By Lisa T. Sarasohn
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, led a remarkable—and controversial—life, writing poetry and prose and philosophizing at the flora and fauna at a time while girls have been denied any technique of a proper schooling. Lisa T. Sarasohn acutely examines the bright paintings of this untrained brain and explores the unorthodox improvement of her common philosophy.
Cavendish wrote copiously on such wide-ranging subject matters as gender, strength, manners, medical process, and animal rationality. the 1st girl to submit her personal normal philosophy, Cavendish used to be now not afraid to problem the hot technological know-how or even ridiculed the project of the Royal Society. Her philosophy mirrored pop culture and engaged with the main radical philosophies of her age. to appreciate Cavendish’s clinical suggestion, Sarasohn explains, is to appreciate the reception of recent wisdom via either insider and outsider views in early sleek England.
In shut readings of Cavendish’s writings—poetry, treatises, tales, performs, romances, and letters—Sarasohn explores the wonderful and gendered components of her normal philosophy. Cavendish observed wisdom as a continuum among cause and fancy, and her paintings built-in inventive hypothesis and actual technological know-how. simply because she was once denied the collage schooling to be had to her male opposite numbers, she embraced an epistemology that preferred contemplation and instinct over good judgment and empiricism.
The typical Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish serves as a consultant to the weird and intricate philosophy of 1 of the 17th century’s so much exciting minds. It not just celebrates Cavendish as a real determine of the medical age but additionally contributes to a broader figuring out of the contested nature of the medical revolution.
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Extra resources for The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution
Example text
11 It was particularly problematic for a philosopher who grounded her material philosophy on atomism. The gods Epicurus had envisioned in antiquity were completely absent from the governance of an eternal universe—it would cause them too much trouble. The God Cavendish pictured in her later works delegates authority to a female deity, Nature, who is better fitted to generate a living universe. This unknowable God was an absent God in much of Poems, and Fancies, and this disappearance can lead to the conclusion that Cavendish’s theology is nature worship at best and atheism at worse.
While her world recalls that of Epicurus—the atoms are infinitesimally small bits of the same matter, distinguished only by shape and size, whirling around in a void—the atoms’ character C av e n di s h ’s E a r ly At o m i s m 37 is profoundly different. In Cavendish’s universe, all beings, both creator and created, are in some sense alive. Motion, reified sometimes as male and sometimes as female, ultimately is the most active force in the universe, endowing matter and its concretions with life.
41 This prime motion is unchanging and self- contained: For the first Motion every thing can make, But cannot add unto it selfe, nor take. Indeed no other Matter could it frame, It selfe was all, and in it selfe the same. Perceiving now this fixed point of Light, To be a Union, Knowledge, Power, and Might; Wisdom, Justice, Truth, Providence, all one, No Attribute is with it selfe alone. 42 The Divine Light is a circle, like the world that Nature and her ministers created in Cavendish’s first poem, or the divine diatical center described in later C av e n di s h ’s E a r ly At o m i s m 45 works.