Appendix

Margaret Cavendish’s Scientific Publications

Margaret Cavendish, a central figure in the Cavendish Circle, is probably the best known of seventeenth-century Englishwomen associated with the new science, largely because she pursued an aggressive publication strategy in hopes of positioning herself as “the Queen of Sciences.” In her quest for fame and influence — “I am restless to Live, as Nature doth, in all Ages, and in every Brain”[1] — Cavendish was drawn to natural philosophy, to extensive publication, and to distributing lavish presentation copies of her folios to important public and private libraries. This voluminous publication record makes Margaret Cavendish more accessible to us today than other women of science in the period.

Cavendish’s first publication was in 1652/1653 (usually recorded as 1653), although some of her science writing, not published until 1655, was fully drafted in 1649/50. And Cavendish was clearly writing on scientific subjects (her “Baby-books”) before this, although she tells us that her earliest thinking, prior to connecting with the Cavendish Circle, was more chaotic than methodical. Her first two books, Poems and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies, stressed poetic engagement and knowing. While past critics have dismissed Cavendish’s “fanciful science,” more recent commentators have recognized its feminist implications. Cavendish’s epistemology did champion her “studious fancy’s” unmediated access to, and “pencelling” of, “the truth of Nature” — as neatly captured in the title of her 1656 publication, Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life. This epistemological stance was not, however, so bizarre as has been suggested.

Cavendish’s naturalist rhetoric in fact dovetailed with the (feminized) topoi of Flemish and Dutch veristic art. And it was well within the tradition of English new science, whose varied discourses aligned literary ingenuities (conceits, tropes, anagrams, emblems, acrostics, epigrams) with the ingenuities of science throughout the period.[2] Science framed as poetry dates back to the Elizabethans, perhaps reaching its apogee in the enormously popular translation by Joshua Sylvester in 1605 of Du Bartas’s encyclopedic religious poem. Bacon himself stated that “There is no proceeding in invention of knowledge but by similitude” — a truism for many early-modern educators, ranging from Cavendish’s husband, William, when privately instructing the young Charles II, to Bathsua Makin (1600–1674?), when pioneering an educational program in experimental philosophy for young women towards the end of our period.[3]

From published fancies, Cavendish moved on to exploring the natural and social worlds in a variety of genres — plays, prose miscellany, essays, letters, orations, science fiction (known then as “voyages to the moon”), prose romance, biography, autobiography. While her Poems and Fancies was re-issued twice more (1664, 1668), the Philosophical Fancies, a small duodecimo volume (and not very grand), was quickly superceded by the Philosophical and Physical Opinions in 1655 (reissued in 1663, then completely revised and published under a new title in 1668). This text was Cavendish’s own favorite, and her designated “masterpiece” (a judgment seconded by her husband).

Despite their lavish presentation, Cavendish’s printed texts are far from stable. Printers’ errors were legion at the time, and many 17th-century authors complained of this. John Beale F.R.S. griped to Henry Oldenburg, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that an essay of his published in the scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, for February 1669 was so full of misprints that readers would conclude Beale to be “Phantastical, Impudent or Distracted.” Cavendish estimated that her own Poems and Fancies contained “above a hundred” errors introduced by the printer, ranging from plurals rendered as singulars, to “false words” that altered her meaning (e.g., “ungrateful” instead of “ungraceful”). Later texts had missing words and sections, and misplaced chapters; in one case, material intended for her 1655 edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions appeared at the end of her 1655 The Worlds Olio instead.

Cavendish mentions hiring university students to “assist” her in revising her works, and they probably handled the bulk of editing required to prepare corrected second and third editions. The one exception to this was her Philosophical and Physical Opinions which Cavendish determined to “rectifie” herself, intending in the process to “make it more intelligible; for my greatest ambition is to express my conceptions so, that my Readers may understand them: For which I would not spare any labour or pains, but be as industrious as those that gain their living by their work.” (Philosophical Letters 412) The “much altered” Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) was the result, and Cavendish proudly tells us that she has accomplished the “many Alterations and Additions” without aid from anyone, having refused to put her Philosophical and Physical Opinions “to suck at the Breast of some Learned Nurse ... but would, obstinately, suckle it my self, and bring it up alone, without the help of any Scholar” (sig. A2v).

While for some time it was thought that Cavendish’s natural philosophy was simply condemned by a patriarchal science establishment — or as she expressed it in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666, 1668), “my Philosophy” is “slighted now and buried in silence” — we have learned that Cavendish’s reception was in fact mixed. Among her detractors was the Restoration poet Andrew Marvell, whose printed attacks on Cavendish characterized her, and other women of the court, as “masculine wives transgressing nature’s law.” Marvell linked Cavendish with Francis Bacon and Robert Hooke as the three icons of perceived excess within the new science.[4]

Among Cavendish’s public supporters was the Newcastle book-seller William London, whose Catalogue of the most vendible books in England (1657) listed Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies, along with Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America (1650), as properly philosophical (versus romantic) poetry. London, a Baconian, used his catalog as a promotional tool for educational reform, hoping to attract men and women of the gentle classes to a life of learning and intellectual improvement. To London, who ignored political allegiances and accusations of heterodoxy in compiling his best-seller list, both (the Royalist) Cavendish’s and (the Puritan) Bradstreet’s poetry of “rare Ideas” was recommended reading.
  
  

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NOTES

1. CCXI Sociable Letters 178. In this, Cavendish emulated Francis Bacon as well as nature; his works, she wrote admiringly, “have been very Propagating and Manuring other mens Brains” (Sociable Letters 146).

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2. E.g., in a 1630 publication, Thomas Johnson titled his discussion of mechanical inventions and simple experiments in mechanics and chemistry “Dainty Conceits, with a number of rare and witty inventions.”

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3. The history of science abounds with examples showing the interdependence of the imaginary and rational. Einstein, for example, believed that in science “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” See Gerald Holton’s The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978) and Einstein, History, and Other Passions (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996), esp. ch. 4.

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4. Enlisting the vocabulary of gender to disparage one’s enemies has long been an effective tactic, and the status-seeking Royal Society invoked it with similar intent. Natural philosophers regularly impugned one another’s masculinity — especially that of their foreign competitors — as was traditional within the agons of knowledge making. See Miriam Brody, Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993) 194, 46.

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