© Blackwell Publishing 2005 Literature Compass 2 (2005) 17C 162, 1–12 Reading Hester Pulter Reading Mark Robson University of Nottingham Abstract This article offers a reading of the poetry of the seventeenth-century royalist Hester Pulter. Focusing on the question of how best to respond to Pulter’s poems, the article takes up the matter of ‘reading as’, explicitly acknowledging the role of gender in and as reading. I suggest that a concern with aisthesis makes possible an engagement that makes apparent reading processes rather than simply producing more readings. Noting the possibility of accounting for Pulter’s poetry through an attention to the ways in which some poems establish a distance between her own position and that of a conventional male tradition, I propose that other poems resist this impression in their division of a ‘female’ position in terms of political subjectivity and class. Drawing on debates about the role of theory in early modern studies that are exemplified in the relation of historicism to presentism, I call for a recognition of the singularity of literature that will keep in play the multiple identifications that Pulter’s poetry both enacts and demands from its readers. What does it mean to read Hester Pulter? This is, of course, too bald a question, too loaded, and too large to be tackled with any seriousness here. But nonetheless, it seems to me a necessary one to broach, and however gestural a short piece such as this will seem, the gesture towards such a question seems necessary. 1 Most obviously it might lead us into a consideration of the histories of women’s writing and reading (as part of a wider consideration of gender) that have been the subject of much elaboration and contestation in recent years. 2 Equally, it would have to acknowledge the theories and histories of reading that have also become increasingly prominent, in which reading has been opened up as an area in ways that go far beyond traditional source studies. 3 In the context of early modern studies more widely, of course, this question of reading also finds itself part of another debate that has been made explicit within Shakespeare studies but which has some pertinence here and which might act as an architectonic frame for the other two areas of inquiry. In making reading the explicit focus of this discussion, that is, in putting reading first and last (as in my title), it is necessary to accept a doubled focus: providing readings of some of Pulter’s work, but also considering what those readings in turn tell us about our own reading practices.