Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind

by Anna Battigelli

Overview

Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), led a dramatic life that brought her into contact with kings, queens, and the leading thinkers of her day. The English civil wars forced her into exile, accompanying Queen Henrietta Maria and her court to Paris. From this vantage point, she began writing voluminously, responding to the events and major intellectual movements of the mid-seventeenth century.

Cavendish published twenty-three volumes in her lifetime, including plays, romances, poetry, letters, biography, and natural philosophy. In them she explored the political, scientific, and philosophical ideas of her day. While previous biographers of Cavendish have focused almost exclusively on her eccentric public behavior, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth her intellectual life. She dismisses the myth of Cavendish as an isolated and lonely thinker, arguing that the role of exile was a rhetorical stance, one that allowed Cavendish to address and even criticize her world. She, like others writing during the period after the English civil wars, focused squarely on the problem of finding the proper relationship between mind and world. This volume presents Cavendish's writing self, the self she treasured above all others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813120683
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	08/27/1998
Series:	Studies in the English Renaissance
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Editorial Reviews

Battigelli's superb contribution is that she presents readers with a sympathetic and sophisticated examination of Cavendish as a thinker who was wrestling with many of the same issues as the great male thinkers of the age.... Thanks to this study, students and scholars can no longer ignore Cavendish's depth and seriousness as a writer and thinker.

Choice

A definite 'must' for every student, scholar, or plain old fan of the seventeenth century, a book that instructs, delights, and always excites.

South Atlantic Review

This study succeeds at recovering the intellect and social engagement of a figure who, before Battigelli's book, many had excluded from the ranks of those about whom one writes an 'intellectual biography'.

Margaret Cavendish Society Newsletter

This highly readable intellectual biography is something of a landmark in Margaret Cavendish studies.

Seventeenth-Century News

While previous biographers have focused on her eccentric public behaviour, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth Margaret Cavendish's intellectual life.

Cahiers Elizabethans

Reading Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind is surely one of the most efficient ways to learn about this writer in a wonderfully thorough historical context and to prepare to read her texts in interesting ways.

In-Between

"While previous biographers have focused on her eccentric public behaviour, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth Margaret Cavendish's intellectual life." — Cahiers Elizabethans

"Battigelli's superb contribution is that she presents readers with a sympathetic and sophisticated examination of Cavendish as a thinker who was wrestling with many of the same issues as the great male thinkers of the age.... Thanks to this study, students and scholars can no longer ignore Cavendish's depth and seriousness as a writer and thinker." — Choice

"Reading Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind is surely one of the most efficient ways to learn about this writer in a wonderfully thorough historical context and to prepare to read her texts in interesting ways." — In-Between

"This study succeeds at recovering the intellect and social engagement of a figure who, before Battigelli's book, many had excluded from the ranks of those about whom one writes an 'intellectual biography'." — Margaret Cavendish Society Newsletter

"This highly readable intellectual biography is something of a landmark in Margaret Cavendish studies." — Seventeenth-Century News

"A definite 'must' for every student, scholar, or plain old fan of the seventeenth century, a book that instructs, delights, and always excites." — South Atlantic Review

From the Publisher

Focusing on the intellectual achievements of the Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) rather than on her eccentric self-exile behavior as have previous biographers, Battigelli (English, Plattsburgh State U.) makes the case that Cavendish deserves at least honorable mention among the leading thinkers of the early Enlightenment for her "wooing of the mind" in 23 volumes of multiple genre writings. Appendices address questions about the dating of her birth and her courtship letters to William Cavendish. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews