The literary manuscript of Lady Hester Pulter (ca. 1607-1678), containing one hundred and twenty poems and a prose romance, was uncovered by Mark Robson in the Leeds University Brotherton Library in 1996. The collection, composed between 1640 and 1670, is one of the most substantial, and varied, surviving bodies of literature produced by an early modern Englishwoman. Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s complete works will be published as part of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, in 2014, making this fascinating collection widely available in full for the very first time.
Intended to accompany the printed edition of Pulter’s works, Lady Hester Pulter: A Digital Companion features a collection of items that could not be accommodated within the printed edition, including Clare Doyle’s documentary about her life and times and a collection of the visual images to which she refers either directly or indirectly in her poetry and prose, or that are relevant to her text in other ways. Pulter’s manuscript does not include pictures, but her writing often evokes people, animals, plants, objects, or places with which she was familiar or that would have been well known to contemporary readers well versed in the illustrated material on which she so often draws. We will be regularly updating the site with Pulter-related news and with short blog pieces about her work, produced by many of the students and scholars that have taken an interest in Pulter during the course of the last decade.
If you have suggestions for material you would like to see displayed here, would like to get involved, or have any other questions or comments, please contact Alice Eardley