“To these curiosities of Egypt, I might here add that supernatural (but fictitious) prodigy, that’s reported to be yearly seen near to old Caire, viz. In the passage she cites, this story is recounted as a fraud and no mention is made of the despair following the resurrection. Often, I don’t grasp how she upends or comes at conventions aslant until I have mucked about composting my “curations.”Įardley identifies a late seventeenth-century account of an annual resurrection in Cairo, Egypt in her invaluable reflections on glossing this poem and Pulter in general. What might the materials I’ve gathered help readers see in the poems-or notice is not there? But also, how do the poems bring fresh perspectives into the conversations into which I draw them? The more one reads the poems as participants in wider ranging conversations, the more fascinatingly twisty Pulter appears. I also look for a multi-vectored traffic among Pulter’s poetry and the other materials. This extends to including extracts that are long enough that readers might find things therein that I do not anticipate. Instead, as a curator I weave the poem into a web of relations, seeking to open out rather than close down interpretive possibilities. Curations don’t precede the poems nor are they implied by the poems-as if the poem gathers them to itself (although it can sometimes feel that way) or hales them forth. Rather than focusing only on possible sources or influences, I cast a wide net both within the seventeenth century and outside it, trying to catch cultural materials Pulter might have engaged, some she excludes or ignores, and even some she probably could never have imagined. I hope to show that Pulter was intellectually and politically embedded rather than isolated, taking up issues, genres, and tropes that also interested her contemporaries and that sometimes accrue unpredictable salience in later periods. As I build the curations for a given poem-provisional and quirky as they are-I keep returning to the poem, re-reading, rethinking, and adding layers to the notes. My “amplified” editions seek to make the poems as accessible as possible by modernizing spelling and punctuation and providing only brief definitions for words, while discursive notes and the materials I gather for the “curations” section place Pulter’s poems into conversations. If alchemy was sometimes a way of disknowing, then what does Pulter use it here not to know? In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), Katherine Eggert argues that learning alchemy sometimes enabled early modern people not to learn other, more challenging disciplines. The structure of the poem-if you believe this, then why not that?-begins to unravel if we do not accept the opening conceit. One knows it by report one accepts it on faith, if at all. Palingenesis is always something someone else has accomplished somewhere else. Kenelm Digby, for instance, who describes reading about an experiment with exactly these flowers-the rose, tulip and clove gillyflower-confides to his reader that he has tried and failed to replicate the results: “no industry of mine could effect it” (see Digby, Discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, in “Curations”). But sources through which Pulter might have learned of palingenesis vary in their confidence in the results. Indeed, the poem can be read as an experimental brief, detailing the steps (“Then” … “Then” ) and equipment required to achieve this result. The highly technical language claims palingenesis as part of experimental science, suggesting that anyone might reproduce these results with the right equipment and procedures. This poem seems to grant that palingenesis is possible or at least imaginable. 1), it is also important to see how Pulter sometimes critiques the pretensions of alchemy to control life and death. If humans can accomplish such a thing, the poem asks, then why is it so hard to believe that God can resurrect humans? While it is invaluable to consider the scholarship on Pulter’s relationship to alchemy as a “discourse of change, metamorphosis, and revolution” that “provided the perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change” ( Jayne Archer, “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter,” Literature Compass 2, pp. This poem addresses palingenesis, an alchemical process by which, supposedly, a plant was reduced to ashes and then revived.
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