‘Under a Heap of Dust They Buried Lye, within a Vault of Some Small Library ’: Margaret Cavendish and the Gendered Space of the Seventeenth-Century Library

2013 ◽  
pp. 58-73
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Gendered Space

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.

Margaret Cavendish

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cunning
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
First Century ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Universe

Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, poet, playwright, and novelist, went to battle with the great thinkers of her time, and in many cases arguably got the better of them, but she did not have the platform that she would have had in the twenty-first century. She took a creative and systematic stand on the major questions of philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. She defends a number of theses across her corpus: for example, that human beings and all other members of the created universe are wholly material; that matter is eternal; that the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies; that matter is generally speaking knowledgeable and perceptive and that non-human creatures like spiders, plants, and cells exhibit wisdom and skill; that motion is never transferred from one body to another, but bodies always move by motions that are internal to them; that sensory perception is not via impressions or stamping; that we can have no ideas of immaterials; and that creatures depend for their properties and features on the behavior of the beings that surround them. Cavendish uses her fictional work to further illustrate these views, and in particular to illustrate the view that creatures depend on their surroundings for their social and political properties. For example, she crafts alternative worlds in which women are not seen as unfit for roles such as philosopher, scientist, and military general, and in which they flourish. This volume of Cavendish’s writings provides a cross-section of her interconnected writings, views, and arguments.

Breath of Sirens

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-109
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Larson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Body ◽  
Acoustic Medium ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Musical Notation ◽  
Acoustic Impact ◽  
Acoustic Phenomenon ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter dissects the physiological matter of song by attending to the gendered mechanisms and rhetorical effects of the musical breath. It explores how early moderns conceptualized the acoustic medium of the breath, charts its movement through the vocal mechanism of the body, and examines the traces of that process preserved in physiological treatises, singing handbooks, and surviving manuscript and print scores. While these documents provide rich insight into singing as a physical and acoustic phenomenon in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, they testify equally powerfully to song’s airy intangibility, particularly at moments where language and musical notation strain to represent the physical experience of singing. Reading the ambivalent figure of the singing siren alongside the prolific output of Margaret Cavendish, the final section of the chapter considers the acoustic impact of the musical breath in relation to the culturally fraught phenomenon of women’s song performance.

Ideas in the Mind: Gender and Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century

Hypatia ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Findlen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The Mind

“Neither doth our Sex delight or understand Philosophy.” (Margaret Cavendish, 1664)

scholarly journals Reading through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading*

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Spiller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The World

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Stewart Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Animal Minds ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Ralph Cudworth ◽  
Henry More

This introduction presents the project of the book, to examine the seventeenth-century debate about materialism that began with the work of Thomas Hobbes. Among those who responded directly to Hobbes, the book focuses on Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. The introduction and book then look at John Locke’s discussion of materialism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which draws on and responds to that earlier discussion. A central question for all these philosophers is whether human minds are material. They also consider whether animal minds are material, and whether God is. Other philosophical issues, including theories of substance and of the nature of ideas, are repeatedly involved in the discussion. The relation of these discussions to the work of René Descartes is noted.

Cartesianism in Britain

2019 ◽  
pp. 495-513
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The Individual

This chapter provides a broad picture of the reception of Descartes’s philosophy in England and Scotland, from the 1630s through to the post-Newtonian attacks on Cartesian physics and cosmology at the end of the seventeenth century. It starts with an overview of the earliest encounters between Britons and Descartes, the reception of Cartesianism in British universities, translations into English, and British editions of Cartesian works. It then discusses some of the individual responses to Cartesianism which are not discussed elsewhere in this Handbook, among them the Cavendish circle (including Margaret Cavendish), Le Grand, Barrow, Boyle, Charleton, Conway, Cudworth, and Clarke.

The Plain Style in the Seventeenth Century: Gender and the History of Scientific Discourse

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Tillery
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Emotional Appeals ◽  
History Of ◽  
Plain Style

This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

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