothing much to say about the piper’s Orphic powers over the rats and the children in Pulter’s telling. I attribute this omission to the way the poem seems deliberately to avoid the possibility of magical music when it seeks alternative explanations for how the piper performed his feat in lines 24-29. However, readers who are interested in considering the poem in this light (perhaps for a future Amplified Edition) might consult the work of Linda Phyllis Austern, Penelope Gouk, Gary Tomlinson, and others who discuss early modern magical and natural philosophical theories of music’s power over human and animal realms.
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

What begins as a poem heralding God’s ability to use animals to punish errant humans dramatically changes into a fable in which animal control is just a commercial venture gone bad. This poem briefly surveys a host of divine plagues, powered by the weapons of mass destruction that are God’s creatures: rabbits, moles, frogs, snakes, insects (even lice!), as well as that most notorious plague beast, the rat—which leads to a retelling of the still-familiar story of the pied piper of Hamelin kidnapping an entire town’s children when the town failed to pay him for clearing the rats. No mere horror story about stranger danger, as it has become for children and parents both today, this is Pulter’s unexpected morality tale about the problems of avarice and the importance of keeping one’s word. Grief for lost children, which Pulter represents so poignantly and personally elsewhere in her poems, is here just punishment for dishonorable action.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

Emblem 17 tells the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or Hamelle, as Hester Pulter and her contemporaries tended to say), in which a mysterious stranger lures away the town’s children in order to punish the townspeople for greedily withholding the payment they owe him for ridding the town of rats. In connecting the natural world – specifically vermin – with cosmic or divine justice, the poem recalls several other of Pulter’s emblem poems in which even the lowliest and most contemptible parts of Creation are given a providential purpose. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], for example, narrates how the Bishop of Mainz was consumed by rats as punishment for burning a group of starving peasants during a grain shortage, and gives numerous examples of how “each despiséd reptile or insect / He [i.e. God] can empower, when we his laws neglect.” Along similar lines, Emblem 17 opens with a series of generalization about how God “will not neglect,” or scorn, to use even “reptile[s] or insect[s] / Or basest animal[s]” to inflict total destruction on a disobedient people, and the examples that follow – all taken from a section of Pliny’s Natural History dealing with the “much hurt and dammage [that] hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account” – suggest that we are in for a lecture on how God uses base means to humble the proud.
Gloss Note
C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), p. 212.
1
However, the poem does not make good on its initial promise. Unlike the “contemptible creatures” that bring proud civilizations and tyrannical rulers to their knees, the rats of Hamelle actually end up having nothing to do with divine punishment – or, if they do, the initial sin that incurred such punishment is never identified. The “vermin” are simply introduced as a “rout” afflicting the town, so that, like the townspeople, readers might well “stand in doubt” as to whether the infestation arose from supernatural or merely natural causes. Instead of providing a moral about God’s punishment through base means, the poem abruptly shifts in line 20 with the announcement of a new ostensible moral, for which nothing in the poem so far has prepared us: “The fruits of curséd avarice now see.” Ironically, within this new moralizing frame, the rats serve not as the punishment for sin but, rather, its occasion, when the stingy townspeople notoriously rip off the piper after he has lured the pests to their death in the river Weser. But even this new moral does not fully survive until the end of the poem. Omitting a detail from her source (Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1605]), in which the townspeople’s miserliness is foregrounded when they attempt to offer the piper “far less then hee lookt for,” the poem ends with yet another explicitly moralizing pronouncement – “Now see how breach of promise is accursed” – shifting the focus once again, this time away from the specific vice of avarice and toward the more general sin of bad faith.
Gloss Note
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), p. 85.
2 Having been lured into what initially seemed to be a story about divinely ordained plagues of vermin only to find a quite different moral lesson about avarice and then promise-breaking, readers might end up feeling faintly defrauded of their initial investment in the poem.
As it turns out, the shifting moral frames in Emblem 17 reflect an apparent uncertainty among other seventeenth-century tellers of the tale as to its significance. The version published in James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645), which is framed by an account of “som odd fellows” who “went skulking up and down London-streets, and with Figs and Reasons [i.e. raisins] allur’d little children, and so pourloy’d them away from their parents,” probably comes the closest to the story’s modern associations with literal stranger danger (along with its homophobic undertones).
Gloss Note
James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae (London, 1645), p. 71. For the modern association between child kidnapping and homophobia, see Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 1. Robert Dixon’s Canidia, or, The witches (London, 1683) notably associates the Pied Piper with sexual deviance, listing the “Roguish Clown” who “lo[st] all the Boys in Hammel Town” alongside “Eels and Frogs” that “have no sex” and “Others” who “from between their Legs did speak, / And act many a Haggish feat” (p. 60).
3 Interestingly, Howell reprints a somewhat different version of the story in A German Diet (1653), where it appears in the context of an anti-German oration by one “John Gulielm of Retwitz” and identifies the piper with “the devill” himself.
Gloss Note
James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), pp. 34-35.
4 Similarly, Robert Burton mentions the Hamelle disappearance in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”
Gloss Note
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), p. 68.
5 The piper’s association with diabolical powers pervades a number of seventeenth-century versions. An anonymous anti-Ranter pamphlet, The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (1653), writes the piper out of the story altogether, the children simply “being carried away by the Devil in a flame of fire” after the townspeople, “holding the same Tenents with the Ranters, Shakers, &c. Of our times,” set them upon a hill in a deliberate attempt “to dare and defie the Lord of all spirits.”
Gloss Note
The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (London, 1653), pp. 3-4.
6 While such retellings present the occurrence as a literal example of Satan’s power on earth, Thomas Hodges’s The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (1647) allegorizes the tale in terms of the “pyde piper Haeresie” that might lead “those that are near and deare unto you, you know not whither.”
Gloss Note
Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (London, 1647), pp. 36-37.
7 Striking in all of these accounts is their attribution of the children’s disappearance to the piper’s (or devil’s) own sinister nature, rather than presenting it as retribution for the wrong the townspeople commit by not paying him. Indeed, John Gaule’s Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (1652) turns the story into a cautionary tale about “the danger, misery, and ruine of such as have affectedly favoured, or preferred, and superstitiously credited, or consulted Magicall and Astrologicall predictors.”
Gloss Note
John Gaule, Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (London, 1652), pp. 364, 366.
8 If the townspeople’s sin in Pulter’s poem is their “breach of promise” to the piper, in Gaule’s account it is their foolish decision to employ such a “Magicall” charmer in the first place.
The polysemous nature of the Pied Piper story helps to account for its presence in some surprising places, such as William Ramesey’s discourse on parasitic worms, Helminthologia (1668), which explicitly cites Verstegan’s account as an example of the “wonderful permission of GOD to the Rage of the Devil,” who, like the vermicular pest Ramesey discusses, “destroys life and all, where he can.”
Gloss Note
William Ramesey, Helminthologia (London, 1668), p. 66.
9 Verstegan himself presents the Hamelle story not with any kind of moralizing import but, unexpectedly, as part of his discussion of the Saxon diaspora – specifically, as a fanciful explanation (which he ends up dismissing) for why “among the Saxons in Transilvnia” there are some “that have lyke surnames unto divers of the burgers of Hamel.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 87.
10 Appropriately enough, given its theme, Verstegan introduces the story as something that has lured him away from his main topic, “one digression [having] drawn on another.”
Gloss Note
Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 85.
11 It is with a similar apology that the tale is prefaced in another unlikely source, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (1615), whose author, George Hakewell, “confess[es]” that he has included it “not so much for the fitnesse, as the strangeness of the story.”
Gloss Note
George Hakewell, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (London, 1615), p. 61.
12 Relieved of the imperative to “fit” the story to any particular end (moralizing, geographical, mag-astro-mantical, or otherwise), perhaps the least surprising context in which the Pied Piper appears in the seventeenth century is in collections of miraculous occurrences such as The Wonders of the Little World (1673) or Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (1683), which simply introduce the event as a “strange Accident.”
Gloss Note
Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (London, 1683), p. 188.
13
Read in the context of these various (and variously explicated) versions, Pulter’s transformation of the Pied Piper legend into an emblem with shifting significances also transforms the genre itself from one of static exposition of a calcified moral into a dynamic meditation on the complex relationships between divine and human justice, avarice and fair trade, labor and exploitation, promise and betrayal, as well as the human and the non-human. Working backwards from what may seem like its overly trite conclusion (“Then keep your word, for better or for worse”), the poem unravels into a promiscuous array of competing possibilities that intermingle and coalesce in unexpected ways, like the mythemes of the legend itself in its various guises. For instance, given early modern associations between avarice and sodomy, Pulter’s tale of a piper luring the “pretty boys” of the town away through the use of some kind of unmentionable means (“what he did, I think no man can say”) potentially emerges as a sublimated form of poetic justice.
Gloss Note
The piper’s queerness is emphasized in several of the early modern versions, which, in addition to emphasizing his flamboyant dress, often describe him with the epithet “odd,” as in Verstegan’s characterization of him as “an od kynd of compagnion” (p. 85). For the connection between avarice and sodomy, see, for example, John Harris, The destruction of sodome (London, 1625), p. 35: “And had couetousnesse a habitation in Sodome? and was filthy auarice a cause of her desolation? then Lord bee mercifull vnto our Land, that hath many a member in it, who out of a couetous desire, haue made a marriage with siluer, and giuen a bill of diuorce to Iesus Christ!” For a larger discussion connecting sodomy more broadly to the misuse of money, particularly through usury and counterfeiting, see Will Fisher, “Queer Money” ELH 66 (1999): 1-23.
14 The poem’s odd (and oddly unnecessary) citation of 1 Samuel 6 as a possible explanation for “how ‘twas done” (along with the five golden mice the Philistines offered Jehovah to mitigate their rodent infestation, they also presented five golden “emerods” to alleviate the divine smiting that was afflicting them “in their secret parts”) probably raises more questions than it answers.
Gloss Note
Even more suggestively, the Latin Vulgate describes the Philistines’ offering as “quinque anos aureos” (“five golden anuses”). For the premodern interpretation of the plagues of 1 Samuel 5-6 specifically in relation to both avarice and “sodomitirie,” see Robert Mills, “Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisées” Speculum 87 (2012): 413-468.
15
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between the rats and divine punishment in Emblem 17 suggests a type of pest that refuses to be controlled either by literal extermination or by providentialist narratives. As Lucinda Cole points out, “given their endless reproducibility and the unpredictable nature of their swarming motion,” rats, mice, and other vermin represented in early modern texts “may actually threaten the ideas of an orderly universe and the regeneration of Nature symbolized by Noah’s Ark,” often resisting neat ontological (and even taxonomic) categorization.
Gloss Note
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 17.
16 Thus, in seventeenth-century depictions of the biblical plagues of Egypt, for example, it is unclear whether “lice, frogs, and swarming things [are] to be read allegorically or literally” and, indeed, whether the story is “about political sovereignty or natural populations.”
Gloss Note
Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 19.
17 Similarly, behind Pulter’s moralizing representation of rats in Emblem 17 may lurk concerns about the real historical presence of rodents in seventeenth-century England (and a future Amplified Edition might fruitfully connect the poem to such on-the-ground conditions).
Ultimately, the poem’s shifting moral framework can have the effect of making Emblem 17 feel like two poems: one about Old-Testament-style divine retribution involving plagues of locusts, frogs, serpents – and, of course, rats – and the other about the all-too-human world of greed, bad faith, and revenge, in which such pests are simply the given facts of life, part of the meaningless chaos of existence. In fact, this doubleness is arguably reflected in a scribal error in Pulter’s manuscript: a neatly-written “18” at the top of folio 102, after the page-break, indicates what its writer evidently mistook for the beginning of a new poem: Emblem 18. Realizing her mistake, the scribe crossed it out; however, by then it was too late: having already continued numbering the next poem (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) as number 19, making the correction would necessarily mean leaving out a number from the total sequence. Like the missing children of Hamelle, Emblem 18 ends up being an absent presence in Pulter’s manuscript: itself an emblem, perhaps, for the material vicissitudes of textual production and circulation that strain against the text’s own pursuit of a world whose meanings are legible in the form of emblems – a world (“Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream”) where betrayal, destruction, and loss are more easily attributable to divine ordination, rather than to the unaccountable and stupid realm of the “strange Accident.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

to subject to trial
Elemental Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

marked out, designated; appointed, assigned, destined
Amplified Edition
Line number 2

 Critical note

The tortuous syntax of the opening lines encourages misreading. Immediately following the prepositional phrase “to mercy,” the infinitive phrases “to punish” and “to try” suggest a parallel between God’s mercy and the punishments and trials he metes out on his people. The humble close-parenthesis is the only thing that separates a God “who is to mercy most inclined” from a God who is “most inclined) / To punish or to try.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

that is, God will not neglect these creatures
Amplified Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

That is, God will not scorn to use these base creatures as instruments of punishment. See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], lines 25-26: “For each despiséd reptile or insect / He can empower, when we his laws neglect.” An account of the Bishop of Mainz and his unfortunate encounter with rats appears immediately before a retelling of the Pied Piper story in James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), p. 34.
Amplified Edition
Line number 5

 Critical note

The antecedent of “their” is “people” (3), but it could easily be mistaken for “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4), suggesting perhaps a conflation between the human objects and the non-human instruments of punishment. This conflation also foreshadows the way in which humans and animals turn out to be equally susceptible to the alluring sound of the piper’s pipe later in the poem.
Elemental Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

The sense of the poem’s opening sentence is that, without a divine “countermand” (an order revoking God’s previous command), the creatures he has designated as plagues upon a given people will destroy everything in their path.
Amplified Edition
Line number 6

 Critical note

A lot depends on the placement of the implied “that” completing the “so” of line 5. If it follows “annoy,” then the sense is that the vermin will “all destroy” unless God issues a “countermand” (leaving open the possibility that God could perhaps relent). On the other hand, placing the implied “that” after “countermand” makes God’s decree seem more absolute and unchanging: in this reading, “without a countermand” functions less as a conditional specifying the circumstances (however unlikely) under which the destruction would be less than total, and more as a categorical denial that such a retraction would ever occur: the pests will simply and ruthlessly “so annoy / Without a countermand,” that “they’ll all destroy.” The lack of punctuation in Pulter’s manuscript effectively confronts readers with the same hedging uncertainty that led the townspeople of Hamelle to renege on their payment: a God – or a Piper – who is inclined more to mercy than to punishment and who thus does not always follow through with his threats is also one whose bluff might more safely be called (or so the townspeople think, to their peril).
Amplified Edition
Line number 6

 Critical note

This time, the third-person-plural pronoun takes “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal” (3-4) as its antecedent, but, again, the syntax (as well as the fact that “each” is singular) encourages a misreading that attaches the pronoun to “people” (3), requiring readers to take special care to distinguish between man and beast.
Elemental Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

In this and the next five lines, Pulter summarizes Pliny’s Natural History where he writes (in Book 8, Chapter 29) of “what cities and nations have been utterly destroyed by little beasts.” After noting that “much hurt and damage hath been known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” Pliny mentions many of the same creatures and locales as Pulter does. (C. Plinius Secundus The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland [1601]: pp. 192-234, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny8.html).
Elemental Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

This phrase is completed in the next line: “moles made Thessaly … a desert lie.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 7

 Critical note

The section of Pliny’s Natural History from which Pulter draws the examples in lines 7-11 focuses on how “much hurt and dammage hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account,” recalling the poem’s opening claim about how God “each reptile or insect / Or basest animal will not neglect” in his punishment of disobedient people (C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World, Trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1601], p. 212).
Elemental Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

a city near Sparta in ancient Peloponnesia
Amplified Edition
Line number 10

 Gloss note

See The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], line 28: “Sulla and Herod by a louse did die.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 10

 Critical note

The reversal of the order of the rhyming words “annoy”/“destroy” from lines 5-6 sits in ironic counterpoint to the notion of a destruction that is supposed to occur “without a countermand” (6).
Elemental Edition
Line number 11

 Gloss note

a Greek island
Elemental Edition
Line number 12

 Gloss note

lament, mourn, tell with grief
Amplified Edition
Line number 12

 Critical note

The relegation of “sins” to parentheses mirrors the people’s spiritually negligent failure to “deplore” their sins as the just cause of their divinely ordained “sufferings.”
Transcription
Line number 13

 Physical note

final “l” appears written over “e”
Elemental Edition
Line number 13

 Gloss note

a market town in Lower Saxony, Germany
Elemental Edition
Line number 13

 Gloss note

to continue in a state of doubt, or, more likely here, “doubt” in the sense of apprehension or dread
Amplified Edition
Line number 13

 Critical note

The poem never specifies what the citizens of Hamelle did to invite the plague of rats in the first place; oddly, we don’t know what sin the vermin are meant to punish.
Amplified Edition
Line number 13

 Gloss note

A town in Lower Saxony, Germany, more commonly known from the Pied Piper legend as Hamelin.
Elemental Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

Pulter refers to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the town was infested with a rat plague (or “rout”: a crowd or pack, especially a noisy, disordered, or violent one).
Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

such as
Amplified Edition
Line number 15

 Physical note

The words “waies, as” were added to the line with a caret.
Amplified Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

For some of the methods the townspeople might have tried, see Leonard Mascall, A booke of engines and traps to take polcats, buzardes, rattes, mice and all other kindes of vermine and beasts whatsoever, most profitable for all warriners, and such as delight in this kinde of sport and pastime (London, 1590).
Amplified Edition
Line number 17

 Critical note

The poem itself never refers to the piper as “Pied,” although the word does appear in a marginal note referring readers to “the story of this Pied Piper” in Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605). (The page number in the note [85] indicates that Pulter was using one of the first three editions of the book: 1605, 1628, or 1634.) Verstegan explains how the piper earned his popular epithet “for the fantastical cote which hee wore beeing wrought with sundry colours,” another common feature in various tellings of the story that is left out of Pulter’s poem (p. 85).
Elemental Edition
Line number 19

 Physical note

In the manuscript’s left margin, just below this poetic summary of the tale, is a reference to her source “See the story of this pied piper at large in Verstegan, folio 85”; see A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), 85.
Amplified Edition
Line number 19

 Critical note

The (perhaps unintentionally) ungrammatical singular form, as it appears in the manuscript, may indicate that Pulter is thinking of the rats as a single mass, as in the “rout” of line 14.
Transcription
Line number 20

 Physical note

in left margin: “See the Story / of this Pied Piper/ at Larg in Verstegan / ffolio 85”
Amplified Edition
Line number 20

 Critical note

This first direct address to the reader moralizes the tale in terms of the townspeople’s greed in withholding payment from the piper.
Transcription
Line number 21

 Physical note

“W” appears written over “w”
Elemental Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

a river in Germany
Amplified Edition
Line number 23

 Physical note

This first line after a page break in the middle of the poem is preceded by a marginal “18” that has been crossed out, indicating that its writer mistook this line as the beginning of a new poem. Since the person numbering the poems had continued with 19 for the next poem in the sequence (The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84]) before realizing the mistake, there is no Emblem 18.
Elemental Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

think it
Transcription
Line number 26

 Physical note

“s” written over former letter with ascender, possibly “t”
Elemental Edition
Line number 27

 Gloss note

charm
Amplified Edition
Line number 27

 Critical note

An object meant to ward off various evils, including pests. Cognate with “talisman,” Pulter’s more unusual spelling reflects the word’s Greek root from τέλεσμα, “payment,” which often appears in the context of religious rites in the sense of “propitiation,” as of a deity – a kind of supernatural “protection money.” This sense of the word is especially ironic given the townspeople’s refusal to pay the piper for ridding the town of rats. Although the accent is on the first syllable in the Greek, Pulter appears to be scanning the word with an accented second syllable. She uses a similar spelling in The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46) [Poem 111], where the Bishop of Mainz is unsuccessful in his attempt to ward off a rodent swarm either by magical or more this-worldly means: “by Tel’sma or Gun” (line 16). In suggesting that some means other than the sound of the piper’s instrument were responsible for luring away the rats and the children, Pulter may be drawing on Nathaniel Ingeno’s prose romance Bentivoglio and Urania (London, 1660), which asks, “Who knows but the Piper of Halberstade was of this Profession [i.e. a magician], and had some Talismans in his Pocket when he drove the Rats into the River and the Boys into the Hill?” (p. 158).
Elemental Edition
Line number 28

 Gloss note

God punishes the Philistines with destruction and hemorrhoids for taking the Ark of Covenant; to be relieved of their sufferings, the Philistines are told to present to God five golden emerods and five golden mice.
Amplified Edition
Line number 28

 Critical note

In 1 Samuel 5-6, the Philistines of Ashdod are visited with a plague of mice and a plague of “emerods [hemorrhoids, tumors, or boils] in their secret parts” after capturing the Ark of the Covenant. Following the counsel of their priests and diviners, the Philistines return the Ark along with a “trespass offering” of “five golden emerods and five golden mice.” These objects were regarded with some ambivalence by early modern commentators. Arthur Jackson, in his Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament (London, 1646), considers the possibility “that the sending of such absurd and ridiculous gifts with the Ark, as emerods and mice, was suggested by Sathan to their diviners in contempt of God,” and remarks on “what a shame must it needs be to the Philistines to send to the Israelites the images of their secret parts, thus tortured with an ignominious disease” (p. 238). Of particular interest in relation to Pulter’s characterization of these objects as “Telesma” in line 27 is John Chetwynd’s Anthologia historica (London, 1674), which lists the biblical “Images of Emrods and Mice” that “were made by the Astrologers directions and were Telesmatical signes” alongside accounts of other “Telesmatical practices” used to ward off scorpions, crocodiles, flies, serpents, and dormice (pp. 322-25).
Transcription
Line number 31

 Physical note

“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Elemental Edition
Line number 31

 Physical note

“’s” in darker ink; “r” could be another “s”
Amplified Edition
Line number 33

 Critical note

Pulter lifts this language directly from Verstegan: “hee threatened them with revenge; they bad him do his wurst” (p. 66).
Amplified Edition
Line number 34

 Critical note

Repeating “now see” from line 20, this second direct address to the reader compounds the ostensible moral about “curséd avarice” with a new one about promise-breaking and, in doing so, asks readers to consider the relationship between the two vices.
Amplified Edition
Line number 36

 Critical note

Pulter follows Verstegan in her account of how many children went missing. Many other early modern English versions of the story also specify the number as 130.
Elemental Edition
Line number 37

 Critical note

Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Amplified Edition
Line number 37
Several early modern English sources for the Pied Piper story, including Verstegan’s, say that it was specifically the town’s boys that the piper lured away, whereas others do not specify the gender of the children. Interestingly, Peter Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos (London, 1625) explicitly draws his account from “a story recited by Verstegan,” but instead of “a number of boyes,” it is “all the children male and female of the Towne” who follow the piper in his account (p. 364).
Transcription
Line number 38

 Physical note

perhaps written over earlier letters
Elemental Edition
Line number 39

 Gloss note

lament; tell with grief; mourn; give up as hopeless
Amplified Edition
Line number 41

 Critical note

With this third direct address to the reader (compare lines 20 and 34), and after introducing at least two other possible morals (i.e. God’s use of base creatures to mete out punishment; the evils of avarice), the poem ends by repeating the moral stated in line 34.
Elemental Edition
Line number 44

 Gloss note

inhabitants of Saxony, here referring to the people of Hamelin in Lower Saxony
Amplified Edition
Line number 44

 Critical note

Given Verstegan’s heavy investment in recovering England’s Saxon identity, it is ironic that Pulter ends her poem warning English readers not to “partake like curse” with their Saxon cousins. For Verstegan and England’s Saxon cultural identity, see Richard W. Clement, “Richard Verstegan’s Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent,” Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 19-36.
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