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Practicing Resurrection: Emblems, Elegy, & Embodiment in the Poetry of Hester Pulter
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Practicing Resurrection: Emblems, Elegy, & Embodiment in the Poetry of Hester Pulter

Hannah Jolene Bocz
University of West Florida Libraries
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2026

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Abstract

In her 17th century manuscript of two parts entitled “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassas” and “The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah,” Hester Pulter attends to the material world around her, from the didactic possibilities of the flowers in her garden to the body of her daughter transformed by death. Reworking the emblem genre and applying its logic to elegy, Pulter emblematically reads and reinterprets material transformation as a dress rehearsal for the resurrection of the body. In my reading of this dynamic, which builds on both Daniel Juan Gil’s study of resurrection in early modern poetry and Jane Bennett’s theories of vibrant matter, I argue that Pulter’s poetry returns to the body as the site of resurrection in contrast to the century’s growing shift toward a dualist understanding of physical matter and the body. Ultimately, Pulter’s poetics—exemplified by her emblems “The Brahman,” “View But This Tulip,” and the elegy “Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter”—exhibits how writing, as a human act of remaking in its fully material process, enacts an embodied resurrection. As she performs transformations in her poetry, reanimating dust and patterning flowers from decay, Pulter demonstrates how poetry itself inscribes resurrection onto the present through the tearing apart and recreating of the material that is the poet’s life, grief, and world. In returning to the transformations of this material world, Pulter’s manuscript argues for an ethical commitment to a resurrection embedded in the human experience of a material, embodied reality. 
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