Margaret Cavendish was the most extraordinary seventeenth-century Englishwoman, refusing to be silent when exiled by the Crowmellian regime, she fought to make her voice heard through her fascinating publications.

It not only celebrates Cavendish as a true figure of the scientific age but contributes to a broader understanding of the contested nature of the scientific revolution.

This collection provides the most comprehensive, multidisciplinary study of the works of Margaret Cavendish currently available.

An eclectic collection of poetry by one of 17th century England's boldest, smartest, and independent women. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a groundbreaking writer—a utopian visionary, a scientist, a science-fiction pioneer. She moved in philosophical circles that included Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, and she produced startlingly modern poems unlike anything published in the seventeenth century or since, at once scientific and visionary, full of feminist passion and deep sympathy with the nonhuman world. In recent years, Cavendish has found many new admirers, and this selection of her verse by Michael Robbins is an ideal introduction to her singular poetic world.

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), Duchess of Newcastle and one of the best-known women writers of the her time, is enjoying a revival in the wake of Aphra Behn's canonization: She appears in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, her poetry will appear in a new edition, and Penguin has recently reprinted her science-fiction novel The Blazing World. This is an edition of her hilarious and rowdy letters, unavailable since their original publication in 1664 Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters is a window into the world of 17th-century marriage and daily life displaying a pleasing blend of the comic, the ironic, and the serious. Along the way, the author provides us with the first detailed criticism of Shakespeare's plays, which she defends against the Restoration distaste for low characters. She also comments on food, home remedies, the English Civil Wars, religious fanaticism, street entertainers, churchgoing as a way to find a husband, and winter sports This edition offers a full introduction to Cavendish's life and works, a bibliography, and detailed notes, and takes account of hand-corrections made at the author's behest

The Seventeenth-Century philosopher, scientist, poet, playwright, and novelist Margaret Cavendish went to battle with the great thinkers of her time, and arguably got the better of them in many cases. She took a creative and systematic stand on the major questions of philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. She argued that human beings and all other members of the created universe are purely material creatures, and she held that there are many other ways in which creatures are alike as well: for example, human beings, non-human animals, spiders, cells, and all other beings exhibit skill, wisdom, and activity, and so the universe of matter is not the largely dead and unimpressive region that most of her contemporaries thought it to be. Creatures instead are sophisticated and display a wide spectrum of intelligent activity, ranging from the highly conscious mentality that Descartes posited to be part and parcel of human thought, to embodied forms of cognition that is more common in non-human creatures but that guide a significant portion of human behavior as well. Cavendish then used her fictional work to further illustrate her views and arguments, and also to craft alternative fictional worlds in which the climate for women was very different than on Seventeenth-Century earth - a climate in which women could be taken seriously in the role of philosopher, writer, scientist, military general, and other roles. This is the first volume to provide a cross-section of Cavendish's writings, views and arguments, along with introductory material. It excerpts the key portions of all her texts including annotated notes highlighting the interconnections between them. Including a general introduction by Cunning, the book will allow students to work toward a systematic picture of Cavendish's metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy (and including some of her non-philosophical work as well) and to see her in dialogue with philosophers who are part of the traditional canon.

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.

Marcy P. Lascano examines the philosophical systems of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway. Cavendish and Conway are both known for their monism, i.e., the view that there is only one kind of substance in the world, which is capable of self-motion and life. Lascano here provides detailed analyses of their respective accounts of monism, substance, self-motion, individuation, and identity over time, as well as causation, perception, and freedom. She thereby shows how their superficially similar views provide importantly different explanations of the workings of the world. Lascano illuminates under-appreciated nuances in Cavendish's and Conway's views, highlighting the important differences between their systems. Examining their views in tandem allows readers to appreciate the originality of their ideas and their responses to seventeenth-century debates. The book's final chapter then explains how Cavendish's metaphysics lays the groundwork for her natural philosophy, while Conway's metaphysics provides the foundation for her theodicy. Drawing on their original writing and engaging with existing scholarship, Lascano presents the first sustained comparison of Cavendish's and Conway's metaphysics revealing the differences between Cavendish's thoroughgoing naturalism and Conway's spiritualism. In turn, she enlarges our view of these thinkers and their unique ways of understanding the world around us.

Only recently have scholars begun to note Margaret Cavendish’s references to 'God,' 'spirits,' and the 'rational soul,' and little has been published in this regard. This volume addresses that scarcity by taking up the theological threads woven into Cavendish’s ideas about nature, matter, magic, governance, and social relations, with special attention given to Cavendish’s literary and philosophical works. Reflecting the lively state of Cavendish studies, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish allows for disagreements among the contributing authors, whose readings of Cavendish sometimes vary in significant ways; and it encourages further exploration of the theological elements evident in her literary and philosophical works. Despite the diversity of thought developed here, several significant points of convergence establish a foundation for future work on Cavendish’s vision of nature, philosophy, and God. The chapters collected here enhance our understanding of the intriguing-and sometimes brilliant-contributions Cavendish made to debates about God’s place in the scientific cosmos.