Margaret Cavendish lived through the tumultuous period of the English Civil War and its aftermath in the mid-seventeenth century. Associated with the losing side – King Charles I, who was executed in 1649, and his court – she fled to France, where she met her husband, William Cavendish, who would be named Duke of Newcastle. She also encountered the scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment, including Descartes. Upon her return to England, she published numerous volumes of her own writing. These covered biographical, literary, and scientific genres. In this seminar, we will range through these writings to assess her experiments in self-fashioning, utopian fictions, and racial formations, among other topics. Our primary source will be Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, edited by Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. The seminar will be discussion-based and culminate in a final project.

This course counts for the “Early Modern Studies Specialization.”