4. Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Writing Matter

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-178
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson

Writing History: Domestic Papers, Biographical Writing, and Public Histories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Family Member ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life Writings

Many who lived through the English Civil War penned memoirs of their experiences, some of which were published after their deaths, such as Richard Baxter’s life writings and Thomas Fuller’s accounts of the worthies of England, or wrote and published topical public histories, including John Milton’s history of Britain. Samuel Pepys’s and John Evelyn’s diaries are among the most important sources about the Restoration years. Others such as Lucy Hutchinson wrote memoirs for their family or, like Margaret Cavendish, to defend the reputation of a family member. There was also interest in the history of foreign cultures, past rulers, and antiquarian topics.

scholarly journals Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish: Civil War and Enemy Commiseration

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Yousef Deikna
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Human Life ◽  
British History ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Difficult Times

Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), prolific writers from the seventeenth century, came of age in one of the most difficult times in British history. Blair Worden, an eminent historian, writes, “The political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century has no parallel in English history,” and none of the previous conflicts “has been so far-reaching, or has disrupted so many lives for so long, or has so imprinted itself on the nation’s memory” (2009, p. 1). Hutchinson and her husband, John, were on the side of the parliamentarians in the Civil War while Cavendish and her husband, William, were stout royalists. Instead of showing aggressive stances against their enemies, Hutchinson and Cavendish engaged expansively in a language of empathizing with the enemy in order to lessen the extreme partisanship of that period. Focusing specifically on Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, and Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, among other writings, I argue that during the political impasse which characterized the English Civil War writings, the perspectives advanced by Hutchinson and Cavendish highlight the valuation of human life regardless of political allegiance, augmenting the odds for peaceful co-existence, in which empathy is foregrounded over, and at times alongside, loss and agony as a result of the Civil War aftermath. Suzanne Keen’s groundbreaking research in Empathy and The Novel draws upon examples from the Victorian period to illustrate her understanding of empathy, but she also states that “I feel sure they also pertain to the hopes of authors in earlier periods as well” (2007, p. 142), which is a position taken wholeheartedly in this article. Using a cognitive literary approach where authorial empathic constructions are analyzed, Hutchinson’s and Cavendish’s closely read texts portray an undeniable level of commiseration with the enemy with the goal of abating violence and increasing cooperation and understanding.

Lucretius Renaissance Thought

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ada Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Society ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Primitive State ◽  
Transmission Studies

Even before its celebrated rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, Lucretius’s didactic Epicurean epic De rerum natura was famous as a Roman masterpiece celebrated by Virgil and Ovid, and infamous as a capsule of dangerous, irreligious paganism ferociously denounced by Arnobius and other Christian apologists. The manuscript remained in the sole possession of Niccolò Niccoli until his death in 1437 when his library was acquired by Cosimo de Medici and numerous copies began to circulate in Florence and, soon thereafter, in Venice and the Veneto region, then Rome, Naples, and Iberia. A total of fifty-four manuscripts survive from the Renaissance, and thirty editions of the poem were printed by 1600, including commentaries by Albertus Pius (1512), Denys Lambin (1563), and Hubert van Giffen (Gifanius, 1565–1566). The diversity of subjects treated in the De rerum natura has invited a broad range of scholarly approaches. Philological study of the text’s transmission has been extensive, and for many years work on the stemma of Lucretius manuscripts served as a model for transmission studies in general. Historians of science frequently examine Lucretius’s influence on atomism, materialism, corpuscular theory, and ideas of generation, especially from the 17th century on. Scholarship on his influence on poetry, literature, language, and art has concentrated on Italian and English contexts, though his influence in France and Iberia is also extensive. Others have concentrated on Lucretius’s influence on ethics and political thought; his Epicurean celebration of pleasure and his account of how human society and government developed gradually out of a less complicated primitive state greatly influenced Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Thomas Hobbes. Lucretius is also a lynchpin in current debates over the modernity of the Renaissance and is often invoked in narratives that portray Renaissance humanism as a modernizing, secularizing force, characterized by a turn toward rationalism and away from Christian orthodoxy—such narratives are common but also controversial, and much scholarship has been devoted to advancing and to refuting such readings of the Renaissance Lucretius. Other figures often examined in a Lucretian context include Pomponio Leto, Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, Bartolomeo Scala, Botticelli, Pierre Gassendi, Edmund Spenser, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, and Girolamo Fracastoro.

Early British Reactions to Absolutism: 1664 to 1687

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Ralph Cudworth

This chapter considers early British reactions to absolutism between the start of Barrow’s pertinent lectures in 1664, and the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687. Although the amount of discussion absolutism received in Britain during this period was much less than it would receive later, it was already capturing the attention of some important thinkers. The reactions to absolutism were mixed. Different kinds of absolutism about space or time was adopted by thinkers such as Samuel Parker, Robert Boyle, and John Turner. In contrast, absolutism was rejected by philosophers such as Margaret Cavendish, Ralph Cudworth, Nathaniel Fairfax, and Anne Conway.

Textual Transformations

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Book History ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).

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