Abstract
This chapter examines the extended conceit of nature’s cabinets in Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century English verse miscellany, Poems and Fancies. Using it to tease out the connections between mind, body, chamber, and world, Cavendish not only illustrates how spatial poetics could enable natural philosophical inquiry, but also how they provide a metaphor for her to understand the workings of her own mind. The chapter shows how persistently the imagination is envisaged in architectural terms. It demonstrates how models of the mind drawn from classical memory arts both informed and were modified in seventeenth-century thought, and also considers Cavendish’s work as an early exploration of the phenomenological imagination.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London: printed for M. Lownes, I. Browne, I. Helme, I. Busbie, 1612), sig. A[1r].
- 2.
[Anon.], Natures Cabinet Unlock’d (London: printed for Edw. Farnham, 1657).
- 3.
Thomas Tenison, ‘An Account of All the Lord Bacon’s Works’, in Baconiana, or, Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (London: printed by J. D. for Richard Chiswell, 1679), p. 77. Though Tenison had vested interests—he was a relative of Browne, and later edited his posthumous papers—the repeat of his misattribution complaint, ironically almost word for word, by Anthony Wood lends credence to the severity of the unknown author’s abuse of title. See Anthony Wood, Athanæ Oxonienses (London: printed for Thomas Bennet, 1692), p. 536. Browne’s stationers explicitly denied his authorship of Natures Cabinet Unlock’d in his next book; see ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, in Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (London: Henry Brome, 1658), [sigs. O6r-O6v].
- 4.
This analysis of use was primarily undertaken using EEBO keyword search and the EEBO-TCP Key Words in Context function of the Early Modern Print project, authored by Anupam Basu and the Digital Humanities Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis: https://earlyprint.wustl.edu/toolwebgrok.html [accessed 1 May 2019]. Though there are limitations to such an approach (including texts not yet digitised or translated into searchable html text, as well as the multiple permutations of metaphor) it does offer enough evidence to give a clear sense of usage over time.
- 5.
See Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 296–326; Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Glenn Adamson, ‘The Labor of Division: Cabinetmaking and the Production of Knowledge’, in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed. by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), pp. 243–79.
- 6.
Thornton, Scholar in His Study, p. 74.
- 7.
On Wunderkammer, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); and Daniela Bleichmar, ‘Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections’, in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
- 8.
Orlin, Locating Privacy, p. 8.
- 9.
Edward Reynoldes, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (London: printed by R. H[earne and John Norton] for Robert Bostock, 1640), p. 499; ‘Abstruse, adj.’, Oxford English Dictionary, https://oed.com [accessed 1 May 2019]. For similar examples, see: Henry Nollius, Hermetical Physick: Or, the Right Way to Preserve, and to Restore Health, trans. by Henry Vaughan (London: printed by Humphrey Moseley, 1655), p. 3; Renodaeus, A Medicinal Dispensatory, Containing the Whole Body of Physick, trans. and rev. by Richard Tomlinson (London: printed by Jo. Streater and Ja. Cottrel, 1657), pp. 674–75; James Hart, Klinike, or the Diet of the Diseased (London: printed by John Beale for Robert Allot, 1633), p. 19; Massarius, De Morbis Foemineis, the Womans Counsellour: Or, the Feminine Physitian, trans. by R. T. Philomathes (London: printed for John Streater, 1657), p. 3; and Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World, or, a General History of Man in Six Books (London: printed for T. Basset, R. Cheswel, J. Wright, and T. Sawbridge, 1673), pp. 16–17.
- 10.
Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies Written by the Right Honourable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle (London: printed by T. R. for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), p. 126. Hereafter: PaF. All subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text in parentheses. Italics are as printed in the original.
- 11.
Tribble and Sutton build on the work of Edwin Hutchins and Andy Clark on cognitive ecologies and embodied mind theory. See Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton, ‘Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies’, Shakespeare Studies, 39 (2011), 96; Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
- 12.
Tribble and Sutton, ‘Cognitive Ecology’, 99.
- 13.
Evelyn Tribble, ‘“The Chain of Memory”: Distributed Cognition in Early Modern England’, Scan, 2 (2005), http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=53 [accessed 1 January 2019]. Though the application of cognitive science in early modern studies has been critiqued for its anachronism, there have been some compelling accounts of how we might use these modern theoretical paradigms to highlight similar (and sometimes neglected) early modern modes of understanding the world. See, for example, Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 5; Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 9 (2009), 4–22 (p. 17), and especially the discussion of Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13.
- 14.
See Paula Findlen, ‘Masculine Prerogatives: Gender, Space and Knowledge in the Early Modern Museum’, in The Architecture of Science, ed. by Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 29–57; Orlin, Locating Privacy, p. 312.
- 15.
See Thornton, Scholar in His Study, pp. 96–97; Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 59; Carolyn Sargentson, ‘Looking at Furniture Inside Out: Strategies of Secrecy and Security in Eighteenth-Century French Furniture’, in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past, ed. by Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 205–36; Bernadette Andrea, ‘Pamphilia’s Cabinet: Gendered Authorship and Empire in Lady Mary Wroth’s “Urania”’, ELH, 68 (2001), 335–58; Katherine R. Larson, ‘Reading the Space of the Closet in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2 (2007), 73–93; and Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
- 16.
On affective knowledge as a form of cognition, see Tribble and Sutton, ‘Cognitive Ecology’, 96.
- 17.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 38–46.
- 18.
Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 255.
- 19.
Ironically Cavendish was famous for wearing black silk or velvet patches, often shaped as stars or hearts, on her face—a trend used by women to hide blemished skin. See Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 297.
- 20.
PaF: on the brain and eye, see ‘Nature Calls a Councell’, pp. 1–4; on disease: ‘What Atomes Cause Sicknesse’, ‘What Atomes make a Dropsie’, ‘What Atomes Make a Consumption’, ‘What Atomes Make the wind Collick’, ‘What Atomes Make a Palsey, or Apoplexy’, and ‘In All Other Diseases They Are Mixed, Taking Parts, and Factions’, pp. 15–16; on sensory perception, cognition and the passions: ‘Of Light, and Sight’, ‘The Objects of Every Sense, Are According to Their Motions in the Braine’, ‘According as the Notes in Musicke Agree with the Motions of the Heart, or Braine, such Passions Are Produced Thereby’, ‘The Motion of Thoughts’, and ‘The Reason Why the Thoughts Are Onely in the Head’, pp. 39–42; on the organs: ‘A Heart Drest’, ‘Head, and Braines’, ‘Similizing the Braine to a Garden’, and ‘Of Two Hearts’, pp. 131, 136, 140–41; on wit and beauty: ‘A Dialogue Betwixt Wit, and Beauty’, and ‘The Mine of Wit’, pp. 81–82, 153–54.
- 21.
Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 18.
- 22.
See Claire Jowitt, ‘Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth’, Women’s Writing, 4 (1997), 383–99.
- 23.
On information overload and Wunderkammern, see: Bleichmar, ‘Seeing the World’, p. 28.
- 24.
See, for example, Robert Hooke’s famous later claim that through the microscope ‘a new visible World [is] discovered to the understanding’: Micrographia (London: printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), p. [5]. Cavendish would critique Hooke’s work in her later books, including Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy and The Blazing World (1666).
- 25.
Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Literature, 1560–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 16.
- 26.
A compelling strain of scholarship has started to consider how natural knowledge is ‘made’, particularly through artistic representation. See, for example, Spiller, Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, ‘The Age of the New’, in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–18; Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cawthorne, S. (2020). Nature’s Cabinets Unlocked: Cognition, Cabinets, and Philosophy in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36066-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36067-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)