Margaret Cavendish, Vision and Fancy

Partner, Jane

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-71017-4_2

Margaret Cavendish, Vision and Fancy

Jane Partner⁴

Chapter
First Online: 10 April 2018

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Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

Abstract

This chapter reappraises the scope and importance of Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with vision, showing that her early interest in atomism and its complex relation to lens technology (as reflected in Poems, and Fancies), paved the way for her developing conception of sight as being governed by the ‘fancy’. Partner offers a new perspective on Cavendish’s early knowledge of Hobbes by revealing her previously unacknowledged familiarity with the unpublished manuscript of Hobbes’ ‘Optiques’, before using this context to illuminate Cavendish’s responses to the observational procedures of the Royal Society, as manifested in the primacy of fancy in the ‘poetic’ prose of the Blazing World.

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Notes

1.
Virginia Woolf on Margaret Cavendish, A Room of One’s Own (London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1929; London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), p. 57.
2.
I intend this chapter to supplement the fullest existing accounts of Cavendish and vision. Anna Battigelli, in Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), gives an excellent treatment of Cavendish’s opposition to the optical work of the Royal Society later in her career, to which I am indebted, but does not place so much emphasis on vision in Cavendish’s earlier work. Elizabeth Spiller discusses vision as a means of understanding Cavendish’s conception of reading in ‘Books Written on the Wonders of these Glasses: Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, and Margaret Cavendish’s Theory of Reading’, in Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). As discussed below, I depart from this interpretation. See also Jen E. Boyle, ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Double Perception: Affective Techniques and Biopolitical Fictions’, in Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 63–90.
3.
See Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, p. 105 and passim; Eve Keller, ‘Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science’, ELH, 64:2 (1997), 447–71 (p. 457); Sylvia Bowerbank refers to a ‘subjectivist perspective’, ‘The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the “Female” Imagination’, English Literary Renaissance, 14:3 (1984), 392–408 (p. 397). For a very useful exploration of Cavendish’s conception of fancy , though one that is not centrally concerned with her interest in vision, see Lisa Sarasohn, Reason and Fancy in the Scientific Revolution: The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
4.
Margaret Cavendish, ‘Epistle to the Reader’ , The Philosophical and Physical Opinions , 2nd ed. (London: William Wilson, 1663), sig. B4^v.
5.
Margaret Cavendish, Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1656), p. 384.
6.
For an account of Cavendish’s construction of a changeable authorial self see Sandra Sherman, ‘Trembling Texts: Margaret Cavendish and the Dialectics of Authorship’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 184–210; Elaine Walker, ‘Longing for Ambrosia: Margaret Cavendish and the Torments of a Restless Mind in Poems , and Fancies’, Women’s Writing, 4:3 (1997), 341–51.
7.
A Collection of Letters and Poems: Written by Several Persons of Honour and Learning, Upon Divers Important Subjects, to the Late Duke and Duchess of Newcastle (London: Langly Curtis, 1678), pp. 143–4; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, pp. 57–8.
8.
The annotated Cambridge University Press editions have split Cavendish’s 1666 volume Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy , to Which is Added The Description of a New Blazing World (London: Printed by A. Maxwell, 1666) into two: Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Blazing World in Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings, ed. Susan James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Previous anthologies that reproduce The Blazing World contain no part of the Observations. See Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000).
9.
Gerald D. Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760 (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 1955), p. 6; Sarasohn gives a very useful reading of an optical passage in Poems, and Fancies, though she comments, ‘To say this passage is opaque is an understatement’, Reason and Fancy, p. 41.
10.
See Jean Jacquot, ‘Sir Charles Cavendish and his Learned Friends’, Annals of Science, 8 (1952), 14–27.
11.
Margaret Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), sig. B1^r.
12.
See John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 1–38. For Cavendish on the political connotations of atomism, see Lisa T. Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 289–307; Reid Barbour, ‘Lucy Hutchinson, Atomism and the Atheist Dog’, in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the R oyal Society, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 122–37.
13.
Barbour, ‘Lucy Hutchinson, Atomism and the Atheist Dog’, p. 131. See also Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
14.
Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, p. 49.
15.
For Cavendish’s role in the dissemination of atomism in England see Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Harriot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 64–76; Stephen Clucas, ‘The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle: A Reappraisal’, The Seventeenth Century, 9:2 (1994), 247–73 (pp. 259–64).
16.
Kargon, Atomism in England, p. 73.
17.
Emma C. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Genre, Gender, Exile (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 56. See also Sarasohn, Reason and Fancy, pp. 34–9.
18.
Margaret Cavendish , Poems, and Fancies (London: Printed by T.R. for J. Martin and J. Allestryre, 1653), sig. A3^r. For poetry as the commonest non-religious genre of writing previously produced by women of Cavendish’s class, see Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings, 1600–1700’, in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 211–82.
19.
John Milton, ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ (1628), in The Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1997), l. 32. All further references to Milton’s shorter poems are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated; Cavendish , Poems, and Fancies, p. 212.
20.
‘Of Poets, and their Theft’, Poems, and Fancies , p. 124.
21.
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663 ed.), sig. B4^v.
22.
Poems, and Fancies , sig. 2A4^r.
23.
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (London: Printed [by James Roberts] for Henry Olney, 1595), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 123.
24.
Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 258.
25.
On these ‘Idols of the Tribe’ see Francis Bacon, Novum organum, trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), pp. 57–61. See also Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp. 232–46.
26.
Henry More’s exposition of atomism in the verse of Democritus Platonissans (Cambridge: Printed by Roger Daniel , 1646), has been put forward as a possible model for Cavendish, see Susan James, ‘The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7:2 (1999), 219–44 (p. 221).
27.
Poems, and Fancies , p. 212. See ‘poetry’ OED 2 ‘fable, fiction’, 3c ‘extended to include expression in non-metrical language’. See also Sidney : ‘verse being but an ornament and no cause to Poetry: since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified’, Apology for Poetry, p. 103.
28.
‘Fancy ’ OED n. 1, as a form of ‘fantasy’.
29.
‘Fancy’ OED n. 2 ‘a spectral apparition, an illusion of the senses’; 3 ‘delusive imagination’; 6 ‘a supposition resting on no solid grounds’; 7 ‘a caprice, a whim’.
30.
See, for example, George Herbert, Wits Recreations. Selected from the Finest Fancies of Moderne Muses (London: Humphry Blunden, 1640).
31.
‘Of Stars’ , Poems , and Fancies, pp. 35–6.
32.
See BL Add. MS 4278, ff. 271–2; NUL MS PWI 668. See also Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (London: Hart-Davis, 1957), p. 93.
33.
Hartlib Papers, 31/22/23A. For items carried back to Welbeck including Margaret’s microscope, and the lenses and telescope tubes collected in Paris, see The English Travels of Sir John Percival and William Byrd II: The Percival Diary of 1701, ed. Mark R. Wenger (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 98; NUL MS PWI 668. In 1648, William borrowed money from Hobbes so that he could pay his creditors and leave Paris to give military support to the Prince on his first campaign. He gave the optical instruments that he had collected during his exile , which included seven telescopes and several microscopes, to Hobbes as surety for the loan. See Charles Cavendish to Pell 4/14 February 1647, BL MS Birch 278, no. 271. For details of the loan see NUL MS PW1 406 (MS Cavendish Misc. 43). For an account of the ‘famous and long tube perspective glasses’ sent from the Earl of Devonshire at Hardwick to Newcastle at Welbeck in 1662, see Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Royalist, Writer and Romantic (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), p. 254.
34.
Before the invention of the reflecting telescope by James Gregory in 1663, the longest, most powerful refracting instruments were especially prone to distortion. See Harriet Wynter, Scientific Instruments (London: Studio Vista, 1975), p. 191.
35.
Margaret Cavendish , The World’s Olio (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), p. 172.
36.
See NUL MS PWI, 668.
37.
The World’s Olio, p. 181.
38.
Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
39.
Joanna Magali Picciotto, ‘Literary and Scientific Experimentalism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’ (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1999), p. 215.
40.
‘It is hard to believe, that there are other Worlds in this World’, Poems, and Fancies , p. 43.
41.
Ibid., p. 44.
42.
‘A World in an Eare-Ring’, Poems, and Fancies , p. 45.
43.
Richard Leigh, ‘Greatness in Little’, Poems Upon Several Occasions (London: Andrew Clark for William Hensman, 1675), p. 22.
44.
Whitaker, Mad Madge, p. 145.
45.
Poems, and Fancies , p. 46.
46.
Cavendish’s possible reference to the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, in which the queen wears an earring in the form of an armillary sphere, lends further force to this more defiant interpretation. See Claire Jowitt, ‘Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth’, Women’s Writing, 4:3 (1997), 383–99.
47.
For Epicurus and Lucretius on vision see David Park, The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 35–8.
48.
For Cavendish’s identification of her authorial hopes with the atomic system see ‘To Naturall Philosophers’: ‘I remaine an unsettled Atome, or a confus’d heape, till I heare my Censure. If I be prais’d, it fixes them; but if I am condem’d, I shall be Annihilated to nothing: but my Ambition is such, as I would either a World, or nothing’, Poems , and Fancies, sig. 2A2^r.
49.
‘Nature calls a Councell, which was Motion, Figure, matter and Life, to advise about making the World’ , Poems, and Fancies , pp. 1–2.
50.
‘Nature calls a Councell’, p. 2.
51.
‘Motion is the Life of all things’, Poems, and Fancies , p. 19.
52.
‘Of Light and Sight’, Poems, and Fancies , p. 39.
53.
On Hobbes’ role in the Newcastle household see Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, pp. 64–7.
54.
‘An Epilogue to my Philosophical Opinions’, in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), sig. B3^v.
55.
See Sarah Hutton, ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy’, Women’s Writing, 4:3 (1997), 421–32; Spiller, Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature, pp. 137–77; Anna Battigelli, ‘Political Thought/Political Action: Margaret Cavendish’s Hobbesian Dilemma’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 40–55; the most comprehensive account to date of Cavendish’s response to Hobbes in made by Sarasohn, Reason and Fancy, pp. 85–9 and passim.
56.
The closet analysis to this is Spiller’s treatment of the way that Hobbes’ account of vision, as set out in the Leviathan, influenced Cavendish’s later conception of reading, see p. 145 in Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature.
57.
Philosophical Letters (London: [s. n.], 1664), pp. 18–21.
58.
Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy the First Section, Concerning Body. Written in Latine by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; And Now Translated into English (London: R. & W. Leybourn for Andrew Crooke, 1656). See Hutton, ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes’, p. 422.
59.
See Lisa T. Sarasohn, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Duke of Newcastle: A Study in the Mutuality of Patronage before the Establishment of the Royal Society’ , Isis: An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 90:4 (1999), 715–37.
60.
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), I, pp. 37–8.
61.
This request is referred to in a letter from Charles Cavendish to Pell, 11 November 1645, British Library MS Add. 4278, fol. 223.
62.
Thomas Hobbes, transcribed by William Petty, ‘A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques’, British Library MS Harley 3360; ‘Thomas Hobbes’ A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques: A Critical Edition’, ed. Elaine Condouris Stroud (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1983), pp. 76–7. The dedication is reproduced in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, 8 vols. (London: Bohn, 1839–45; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1962), II, 87.
63.
Stroud, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques’, pp. 76–7.
64.
René Descartes , Discours de la methode […] Plus la dioptrique. Les meteores. Et la geometrie (Leiden: Jan Marie, 1637).
65.
See Stroud, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques’, p. 728.
66.
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1975), p. 242.
67.
On Hobbes, Petty and dissection see Miriam M. Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), p. 78 n.; Stroud, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques’, p. 86.
68.
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), sig. B1^r.
69.
Stroud, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques’, pp. 95–6.
70.
Ibid., p. 95.
71.
Ibid., p. 69. See also Jan Prins, ‘Hobbes on Light and Vision’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 129–56 (p. 129).
72.
See A. Malet, ‘The Power of Images: Mathematics and Metaphysics in Hobbes’s Optics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32A:2 (June 2001), 303–33.
73.
Thomas Hobbes, De homine (London: Andrew Crooke, 1658), pp. 5–56.
74.
Poems, and Fancies , p. 39.
75.
Ibid., p. 143.
76.
‘Prospect’ OED n. 2a ‘the view of the landscape afforded by any position’; 3a ‘a spectacle, a scene’; 5 ‘a pictorial representation of a scene’; 9 ‘short for prospect-glass’; 6 ‘a mental view or survey; a look, inspection, examination’; 7 ‘a scene presented to the mental vision […] a mental vista’.
77.
Poems, and Fancies, p. 143.
78.
Ibid., pp. 143, 144. For Milton’s use of a similarly impossible perspective as an instrument of temptation in Paradise Regained , see Chap. 6.
79.
Poems, and Fancies, p. 143.
80.
To cite one example, a prose version of sections from Poems, and Fancies is given in Natures Pictures , pp. 157–60.
81.
For Cavendish’s anxiety about verse form preventing translation, see Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), sig. A2^r.
82.
All references to Cavendish’s 1666 volume are given initially to the first edition, from which the citations have been taken, and they then refer to the respective modern editions edited by O’Neill and James cited above; ‘Epilogue to the Reader’, Blazing World, sig. Ii^r (inserted after the narrative, [mispaginated] p. 121): p. 109.
83.
See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
84.
On Hooke’s work as incommensurate with the increasing probabilism of seventeenth-century science see Lotte Mulligan, ‘Robert Hooke and Certain Knowledge’, The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), 151–69.
85.
Bacon , Novum organum (trans. Urbach), pp. 66–70.
86.
See Keller, ‘Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science’, p. 453; Lorraine Daston, ‘Baconian Facts, Academic Civility and the Prehistory of Objectivity’, Annals of Scholarship, 8:3–4 (1991), 337–64 (pp. 346–7).
87.
On the emergence of probability as an adequate level of truth for causal explanation in natural philosophy, see Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp. 15–73; Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
88.
Observations, [mispaginated], p. 33 (sig. Kk2^r): p. 269. See also Stephen Clucas, ‘Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric’, in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (London: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 199–209.
89.
Francis Bacon, Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1879), IV, p. 125.
90.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 108. See also John T. Harwood, ‘Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia’, in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (London: Boydell Press, 1988), pp. 119–47 (p. 142).
91.
Robert Hooke , Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: Royal Society, 1665), sig. A2^v.
92.
Ibid., sig. B1^r.
93.
Ibid., sigs. A2^r, A2^v.
94.
Ibid., sig. B1^v.
95.
The minutes of the Royal Society meeting for 23 May 1667 record that ‘the Duchess of Newcastle had expressed a great desire to come to the society, and to see some of their experiments’, see Samuel Mintz, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society’, Journal of English and German Philology, 51 (1952), 168–76. John Evelyn recorded in his diary (entry for 30 May 1667) that the Duchess passed no comment about what she saw, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), III, pp. 482–3. Pepys also recorded (entry for 30 May 1667) that the Duchess did not ‘say anything that was worth hearing’, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: Bell, 1971–83), VIII, pp. 242–3.
96.
‘The Preface to the Ensuing Treatise’, Observations, sig. D1^v: p. 10; sig. C1^v: p. 8.
97.
Ibid., p. 10: p. 51.
98.
Ibid., p. 6: p. 49.
99.
Hooke , Micrographia, sig. B1^r.
100.
Observations, p. 7: p. 49.
101.
Ibid., p. 12: p. 53.
102.
Ibid., p. 9: p. 50.
103.
See Wynter, Scientific Instruments, p. 204.
104.
Observations, p. 11: p. 52.
105.
For bubbles as a symbol of vanity see, for example, David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life with Portrait (Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York, circa 1650).
106.
Observations, p. 8: p. 50.
107.
Observations, p. 8: p. 50.
108.
Hooke , Micrographia, sig. F2^v.
109.
Ibid., sig. F2^v.
110.
Observations, p. 9: p. 51; Hooke , Micrographia, sig. B1^r.
111.
Keller, ‘Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science’, p. 454.
112.
Observations, sig. C2^v: p. 9.
113.
Cited from ‘artist’ OED 2.
114.
‘Further Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy’, in Observations, paginated separately in the 1666 edition, p. 12 (paginated continuously as pp. 268–9 in 1668 edition): p. 201.
115.
‘Further Observations’, in Observations, p. 11: p. 201.
116.
Ibid., pp. 12–13: pp. 201–2.
117.
‘Most noble Readers or Spectators’, Nature’s Pictures, sig. A1^v.
118.
See Bowerbank, ‘The Spider’s Delight’, passim.
119.
‘Further Observations’, in Observations, p. 12: p. 201.
120.
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663 ed.), p. 12. For Cavendish’s system of physical bodies as composed of three degrees of matter in differing proportions, see Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters (London: [s. n.], 1664), pp. 24–5; Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663 ed.), pp. 1–4, 8, 13–14; James, ‘The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish’, pp. 225–6.
121.
Observations, p. 9: p. 51.
122.
‘Of the senses, and the objects that pass through the senses’, in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), p. 116. These concepts are restated in the Observations, pp. 146–7: pp. 174–5.
123.
Observations, p. 9: p. 51.
124.
For example, whilst in Antwerp, Margaret and William had lived in the richly decorated house of the late painter Rubens , and extensive allegorical wall paintings still survive inside their later residence at Bolsover. See Whitaker, Mad Madge, pp. 52, 111–12.
125.
‘Of Knowledge and Perception in General’, Observations, p. 171: p. 146.
126.
See Philosophical Letters, pp. 22, 60.
127.
Observations, p. 59: p. 79.
128.
Ibid., p. 157: pp. 138, 156: p. 138.
129.
Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing (London: Henry Eversden, 1661), p. 111.
130.
‘Of Sight’, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), p. 119 [mispaginated 109].
131.
See, for example, Bowerbank: ‘Cavendish’s response to her failure as a natural philosopher was to retreat into fantasy’ (‘The Spider’s Delight’, p. 402); see also Grant, Margaret the First, p. 206, and Lilley, Description of a New World, intro., p. xxiv.
132.
Francis Bacon , Sylva sylvarum: or a naturall historie in ten centuries. Written by the Right Honourable Francis Lo. Verulam Viscount St. Alban. Published after the authors death, by VVilliam Rawley Doctor of Diuinitie, late his Lordships chaplain (London: Printed by I[ohn] H[aviland and Augustine Mathewes] for William Lee, 1626 [i.e. 1627]). This posthumous publication appears to have been prepared for the press by Bacon . The title of the New Atlantis was not mentioned in the overall title of the volume in the first editions.
133.
Blazing World, p. 3: p. 9.
134.
Ibid., p. 3: p. 9.
135.
Ibid., p. 25: p. 26.
136.
Ibid., p. 26: p. 26.
137.
Ibid., p. 41: p. 36.
138.
Ibid., p. 21: p. 23.
139.
Ibid., p. 27: p. 27.
140.
Ibid., pp. 27–8: pp. 27–8.
141.
Ibid., p. 28: p. 28.
142.
‘Of Many Worlds in This World’, Poems, and Fancies, p. 44.
143.
Blazing World, pp. 96–7: p. 72; p. 98: p. 73.
144.
‘To the Reader’, ibid., sig. B*^v: p. 6.
145.
‘The Epilogue to the Reader’, ibid., sig. Ii^r inserted after the narrative, [mispaginated] p. 121: p. 109.
146.
Ibid.
147.
‘To Sir Charles Cavendish’, Poems, and Fancies, sig. A2^r.
148.
The World’s Olio , p. 162.
149.
Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, p. 110.
150.
The World’s Olio , p. 100.
151.
‘A Prospect of a Church in the Mind’, Poems, and Fancies, p. 143.
152.
Margaret Cavendish , The Ground of Natural Philosophy (London: A. Maxwell, 1668), p. 294.
153.
Observations, p. 161: pp. 140–1.
154.
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), sig. B1^r.

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Partner, J. (2018). Margaret Cavendish, Vision and Fancy. In: Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71017-4_2

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