Margaret Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655)

Phi.3.20

“and who knows but after my honourable burial, I may have a glorious resurrection in the following ages

‘Mad Madge’ between proto-feminism and tradition

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne, had never received any formal education. Still, she became not only the most important 17th-century female writer, but a prolific author even when compared to her male contemporaries. Cavendish’s numerous works cover the literary genres of poetry, prose, and drama. Unusually for a female author at the time, she also published philosophical and scientific works. In May 1667, Cavendish became the first woman to visit the Royal Society. She published her first work Poems and Fancies in 1653, a collection of works predominantly on natural philosophy in different genres. She is arguably best known for The Blazing World (1668), an attack on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, which first appeared in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666 (Fitzmaurice). This utopian work is often described as a forerunner of science fiction.

Displayed here is the first edition of The Philosophical and Physical Opinions from 1655, in which Cavendish sets out her ‘materialist natural philosophy [agreeing] with Hobbes that incorporeal substance makes no sense and that all natural change involves change in motion’ (Fitzmaurice). The main text is preceded by a large number of prefaces, letters, and dedicatory texts. One of these is a letter entitled ‘To the Two Universities’, i.e. Oxford and Cambridge, in which Cavendish expresses her hope that there at least she could find some kind of acceptance ‘where nature is best known, where truth is oftenest found, where civility is most practised’. Cavendish presented copies of this publication to a number of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, including, as the ex dono inscription on the title-page shows, St John’s College. The writings of Margaret Cavendish, who eventually became
known as ‘Mad Madge’, have been either belittled or entirely forgotten for centuries. Interest rekindled only recently and her achievements are now reassessed on their own merit (Walters, p. 1).