Pulter, Hester

Hester Pulter was a seventeenth-century poet and romance writer who used her writing to engage with a wide range of contemporary political, theological, and scientific ideas. As a staunch Royalist during the English Civil Wars, Pulter wrote poems condemning the violence committed against the monarchy. As a Christian woman and mother, she reflected on mortality in poetic elegies about her children’s deaths. As a keen scientific thinker, she used observations about the natural world to understand the implications of political and social events. Pulter’s manuscript, discovered in 1996, contains a section of occasional and devotional poems, the earliest known series of emblem poems by an English woman writer, and an unfinished prose romance titled The Unfortunate Florinda. In each section of the manuscript, Pulter’s multiple identities intertwine and the result is a deeply reflective, philosophical text laced with political and social commentary.