This ongoing open-access project seeks to represent the striking verse of Hester Pulter (1605-1678) in at least four versions: transcriptions of the manuscript; photographic facsimiles of its pages; Elemental Editions (basic modernizations with spare annotations); and contrastive Amplified Editions, created by a growing team of contributors. Side-by-side display enhances opportunities for comparison. Supporting Curations contextualize individual poems, and Explorations offer broader points of entry. An index features hyperlinked keywords to generate thematic subsets of the verse.
This site operates as both a teaching and a research resource for students and scholars of the English literary Renaissance. It not only provides freely-accessible editions of Pulter’s still little-known poetry, it also brings those editions into close contact with images of the unique manuscript witness, while contextualizing them through contact with other verbal and visual materials that help to integrate Pulter’s novel literary voice into the canon. The deliberate display of contrastive versions also helps to pull back the curtain on scholarly editing.