Margaret Cavendish

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the context of the new science and natural philosophers’ radical successes in this burgeoning field. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together and emphasize the way in which one aspect of rationality in early modern philosophy led to the development of modern science. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. Margaret Cavendish provides a compelling example of a thinker from this period who was not only engaged in the scientific enterprises of her day, but included within her purview disciplines we typically categorize today as belonging squarely to the humanities. Her philosophical work opens a window into how enlightenment thinkers conceived of the role, and arguably more importantly, the limits of reason and the sciences. In contrast with the traditional interpretation of the modern period, I argue that reason was significantly broader in scope — its developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in the music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, etc. Cavendish’s work forces us to recognize the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas; philosophy was able to act as a bridge between the sciences and humanistic disciplines. Integrating Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment philosophy creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on central, humanistic features of philosophy that make its practice fruitful. I use the example of Cavendish to make a broader point about the nature of higher education today. With the increased focus on so-called “practical” skills, vocational, and STEM focused education, I argue that we have lost focus on the end for the sake of which we pursue education: to live well. Cavendish provides us an opportunity to re-evaluate the narrowly scientific conception of reason during the 17th and 18th centuries as well as our current outlook on why we pursue education. In doing so, I make a case for a well-rounded liberal arts education.

Margaret Cavendish appropriated images of Elizabeth I in order to show her support for an imperialist England and to question the status Restoration society awarded to women. During the seventeenth century hagiographic representations of Elizabeth I were increasingly used to criticise the policies and
personalities of the Stuart monarchs. William Cavendish, for example, harked back to England’s glorious past under Elizabeth in order to inculcate in Charles II’s government expansionist and imperialist policies. Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World demonstrates similar concerns but Cavendish’s work is also interested in using representations of Elizabeth I as a way of exploring both the disenfranchisement of women and, I argue, the possibility of female empowerment.

Reading Margaret Cavendish’s fiction The Blazing World (1666)
alongside her philosophical tract Observations upon Natural Philosophy,
which was published together as a companion piece, this article
examines Cavendish’s unique view on the relationship of soul and body
as well as its gendered implications. In Observations, Cavendish puts
forth her philosophy of nature, now called “vitalist materialism,” which
suggests that everything in nature is corporeal, self-moving,
self-knowing, and self-living. In The Blazing World, Cavendish
complements Observations and uses the genre of fiction to explore
uncertainties and ambiguities regarding the questions of the gendered
nature of the body and soul. Firstly, this essay focuses on the difference
between immaterial spirits and corporeal human souls as explained in
The Blazing World and draws a tentative conclusion that Cavendish
views the mind and soul as gendered. However, through a close reading
of two scenes where female souls merge together in one body, and two
female souls enter into the male body, this article argues that Cavendish
comes up with a fictional human body that rejects gender essentialism
as a way to envisage a more empowered mode of women’s existence.
Therefore, Cavendish’s creation of a “hermaphroditical” body, justified
by her system of natural philosophy, functions as an effective
counter-attack on the seventeenth-century discourses that had accused
masculine women as unnatural and monstrous.

“Seeing the Invisible Under the Microscope: Natural Philosophy and John Donne’s Flea” considers the mythological, poetic, and conceptual categories that influenced what the natural philosopher ostensibly “saw” under the lens. I argue that early microscopic texts, especially Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy, reveal a surprising indebtedness to fabular, fictional insects. Poetic fleas and their brethren, immortalized by John Donne but ubiquitous in classical and early modern works, were veritable workhouses of erotic, natural philosophical, and metaphysical speculation. Their miniscule size promised access to hidden knowledge, and their uncanny ontology led to analogies with other small entities like atoms and verses. I examine in turn the mutually reinforcing effects of microscopic oculus and poetic microcosm, showing how natural philosophy revels in imagination. These works of microscopy do study nature, but they also cite Donnean seduction poetry, recast insects as romancical characters, and reflect on nothingness.

This Hungarian paper compares two female careers in the seventeenth century, one Hungarian (Petrőczy Kata Szidónia) and one English (Margaret  Cavendish). Based on a look at the (non-)publication history of the works and relevant passages from the works, together with the contextualisation of their reception, I argue that while the differences in the two settings are striking, the situation of female writers in both countries faced similar challenges.

This essay begins by arguing that discussions of interdisciplinarity between literature and science have been overly preoccupied by problems of counting: the issue is not that there are or are not Two Cultures, but that we start from defining and delimiting specific numbers of disciplines. It then suggests that that the works of Margaret Cavendish, a philosopher, scientist, playwright, and poet from the mid-seventeenth century, offer two concepts that may help us escape the traps of counting. With her concepts of grounds, she insists on fiction or literature as a mode of rationality parallel to and comparable to reason or science. She also attempts to re-orient contemporary debates about the possible grounds of scientific knowledge, insisting that Nature herself, in all of her variety, must serve as the ground or basis of nature. The essay then shows that the concept of the creature, as Cavendish develops it in her late works, offers a generative model for thinking about combination, cooperation, and association, and might therefore be a useful concept for helping us think beyond the numbering of disciplines.

It has often been noted that Margaret Cavendish discusses God in her writings on natural philosophy far more than one might think she ought to given her explicit claim that a study of God belongs to theology which is to be kept strictly separate from studies in natural philosophy. In this article, I examine one way in which God enters substantially into her natural philosophy, namely the role he plays in her particular version of teleology. I conclude that the way Cavendish relies upon God in this context in not inconsistent with her broader philosophy.

This volume is an edited collection of private letters and published epistles to and from English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650–1700). It includes the letters and epistles of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the correspondents of some of the best-known intellectuals of the period, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains the significance of the letters and epistles with respect to early modern scholarship and the study of women philosophers. It is argued that this selection of texts demonstrates the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in this period. To help situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume also includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known male contemporaries. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters and epistles. Among its critical apparatus, the volume includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.

This essay explores an unstudied compendium to Margaret Cavendish’s 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions that was composed by the learned physician, plant anatomist, and secretary of the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew. Despite the growing body of scholarship on Cavendish, minimal attention has been dedicated to her early reception. But studying this compendium provides some fascinating insights into how one of the foremost thinkers of her day read, emended, and manipulated her ideas. I propose that Grew turned to Cavendish’s work when developing his substance theory in the years leading up to the publication of his 1682 The Anatomy of Plants, but that shifting intellectual tides led him to critique her version of material vitalism in his 1701 Cosmologia Sacra. Supported by a transcription of the compendium as an appendix, this article also sheds light on the role that early modern pedagogical techniques and memory tools played in shaping concepts of matter and mind.

Keywords: Nehemiah Grew, Margaret Cavendish, Commonplace Book; Spirits; Soul; Scala Naturae

The aim of this thesis is to clarify the role that female interpreters in Britain played at an early stage in the canonisation of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, one of the popular playwrights in English Renaissance theatre, became increasingly famous during the first half of the eighteenth century, and the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 marked the climax of the popularisation of his works. It is said that since then, he has maintained his position as the ‘national poet’ of England (or Britain). Although women had supported Shakespeare even before his works had established their canonical status, the extent to which female interpreters contributed to the canonisation of Shakespeare, how they participated in the process, and why they played the roles that they did have not yet been sufficiently visible. In this thesis, I illustrate women’s engagement in the process of the popularisation of Shakespeare by examining the early reception of his works, and to document how individual women’...

This course considers the historical period of European philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period constitutes a break with ancient, medieval, and Renaissance philosophies and inaugurates a new philosophical approach that emphasizes foundations of knowledge and method. The two primary traditions of modern philosophy, rationalism and empiricism, will be studied in detail in this historical survey course. We will primarily consider issues of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and metaphysics (the nature of reality and first principles) that arise in the modern period alongside advances in science and technology. Questions considered will include: Can I know anything for certain? How do I receive knowledge? How does change occur? What is the nature of personal identity? Is there a split between mind and matter? The course will be focused around three units: 1. Rationalism: in this unit, we will study themes of certainty, reason, imagination, substance, and God in René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Anne Conway. We'll also draw on critiques by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Margaret Cavendish, questioning the place of rationalist method in the history of philosophy. 2. Empiricism: this unit will situate empiricism as a response to rationalism and delve into themes of sense-perception, personal identity, knowledge, and causation in the works of Locke, Hume, and Cockburn. 3. Kant and Rousseau: the final section of the course will address responses to empiricism and rationalism offered by Kant and Rousseau. The unit will go out of chronological order, first taking up Kant's accounts of knowledge, space and time, and freedom. We will then finish with Rousseau's Reveries, a lyrical summary of issues considered throughout the course, particularly those of personal identity, freedom, and reason. Course Objectives: By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and distinguish the theories of the thinkers studied in the course. In particular, they will be able to remark on various modern theories of knowledge, causation, substance, personal identity, perception, and imagination. Students will be able to situate these concerns in their historical context.

The aim of this thesis is to clarify the role that female interpreters in Britain played at an early stage in the canonisation of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, one of the popular playwrights in English Renaissance theatre, became increasingly famous during the first half of the eighteenth century, and the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 marked the climax of the popularisation of his works. It is said that since then, he has maintained his position as the ‘national poet’ of England (or Britain). Although women had supported Shakespeare even before his works had established their canonical status, the extent to which female interpreters contributed to the canonisation of Shakespeare, how they participated in the process, and why they played the roles that they did have not yet been sufficiently visible. In this thesis, I illustrate women’s engagement in the process of the popularisation of Shakespeare by examining the early reception of his works, and to document how individual women’s pleasure of reading and playgoing relates to their intellectual activities. I adopt three approaches to provide answers to my research questions in this thesis: reading critical and fictional works by women; analysing the descriptions of female readers and playgoers by male writers; and conducting a large-scale survey of the ownership history of pre-mid-eighteenth-century printed books of Shakespeare’s plays.
      This thesis is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, I analyse women’s engagement with theatre in Renaissance England, and consider Shakespeare’s popularity amongst them based on records about female audiences. The second chapter discusses female readers and writers in Renaissance England and their responses to Shakespeare’s works. Chapter 3 focuses on Restoration Shakespeare and female interpreters from 1642 to 1714. The fourth chapter discusses women’s playgoing, play-reading, writings, and their participation from the early eighteenth century to the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769.

This essay reads the social contract tradition through the lens of cruel optimism. Using Berlant’s theory to highlight the complex affective structures of promissory relations, I argue for deeper engagement with the rhetorical and affective dimensions of the contract tradition. I reveal the disavowed place of rhetoric in critical contract theory and turn to early modern political thought to recover a fugitive tradition of contract in which imaginative language appealing to affect is essential for diverse political purposes. I consider the example of racial reparations to show the expanded critical possibilities of contract-talk in the mode of claiming broken promises.

The rarity of female writers in seventeenth century England raises the querelle de femmes or the woman’s question and focuses attention on the few of them who have made an impact. Questioning the concerns and issues they chose to highlight amid the struggle to find a voice. This paper aims to show the effects seventeenth century politics and societal norms had on the work of the two most well known female writers of the time. Analysing the similarities and differences between Aphra Behn’s play The Rover and Margaret Cavendish’s The Covent of Pleasure with regards to women’s issues and which mattered the most.

This paper traces how the seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, developed her ideas on plant life in three major publications: her 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1664 Philosophical Letters, and 1666 Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. As I seek to demonstrate, Cavendish's mostly overlooked ruminations on vegetality were indispensable to her formation of a substance theory according to which matter is endowed with life, vitality, knowledge, and, in her mature works, perceptivity. Over the course of this paper, I also suggest that her visions of matter and plant life were largely grounded in Galenic and Aristotelian insights that she extracted and adapted from a range of sources, not least from William Harvey's field-changing writings on the circulation of blood and the generation of animals. In building upon this material, Cavendish was driven to uphold the innate livelihood of plants against mechanical accounts and to champion a "natural" mode of classification that focussed on the diversity of plant attributes rather than foregrounding specific features that humans deemed valuable or significant.

A utopia A Descrição de um Novo Mundo, chamado O Mundo Resplandecente, de 1666, é de autoria da filósofa natural e Duquesa de Newcastle Margaret Lucas Cavendish. Tal obra é considerada a primeira no gênero literário utópico escrita por uma mulher e apresenta a história do descobrimento de um novo mundo por um estrangeiro que, após atravessar os mares, ali desembarca. O Mundo Resplandecente possui uma organização das leis, do estado, da religião etc. que permite uma vida em perfeita harmonia. A intenção principal desse artigo é apresentar algumas observações sobre a estrutura utópica do texto, como o fato de que, diferentemente da estrutura
paradigmática do texto de Thomas More, após sua chegada, o estrangeiro passa a interferir nesse mundo provocando-lhe mudanças substanciais. Também procuro apontar algumas das relações presentes entre a obra e outros textos contemporâneos, como os de Thomas Hobbes e de Francis Bacon, referências influentes para a
construção do pensamento de Cavendish.

This chapter focuses on the response among women writers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain to one of the original bad girls of English literature – Cleopatra in William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Unlike other Shakespeare heroines, who are often young and tomboyish, the Bard’s Queen of Egypt is an experienced politician and a mature, voluptuous woman of ‘infinite variety’. In the broader classical and medieval literary tradition – which includes portrayals of Cleopatra ranging from the ‘fatale monstrum’ (fatal monster) of Horace’s Odes to the tragic lover in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women – Egypt’s final pharaoh attracted both praise and censure. For almost all writers she was beautiful – but for some of these authors she was constant and wise, while for others she was lascivious and ambitious. Shakespeare’s play incorporates these ‘good woman’ and ‘bad woman’ characteristics into one person, endowing the work with an intriguing complexity. In this chapter, I demonstrate that female writers after Shakespeare were both fascinated and troubled by the playwright’s seemingly evil yet exceptional heroine, and detail their difficult relationships with her ‘bad woman’ characteristics. Some authors condemn Cleopatra – Sarah Fielding’s The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia highlights her dishonesty. Others refuse to present Cleopatra as evil – Margaret Cavendish frames her as a political figure rather than a sexualised woman in The Worlds Olio. Still others were fascinated with Cleopatra as a femme fatale, and wrote fiction influenced by Shakespeare’s characterisation. For example, in The Royal Mischief, Delarivier Manley frames her ‘bad woman’ heroine Homais sympathetically by focusing on her suffering and rebellion in the face of male oppression. The varied responses of these writers to Antony and Cleopatra, demonstrated through their portrayals of powerful female characters, illustrate their different approaches to negotiating traditional gender norms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British society.

Margaret Cavendish was a contemporary critic of the mechanistic theories of matter that came to dominate seventeenth century thought, and the proponent of a distinctive form of non-mechanistic materialism. Colour was a central issue both to the mechanistic theories of matter that Cavendish opposed and to the non-mechanistic alternative that she defended. This paper considers the form of colour realism that Cavendish developed to complement her non-mechanistic materialism, and uses her criticisms of contemporary views of colour to try to better understand the experimental approach to natural philosophy associated with writers like Hooke and Boyle. I argue that Cavendish's discussion of colour in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy helps to show that there was a close connection between experimental philosophy and mechanistic theories of matter, and that, at least in the middle of the seventeenth century, experimental and speculative forms of mechanism were not mutually exclusive.

A B S T R A C T In La città delle dame e Bell in Campo, Christine de Pizan e Margaret Cavendish immaginano la partecipazione delle donne alla guerra come metafora del conflitto sessuale che esse devono praticare per conquistare visibilità nella storia. Mentre Pizan riscrive la storia dal punto di vista delle donne, conferendo alla differenza sessuale un valore universale nel disegno della salvezza, Cavendish si muove in un orizzonte moderno e pensa la storia come il risultato dell'azione umana. In entrambi i casi, il racconto della partecipazione delle donne alla guerra permette di contestare le implicazioni morali e normative del riferimento alla natura.

Pizan and Margaret Cavendish imagine women's participation to war as a metaphor of the sexual conflict that they must fight in order to conquer their visibility in history. While Pizan rewrites history from women's stand point and acknowledges the universal value of sexual difference for the plan of salvation, Cavendish moves within a modern frame and thinks history as the result of human action. In both cases, the tale of women's participation to war allows criticizing the moral and normative implications of «nature».

The first publication of the prolific and unorthodox early modern writer Margaret Cavendish versifies the atomist underpinnings of the cosmos in imitation of Lucretius's great first-century BCE atomist poem, De rerum natura. However, soon after the publication of the 1653 Poems and Fancies, Cavendish claimed to have "Wave[d] the opinion of Atoms." Following her cue, critics have generally either ignored or maligned the atomist poems, downgrading the status of Lucretianism and poetry alike in the Cavendish corpus. In this article, I argue that although Cavendish does abandon the idea that inanimate particles constitute the fundamental structure of matter, she never forswears the fanciful Lucretian epistemology she develops in Poems and Fancies. Closely attuned to the intersection between epistemological skepticism and poetic bravado in De rerum natura, Cavendish's atomist poetry amplifies the elements of Lucretian atomism that bring it into conversation with skepticism. Agreeing with Lucretius that nature's inner truths are fundamentally unknowable, Cavendish establishes fancy as a legitimate speculative practice. By pitting her fanciful poetics against scientific methodologies that make claims to truth, Cavendish establishes ignorance as a defensible epistemological posture. Her manipulation of gender stereotypes in her showy modesty and ostentatious professions of flightiness and ignorance is essential to this goal. She subverts the conventional modesty topoi that are so central to early modern women's writing in order to establish epistemological modesty-skepticismas the hallmark of genuine natural philosophy.

What is a non-human animal? During the early modern period, definitions ranged from an ensouled creature that exists between humans and plants on the scale of nature to a soulless but finely constructed automaton. Particularly fierce disputes erupted over whether animals are rational, sensitive, or language-using, and the ascribed attributes were widely thought to have a bearing on ethical questions. Is it acceptable to hunt animals? To eat them? Kick them? Experiment on them for the amelioration of human health and knowledge? This entry delves into these issues. It begins with a brief overview of Renaissance perspectives on the status of animals and René Descartes’ attempt to upend them, then turns to Pierre Gassendi’s and Henry More’s head-on refutations of Descartes, and proceeds to the less direct responses of other major early modern philosophers including Kenelm Digby, Margaret Cavendish, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Finally, I look at debates about animal anatomy and their implications for attitudes towards consuming animals, with a focus on Gassendi and the responses to him from John Wallis and Edward Tyson, concluding with a broader overview of perspectives on animal ethics, with reference to Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke, and David Hume.

This chapter discusses methodology in feminist history of philosophy and shows that women philosophers made interesting and original contributions to the debates concerning the cosmological argument. I set forth and examine the arguments of Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Emilie Du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd, and discuss their involvement with philosophical issues and debates surrounding the cosmological argument. I argue that their contributions are original, philosophically interesting, and result from participation in the ongoing debates and controversies about the cosmological argument, causal principles, and necessary existence.

The Empress of the new world ordered her scientists to "break the telescopes." But the men of the Blazing World told her, pleading on their knees to the diamond-laced Queen that "we take more delight in artificial delusions, then in natural truths." They begged her to let them continue in their optical endeavors, analyzing the movement of blazing stars across celestial realms. The Empress judged the men to be biased in their undertakings, nothing more than petty squabblers with only cupidity to offer the advancement of truth for her civilization. The men were irrational, incapable of consensus, and deceived by the sensations they wished to display as their pathway towards replicable science. The woman was powerful, progressive, and judgmental, gazing upon her subject philosophers as foolhardy narcissists who believed in a fraudulent capacity to reach dominion over nature.

In this chapter, I analyze the metaphysical positions of key Early Modern authors such as Descartes, Cavendish, Spinoza, Hobbes, Conway, and Leibniz in order to determine where they fall on the 'mechanism-holism' spectrum that defines their mereological commitments.

Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree of self-satisfaction in her writing and an unprecedented disregard for her readers’ opinions. While her authorial self-fashioning is often dismissed as self-involved, aristocratic snobbery, I propose an alternative reading that understands Cavendish’s claims of self-sufficiency and self-pleasure as endeavoring to craft a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority. My construction of a skeptical Cavendish investigates a crucial distinction in her work between the pleasures of invention and the promise of pleasure through imitation. This affective distinction gives rise to analogies in her writing among texts, women writers, and colonial subjects, encouraging reflection on how we read texts and how we read one another. With an emphasis on textual sovereignty, Cavendish depicts two socialities of reading: imperial conquest and witty conversation. By using satiric indirection to destabilize authorized categories of interpretation, Cavendish, I suggest, not only re-imagines the affective agency of readers and authors, but also conceives of a sociability that privileges the pleasures of writing and the imaginative potential of individual creators and what Cavendish calls “creatoresses.”

Twentieth-century analytic philosophy has tended to gloss over historical research into the late medieval period and to accept with little criticism an Enlightenment account of the history of ideas. This history posits an uninterrupted progress in ideas from the Enlightenment to the present, with each step representing an advance toward the modern ideal of philosophical inquiry. Analytic feminist philosophers have not been immune to this worldview. In the 1970s, feminism was at first represented as a completely new progressive phenomenon. Soon, however, research into the nineteenth-century women's movement led to it being called 'second-wave feminism'. Further research pushed our knowledge of women's engagement with issues such as women's rights and women's exclusion from education back to before the French Revolution. But the assumption remained that feminism had its intellectual origins in the progress of men's ideas -in liberalism or socialism or at least in Enlightenment thought. 1 The history of feminism, in other words, was interpreted teleologically in terms of an advance toward our current philosophical concerns, such as abstract individualism, rights-based theory, contractarian ethics, and so on. The modern focus on women's equal rationality, in particular, is thought to have originated with Cartesian philosophy. After Descartes, a common story goes, the doors of our minds were opened to a new critical spirit that spelled the death of Aristotelianism. Aristotle's dictum that women were 'monsters in nature'defective men who could never attain the rational excellence necessary to be philosophers -thus fell, like belief in witches, crystalline spheres and Ptolemaic astronomy, before the advance of reason.

From armies of ants marching in uniformity to the harmony displayed by the movements of the heavenly bodies above, few would deny that Nature displays at least some order. However, the nature of this order, a central question to many Early-Modern philosophers in the West, continues to creep its head into modern academic debates in the humanities and sciences. One inquiry, especially puzzling to these theorists of old, was whether Nature’s nature was immaterial or material. This article will begin to explore this topic by focusing the reader on the works of Margaret Cavendish, who declares that all features of Nature, from the rational to the sensible are, alas, material. Following this explication of Cavendish’s philosophy, this piece will then explicate George Berkeley’s immaterialist vision of existence. Lastly, this article will close with Karl Jaspers’ interpretation of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika Buddhism, in conjunction with Berkeley’s understanding of the natural order, and by doing so help deny Cavendish’s view that Nature’s nature is ultimately material.

Many scholars point to the close association between early modern science and the rise of rational arguments in favour of the existence of witches. For some commentators, it is a poor reflection on science that its methods so easily leant themselves to the unjust persecution of innocent men and women. In this paper, I examine a debate about witches between a woman philosopher, Margaret Cavendish (1623-73), and a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill (1636-80). I argue that Cavendish is the voice of reason in this exchange—not because she supports the modern- day view that witches do not exist, but because she shows that Glanvill’s arguments about witches betray his own scientific principles. Cavendish’s responses to Glanvill suggest that, when applied consistently, the principles of early modern science could in fact promote a healthy scepticism toward the existence of witches.

This essay offers a historical context for the influence of epicurean philosophy in mid-seventeenth century so that the ideological nature of poetry during the Interregnum becomes more clear. I begin by discussing the epicurean tradition in France from Michel Montaigne to Pierre Gassendi that had been maturing for half a century. This late Renaissance secular tradition, sometimes referred to as a new humanism, has too often been misinterpreted as the consequence of neo-stoicism rather than neo-epicureanism. Prominent French libertins (epicurean free-thinkers) greeted the defeated cavalier=s after their decisive defeat at the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. Rather than continuing to live in their enemy's England, many cavaliers gathered around Queen Henrietta Maria=s court-in-exile in Paris for a decade and a half. The libertins befriending the English included many French aristocrats and intellectuals including Gassendi himself whose neo-epicurean philosophy had Christiaized ancient epicureanism. English royalists began thinking and writing as new humanists, and some began translating epicurean, lucretian and Gassendian texts. A number of these royalist writers published epicurean influenced poetry and other texts in the London press from mid 1640s through the 1650s. The puritans, in charge of the English government during the Interregnum generally saw these texts as an ungodly literary invasion. Andrew Marvell, a kind of Poet Laureate to the Cromwell Protectorate, wrote a likely satire in response to royalist epicurean verse, which was not published until after his death. Yet To His Coy Mistress is generally regarded as having been written in the early 1650s. Today the poem is being read in the cavalier carpe diem tradition, indeed almost defines the genre. Our naive reading of what is most likely Marvell’s finest satire would surprise Marvell, if he knew how we have wrenched it out of its cultural context as a puritan response to royalist epicurean ideology.

The development of women’s writing in English throughout the seventeenth century is quite extraordinary. In the field
of drama, women participated not only as spectators or readers, but more and more as patronesses, as playwrights, and later on as actresses and even as managers.
Yet some dramatic forms proved more resilient than others to
women’s coming to voice. Comedies were more flexible, as their conventions allowed for female characters – heroines
– as mates and nearly equals to the young male hero. But tragedies required high-born,  authoritative and powerful characters, and such defining traits seemed to be the prerogative of the male. The question, then, for these women playwrights,  was to what extent one could bend dramatic conventions to accommodate women’s heroic behaviour. How can one construct a female hero and yet not masculinize her in the attempt? Is it possible to rethink the traits of the heroic to  include, rather than exclude, women? This paper engages with the ensuing problems and conflicts by looking into the
work of two women dramatists of the period: Margaret
Cavendish and Aphra Behn.