Lady of Contemplation: On the education and Copia of Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) lived, wrote, and published during the tumultuous decades of the mid-seventeenth century. With the lingering effects of Renaissance Humanism still guiding educational decisions made by the grammar schools and universities of England, the works of Sir Francis Bacon extended learning beyond the literature of the ancients towards inductive reasoning, experiential learning, careful observation, and experimentation. Several educational reformers—including John Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib—worked to streamline and systematize these changes through a series of publications and appeals to parliament mid-century. Such reforms resulted in a general expansion of access to education while creating and undergirding disciplinary distinctions related to knowledge creation and distribution. It was amidst these changes, that Margaret Cavendish wrote and published her many books.

This dissertation examines Cavendish’s engagement with educational reforms by exploring her use of copia as both an aesthetic and a methodology. Cavendish models this linguistic copia, or verbal variety, after her own feminized (and feminist) theory regarding the complexity and abundance of Nature. She presents herself as a role model for women, while actively exploring the many potentialities that she believed ought to exist for all early modern women. The dissertation thus argues that in addition to being a prolific published author and natural philosopher, Cavendish was also an educational philosopher. As such, she critiques patriarchal models of learning, while advocating for alternate paradigms that would ultimately benefit both sexes. Indeed, Cavendish breaks open the patriarchal traditions of her day and offers educational alternatives that are demonstrably modern. She does this by advocating for increased access to education, individualized instruction, support for the unlearned, and symbolic models for teaching through her texts.

As a secondary focus, this dissertation addresses four key issues that arise when teaching Cavendish’s texts: her complicated reception history, her complex and often contradictory authorial persona, the interdisciplinary nature of her writing, and the tremendous size of her corpus and changing access to her many books. By improving access to, and knowledge of, Cavendish’s writing amongst non-specialists, this dissertation addresses the persistent inequity of representation between male and female authors in the English literary canon and offers an alternative to the ill-fitting paradigm of masculine authorship commonly taught at the post-secondary level.