Abstract
Although Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway are now recognized as the most significant female natural philosophers, or scientific thinkers, in seventeenth-century England, Viscountess Conway would have been troubled to find herself associated with the notorious Duchess of Newcastle. Unlike Cavendish, Conway neither sought public attention through publication nor presented herself as an authority on the old or the “New Science.” Among Conway’s correspondence, we find two letters from Henry More, the Oxford philosopher and theologian, that mock the scientific exploits of Cavendish.1 No doubt, Conway would also have scoffed at Cavendish’s attempts to style herself as a “great Philosopher” (237). Conway, unlike Cavendish, was readily inclined to cloak herself in the language of humility, often reminding More that she was not worthy of his good opinion of her. And yet, while Cavendish was making every effort to situate herself within the “gentlemanly culture” of the “New Science,” with little success, Conway managed to negotiate a place for herself within it without being perceived as a threat.2
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Notes
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, ed., The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 234, 237. All further references to letters from, to, or about Conway are from this edition unless otherwise noted.
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 407.
Stephen Pender, “Signs of Interiority, or Epistemology in the Bodyshop,” The Dalhousie Review 85.2 (2005): 229.
Quoted in Grace B. Sherrer, “Philalgia in Warwickshire: F. M. van Helmont’s Anatomy of Pain Applied to Lady Anne Conway,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 205. Although this Latin poem is unsigned, Sherrer presents a compelling case for F. M. van Helmont as its author. Sherrer’s prose translation is quoted here.
For a lucid account of Conway’s place in the history of the diagnosis and treatment of migraines, see John Pearce, Fragments of Neurological History (London: Imperial College Press, 2003), 123–77, especially 125–55.
Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27.
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), 11.
Simon Dickie, “Hilarity and Pitilessness in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: English Jestbook Humor,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.1 (2003): 1–22.
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard the Third, in Shakespeare’s Histories, ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson, 2007), 652.
John Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope and His Writing (London, 1716)
quoted in Sharon L. Snyder, “Infinities of Form: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: The Modern Language Association, 2002), 177, 178.
Felicity Nussbaum, “Dumb Virgins, Blind Ladies, and Eunuchs: Fictions of Defect,” in “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, ed. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 41.
Henry More, “Preface to the Reader,” The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, in Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More… to which are annex’d Divers of his Useful and Excellent Letters (London: Printed and sold by Joseph Downing, 1710), 203, 204.
Nicolson, Conway Letters, 1. See also Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11. Lindemann explains that certain illnesses were sometimes viewed as “a mark of special religious merit and moral virtue.”
Thomas Willis, “Of the Headache,” in Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (London: Printed for Thomas Dring, 1683), 121–2. While this passage has been read as evidence of a misogynist medical establishment—and no doubt this reading has merit—the emphasis on Conway’s exceptional form and substance, and her illness, attributed to nature rather than to God, is not linked with moral deficiency.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), quoted in Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 79.
The title of the subheading for this section of the essay comes from Francis Mercury van Helmont, “The Preface to the Reader,” in The Spirit of Diseases; or, Diseases from the Spirit Laid open in some Observations Concerning Man and his Diseases (London: Printed for Sarah Howkins, 1694), sig. A4r.
Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47; see also “The Popularization of Medicine in Early Modern England,” in Wear’s Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in Social and Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 17–41.
John Wilkins, A Discovery of a New World, or A Discourse Tending to prove, that’tis possible there may be another Habitable World in the Moone. In 2 Bookes (London: Printed for John Maynard, 1640), 16–18.
Roy Porter, “What is Disease?” in The Cambridge History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80;
Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls (London: Penguin, 2004), 50.
William Clowes, “The Epistle to the Reader,” in A Right Frutefull and Approoued Treatise, for the Artificiall Cure of that Malady called in Latin Struma (London: By Edweard Allde, 1602).
Our attention was drawn to Clowes’ statements on this subject by Allen G. Debus, “Medicine and Alchemy: The Chemical Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution,” in The Scientific Revolution, ed. Marcus Hellyer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 171.
Harold J. Cook, “Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of ‘The Clever Politician,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 60.1 (1999): 101.
William Birken, “Ridgley, Thomas (c.1576–1656),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47340, accessed August 17, 2010.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 257
Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 121–2. In Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, Wear explains that Willis diverges from the Helmontians insofar as he “asserted, as did many Galenists and virtuosi, that anatomical research was necessary in medicine” (362).
For a historical account of the overmedication of chronic migraine sufferers, including Conway, see C. J. Boes and D. J. Capobianco, “Chronic Migraine and Medication-Overuse: Headache through the Ages,” Cephalalgia 25.5 (2005): 378–90.
For more on Clodius, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 257–68.
Vaughan, “The Translator to the ingenious Reader,” in Hermetical Physick, in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 548.
David Lloyd, Wonders No Miracles, or, Mr. Valentine Greatrates [sic] Gift of Healing Examined (London: Printed for Sam Speed, 1666), 44.
Greatrakes, A Brief Account of Mr. Valentine Greatraks, and Divers of the Strange Cures by him lately Performed (London: Printed for J. Starkey, 1666), 2B.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971; London: Penguin, 1991), 322.
Hutton, “Of Physic and Philosophy: Anne Conway, F. M. van Helmont and Seventeenth- Century Medicine,” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). See also Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 140–55.
Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (London, 1692), 39. All further references to The Principles are from this edition.
For an in-depth account of the ideological foundations of Conway’s natural philosophy, see Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse’s editorial introduction to The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially xv–xxxiii, and Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher.
Stephen M. Fallon notes that vitalists held “that life is a property traceable to matter itself rather than to either the motion of complex organizations of matter or an immaterial soul” (Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 111). In “The Duchess and the Viscountess: Negotiations between Mechanism and Vitalism in the Natural Philosophies of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway” (In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 [2000]: 125–36), Stephen Clucas describes Conway’s vitalism as hylozoic, based on Ralph Cudworth’s definition of hylozoism as “the Life and Perception of Matter” (125).
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Nelson, H.F., Alker, S. (2011). Conway: Dis/ability, Medicine, and Metaphysics. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_5
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