Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda

Alice Eardley has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool and is now Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Southampton. She has worked on the “Constructing Elizabeth Isham” project at Warwick University and the “Verse Miscellanies Online” project at the University of Reading and has contributed to editions of Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (OUP) and John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (OUP). Her publications include articles on early modern women’s writing and editorial theory in Studies in English Literature and Women’s Writing.

• Acknowledgments xiIllustrations xiiiINTRODUCTION 1Abbreviations Used in Footnotes to the Text 39POEMS BREATHED FORTH BY THE NOBLE HADASSAH 41THE UNFORTUNATE FLORINDA WRITTEN BY THE NOBLE HADASSAH 267Glossary 367Bibliography 385Index of Poem Titles and First Lines 401Index 409

"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."