Lady Hester Pulter'sThe Unfortunate Florinda:Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape^*

Abstract

In the mid-1990s a manuscript was discovered containing the poetry and prose of a previously unknown female author, Lady Hester Pulter. The poems, likely written during the 1640s–'50s, demonstrate Pulter's wide reading and her near-fanatical Royalism. The prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, however, displays a very different politics. Basing her fiction on the legends surrounding the Muslim conquest of Spain, I argue that Pulter adjusts her sources to present an alternative, Augustinian view of rape, one that blames the rapist, not the victim. The monarchs in Pulter's fiction use absolutist rhetoric to justify rape, and,contraher earlier poetic denunciations of Charles I's execution, rape now justifies regicide. I suggest that the sexual corruption of Charles II's court prompted Pulter to create a romance with distinctly republican overtones in which chastity is the highest value, sexual corruption the lowest vice, and rulers who commit such crimes forfeit both their right to rule and their right to live.

“Then Ibis Came”: Lady Hester Pulter’s Unpublished Manuscript in Its Socio-Political and Normative Context

“…Some studies have been published since then, such as the pioneering work by Peter C. Herman (2010). 2014 is another watershed year, because in it Alice Eardley published her masterful Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda; its erudite and clear introduction, along with notes and a final glossary, make it required reading for all those studying the 17th-century writer.…”

Serious Extravagance: Romance Writing in Seventeenth‐Century England

“…Like William Rowley’s play All’s Lost for Lust , about the same events, it seems more interested in using its source for a captivating story than in bringing to the fore the relationship between romance and history. For discussion of The Unfortunate Florinda , see Herman.…”