Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Poem & Fancies with The Animal Parliament
Iter Press, 2018
Margaret Cavendish released her Poems and Fancies during a brief reprieve from exile, and at a time when international conversations on questions regarding science, mathematics, and metaphysics significantly advanced the state of knowledge across Britain and Europe despite war and political turmoil. This volume offers the first complete modernized version of the third edition of Cavendish’s book, including prefaces and dedications, all 274 poems on nature’s various avatars, interludes and masques, and the final prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Cavendish offers views on physics, chemistry, algebraic geometry, medicine, political philosophy, ethics, psychology, and animal intelligence, as she develops her own theory of vital matter within the scope of nature’s ordering principles.
Review by Kimberly Johnson presented at Faculty Book Lunch:
Margaret Cavendish was a Renaissance woman in every sense of the term: her body of published works includes poetry, essays, plays, prose romances, natural philosophy, science fiction, and science. During an era when many women published pseudonymously or anonymously, if at all, Cavendish published a massive output under her own name, exploring concepts of gender and power, fame and social satire, science and the imagination. She is a towering figure of 17th-century literature and culture—sufficiently so that scholarship on Cavendish is not so much a recovery effort as it is an effort to account for the force she was recognized to be even in her own time. She was, after all, the first woman to be invited to visit the Royal Society, an episode drolly recounted in the introduction to this masterful new edition: Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament. Our own Renaissance woman Brandie Siegfried has shepherded this new edition into print as part of the venerable The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Cavendish’s text—her first publication—originally appeared in 1653 and comprises nearly 300 poems in five parts as well as the prose parable The Animal Parliament. It is Brandie’s editorial generosity that makes this volume so useful to so many different kinds of readers, from specialists to undergraduate initiates. Brandie’s introduction and notes exhibit an encyclopedic familiarity not only with Cavendish’s body of work but also with the healthy body of scholarly work on Cavendish and her milieu. Moreover, Brandie’s apparatus illuminates and contextualizes Cavendish’s broad engagement with an astonishingly wide range of contemporary and classical thought, including math, the various sciences under the heading “natural philosophy,” politics, folklore, moral philosophy. Under Brandie’s confident guidance, this complex and vast mass of supporting material for Cavendish’s early work is rendered accessible, and our appreciation of her mastery and her ambitious and hungry intellect ultimately redounds to the admiration of the poet. Brandie has done Margaret Cavendish proud, and done a great service to her readers.