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The emblem book genre has long been dismissed as unworthy of serious critical study. But the recently discovered mid-seventeenth century manuscript of Hester Pulter, and the generic existential crisis figured therein, imply otherwise. A vehement royalist, Pulter suggests that the events of the English civil wars have broken established emblem form by defying analogy in their horror; according to her, emblems cannot continue as they were after the deposition and regicide of Charles I. Yet, rather than succumbing along with the monarchy, Pulter's emblems formally reimagine emblem structure, adopting a new devotionalism at odds with conventional emblem form. Thus, even while Pulter's poems register political crisis, they prepare for a political order beyond that of the Commonwealth and demonstrate emblems' ability to comment upon their own contemporary world.

This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the five most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. It presents these poems in modern-spelling, clear-text versions for classroom use, and for ready comparison to mainstream editions of male poets’ work. The anthology reveals the diversity of women’s poetry in the mid-seventeenth century, across political affiliations and forms of publication. Notes on the poems and an introduction explain the contexts of Civil War, religious conflict, and scientific and literary development. The anthology enables a more comprehensive understanding of seventeenth-century women’s poetic culture, both in its own right and in relation to prominent male poets such as Marvell, Milton and Dryden.

In the mid-1990s a manuscript was discovered containing the poetry and prose of a previously unknown female author, Lady Hester Pulter. The poems, likely written during the 1640s-'50s, demonstrate Pulter's wide reading and her near-fanatical Royalism. The prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, however, displays a very different politics. Basing her fiction on the legends surrounding the Muslim conquest of Spain, I argue that Pulter adjusts her sources to present an alternative, Augustinian view of rape, one that blames the rapist, not the victim. The monarchs in Pulter's fiction use absolutist rhetoric to justify rape, and, contra her earlier poetic denunciations of Charles I's execution, rape now justifies regicide. I suggest that the sexual corruption of Charles II's court prompted Pulter to create a romance with distinctly republican overtones in which chastity is the highest value, sexual corruption the lowest vice, and rulers who commit such crimes forfeit both their right to rule and their right to live.

This chapter explores Hester Pulter's poem \"The Complaint of Thames.\" The river laments the imprisonment of Charles I by the Parliamentarians in 1647; she expresses political rage, seeing herself as having lost global status with the downfall of the English King. The river Thames calls on the ancient sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis to cleanse England of the scourge of the Parliamentarians by drowning them in estuarial floodwaters. But the river's descriptions of a violent Caroline court and her call for community with global river cultures reframes the sea monsters, linking environmental and political resistance. Pulter deploys but also sometimes upends racist, sexist, and ableist tropes about dark environments and monsters; she posits dissolution and revolution-submersion in estuarial waters-as central theological, poetic, and political tenets.

The recovery and study of manuscript texts remains an important endeavor for those interested in early modern women writer, as much as it is an important part of recovering artifacts of literary history. These artifacts increase the amount of material on which we base our conclusions, but one could argue that such texts offer more than simply evidence of literary production. Unfortunately, the tendency in the new field of the history of the book to define “book” as being a printed object threatens once again to marginalize women's participation in literary culture in the same way that previous models of literary history based on “great man” or spirit of the age did in previous generations. Using as a case study the newly recovered manuscript volume by Hester Pulter (1595/96–1678), this essay concludes by examining some premises about early modern women's participation in various aspects of literary culture as being “exceptional,” or anomalous, or whether instead we are still in the process of recovering the materials that would make such conclusions warranted.

The Unfortunate Florinda weaves together two distinct, yet complementary narrative threads: one (the primary, titular plot) features the character of Florinda, and retells the myth of La Cava. This centuries-old myth relates King Rodrigo's rape of the daughter of a Spanish noble, an act that allegedly precipitated the eighth-century Muslim invasion of Spain. Layered onto this plot are allusions to the myth of Lucretia and, as noted, the attempted suicide of Paulina. The second major plot concerns Fidelia, a native of \"Barbary,\" who appears to be Pulter's own creation.18 In a lengthy retrospective narration to the Spanish court, Fidelia explains how she fell in love with Amandus, a captive Neapolitan prince, who converted her to Christianity. After being separated, the lovers reunite at Roderigo's court, where they marry; Amandus subsequently assumes his rightful place as king of Naples and France. Disparate as these plots may seem, they unite The Unfortunate Florinda in a common argument for individual agency's ascendancy over a determinative Fortune or Providence.

Recent scholarly emphasis on the public nature of manuscript circulation has highlighted the important contributions women made to a wide range of literary, intellectual, and social discourses. Against this backdrop, BC MS Lt q 32, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (compiled ca. 1660) poses something of a problem. During Hester Pulter’s lifetime, it did not circulate beyond her immediate family. After her death, it remained within the household; it was annotated by an eighteenth-century reader but never printed. The anomalous history of BCMS Lt q 32 makes it a useful test case of our ideas of women’s authorship and manuscript authorship in general. It reveals how histories of publication affect our understanding of women writers and how patterns of preservation shape our approach to literary studies.

Several recent commentators have called for complete rejection of editorial annotation. Using Hester Pulter's atomic poetry as a case study, this article argues instead for its importance and highlights the need for a transparent methodology sensitive to broader developments in literary research. This means taking into account factors including conceptions of the author and the generic and formal characteristics of the text in question. This approach is facilitated by recent developments in digital technology, which expanded the range of material we are able to bring to bear on the work being annotated.

This essay takes the case of the relatively newly discovered manuscript poetry of Hester Pulter as a means of examining methodological questions about how useful “female authorship” is as a rubric of analysis for literary scholars. In what ways has the ascription of work to women writers (such as Whitney, Lanyer, and Philips) created a fruitful lens for interpreting poetry and expanding the canon? And how has scholarship revealed blind spots in this method (including critiques of the author as guarantor of meaning, the discovery of often anonymous manuscript writing, the turn to material textualities not traditionally authored, and the exploration of the instabilities of gender)? As we find ways of newly situating Pulter's verse, I argue, it is important that we understand her sustained inquiry into topics such as the elemental composition of matter in ways that do not restrict her poems to modern assumptions about authorship or gender.

\"Monuments of Truth\" focuses on Englishwomen's texts from the 1650s to 1670s that attempt to reframe history and control access to the recent past. Turmoil marks the years covered by this project, and throughout this period the authors I consider and the politically-defined communities to which they belong experience multiple turns of fortune's wheel. While at some point all deal with injustice, injury, and instability that originates in war, they experience this most urgently at different times depending on their political allegiances. Thus the first two chapters of my dissertation consider royalist commemoration from the Commonwealth years, in the forms of autobiography and recipe book, that helped construct and sustain a community in exile and defeat prior to the return of the Stuart monarchy. The latter half of the dissertation turns to the work of the republican Lucy Hutchinson, who struggles to come to terms with the Restoration as a source of personal and political grief. Both sections trace the meanings about war that individual authors make for themselves and express in their own stories, but in ways that link them up with and make them available for shared commemorative efforts, including publication and the use of particular keywords or vocabularies of metaphor. Throughout the dissertation, I show that writers from across the spectrum of religious and political affiliation and working in diverse genres nevertheless turn to languages of the domestic in order to collectivize their individual memories of the wars. This project contributes to growing research in several areas: the politicization of domesticity in the seventeenth century, women's war writing, and the relationship between memory and history in accounts of the English Civil Wars.