In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The emblematic device of the Royal Society, the mark of its belief in experimentation as a way to understand nature, was the air-pump, used by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke to measure the pressure of air and the viability of living creatures in a vacuum. But the air-pump generated a result the experimenters did not anticipate, at least for one imaginative commentator. “Then came the Lice-men, and endeavoured to measure all things to a hairs breadth, and weigh them to an Atome,” wrote Margaret Cavendish in her satiric account of the new science, The Description of a New World, called The Blazing World. “But,” she continued, “their weights would seldom agree, especially in the weighing of Air, which they found a task impossible to be done; at which the Empress began to be displeased, and told them there was neither Truth nor Justice in their Profession; and so dissolved their society.”1 Other beastly scientists inhabit the fantastic world created by Cavendish in her 1666 satire. “We take more delight in Artificial Delusions, then [sic] in natural truths,” declare the bear-men experimental philosophers. If their telescopes and microscopes actually found the truth, these monstrous scientists argue, “we should want the aim and pleasure of our endeavours in confuting and contradicting each other; neither would one man be thought wiser then [sic] another, but all would either be alike knowing and wise, or all would be fools.”2 Ape-men “chymists” foolishly waste their time trying to find the philosopher’s stone. The Empress of the Blazing World, voice and avatar of Cavendish herself, dissolves all their societies , hoping to avoid the factions that might bring “an utter ruine upon a State or Government.”3 In Blazing World, published six years after the foundation of the Royal Society, Cavendish used parody to figuratively demolish an institution she viewed as dangerous , useless, and deluded in thinking that its experimental program could rii n t r o d u c t i o n Gender, Nature, and Natural Philosophy BA 2 t h e n a t u r a l p h i l o s o p h y o f M a r g a r e t c av e n d i s h val and confine the works of nature. Historically, the Royal Society is widely seen as a part of the resolution of the upheavals in religion, science, and politics that shook Europe and England in the seventeenth century.4 Cavendish saw it differently. In many different genres—essays, treatises, poetry, romance, orations, plays, and treatises—Cavendish brought intellect and awareness to analyzing the implications of the new science for nature and women. Historians lament the absence of female voices in the past, but sometimes a single voice reveals common experiences and concerns. Commenting on the changes she observed during a tumultuous personal and public life, Cavendish criticized mechanical and experimental philosophy, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, and alchemy. As the first woman to publish her own natural philosophy, Cavendish was completely singular—and strange—in her time and place, but her singularity reveals the revolutionary potential of many of the ideas and practices she questioned. Margaret Cavendish had a scientific revolution, but it was different from the one that has made it into the history books. Cavendish adapted the ontology of the mechanistic philosophers—matter in motion—but reconfigured it to suit her own view of nature. Her natural philosophy , a form of vitalistic materialism that posited a universe composed of three kinds of matter—rational, sensitive, and inanimate matter—is no stranger to modern definitions of science than are the philosophies of many of the thinkers Cavendish critiqued in her works, including Hobbes, Descartes, Henry More, and Joan Baptista Van Helmont. Her work is dialogic and polemical. It is also anachronistic , at least in terms of form. Boyle and other members of the experimental community rejected romance, poetry, and speculative fiction as legitimate means for expressing philosophic ideas about nature. Cavendish embraced all genres as a vehicle for her ideas and had no compunction about injecting philosophic discussion into the middle of comedies of manners or utopian fiction. It may be that she used different rhetorical tactics to insinuate her ideas into a public forum increasingly closed to women in the late seventeenth century, but she may also reflect the discoursive practices of earlier natural philosophers, like the Italian naturalists and alchemists who presented their ideas in many different forms. Among other seventeenth...

Share