Margaret Cavendish

Lisa Walters is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She is author of Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge 2014). She coedits the Restoration section of the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women Writers and has published articles on Cavendish, Shakespeare and Milton. Brandie R. Siegfried was the Nan Grass Professor at Brigham Young University. She won the Josephine Roberts Award for the Best Scholarly Edition of 2018, awarded by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, for her edition of Cavendish's Poems and Fancies. She also coedited two volumes, including World-making Renaissance Women (Cambridge 2021).

• Introduction: The intellectual span of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa Walters; History of Science: 1. Margaret Cavendish: Natural philosopher and feminist Carolyn Merchant; 2. Margaret Cavendish thinks about sex Lisa T. Sarasohn; 3. Margaret Cavendish and the rhetoric and aesthetics of the microscopic image in seventeenth-century England Stephen Clucas; 4. Margaret Cavendish and the nature of infinity Sara Mendelson; Philosophy: 5. Cavendish's philosophy of the passions: Theory and practice Jacqueline Broad and Maks Sipowicz; 6. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, and the Plenum David Cunning; 7. Cavendish's philosophical genres in Philosophical and Physical Opinions and the question of hierarchy Karen Detlefsen; Literature: 8. Of webs and wonder: The atomic vitalism of Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies Brandie R. Siegfried; 9. The Blazing World: Literary history, genre, and the inner world Mary Baine Campbel; 10. Margaret Cavendish's Prudence; or, preservation and transformation in Playes (1662) and Plays Never Before Printed (1668) Lara Dodds; 11. Lady Newcastle's 'Unsoiled Petticoats' and the literary reputation of Margaret Cavendish, 1652–1985 James Fitzmaurice; Politics and Reception: 12. The politics of the English civil wars in Natures Pictures Mihoko Suzuki; 13. Cavendish: The nexus among orations, power, and women intellectuals Hilda L. Smith; 14. Margaret Cavendish's sociable letter #16: Women's political obligation and independence Joanne H. Wright; New Directions: 15. Close reading (and) textual bibliography: How many parts does Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World have? Liza Blake; 16. Companions, competitors, contexts: Margaret Cavendish in women writers online Sarah Connell; 17. Cavendish studies and the digital turn Jacob Tootalian and Shawn Moore; Afterword: Margaret Cavendish: A grandmother for twenty-first century philosophy of science Siri Hustvedt.

'This new collection expertly gathers the work of a variety of scholars from diverse disciplines and connects the many threads that bring us closer to understanding the value of reading Margaret Cavendish from many perspectives at once.' Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal