Two professors’ unique digitization of a little-known 17th century manuscript has won a prestigious award from the Modern Languages Association.

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, by Leah Knight, Associate Professor with Brock’s Department of English and Wendy Wall, a professor of English at Northwestern University, encourages a fresh approach to literary history in its digitization of Hester Pulter’s poetry. It has won this year’s MLA’s Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographic, or Archival Scholarship, which will be awarded Jan. 9, 2021.

“We were of course delighted to receive this recognition, and we’re especially buoyed by the adjudicating committee’s sensitivity to the way our project is not just about Pulter’s poetry: it’s also about ways of receiving and treating materials from the past,” says Knight.

The open-access project brings together scans of the original manuscript, a basic readable transcription of the poem, and amplified editions that provide more expansive and imaginative ways of presenting the poetry. Additional essays explore the scientific, theological, and cultural context of Pulter’s work, as well as the poet’s personal life.

“The Pulter Project is an exceptional example of textual and digital scholarship that is committed to being public-facing,” said the prize selection committee in a press release. “The Pulter Project is a demonstration of the inevitable instability of textuality, as witnessed in competing manuscript versions, transcriptions, and editions.”

The Pulter project encourages international collaboration between scholars and students in editing, reviewing, and curating Pulter’s poems and reflecting on how a writer’s profile is created through scholarship.

“As scholars and readers, the choices we make about how to represent texts and other artifacts are part of an ongoing, creative, cultural process,” says Knight. “Our project foregrounds that fact in order to provoke readers to see all texts as always open to new readings and representations.”

Since the project launched in November 2018, Wall and Knight have completed elemental editions of each of Pulter’s 120 poems and a host of contributors have created contrastive amplified editions. The project has also been incorporated into a number of courses at various universities and selections of the poems are being created for two anthologies.

Pulter was born in 1605 in Dublin and her father eventually joined the aristocracy as the first Earl of Marlborough in 1626. Her poetry references the events of war-torn England in the 1640s, including the imprisonment and beheading of Charles I, as well as more personal themes such as the births and deaths of her own children.

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making from Media and Design Studio on Vimeo.