Resources

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

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

Pulter’s work has recently come to the attention of popular as well as scholarly writers, and has begun to be featured in podcasts, blogs, radio programs, and other public-facing, non-traditional academic genres and publications. These materials are assembled below in the category Popular Pulter.

Instructors are also incorporating Pulter’s work into their course outlines and assignments; examples and models are featured in below in the section on Teaching Materials.

Editions of selections from Pulter’s verse began to appear in printed anthologies as early as 2001, but an edition of her work as a whole did not appear in print until 2014, with Alice Eardley’s edition of her complete poetry and prose, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. For her 2008 dissertation, Eardley produced the first complete edition of the emblems. Eardley has also contributed substantially to the development of scholarship on Pulter in various articles as well as in the extensive introduction to her edition. Another edition of the complete verse, complemented by an in-depth introduction, may be found in Stefan Graham Christian’s 2012 dissertation. The University of Leeds has made the manuscript publicly accessible via high-resolution images. Selections and collections of Pulter’s work are featured below in the Editions category.

The following list of publications will be updated periodically. We seek to provide a complete inventory of items that directly and substantially respond to her work. We welcome suggestions for making the list as comprehensive as possible.

Scholarship

• Archer, Jayne. “‘A Perfect Circle?’: Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter.” Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 160, 1-14.
• Blake, Liza. “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 71-98.
• Brady, Andrea. “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War.” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (January 2006): 9-30.
• Britland, Karen. “Conspiring with ‘Friends’: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green.” The Review of English Studies 69, no. 292 (November 2018): 832-54.
• Britland, Karen. “The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter’s Poem, ‘Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646.’” Women’s Writing 28, no. 3 (August 2021): 1-20.
• Burke, Victoria E. “Gendering the Emblem: Hester Pulter’s Formal Experimentation.” In Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, 92-109. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
• Burke, Victoria E. “Playing Football with the Stars: Hester Pulter Rethinks the Metaphysical Astronomy Poem.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 169-91.
• Chalmers, Hero. “‘Romancy-Ladies’: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Writing by Women.” In Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature, edited by Goran Stanivukovic, 299-316. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017.
• Chedgzoy, Kate. “‘Shedding Teares for England’s Loss’: Women’s Writing and the Memory of War.” In Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700, 144-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Clarke, Danielle. “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts.” Text 15 (2003): 187-209.
• Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 159, 1-3.
• Clarke, Elizabeth. “Women in Church and in Devotional Spaces.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers, 110–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Connolly, Ruth. “Hester Pulter’s Childbirth Poetics.” Women’s Writing 26, no. 3 (2019): 282-303.
• Connolly, Ruth. “The People in Royalist Women’s Writing.” In Words at War: The Contested Language of the English Civil War. Edited by Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, 208–220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Coolahan, Marie-Louise. “New Technologies of Research and Digital Interpretation for Early Modern Irish Studies.” Irish University Review 50, no. 1 (May 2020): 175-86.
• Coussens, Catherine. “‘Virtue’s Commonwealth’: Gendering the Royalist Cultural Rebellion in the English Interregnum (1649-1660).” Cankaya Universitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakultesi, Journal of Arts and Sciences 6 (2006): 19-31.
• Crawford, Julie. “Afterword.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 192-204.
• Dodds, Lara. “Hester Pulter Observes the Eclipse: Or, the Poetics of the Astronomical Event.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 144-68.
• Dodds, Lara and Michelle M. Dowd. “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing.” Criticism 62, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 169-93.
• Dolan, Frances E. “Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 16-42.
• Dolan, Frances E. “Hester Pulter’s Renaissance.” English Literary Renaissance 50, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 32-39.
• Dunn, Rachel. “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book.” The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55-73.
• Eardley, Alice. “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 52, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 117-41.
• Eardley, Alice. “‘I Haue Not Time to Point Yr Booke … Which I Desire You Yourselfe to Doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse.” In The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton, 162-178. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014.
• Eardley, Alice. “Lady Hester Pulter’s Date of Birth.” Notes and Queries, 57, no. 4 (December 2010): 498-501.
• Eardley, Alice. “‘Saturn (whose aspects soe sads my soule)’: Lady Hester Pulter’s Feminine Melancholic Genius.” In New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 2002–2006, edited by Michael Denbo, 239-54. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 2008.
• Eardley, Alice. “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History.” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 345-59.
• Ezell, Margaret J. M. “The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History.” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (May 2008): 331-55.
• Gorman, Cassandra. “The Imperfect Circle: Hester Pulter’s Alchemical Forms” In The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England, edited by Elizabeth Swann and Subha Mukherji, 55-79. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
• Gorman, Cassandra. “World-Making and World-Breaking: The Atom Poems of Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter.” In The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Poetry, 117-73. Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
• Hall, Louisa. “Forms of Release: The Escape Poetry of Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2014.
• Hall, Louisa. “Hester Pulter’s Brave New Worlds.” In Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton, edited by John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon, 171-186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Harrison, Matthew. “The Relationship of Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar in Pulter’s ‘Vain Herostratus.’” Notes and Queries 71, no. 4 (December 1, 2024): 424–27.
• Hatton, Nikolina. “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems.” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.
• Hatton, Nikolina. ““My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble”: Hester Pulter’s Apostrophe to the Soul”, Poetica 54, 3-4 (2023): 282-300.
• Henderson, Diana E. “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Seventeenth-Century England.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme. Special issue / Numéro spécial: Gendering Time and Space in Early Modern England 35, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 139-165.
• Herman, Peter. “Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape.” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 1208-46.
• Hutton, Sarah. “Hester Pulter (c. 1596–1678): A Woman Poet and the New Astronomy.” Etudes Epistemes 14 (2008): 77-87.
• Jacobs, Nicole A. “Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda and the Conventions of Sexual Violence.” APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture: Genres & Cultures 7 (July 2014).
• Jacobs, Nicole A. “Worker Bee Sacrifice.” Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, 131–58. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Kaznowska, Helena. “Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory.” In Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, edited by John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives, 276-302. New York: Routledge, 2021.
• Knight, Leah, and Wendy Wall. “Poet in the Making: How Hester Pulter Read the Digital Age.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 1-15.
• Kolkovich, Elizabeth Zeman. “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 43-70.
• Mahadin, Tamara. “‘For I No Liberty Expect to See’: Astronomical Imagery and the Definition of the Self in Hester Pulter’s Elegiac Poetry.” Master’s thesis, Mississippi State University, 2018. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (10792361).
• Nevitt, Marcus. "Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651).” The Seventeenth Century 24, no. 2 (2009): 287-304.
• Padaratz, Pricilla. “‘But oh, I could it not refine’: Lady Hester Pulter’s Textual Alchemy.” Master’s thesis, University of Ottawa, 2016.
• Rayner, Emma. “Monumental Female Melancholy in John Webster and Hester Pulter.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 60, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 67-89.
• Rinkevich, Matthew. “Remaining: John Donne’s Decaying Corpses and Hester Pulter’s Dissolving Bodies.” Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660. PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2020. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (available upon request).
• Robson, Mark. “Pulter [née Ley], Lady Hester.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, updated in 2019.
• Robson, Mark. “Reading Hester Pulter Reading.” Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 1-12.
• Robson, Mark. “Swansongs: Reading Voice in the Poetry of Lady Hester Pulter.” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9 (2000): 238-56.
• Ross, Sarah C. E. “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing.’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 99-119.
• Ross, Sarah C. E. “The Idea of a Woman: Teaching Gender and Poetic Form in Early Modern Elegy.” In Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, 232-249. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
• Ross, Sarah C. E. “‘This Kingdoms Loss’: Hester Pulter’s Elegies and Emblems.” In Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain, 135-73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Ross, Sarah. “Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter’s Civil War Lyrics.” Literature Compass 2 (December 2005): 161, 1-14.
• Ross, Sarah C. E. “Women and Religious Verse in English Manuscript Culture c1600–1688: Lady Anne Southwell, Lady Hester Pulter and Katherine Austen.” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2000. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (U140819).
• Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth. “Hester Pulter’s Well-Wrought Urns: Early Modern Women, Sonnets, and New Criticism.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 120-43.
• Smith, Katherine Jo. “Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson and Andrew Marvell: Elegy and Retreat as Female-voiced Complaint.” In “Ovidian Female-Voiced Complaint Poetry in Early Modern England,” 111-55. PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2016.
• Smulders, Claire. “‘I to Solitude Am Still Confind’: Confinement and Resistance in Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry.” Master’s thesis, Leiden University, 2014.
• Snively, Samantha. “‘We give a being to another world’: Recipes, World-making Labors, and Early Modern Science in Cavendish and Pulter.” Making Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century England: Recipes, Writing, and Experimentation. PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2019. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (available upon request).
• Sperrazza, Whitney. “Perverse Intimacies: Poetic Form and the Early Modern Female Body.” Master’s thesis, Indiana University, 2017. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (10642480).
• Torralbo Caballero, Juan de Dios. “‘Then Ibis Came’: Lady Hester Pulter’s Unpublished Manuscript in its Socio-Political and Normative Context.” Raudem: Revista De Estudios De Las Mujeres 4 (Winter 2017): 241-57.
• Wall, Wendy. “Female Authorship.” In A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates, 128-40. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018.
• Waller, Gary. “The Female Baroque in Court and Country.” In The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, 163-203. Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
• Wilcox, Helen. “‘My Hart Is Full, My Soul Dos Ouer Flow’: Women’s Devotional Poetry in Seventeenth-Century England.” Huntington Library Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2000): 447-66.
• Woodward, Marshelle. “Formalism Dispossessed: Pulter, Donne, and the Obliviated Urn.” In Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, 166-184. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
• Woodward, Marshelle. “Hester Pulter’s Dissolving Worlds.” In World-Making Renaissance Women: Rethinking Early Modern Women’s Place in Literature and Culture, edited by Pamela S. Hammons and Brandie R. Siegfried, 168-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Zhang, Rachel. “Carnival of the Animals: The Competing Constancies of Hester Pulter’s Emblems.” In Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars, 125–62. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
• Zhang, Rachel. “Crafting Un-Fortune: Rape, Romance, and Resistance in Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda.” Early Modern Women 12, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 76-98.
• Zoch, Amanda. “Rewriting the Lying-In: Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, and the Felt Mortality of Pregnancy.” Early Modern Women, 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 3-25.
• Zoch, Amanda. “‘sad mother’s fears’: Felt Mortality in Poetic Representations of Child Loss and the Lying-In.” Pregnant Self-Fashioning: The Narrative Management of Maternity in Early Modern Drama and Women’s Writing. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2018. Proquest Dissertation Publishing (available upon request).

Editions

• Bushnell, Rebecca, ed. [Selected Poems]. In The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
• Christian, Stefan Graham. “The Poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678): An Annotated Edition.” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2012. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (3545910).
• Clarke, Elizabeth. “Hester Pulter’s ‘Poems Breathed Forth by the Nobel Hadassas’: Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32.” In Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, general eds. Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright, 111-27. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
• Eardley, Alice. “An Edition of Lady Hester Pulter’s Book of ‘Emblemes’.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2008. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (U519295).
• Eardley, Alice. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. By Hester Pulter. Toronto: Iter and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014.
• Ross, Sarah. “Lady Hester Pulter, ‘The Unfortunate Florinda,’ (c. 1660).” In Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700, edited by Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, 302-4. New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Ross, Sarah. “‘Then if Your Husbands Rant it High and Game’ (1640–1665).” In Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700, edited by Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, 389-91. New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Ross, Sarah C. E. and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, eds. “Hester Pulter.” Women Poets of the Civil War, 89-148. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018.
• Stevenson, Jane and Peter Davidson, eds. “Hester Pulter, née Lee.” In Early Modern Women Poets, 1520–1700: An Anthology, 187-94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Popular Pulter

• Bourrier, Karen and Kathryn Holland. “4. Lady Hester Pulter / Alice Eardley.” Orlando: A Podcast on Women’s Writing, November 21, 2021.
• Clarke, Elizabeth, et al. “Hester Pulter’s Hertfordshire.” Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, n.d.
• Cock, Emily. “Sticking Her Nose In: Hester Pulter’s Fleshy Gift.” The Polyphony: Conversations Across the Medical Humanities, Durham University. November 20, 2019.
• Davidson, Peter. “Green Thoughts. Marvell’s Gardens: Clues to Two Curious Puzzles.” Times Literary Supplement 5044 (3 December 1999): 14-15.
• Diaz, Joanne and Abram Van Engen. “Hester Pulter, View But This Tulip.” Poetry For All. March 29, 2021.
• Eardley, Alice. “Lady Hester Pulter,” interview by Karen Bourrier and Kathryn Holland. Orlando: A Podcast on Women’s Writing. November 2021.
• Eardley, Alice, et al. Lady Hester Pulter: A Digital Companion, n.d.
• Hill, Kim. “Sarah Ross - The Pulter Project.” Saturday Morning. Radio New Zealand, November 24, 2018.
• Inzerillo, Jenny. “‘Lying-in’ & Spacin’ Out: WT’s Great Books Series Continues Tonight with Dr. Matthew Harrison.” High Plains Public Radio, June 8, 2021.
• Kolkovich, Elizabeth Zeman. “How My Postpartum Guilt Was Healed by a 17th-Century Poet.” Nursing Clio, April 5, 2022.
• Meikle, Olivia. “The Poet Hester Pulter.” What’s Her Name. May 6, 2019.
• Mulvihill, Maureen. “The Book of Hester: Editing an Uncanonical Text.” Old Books/New Editions, Rare Book Hub (website), 2016.
• Petsko, Emily. “A 17th-Century Noblewoman’s Rare Poems About War-Torn England Can Be Read Online.” Mental Floss, November 30, 2018.
• Pulter, Hester (@NobleHadassah). 2016. Twitter.
• The Pulter Project. 2021. YouTube.
• Skuse, Alanna. “This 400-Year-Old Botched Nose Job Shows How Little Our Feelings About Transplants Have Changed.” The Conversation, March 26, 2021.
• Snively, Samantha. “Hester Pulter’s 17th-Century Spaceflight of Imagination.” Lady Science, January 2, 2020.
• Snively, Samantha. “In the 1600s Hester Pulter Wondered, ‘Why Must I Forever Be Confined?’ — Now Her Poems Are Online for All to See.” The Conversation, November 21, 2018.
• Solly, Meilan. “Critically Explore 17th-Century Noblewoman’s Little-Known Poems Online.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 28, 2018.
• Taff, Dyani Johns. “Death and Revolution: Thinking with Hester Pulter.” The Sundial, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Medium, October 27, 2020.
• Tett, Gillian. “The Poet Hester Pulter: Hear Her Voice After 400 Years.” Financial Post, December 5, 2018.
• Wikipedia contributors. “Lady Hester Pulter.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, n.d.
• Woodcock, Emma. “‘A Solitary Discourse’?: The Manuscript of Hester Pulter.” Literary Manuscript Leeds, July 2, 2020.
• Yip, Hannah and Thomas Clifton. “‘Thrust from the society of many dear friends’: loneliness in early modern Britain and in the humanities today.” The Lancet 8, no. 8 (August 2021): 1-3.

Teaching Materials

• Malcolm, Aylin. “RSE #2: Close Reading, English 200: Science/Fiction, Spring 2020.” AylinMalcolm.com, March 2020.