CLASS DESCRIPTION
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was one of the most prolific writers of the seventeenth century. She wrote and published volumes of poetry, letters, orations, plays, and a work of proto-science fiction, 'The Blazing World'. She was also a natural philosopher, someone who studied nature, and she composed numerous scientific and philosophical treatises. Across her writing, she formulated a vitalist-materialist theory of matter, arguing for a world composed of entirely of self-moving matter. Cavendish’s concept of Nature is vibrant, teeming with rationality, putting her at odds with the increasingly mechanistic science of the seventeenth century. She also insisted on the value of the imagination, what she called ‘fancy’, for philosophical speculation. For Cavendish, the mind was fundamentally material, with fancy composed of an especially agile kind of matter.
This talk will introduce Cavendish and her materialist philosophy, focusing on the dancing metaphors that she uses to characterise the rhythmic motions of matter, the mind and poetry. ‘Figure, Matter, Motion, all is one’ she claims in the atom poems that open her first book, 'Poems and Fancies' (1653), and dancing is the perfect metaphor and, more literally, the perfect verb to describe the material motions that are so crucial to Cavendish’s vision of the world. Recovering the rhythm of Cavendish’s Nature allows us to appreciate the dynamism of both her philosophical ideas and her poetry which can seem to charge on relentlessly, relishing in the dizzying motion sickness and disorienting whiplash it can cause its readers.
This lecture is part of our very first three-part series of lectures covering the life and work of Margaret Cavendish - make sure to check out the other two lectures to get a full picture of this incredible woman’s work 🌟
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Charlotte Newcombe is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Birkbeck, University of London and an Associate of the ‘Scientific Poetry and Poetics’ project based at the University of York. She completed her PhD at York in 2025, where her thesis explored the interactive relationship between poetry and natural philosophy in seventeenth-century women’s poetry. She is interested in the interconnections between early modern intellectual culture and literature more broadly, particularly in the work of women writers. Charlotte has edited for 'The Pulter Project', an open access edition of Hester Pulter’s poetry, and has work forthcoming in a number of places including 'The Oxford Handbook of Anne Bradstreet'.
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-newcombe-afhea-605634230/
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