Wendy Wall (Northwestern University) and Leah Knight (Brock University) are pleased to announce a new open-access resource for exploring the fascinating verse of Hester Pulter (1605-1678):
The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu
Featuring contributions from a team of editors, reviewers, and curators from countries across the Anglophone world, The Pulter Project offers deliberately-distinguished editorial visions of Pulter’s poems. Instead of one allegedly definitive authorized edition, we present a set of possible texts and interpretations, in a framework that is transparent about the editorial choices at stake. Pulter’s rich but understudied poems engage with natural philosophy, astronomy, devotional writing, politics, and religion, while experimenting with literary forms such as pastoral, complaint, satire, elegy, and dialogue. Contrasting editions of poems invite awareness of the different lenses through which her work is made legible.
We think Pulter’s long-neglected manuscript affords us a rare opportunity: to reflect on a writer’s profile in the making. The Pulter Project, intended as a work-in-progress, not only makes Pulter’s poetry more widely available but also invites collaboration and mindfulness about the making of Pulter as a poet: an ongoing creative process we encourage you to join by trying out the site.
The Pulter Project includes:
- Elemental Editions, for readers who seek to read with minimal interruption and with only basic notes.
- Amplified Editions, which provide additional and potentially contrasting contextualization and commentary.
- Ways to compare editions, side by side, for a deeper dive into the material. Juxtaposing the manuscript, transcriptions, and various editorial approaches shows how a single poem’s significance can multiply and how a modern edition is “made.”
- Curations, which offer an array of verbal and visual materials that invite readers to contemplate different ways that a poem might be contextualized.
- Explorations, which look beyond individual poems to frame Pulter’s works as a whole in different ways.
We welcome feedback: pulterproject@gmail.com