Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a wide variety of works including poems, plays, letters and treatises of natural philosophy, but her significance as a political writer has only recently been recognised. This major contribution to the series of Cambridge Texts includes the first ever modern edition of her Divers Orations on English social and political life, together with a new student-friendly rendition of her imaginary voyage, A New World called the Blazing World. Susan James explains the allusions made in this classic text, and directs readers to the many intellectual debates with which Cavendish engages. Together these two works reveal the character and scope of Margaret Cavendish’s political thought. She emerges as a singular and probing writer, who simultaneously upholds a conservative social and political order and destabilises it through her critical and unresolved observations about natural philosophy, scientific institutions, religion, and the relations between men and women.

• A major addition to this well-known series, this book features texts by an extraordinary figure in the history of ideas • The editor, Susan James, is one of the world’s leading authorities on early modern and feminist philosophy • All the student-friendly series features will be useful for the many courses on women’s writing where Cavendish is studied

Preface; Introduction; Chronology of Margaret Cavendish; Further Reading; The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World; Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places; Index.

‘… a handsome addition to syllabuses on seventeenth-century thought, early-modern women writers and gender studies.‘ Forum for Modern Language Studies