Margaret Cavendish

In this paper, I develop a new interpretation of the order of nature, its function, and its implications in Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. According to the infinite balance account, the order of nature consists in a balance among the infinite varieties of nature. That is, for Cavendish, nature contains an infinity of different types of matter: infinite species, shapes, and motions. The potential tumult implicated by such a variety, however, is tempered by the counterbalancing of the different kinds and motions of (...) matter against one another, or what Cavendish calls the “poising” of nature’s actions by their opposites. The infinite balance account of order offers insight into a central notion of Cavendish’s system and bears important implications for other interpretive issues. To wit, the account resolves the standing issue of whether there is genuine disorder in Cavendish’s universe and elucidates the nature of her opposition to atomism. Nevertheless, the interpretation faces an epistemic challenge, insofar as Cavendish appears to deny knowledge of infinity. I argue that, for Cavendish, our knowledge of the order of nature is conceptual and non-empirical, revealing limits to her apparent empiricism. (shrink)

In this rich and detailed study of early modern women's thought, Jacqueline Broad explores the complexity of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual legacy in England and Europe. She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Locke. She also illuminates the continuities between (...) early modern women's thought and the anti-dualism of more recent feminist thinkers. The result is a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought than has hitherto been available. Broad's clear and accessible exploration of this still-unfamiliar area will have a strong appeal to both students and scholars in the history of philosophy, women's studies and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Many of Margaret Cavendish’s criticisms of Thomas Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters (1664) relate to the disorder and damage that she holds would result if Hobbesian pressure were the cause of visual perception. In this paper, I argue that her “two men” thought experiment in Letter IV is aimed at a different goal: to show the explanatory potency of her account. First, I connect Cavendish’s view of visual perception as “patterning” to the “two men” thought experiment in Letter IV. Second, (...) I provide a potential reply on Hobbes’s behalf that appeals to physiological differences between perceivers’ sense organs, drawing upon Hobbes’s optics in De homine. Third, I argue that such a reply would misunderstand Cavendish’s objective of showing the limited explanatory resources available in understanding visual perception as pressing when compared to her view of visual perception as patterning. (shrink)

Contention about who discovered the compound nature of water occurred in two phases. During the first phase, in the 1780s, the claimants to the discovery produced the work on which their claims were based. This phase of controversy was relatively short and did not generate much heat, although it was part of the larger debates surrounding the 'chemical revolution'. The second phase of controversy, in the 1830s and 1840s, saw heated exchanges in Britain between advocates of Watt on the one (...) hand and of Cavendish on the other. This paper concentrates on this second phase. The concern is not to arbitrate the contest but to delineate the pattern of advocacy and the arguments used to support the opposing cases. 'Discovery' is not treated as an event but as the outcome of an after-the-fact process of attribution of credit. Apart from identifying the opposing argumentative strategies employed in making different attributions, the paper also seeks to explain why there was so much concern about this priority dispute long after the deaths of the protagonists. It is shown that while Scottish-English rivalries were important they were not the only or most significant impetus. Ideological struggles over the nature of science provided a context in which the attribution of discovery to Cavendish or to Watt was of major import. These ideological struggles are shown to have roots in the politics of early Victorian science that ultimately lay behind the second phase of the water controversy and shaped the course that it took. (shrink)

The two extant Old English lives of the virgin-martyr St. Margaret of Antioch, in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library 303, reflect the specific interest in this saint that appears to have developed in England in the late Anglo-Saxon period. More broadly, they are representative of the widely evident interest in this period in making hagiographical material available, in prose, to vernacular audiences. Although Ælfric played the leading part in that enterprise, numerous translations (...) and adaptations not by him also survive from late Anglo-Saxon England, presenting a wide range of approaches to inherited material. In that connection it should be noted that there is no mention of St. Margaret in the writings of Ælfric, nor does the passio of St. Margaret appear in the Latin legendary believed to have served as Ælfric's principal source for his saints' lives. (shrink)

It is often thought that the numerous contradictory perspectives in Margaret Cavendish's writings demonstrate her inability to reconcile her feminism with her conservative, royalist politics. In this book Lisa Walters challenges this view and demonstrates that Cavendish's ideas more closely resemble republican thought, and that her methodology is the foundation for subversive political, scientific and gender theories. With an interdisciplinary focus Walters closely examines Cavendish's work and its context, providing the reader with an enriched understanding of women's contribution to early (...) modern scientific theory, political philosophy, culture and folklore. Considering also Cavendish's ideas in relation to Hobbes and Paracelsus, this volume is of great interest to scholars and students of literature, philosophy, history of ideas, political theory, gender studies and history of science. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a wide variety of works including poems, plays, letters and treatises of natural philosophy, but her significance as a political writer has only recently been recognised. This major contribution to the series of Cambridge Texts includes the first ever modern edition of her Divers Orations on English social and political life, together with a new student-friendly rendition of her imaginary voyage, A New World called the Blazing World. Susan James explains the allusions made in (...) this classic text, and directs readers to the many intellectual debates with which Cavendish engages. Together these two works reveal the character and scope of Margaret Cavendish's political thought. She emerges as a singular and probing writer, who simultaneously upholds a conservative social and political order and destabilises it through her critical and unresolved observations about natural philosophy, scientific institutions, religion, and the relations between men and women. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish's 1668 edition of Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, presented here in a 2001 edition, holds a unique position in early modern philosophy. Cavendish rejects the Aristotelianism which was taught in the universities in the seventeenth century, and the picture of nature as a grand machine which was propounded by Hobbes, Descartes and members of the Royal Society of London, such as Boyle. She also rejects the views of nature which make reference to immaterial spirits. Instead she develops an original (...) system of organicist materialism, and draws on the doctrines of ancient Stoicism to attack the tenets of seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy. Her treatise is a document of major importance in the history of women's contributions to philosophy and science. (shrink)

With a never-before published paper by Lord Henry Cavendish, as well as a biography on him, this book offers a fascinating discourse on the rise of scientific attitudes and ways of knowing. A pioneering British physicist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Cavendish was widely considered to be the first full-time scientist in the modern sense. Through the lens of this unique thinker and writer, this book is about the birth of modern science.

This chapter shows how Mary Astell and Margaret Cavendish can reasonably be understood as early feminists in three senses of the term. First, they are committed to the natural equality of men and women, and related, they are committed to equal opportunity of education for men and women. Second, they are committed to social structures that help women develop authentic selves and thus autonomy understood in one sense of the word. Third, they acknowledge the power of production relationships, especially friendships (...) among women, in cultivating fulfilling lives for women. All three forms of feminism promote greater liberty for women. Moreover, the chapter establishes that many of these conclusions are especially forceful given Cavendish’s use of the genre of literature, and given the method that literature allows, namely that of presenting alternate points of view. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with mid-seventeenth-century debates on spirits and spiritual activity in the world, especially the problems of incorporeal substance and magnetism. I argue that between 1664 and 1668, Cavendish developed an increasingly robust form of materialism in response to the deficiencies which she identified in alternative philosophical systems – principally mechanical philosophy and vitalism. This was an intriguing direction of travel, given the intensification in attacks on the supposedly atheistic materialism of Hobbes. While some (...) scholars claim that Cavendish’s views were not formed out of extensive engagement with contemporary thinkers, I suggest that, on the contrary, Cavendish engaged very closely with the views of More, Hobbes and others – including the vitalist thinker Johannes Baptista van Helmont and the mechanical philosopher Henry Power – on the subject of spirits and... (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) held a number of surprising philosophical views. These included a materialist panpsychism, and some views in what we might call environmental ethics. Panpsychism, though certainly not unheard of, is still often a surprising view. Views in environmental ethics - even just views that involve a measure of environmental concern - are unusual to find in early modern European philosophy. Cavendish held both of these surprising views. One might suspect that panpsychism provides some reasons for environmental concern. I (...) argue, however, that Cavendish did not derive her environmental ethics from her panpsychism. If there is a connection, it is a developmental one, leading from the ethics to the panpsychism. The investigation of these issues also provides an occasion for thinking more generally about how Cavendish's views fit together, and whether she developed a systematic philosophy in the manner of several of her contemporaries. (shrink)

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 lent 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 , and a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill . 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.Keywords: Margaret Cavendish; Joseph Glanvill; Witches; Inference to the best explanation; Anti-dogmatism; Religion. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish Margaret Lucas Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, was a philosopher, poet, playwright and essayist. Her philosophical writings were concerned mostly with issues of metaphysics and natural philosophy, but also extended to social and political concerns. Like Hobbes and Descartes, she rejected what she took to be the occult explanations of the Scholastics. […].

Each word in the phrase "the history of the book" raises questions, even the definite articles: What does "the" book look like? How is it made? How is it read? Who or what distinguishes "the" book from "a" book? Surely the founding scholars of "the history of the book" did not mean for these definite articles to be read so literally or so archly, and in practice, scholars like Roger Chartier and Roger Darnton privilege study of particular books over generalizations (...) about "the" book. But in discussions of seventeenth-century English literary books these innocuous articles sometimes assume their definitive force. Ben Jonson is said to have invented the book with his Workes , and the significance of later books seems to depend upon their conforming to Jonson's invention: since Jonson's folio is a monumental collection carefully selected and arranged to enshrine the achievements of a monadic, proprietary author, so, too, will other examples of the book be crafted monuments that either, in the case of posthumous editions, arrange and preserve the authors' remains, or, in the case of books published during their authors' lifetimes, celebrate accomplishments so far and anticipate the future glories of rising poets. Limited to this understanding of "the" book, accounts of literary books in seventeenth-century England can retrace a familiar line that begins with Jonson's Workes and runs through such points as Shakespeare's First Folio , Herbert's The Temple , Donne's Poems , and Humphrey Moseley's publications of the 1640s and 1650s, especially Milton's Poems . This linear history of books obviously reaffirms the centrality of canonical authors; major writers, besides being major writers, seem also to have been the agents or the beneficiaries of crucial technological innovations. And although this line of major books has effectively shown that "the" book, as the idiom goes, has a history, it slights the many literary books that seem to have nothing but a history, that seem to exert no influence on modern understandings of books, authorship, and readership.Margaret Cavendish's debut in print, Poems, and Fancies , is one of many such books. Although Poems, and Fancies seems to have been remarkable for Cavendish's contemporaries , her book is rarely analyzed in surveys of seventeenth-century books of poetry. Cavendish's first book nevertheless invites such analysis, for its famous prefatory material shapes the book's place among other books published in the mid-seventeenth century. Because prefaces record emerging assumptions about the production, circulation, and proper use of texts, they have long been important archives for theorists and for historians of early modern literature, such as W. W. Greg, whose collection of "Prefaces and Such" to early modern plays reflects a complex variety of transactions among authors, readers, regulatory agents, and stationers. Roger Chartier has argued more recently that prefatory material reveals authors' and publishers' strategies for securing proper appreciation of their books, so that prefaces offer specific evidence about contemporary writing, publishing, and reading. Cavendish's first prefaces accordingly register her initial understandings of authorship, readership, and print, and her understandings differ sharply from those presented by that exemplar of "the" book, Humphrey Moseley, the stationer whom Ann Baynes Coiro has justly called "the leading purveyor of high literary culture in the seventeenth century." Cavendish and Moseley define their concepts of books in prefaces, and the profound differences between their definitions demonstrate that, however teleological twentieth-century accounts may become, the book was still under active negotiation almost fifty years after Jonson is said to have invented it. This active negotiation complicates sweeping claims about "the" book, and indeed, Poems, and Fancies defies critical and historiographic methods based on a stable model of the book, a model much more favorable to Moseley's work than to Cavendish's. As a representative of the many books that may not qualify as "the" book, Poems, and Fancies illuminates both the seventeenth-century process of fetishizing printed books by.. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish was a philosopher, poet, scientist, novelist, and playwright of the seventeenth century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. It presents an early and compelling version of the naturalism that is found in current-day philosophy; it offers important insights that bear on recent discussions of the nature and characteristics of intelligence and the question of whether or not the bodies that surround us are intelligent or have an intelligent cause; it anticipates some of the central views (...) and arguments that are more commonly associated with figures like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. This is the first full account of Cavendish’s philosophy and covers the whole span of her work. David Cunning begins with an overview of Cavendish’s life and work before assessing her contribution to a wide range of philosophical subjects, including her arguments concerning materialism, experimentation, the existence of God, social and political philosophy and free will and compatibilism. Setting Cavendish in both historical and philosophical context, he argues that like Spinoza she builds on central tenets of Descartes’ philosophy and develops them in a direction that Descartes himself would avoid. She defends a plenum metaphysics according to which all individuals are causally interdependent, and according to which the physical universe is a larger individual that constitutes all of reality. Cavendish is essential reading for students of seventeenth-century philosophy, early modern philosophy and seventeenth-century literature. (shrink)

Seventeenth-century philosopher Margaret Cavendish wrote not only several philosophical treatises, but also many fictional works. I argue for taking the latter as serious objects of study for historians of philosophy, and sketch a method for doing so. Cavendish's fiction is full of conflicting viewpoints, and many authors have argued that this demonstrates that she did not intend her literary works to serve serious philosophical purpose. But if we consider philosophers more central to the canon, such as Plato or Kierkegaard, who (...) sometimes used literary forms to do serious philosophy, we see that these arguments are unfounded. Like those philosophers, Cavendish had several philosophical motivations for pursuing value-theoretic issues through the flexible formats of literary genres. This suggests that Cavendish's literary corpus may be fruitful and largely unexplored ground for the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Scholarly interest in Margaret Cavendish's philosophical views has steadily increased over the past decade, but her epistemology has received little attention, and no consensus has emerged; Cavendish has been characterized as a skeptic, as a rationalist, as presenting an alternative epistemology to both rationalism and empiricism, and even as presenting no clear theory of knowledge at all. This paper concludes that Cavendish was only a modest skeptic, for she believed that humans can achieve knowledge through sensitive and rational perception as (...) well as through self-knowledge and can form probable opinions through reasoning. (shrink)

This study discusses the importance of the idea of the material soul in the writings of Margaret Cavendish and, more broadly, in the literature of early modern England, showing that the seemingly arcane notion that discourse is the product of the psychic mechanism was central to Cavendish's works. I suggest that cultural proscriptions against early modern women's discourse were more complex than has been recognized. These proscriptions were both supported and made problematic by conflicting ideas about the nature of the (...) soul. I argue that, in engaging these conflicting ideas, Cavendish exhibits not her personal inadequacies as a writer as has often been thought, but rather, simultaneously, a highly self-conscious strategy of self-representation and a sophisticated materialist psychology. In so doing, my study provides a new perspective on a tradition of early modern women's literature concerned with psychic development and management of the passions and shows that Cavendish responded to epistemological and class conflict in a singularly resourceful manner. (shrink)

This paper considers Margaret Cavendish's distinctive anti-mechanist materialism, focusing on her 1664 Philosophical Letters, in which she discusses the views of Hobbes, Descartes, and More, among others. The paper examines Cavendish's views about natural, material souls: the soul of nature, the souls of finite individuals, and the relation between them. After briefly digressing to look at Cavendish's views about divine, supernatural souls, the paper then turns to the reasons for Cavendish's disagreement with mechanist accounts. There are disagreements over the explanation (...) of particular phenomena, but also a broader disagreement over what to take as one's most basic causal model. (shrink)

Writing at a time when women had few property rights, were given scarce educational opportunities, and were viewed as incorrigibly irrational, the largely autodidactic English intellectual Margaret Cavendish is fascinated by knowledge and how to secure for herself a place in the micro- as well as macrocosmic community of letters. In particular, Cavendish holds an abiding interest in what we now call "consciousness" which she attributes to every piece of matter. Throughout the universe, the three aspects of matter--inanimate, sensate, and (...) rational--are omnipresent. While throughout all of Cavendish's eclectic literary creation, consciousness is the unifying principle. Her exploration of consciousness manifests itself across genres--in scenes from her fiction, in the themes of her poetry, in her philosophical principles, and in her explanations of the natural world. I maintain that although this is not commonly recognized, Cavendish's principle of pervasive consciousness is a premise throughout her writings. (shrink)