Margaret Cavendish, née Lucas
*1623 (Colchester, United Kingdom)
†December 15, 1673 (Welbeck Abbey, United Kingdom)
Spouse: William Cavendish
Margaret Cavendish was an English intellectual whose works span across philosophy, natural science, poetry, play-writing, fiction and an auto-biography. Cavendish was an early advocate of naturalism and believed that ideas and thoughts, as well as souls, are material. She argued against all forms of tracing bodily actions to immaterial beings, such as immaterial forms, God or an immaterial mind, and held the view that the causes for bodily actions rest in matter itself. Cavendish believed that we cannot have knowledge of immaterial things. Earlier than Hume, she argued for the idea that knowledge of causal relations rests solely on experience.
Cavendish, like most women at her time, did not receive a formal education. She had access to libraries, which she used enthusiastically. She was the youngest of 8 children and engaged herself in intellectual conversations with her siblings, especially her middle brother John Lucas, who was very well educated and was to become a founding member of the Royal Society. At a very young age she started to put her ideas into writing. After three years as a maid of honor at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, who she followed into exile in France, Cavendish married William Cavendish in 1645. Margaret Cavendish engaged with prominent intellectuals of her time such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. Cavendish published in her own name at a time when women often published anonymously. While her publishing as a woman was often perceived as scandalous during her lifetime, she played an important role in many intellectual debates of her time. Cavendish’s book The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World is regarded to be one of the first science-fiction novels in literary history.
Clara Carus
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Primary Sources
Cavendish, Margaret 1653. Poems and Fancies. London: T. Roycroft.
Cavendish, Margaret 1653. Philosophicall Fancies. London: T. Roycroft.
Cavendish, Margaret 1655. The World’s Olio. London: T. Roycroft.
Cavendish, Margaret 1655. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London: Wilson.
Cavendish, Margaret 1656. Nature’s Pictures drawn by fancies pencil to the life. London.
Cavendish, Margaret 1662. Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places. London: W. Wilson.
Cavendish, Margaret 1662. Plays. London: Warren.
Cavendish, Margaret 1662. Bell in Campo. In: Playes. London: John Martyn, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas.
Cavendish, Margaret 1662. Love’s Adventures. London. Online here: http://digitalcavendish.org/complete-works/playes/loves-adventures/.
Cavendish, Margaret 1663. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London: Wilson.
Cavendish, Margaret 1664. Poems and Fancies. London: Wilson.
Cavendish, Margaret 1664. Philosophical Letters. London: Wilson/Maxwell?.
Cavendish, Margaret 1664. Sociable Letters. London: Wilson.
Cavendish, Margaret 1666. Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. Maxwell.
Cavendish, Margaret 1668. Plays Never before Printed. Maxwell.
Cavendish, Margaret 1814 (1656). A True Relation of the birth, breeding and life of Margaret Cavendish Printed at the private press of Lee priory, by Johnson and Warwick.
Cavendish, Margaret 1992. The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World And Other Writings. Kate Lilley (ed.). London: William Pickering.
Cavendish, Margaret 1996 (1668). Grounds of Natural Philosophy. Colette V. Michael, West Cornwall (eds.). CT: Locust Hill Press.
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Cavendish, Margaret 2001 (1668). Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Eileen O’Neill (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavendish, Margaret 2001. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Eileen O’Neill (ed.). New York: Cambridge UP.
Cavendish, Margaret 2001. Die gleißende Welt. Virginia Richter (trans. & ed.). München: Scaneg Verlag.
Cavendish, Margaret 2002. Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions. Alexandra G. Bennett (ed.). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
Cavendish, Margaret 2003 (1666). The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. In: Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings. Susan James (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavendish, Margaret 2004. Sociable Letters. James Fitzmaurice (ed.). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
Cavendish, Margaret 2015. The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. London: Leopold Classic Library.
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Secondary Sources
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Payne, Linda R. 1991. Dramatic Dreamscape: Women’s Dreams and Utopian Vision in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1830. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds.). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 18-33.
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Quotes
“But be it, that there are Immaterial Spirits, yet they are not natural, but supernatural; that is, not substantial parts of Nature; for Nature is material, or corporeal, and so are all her Creatures, and whatsoever is not material is no part of Nature, neither doth it belong any ways to Nature: Wherefore, all that is called Immaterial, is a Natural Nothing, and an Immaterial Natural substance, in my opinion, is non-sense […].”
― Philosophical Letters, XX1
“[N]atural reason cannot know nor have naturally any perception or idea of an Incorporeal being.”
― Cavendish 1668a, 78
“I Here present the sum of my works, not that I think wise School-men, and industrious, laborious students should value my book for any worth, but to receive it without a scorn, for the good incouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots, by the 〈◊〉 of our spirits, through the carelesse neglects, and despisements of the masculine sex to the effeminate, thinking it impossible we should have either learning or understanding, wit or judgement, as if we had not rational souls as well as men, and we out of a custom of dejectednesse think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge being imployed onely in looe, and pettie imployments, which takes away not onely our abilities towards arts, but higher capacities in speculations, so as we are become like worms that onely live in the dull earth of ignorance […]: thus by an opinion, which I hope is but an erronious one in men, we are shut out of all power, and Authority by reason we are never imployed either in civil nor marshall affaires, our counsels are despised, and laught at, the best of our actions are troden down with scorn, by the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves and through a dispisement of us.”
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