Poems, emblems, and The unfortunate Florinda

Scholars who study early modern women’s writing have been eager for a full-text edition of the works of Hester Pulter since her manuscript was discovered in the mid-1990s.

Now that Alice Eardley has brought together all of Pulter’s writing—poetry, emblems, and a prose romance—in a modern-spelling edition, students and academics will be able to access a remarkable body of work.

The introduction does a brilliant job of situating Pulter in various milieux (the Civil War, religion, science) and in assessing the genres in which she worked.

Eardley’s edition is clear and comprehensive enough to be useful to a wide audience of non-specialists, but its learned glosses are also illuminating for more experienced readers of early modern texts.