Margaret Cavendish’s materialism holds that all motion is self-motion. Although she shows affinities to Hobbes’s understanding of “entire cause,” her strategy opposes features of Hobbes’s account of matter while revising his understanding of “motion.” Cavendish’s rejection of Hobbes’s persistence principle and his account of “place” can be understood as following from a more thorough interpretation of the impossibility of abstracting accidents from bodies.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to the history of early modern note-taking by examining the note-taking practices of Sir Charles Cavendish (1591–1653). Rather than viewing the notes as records and memoranda for strictly personal use, Cavendish’s notes are seen as a repository of information which he shared with other scholars. Note-taking and the recording of “quaeres” are shown to be socially extensive, involving exchanges via correspondence or in-person encounters, and sometimes involved more than two people. A close examination (...) of manuscript notes on Walter Warner’s theories concerning the circulation of the blood and notes on Thomas Hobbes’s draft of De corpore reveal that Cavendish often gathered extracts from different sources on the same topic on the same manuscript page and was actively engaged in questioning the sources he was perusing and engaging others in those questions. (shrink)

This paper reads Margaret Cavendish’s play Bell in Campo (1662) as an implicit critique of Hobbes’s own depiction of the Amazons. In the play, Cavendish adopts a Hobbesian conception of equality and, like Hobbes, uses the Amazons as evidence of this natural equality. She departs from Hobbes, however, in setting her Amazon tale in a modern civil war. For Cavendish, Hobbes’s Amazons are insufficiently threatening, as he neglects to show their origins in a rebellion of wives against their husbands. By (...) retelling the Amazon tale in the context of civil war, she reminds Hobbes of the importance of extending the ninth law of nature – that we acknowledge each other’s equality – to both sexes. (shrink)

An introduction to the Hobbes Studies special issue “Hobbes and the Cavendish Circle: Intellectual Networks in the Seventeenth Century” (38:1 [2025]), edited by Oberto Marrama and Pietro Daniel Omodeo. The issue gathers selected contributions that investigate ways in which philosophical and scientific ideas were discussed and circulated within and through the so-called “Cavendish Circle” – the cosmopolitan network of European thinkers that revolved around William Cavendish, 1st Earl, Marquess, and eventually Duke of Newcastle (1593–1676) and his family, via direct relationships (...) of patronage and indirect learned exchanges. This collection aims to shed light on the role of Thomas Hobbes within this intellectual network and how aspects of his philosophy influenced, and were in turn influenced by, the system of knowledge circulation and knowledge production fostered by William and his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish (1591–1653). Invited contributors are (as listed in the table of contents) Timothy Raylor, Stephen Clucas, Mary Jo MacDonald, Marcus Adams, and Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon. (shrink)

Taking up Noel Malcolm’s suggestion that, rather being than an integral part of the conception of the work, the table of sciences featured in Chapter 9 of Leviathan was included because Hobbes had it to hand, having perhaps prepared it for William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, this article establishes the raising of queries for clients to settle as a standard practice within the Cavendish Circle, and argues that the table was likely Hobbes’s response to enquiries about the status of different (...) sciences following the 1644 publication of works on mixed mathematics by Mersenne. The table is more closely connected than we have realized with other works by Hobbes and appears to be a transitional schema, offering a looser and more expansive definition of philosophy, one better equipped to account for natural phenomena, than the narrowly logical definition established in The Elements of Law. (shrink)