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Parergon 26.2 (2009)

Familiar Epistolary Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664)

Diana Barnes

The autobiographical terms in which Margaret Cavendish’s writing is often read obscure the degree to which she engaged with her intellectual heritage. Philosophical Letters (1664) in particular has been interpreted as Cavendish’s bid to establish her friendship and parity with her philosophical peers, but her argument has broader implications. She uses the genre of the familiar letter, or letter of friendship, to demonstrate that her philosophical ideas issue from sociable principles. Cavendish opens with a discussion of Hobbes’ Leviathan ostensibly focused upon non-political issues. However her political views are implied through the inherently sociable form of the letter. Cavendish uses the friendship letter to portray sociability as natural, and therefore, an ideal basis for the restored royalist polity.

Margaret Cavendish had few friends in the philosophical community of her time. The sneering tone in which Cambridge Platonist Henry More reported her new book, Philosophical Letters to his friend and fellow philosopher, Anne Conway, is typical of the reception Cavendish was given by her contemporaries:

I am also inform’d that the Marchionesse of Newcastle has in a large book confuted Mr Hobbs, Des Cartes, and myself, and (which will make your Ladiship at least smile at the conceit of it) Van Helmont also to boot.1

Although Thomas Hobbes was attached to her household through the patronage of her husband William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, he too kept his distance from her, thanking her guardedly when she sent him her Playes (1662), noting that ‘tokens of this kind are not ordinarily sent but to such as pretend to the

1 §153, ‘Henry More to Lady Conway’ [early March 1664/5], The Conway Letters, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, rev. ed. with an introduction by Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 232–34 (p. 234).


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title as well as to the mind of Friends’.2 Margaret Cavendish’s outsider status in the philosophical community seems ironic given that: she met a number of prominent philosophers in England and on the Continent; she sent copies of her numerous books to contemporary philosophers of note including More and Hobbes; she dedicated her philosophical works to the universities; she tried to establish friendship with philosophers through her published writing and personal letters; and she wrote about friendship and philosophy in Philosophical Letters.

In the ‘Preface to the Reader’, Cavendish emphasizes her ignorance of Latin and her ineptitude for ‘School-learning’, asserting: ‘I do not repent that I spent not my time in Learning, for I consider, it is better to write wittily then Learnedly; nevertheless, I love and esteem Learning, although I am not capable of it’. She attributes this to her sex, explaining that ‘being a Woman, and not bred up to Scholarship, [she] did want names and terms of Art’.3 As Catherine Gallagher observes, Cavendish is a ‘troublesome ancestress’ for feminists due to what Hilda Smith describes as ‘the radical and often unseemly things she uttered’.4 It has been suggested that Margaret Cavendish wrote Philosophical Letters to renovate her reputation as a philosopher and thereby establish her membership of the philosophical community. Sarah Hutton argues that in Philosophical Letters Cavendish attempted to defend herself against the accusation that she poached ideas from her male contemporaries.5 Lisa Sarasohn holds that Cavendish used the genre of the philosophic letter to ‘force an acknowledgment of her own parity with other investigators of

2 §145, ‘Hobbes to Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle’ [9 February 1662], The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, II (1660–79) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 524.

3 Philosophical Letters (London, 1664) [b1]. Hereafter PL.4 Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in the

Seventeenth Century’, Genders, 1 (Spring 1988), 24–39 (p. 26); Hilda L. Smith, ‘“Though it be the part of every good wife”: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Women and History: Voices of Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House, 1995), pp. 119–44 (p. 119).

5 ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy’, Women’s Writing 4.3 (1997), 421–32 (p. 429).


Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters 41

nature’.6 Although Cavendish was well read in philosophy she was not well trained in its modes of argumentation and proof.7 This may have made the more fragmentary mode of analysis afforded by epistolary form seem an attractive alternative to writing a sustained philosophical treatise.8 No doubt there are personal motivations behind Philosophical Letters but it is important not to focus on them at the expense of giving due attention to the overall implications of the work as a contribution to intellectual history.

In the 1980s Sarasohn and Carolyn Merchant explained the contradiction of Cavendish by positioning her in female tradition opposed to the philosophical mainstream represented by Hobbes and Descartes.9 As Hutton argues, this obscures what Cavendish shared with her contemporaries, even those she openly criticized, such as Hobbes.10 It is important to contextualize Cavendish in the intellectual ferment that was reshaping the intellectual milieu she shared with Hobbes, More, and others.11 Although questions remain concerning

6 ‘Leviathan and the Lady: Cavendish’s Critique of Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters’, in Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, eds Line Cottegines and Nancy Weitz (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 40–58 (pp. 40, 41, 45).

7 Sarah Hutton, ‘Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Seventeenth-Century Scientific Thought’, in Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700, eds Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (London: Sutton, 1997), pp. 218–34 (pp. 220–21).

8 On the distinction between a letter and treatise see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning: Three Essays by Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. and trans. Edward P. Mahony (Durham: Duke University Press, 1974), pp. 12–13; Lynette Hunter’s discussion of the conversational rhetoric of the letter by distinction to dialectics is also useful here; see ‘Introduction’, The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612–64, ed. Lynette Hunter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. xv–liv (pp. xxx, xxxiii).

9 Lisa Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47.4 (Autumn, 1984), 289–307; Caroline Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper, 1983).

10 Susan Wiseman also complains that feminist accounts ‘have tended to accommodate Cavendish’s singularity by regarding her writing as ‘women’s autobiography’ rather than as the product of a ‘cultural network’ including male discourses; see her Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 92–93.

11 Sarah Hutton, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Henry More’, in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 185–98 (pp. 186–87).


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the state of her philosophical learning, she was certainly well versed in the rhetorical tradition, as her use of epistolary form demonstrates. Her declared ignorance of learning is symptomatic of the prevailing ambivalence towards ars rhetorica and eloquence, and preference for wit, nature, or innate reason. She argues that superior wisdom derives not from books or experience but ‘Natural Ingenuity’ or the rare ability ‘to conceive Rationally, to judge Solidly’ which makes ‘Natural Philosophers and Poets … the most Ingenious men’.12 As Conal Condren explains of her husband’s letter of advice to the future Charles II, this ‘preference for ignorance … is situated in the context of some widespread renaissance, even bookish distinctions between theory and practice, and between the active and the contemplative’.13 A declaration of ignorance, or a state preference for life over books, then may be read as an endorsement of the humanist cliché that ‘too much contemplation spoils action and virtue consists in that’,14 and thus as a signal that her volume of letters is both truthful and profitable, honestus and utile, in other words that it has practical application to life.

Recent scholarship demonstrates that genre is an important dimension of the intellectual heritage Cavendish manipulates in her writing.15 A conventional, or overly narrow, approach to genre is not useful, however, as Elspeth Graham advises, only a flexible approach will account for her writing’s ‘spontaneity, and … its lack of strict adherence to the stabilities of aesthetic tradition’.16 Accordingly, I will not read Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters as a collection of philosophical treatises in epistolary form as Sarasohn has done, but as familiar epistles, or letters of friendship adapted to philosophy. The familiar letter is derived from classical examples and used in studia humanitatis as a means of teaching rhetoric as a practical everyday art. The consequences of using this genre to write about philosophy are evident in the critique of Hobbes with

12 Cavendish, §14, Sociable Letters [1664], ed. James Fitzmaurice (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 21. Hereafter SL.

13 ‘Casuistry to Newcastle: “The Prince” in the world of the book’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, eds Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 164.

14 Machiavelli, The Prince cited in Condren, ‘Casuistry to Newcastle’, p. 167.15 Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2003) and Authorial Conquests, eds Cottegines and Weitz.16 ‘Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish’,

in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, eds Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 131–50 (p. 131).



which Cavendish opens Philosophical Letters. For Cavendish it was also a return to the form she established in the companion volume Sociable Letters.

Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters and Sociable Letters are both collections of familiar letters addressed to an unnamed female friend simply referred to as ‘Madam’. Although the letter-writer closely resembles the author, her letters are anonymously signed ‘Your Faithful Friend and Servant’. Likewise the friend to whom most of the letters are written is addressed simply as ‘Dear Madam’. Noel Malcolm suggests that this may be a cover for Anne Conway, but there is little firm evidence for this identification or any other.17 The ladies are sociable entities defined by the position they occupy within the discourse of friendship. Cavendish’s female friend is an epistolary type representing the possibility of rational feminine exchange. No letters written by ‘Dear Madam’ are included but Cavendish’s desire to please her friend by attending to her implied questions motivates each letter.18

In the opening letter of Sociable Letters Cavendish states: ‘since we cannot converse Personally, we should converse by Letters, so as if we were speaking to each other, discoursing our Opinions, discovering our designs, asking and giving each other Advice’. Here she reiterates a key tenet of humanist epistolary theory: that familiar letters are modelled upon the conversation between friends; indeed they continue conversations otherwise hindered by distance or time. The first important detail to note here is the fact that the friendship is prior to the writing. The second is that friendship is a species of sociable relationship. Sociability involves a range of social relationships, such as that between husband and wife, or a lady and her servant, or between sisters, which the women discuss in their letters. Friendship is distinguished from other sociable modes by sympathy. As Cavendish stresses, friendship is based upon understanding: ‘I am never better pleased, than when I am reading your Letters, and when I am writing Letters to you; for my mind and thoughts live always with you, although my person is at distance from you.’19 This friend understands her better than anyone else; she is someone to whom she can confide her thoughts on matters trivial or serious, private or public; and thus in the friendship the women are most alive to their true beliefs. Here Cavendish echoes the terms of classical epistolary friendship

17 The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Malcolm, II, p. 811.18 Susan Fitzmaurice, ‘“But Madam”: The Interlocutor in Margaret Cavendish’s Writing’, in

In-Between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism, 9.1 & 2 (2000), 17–27.19 §1, SL, p. 13.


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drawn from the letters of Cicero and Atticus popularized by the humanist ars rhetorica in the theory of the familiar epistle developed by Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and even Petrarch, and adapted to English by William Fulwood, Angel Day, and others.20

Cavendish explains the division between Sociable Letters and Philosophical Letters in terms of the friendship between the two women. In the penultimate letter of Sociable Letters Cavendish apologizes to her friend for having failed to answer her specifically ‘Philosophical Questions’. She risks incurring her friend’s ‘Anger’ for this omission, but fears that her long answers may ‘be too Tedious, or Wearisome to [her] Readers’ and neither ‘Fit [nor] Proper for this Book, wherein are only Described Humours’. Therefore, she explains that ‘I am Resolved to put your Philosophical Questions and my Answers in a Book by themselves.’21 Her distinction between sociable ‘humours’ and pure philosophical argument follows from her judgement of what is fitting and proper to the printed record of their friendly exchange. Here the social scenario represented by the friends’ conversation comes first, and philosophy is distilled from it in an act of authorial judgement and decorum. Decorum is determined by the author’s judgement of the place of the friendship within a wider sociable context constituted by the readership. Decorum is another important tenet of ars rhetorica adapted to epistolary theory, as Lynn Magnusson has shown in her work on Erasmus and Day. Epistolary manuals devote much space to elaborating the idea of decorum, specifically the principle that the letter-writer must fit his or her discourse, tone, and subject matter to his/her relationship to the addressee. The match is determined by social circumstances such as class or familial position.22 In the humanist rhetorical

20 On early modern epistolary friendship see: Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 211–40; Jonathan Goldberg, Writing

Matter: From the Hands of the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 267–78 and also Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 63–101; Forrest Tyler Stevens, ‘Erasmus’ “Tygress”: The Language of Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 124–40; and my own essay, ‘The Secretary of Ladies and Feminine Friendship at the Court of Henrietta Maria’, in Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, ed. Erin Griffey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 39–56.

21 §211, SL, pp. 228–29 (p. 229).22 Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters



tradition from which epistolary theory was derived, prudent attention to decorum signalled a claim to utility, i.e. that this rhetoric was a practical art that shaped society.23 As Lorna Hutson glosses, ‘the practical value of any moral virtue depends upon its being appropriate or fitting (decorus) to the contingencies of time and place (occasio)’.24 The letter was theorized as a quotidian form distinguished by its classical literary precedents yet suitable for a broad range of writers, addressees, and social situations. Thus when Cavendish signals that the division between sociable and philosophical letters derives from sociable principles – she aims to please her readers without angering her friend – she is underscoring the practical utility of her writing. The overriding imperative is her social obligation to an imagined print community, her readers, yet it originates in her friend’s letters. Thus her friendship with ‘Madam’ creates the social dialogue she extends to her readers.

Too often Cavendish’s œuvre has been treated as two halves: the literary and the philosophical; neither approach alone is entirely satisfying, as Jacqueline Broad complains.25 Although recently Cavendish’s letters have received considerable scholarly interest, typically literary critics have attended to Sociable Letters and philosophers to Philosophical Letters. Neither group has satisfactorily considered the link between them. No doubt this reflects the biases of contemporary disciplinary training. Clearly the literature/philosophy division meant something to Cavendish: she describes the sociable letters as ‘Scenes’ or ‘humours’, and the philosophical letters as ‘Controversies and Disputations’.26 Whereas sociable letters describe different social scenarios and are works of imagination or fancy, the philosophical letters are fragments of argument and the products of reason. Nevertheless the similarity of the titles, the proximity of publication, and the bridging narrative underscore a connection between sociable scenes and philosophy. Cavendish returned to this connection in 1666 when she published the fictional romance The Blazing World with a

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61–90; see also Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 233–78.

23 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 36–42.

24 The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 28.

25 ‘Cavendish Redefined’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12.4 (2004), 731–41.

26 “The Preface”, SL, p. 8; ‘To his Excellency the Lord Newcastle’, PL, a.


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philosophical work, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. There are specific implications however, of staging the connection in familiar epistles. For Cavendish, one of the virtues of the letter is that it is a quotidian form, the social discourse of everyday life, ‘so apt, plaine and easie, to any learners capacity’, as the title page of Angel Day’s frequently reprinted epistolary manual The English Secretary (1586) boasted. Thus her letters are bound to the ‘Temporal’ ‘Actions and Designs of Men [and] the ordinary works of Nature’; in other words they are not transcendent.27 Rather, letters demonstrate that nature provides the pattern for human behaviour, thus reinforcing the stoic principle that philosophy issues from life. While Sociable Letters illustrates community through imagined social scenes, Philosophical Letters identifies the underlying principles through the lens of natural philosophy.

Cavendish’s Philosophical LettersCavendish deploys the title page and prefatory materials to position Philosophical Letters within sociable exchange. In the full title – Philosophical Letters: or Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, Maintained By Several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way of Letters: By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (1664) – she places her opinions within a community constituted discursively by the ‘Opinions’ of contemporary philosophers, as Hutton and Sarasohn observe. Her title gives her entry. The prefatory materials further emphasize this. Like Sociable Letters, Philosophical Letters opens with a dedicatory poem written by her husband, William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, signalling his unconditional support of her intellectual endeavour and his admiration for the ‘clear and fresh … Wit and Phancie’ of her ‘eternal Spring’.28 In reply, she acknowledges his encouragement, ‘yet [she writes] was I afraid that your Lordship should be angry with me for Writing and Publishing this Book, by reason it is a Book of Controversies, of which I have heard your Lordship say, That Controversies

27 §14, SL, p. 23.28 ‘To her Excellency The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, On her Book of Philosophical

Letters’; on their marriage see Karen Raber, “‘Our wits joined as in matrimony’: Margaret Cavendish’s Playes and the Drama of Authority”, English Literary Renaissance, 28.3 (Autumn 1998), 464–93; Kate Lilley, ‘Contracting Readers: “Margaret Newcastle” and Conjugality’, in A Princely Brave Woman: ed. Clucas, pp. 19–39.



and Disputations make Enemies of Friends’.29 Although his ‘Favour is more then the World to [her]’, in writing she must risk disagreement even with him. Nevertheless she will endeavour, she promises, to avoid that ‘pedantical kind of quarrelling’ of which he disapproves in ‘Noble Persons’. Here she makes it clear that her agenda is not simply to serve her husband, but to speak the truth; she does so with his sanction, although he may have some misgivings.30

Cavendish draws upon the resources of epistolary form to honour her promise to her husband not to ‘make Enemies of Friends’ while engaging in philosophical disputes. She explains to him that she ‘was in a manner forced to write this Book’ in order to explain her original ideas, and in doing so ‘neither do I do any thing, but what they have done themselves, as being common amongst them to contradict each other: which may as well be allowable, as for Lawyers to plead at the Barr in opposite Causes.’31 In her preface to the reader she elaborates the idea of fair reciprocity to which she appeals. She explains ‘my answers [to philosophers take] the form of Letters, which was the easiest way for me to write, and by so doing, I have done that which I would have done unto me’.32 She indicates that she writes in familiar epistolary form because it preserves the reciprocity to which she alludes. Sociability is underpinned by complaisance or doing unto others as she would have them do unto her. The familiar letter is able to fulfil this principle since it is the genre of friendship. Form is inseparable from content; epistolary philosophy is sociable philosophy.

Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters is organized according to sociable principles. Philosophical discussion focuses upon the work of individuals rather than debates or ideas. It is broken into four sections: the first deals with Thomas Hobbes and then René Descartes; the second with Henry More; the third with Jan Baptiste Van Helmont; and the fourth with Galileo Galilei,

29 Cavendish, ‘To his Excellency the Lord Marquess of Newcastle’, PL, a.30 See Hilda Smith, ‘“A General War Amongst the Men”: Political Differences Between

Margaret and William Cavendish’, in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer, ed. Howard Nenner (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997) pp. 143–60 (pp. 151, 154); also Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad, ‘Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in their Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) pp. 199–224. I thank Jacqueline Broad for allowing me to read a draft of this chapter.

31 Cavendish, ‘To his Excellency the Lord Marquess of Newcastle’, PL, av.32 Margaret Cavendish, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, b.


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William Harvey, ‘Dr Ch’ (Walter Charleton33), Aristotle, and Cavendish’s own philosophy. Her discussion of Hobbes centres on the ostensibly non-political questions such as motion, pressure, and perception raised in sections of Elements of Law (1640–1655) and Leviathan (1651). Although she rejects Hobbesian mechanism, like Hobbes, she is a materialist and, contra Descartes, she views the mind as a material thing. She argues her own dualist case, however, that there are both material and supernatural realms: one is the province of nature and the other of God. In the second section she criticizes both More’s Cartesianism and his admission – in An Antidote to Ætheism (1652) and The Immortality of the Soul (1659) – that not everyone believes in God, because it may spread rather than eliminate doubt.34 In the third part she disparages Van Helmont’s mysticism (i.e. his metaphorical language, alchemy, and faith healing); and asserts that his discoveries are discredited by his secrecy.35 In the fourth and final section she briefly discusses: Harvey’s ideas about human generation and the circulation of the blood; Galileo’s theory of motion; Charleton’s theory of the vacuum; and a few other contemporary philosophical problems and works (not always specifically acknowledged). Then she considers more general questions facing seventeenth-century philosophy, arguing that the opposition between the ancients and the moderns is futile. She rejects reasoning by argument in a letter about a lady who fancies herself a quick wit but errs in thinking that everything is subject to mathematical proof.36 She also considers religious division.37 Cavendish describes ‘Writer B’ (possibly Robert Boyle) as ‘a very civil, eloquent, and rational writer’ and then criticizes his tendency to ‘stud[y] the different parts and alterations, more than the motions that cause the alterations in those parts’.38 She praises the English preference for proofs based upon ‘learning and experience’ over the ‘wit and ingenuity’ of the French.39 Thus she sketches the community of ideas against which she clarifies her own philosophy.40

33 See Merchant, The Death of Nature, pp. 202–03.34 Cavendish, §1, II, PL, pp. 137–38.35 Cavendish, §12, III, PL, pp. 278–79; §2, III, p. 239; §8, III, p. 285; §13, III, p. 284; §42, II,

p. 405.36 Cavendish, §21, IV, PL, pp. 493–95. I thank Jacqueline Broad for suggesting Robert Boyle

here.37 Cavendish, §25–26, IV, PL, pp. 502–505.38 Cavendish, §22, IV, PL, pp. 495–97; §27–28, IV, PL, pp. 506–42.39 Cavendish, §22, IV, PL, pp. 495–97.40 Cavendish, §27–28, IV, PL, pp. 506–542.



Women, Philosophy, and LettersPhilosophical Letters implicitly claims a rhetorical art, and therefore a social practice, hitherto unavailable to women. In Sociable Letters Cavendish observes that philosophers ‘Teach and Explane’ their ideas by ‘Inscrib[ing] them either in Letters, Figures, Cifres, or the like’. Intellectual endeavour is facilitated by particular genres of exchange. Historically women were excluded from philosophy through their ignorance of the genres by which its community is constituted. Cavendish explains that as ‘it is not Proper for [her] Sex to be a Publick Oratour, [or] to Declare or Explane [her] Opinions in Schools’, then ‘the Right Understanding of [her] Philosophical Opinions are [sic] likely to be Lost, for want of a Right Explanation’. She elaborates: ‘I believe that the Opinions or Doctrines of former Natural Philosophers, were no more Understood at first, than if they had Written, or Spoken in Unknown Languages, till by Degrees their Language was Learned.’ In other words a philosophical system has its own terms, comprehension of which depends upon a shared language. Access to that code is limited socially: ‘former Natural Philosophers … had this Advantage, being Men, that they had liberty not only to Write their Opinions, but to Preach, Teach, and Instruct others to Understand them’.41 Cavendish acknowledges that Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655, 1663) was misunderstood because she lacked ‘the terms and names of [the] Art’ of ‘learned men’.42 Language is inseparable from social institutions and practices. As innovative philosophers need the support of a community in which to circulate their ideas, in Philosophical Letters she defies the masculine bias of philosophy by anchoring her critique of contemporary philosophers to a rational dialogue between female friends.

In a practical sense the letter was a means for women to gain access to intellectual culture. Cavendish’s contemporary, Anne Conway, for instance, was introduced to Henry More by her brother and received instruction in the philosophy of Descartes via an exchange of letters. The published letters of humanists and philosophers opened the dialogical practice underpinning intellectual community to seventeenth-century women. There are examples of letters written by philosophers to women, such as the one Galileo addressed to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615).43 This is less a personal address and

41 §144, SL, pp. 154–55.42 ‘The Preface’, PL, bv.43 Sarasohn, ‘Leviathan and the Lady’, p. 42.


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more a symbolic one written to a patron for wide circulation.44 Christina is a representative reader from whom Galileo expects no reply. Nevertheless it is not simply a treatise given an epistolary frame, Galileo claims to be continuing a conversation about the scriptural interpretation of key Copernican tenets he had begun with Christina at a dinner party.45 No doubt Galileo stages this epistolary friendship in the hope that Christina’s name will give his arguments currency within the social circles of his patrons.46 By contrast, female-authored philosophical letters tended to remain private. Elisabeth of Bohemia declined to have her letters published with the rest of Descartes’ correspondence.47 Even the correspondence of published female philosophers remained in manuscript; for example, neither the letters of Conway to More, Van Helmont, and Robert Boyle, nor those of Damaris Cudworth to John Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were published until the twentieth century.48 Cavendish herself wrote to a number of contemporary philosophers: cursorily to Walter Charlton and Henry More, and in greater depth to Joseph Glanvill.49 Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters anticipates later seventeenth-century publications such as the exchange between Mary Astell and John Norris in Letters Concerning the Love of God (1696).

Cavendish’s inclusion of women within philosophy is not simply a rhetorical effect endorsed by a philosophy with epistolary origins; epistolary philosophy entails a theory of community. In Epistulae Morales, Seneca stresses that ‘The first thing which philosophy undertakes is fellow-feeling

44 More precisely Christina is the mother of Galileo’s patron, Cosimo II de Medici.45 Kristeller, ‘The Scholar and his Public’, pp. 12–13.46 Jean Dietz Moss, ‘Galileo’s Letter to Christina: Some Rhetorical Considerations’,

Renaissance Quarterly, 36.4 (Winter, 1983), 547–76; Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 33, ns 73, 68.

47 On Elisabeth of Bohemia see Margaret Atherton ed, Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) p. 10.

48 Their seventeenth-century publications are Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1690; trans. 1692) and Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Virtuous or Christian Life (1705).

49 Sarasohn, ‘Leviathan and the Lady’, pp. 41–45, esp. p. 42. On More’s cursory response to Cavendish’s letter to him see Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 69–70.



with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability.’50 Cavendish self-consciously reiterates these stoical principles within the sociable genre in which Seneca expressed them. Seneca holds that the wise man looks inward for truth and is self-sufficient, ‘yet he has need of friends’ because the value of knowledge is in sharing it.51 The loyalty of Cavendish’s epistolary friend is absolute; she not only provides the volumes upon which the discussion is based but supports Cavendish’s prerogative to judge the work of famous philosophers and defends her against critics. This is the kind of empathetic and loyal friend indispensable to a wise woman. While Cavendish approves of the stoic emphasis upon sociability, she stresses that sympathy should not entail the erasure of difference. Thus she distinguishes her conception of friendship from Ciceronian amicitia which emphasizes that equality, sameness, or parity is necessary to friendship. Sociability supports variety. For Cavendish to ‘Live according to Nature’,52 as Seneca recommends, entails accepting that ‘it is impossible for one Person to be of every one’s Opinion’.53 In other words, disagreement may be natural but it need not be unsociable. This is why in Philosophical Letters she clarifies her philosophy in relation to the opinions of others. Cavendish strives to maintain the difference between thinkers and to present her own opinions in this context. She insists that disagreement between the sexes is no ‘disgrace’ if ‘it be done with respect and civility’. Therefore when she asks her readers to ‘pardon those faults’ due to her ‘sex and breeding’ what seems on first impressions to be a self-abnegating statement at odds with her constant assertions of originality and wit, can be read as her deliberate attempt to highlight the irreducibility of her sex to both her discourse and argument.54 Being a woman does not preclude her participation in philosophical dialogue with men.

Cavendish casts disputation positively as the expression of the infinite variety intrinsic to the state of nature and therefore particularly well suited to the practice of natural philosophy. Philosophers do not ‘become Enemies to each other, by being Industrious in their Profession’; rather, like lawyers who ‘plead at the Barr in opposite Causes’, they are ‘great Friends’. Although

50 Seneca, §5, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard Gummere, I , Loeb (London: Heineman, 1925), pp. 20–21.

51 Seneca, §7, p. 37; §9, pp. 43–57; §6, p. 26.52 Seneca, §5, p. 23.53 Cavendish, ‘To his Excellency, the Lord Marquis of Newcastle’, PL, a.54 Cavendish, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, PL, [cv].


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she marks her disagreement with philosophers, she affirms her ‘respect and esteem [for] their Merits and Works.’55 Her quarrel with philosophers is motivated not by a love of disagreement but by her commitment to truth. As she ‘find[s] out a Truth, at least a Probability in Natural Philosophy by a new and different way from other Writers’, she has a social responsibility to explain it.56 ‘Opinion is free, and may pass without a pass-port’, yet if philosophy is to serve the greater good, it must be civil, and not threaten social harmony.57 In Philosophical Letters Cavendish presents a series of interventions in contemporary religious and political debates as decorous expressions of her liberty to respond to the arguments of others.

Ideas of Philosophical Community at the RestorationCavendish’s use of epistolary rhetoric to model sociable intellectual discourse in Philosophical Letters fit the intellectual and political climate of the early restoration. As Mario Biagioli emphasizes, the new truths promulgated by seventeenth-century natural philosophy were predicated upon the erosion of the patronage system that had supported intellectual culture in Europe, and the emergence of self-authorizing corporations, such as the Royal Society. Such societies were more bound by the proto-democratic practice of friendship and alliance of choice than the name of the king or a powerful patron. The 1662 charter of the Royal Society granted the society its own imprimatur enabling it to independently authorize its own publications. Rather than scientific and philosophical theories being validated by their publication under the name of the monarch, titles were published under the individual name of a philosopher or scientist.58 Interdependence, or friendship, was a crucial means of giving authority to new truths, or ‘graft[ing]’ ‘veracity’ onto them in Adrian Johns’ terms.59

At the Restoration when the memory of the uncontrolled debate of the Civil War was fresh, intellectuals were under pressure to show that their arguments did not threaten the newly restored monarchical polity. Restoration

55 Cavendish, ‘To his Excellency’, PL, a–av.56 Cavendish, ‘To his Excellency the Lord Marquess of Newcastle’, PL, av.57 Cavendish, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, PL, b.58 Mario Biagioli, ‘Ettiquette, Interdependence, and Sociability in Seventeenth-Century

Science’, Critical Inquiry, 22 (Winter 1996), 208–10.59 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 2, 31, 41.



philosophers and experimental scientists were acutely aware that forms of knowledge and discourse support forms of social or political community. In this climate, the new philosophy – modelled upon Descartes’ meditations – seemed to repudiate sociability in its conception of the solitary philosopher unconstrained by received opinion, looking to himself alone for truth. Royal Society members included Latitudinarians keen to gain royal patronage by separating themselves from their former support of the revolutionary regime, and the charge that science was atheistic, and puritan enthusiasm.60 The Royal Society described itself as a community in which debate was free, and yet constrained by certain limits. Although it strove to separate philosophy from politics and natural science from civic theory in order to win the right to the open debate of ideas, it used the metaphor of civil war to describe the debate it fostered but insisted that restricted membership contained the disruption and facilitated the restoration of peace.61 By contrast, in Dialogus physicus (August 1661) Hobbes argued that the Royal Society was a private institution because it was governed by a presiding master and its membership was restricted to fifty men. It did not foster philosophy, ars or method, he argued, but rather ingenuity or invention.62 As such it could only offer partial truths and lacked the authority to witness experimental science.63 Philosophers should not be limited by such obedience. Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester and Royal Society historian, criticized Hobbes for being a ‘dogmatist’, that is, a political absolutist. Both agreed that philosophers should be free from law, although law was necessary to the state. As Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer argue: ‘Each philosophical programme was predicated upon its distinctive social relationships, each valued a characteristic philosophical persona.’64 In addition, different genres were used to represent distinct forms of community. Epistolary form represented the philosopher as a participant in a dialogue and thus as a member of a community. Royal Society members frequently shared their ideas and observations in letters published in Philosophical Transactions. These printed letters model intellectual conversations in which

60 Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Civil War (1980; London: Phoenix, 1997), pp. 62–63.

61 Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 153, 303–06.

62 Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 129.63 Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 113–14.64 Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 139 (including quotation from Thomas Sprat).


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participants argue a case. They also present new truths for the ratification of a civil and sociable community of friends and associates. Thus publication of the letters symbolically extended the familiar circle of the Royal Society to include readers. As the genre of friendship, the familiar letter fitted the Restoration climate perfectly.

In the opening letter of Philosophical Letters, Cavendish reiterates the friendly basis of the women’s exchange. She writes about the difficulties facing a woman acutely aware of the failings of her education, yet she reminds her readers ‘but on the other side I considered first, that those Worthy Authors, were they my censurers, would not deny me the same liberty they take themselves’.65 Trusting that decorum will reign, she is reassured that the sociable principle of complaisance ensures her right to speak/write philosophically regardless of her abilities. The second letter establishes the grounds of her natural philosophy as ‘Infinite Matter’ or the principle that ‘Nature is altogether Material’. She adds that if the universe were modelled upon others’ opinions ‘the Universe and Production of all Creatures would soon be without order and Government’ and ‘Eternal War’ would ensue.66 Thus she implies that since her theory of nature is inherently sociable, it secures order in the cosmos. Each opinion in natural philosophy may be judged as sociable and irenic or unsociable and bellicose. In Cavendish’s scheme, philosophical civility is guaranteed by intellectual governance, a regulatory function she attributes to institutions that foster heterogeneity. When she emphasizes the necessity of risking disagreement with her husband, she implies that marriage can support different opinions. Likewise in ‘To the Most Famous University of Cambridge’, she praises the university’s ‘Service’ ‘for the increase of profitable Arts and Sciences: so as your several studies may be, like several Magistrates united for the good and benefit of the whole Common-wealth, nay, the whole World.’67 Familiar epistolary discourse is another such institution. Naturally occurring different opinions can peacefully serve the commonwealth, if they are harnessed to civility through the practice of eloquent speech preserved in epistolary amicitia. This general discussion of sociability is immediately followed by her treatment of Leviathan; sociability is the concept that underpins her critique.

65 §1, PL, p. 2.66 §2, PL, pp. 12–13.67 ‘To the Most Famous University of Cambridge’, PL.



Cavendish on HobbesCavendish gives great weight to her opposition to Hobbes by opening Philosophical Letters with a discussion of Leviathan. This was not a new theme; Cavendish had been asserting her intellectual independence from Hobbes for some time (see her Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655).68 Hobbes is both Cavendish’s familiar and her philosophical opponent, yet his social standing was markedly different. He maintained close relations with the Cavendish household throughout his life but was a dependent, or servant. Although primarily employed by the Earls of Devonshire, he was also patronized by their nephew and cousin William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish’s husband. Newcastle and his brother Sir Charles Cavendish introduced Hobbes to leading philosophers of the day including Descartes, Galileo, Marin Mersenne, and John Bramhall (Archbishop of Armagh from 1661), and their military interests stimulated his work on horsemanship, optics (especially the telescope), and ballistics.69 Hobbes dedicated a number of works to Newcastle including his justification of monarchy from first principles, Elements of Law (1640). Nevertheless Hobbes’ willingness to serve Newcastle did not extend to his wife. This was partly due to her sex; Margaret Cavendish’s descriptions of her silent observation of proceedings at her husband’s Parisian salon fitted the behaviour expected of women.70 Although Cavendish emphasizes that friendship rules the philosophical arguments comprising Philosophical Letters, Hobbes did not describe their relationship thus. She acknowledges this indirectly in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655, repr. 1663) when she praises Hobbes’ absolutely decorous refusal to dine with her in London in the early 1650s.71 Hobbes’ public letter of reply to the poet William Davenant’s letter demonstrates that he understood the implications of literary-philosophical friendship;

68 Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, II (1660–1679), p. 811.69 Hobbes wrote a manuscript on horse gaits in the 1630s for Newcastle (Richard Tuck,

Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 4–5, 18–19).70 Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

1623–1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), p. 61.71 Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 65–66.


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his polite refusal must be deliberate.72 Friendship between Cavendish and Hobbes was impossible because friendship is predicated upon sameness and equality, although Cavendish downplays this tenet of classical amicitia.73 She points out that lawyers, philosophers, or members of a profession may dispute and yet be ‘great friends’ yet she also held that hierarchy was determined by nature. She wrote that ‘Wit makes a Ladder of Words, to climb to Fame’s high Tower’.74 Hobbes was subject to the patronage system, a servant in traditional royalist social networks. By contrast, Cavendish was the wife of an exemplary and powerful nobleman. She had a title and position in her own right; her husband repeatedly publicly acknowledges (in his prefaces) that her identity is reinforced by his class and station but augmented by her own original wit. Thus according to her own husband she is positioned both within and without royalist social forms. Her anomalous position is evident in the conditions of publication, namely that her philosophical letters are prefaced by her husband and, unlike Sociable Letters, no publisher is mentioned on the frontispiece. This is a private publication endorsed only by her husband.

Exemplifying natural sociability, Cavendish exercises the utmost civility in challenging Hobbes’ opinions. The first nine letters on Hobbes cover the opening six chapters of Leviathan, namely: ‘Of Sense’; ‘Of Imagination’; ‘Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations’; ‘Of Speech’; ‘Of Reason and Science’; and ‘Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions, commonly called the Passions; And the Speeches by which they are expressed’ (4–13). Although she does not simply respond to a single chapter with a single letter, and some discussions continue over two or three letters, the order of her discussion respectfully follows Leviathan. Employing animadversion she uses short quotations to exemplify Hobbes’ argument. Thus her dialogue with her friend, ‘Dear Madam’, is expanded to effect a three-way conversation. She only enters the dialogue because she is invited to do so by her friend’s

72 William Davenant, ‘The Author’s Preface to his much honor’d Friend M. Hobbes’, and Thomas Hobbes, ‘The Answer’, in Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, ed. David Gladish(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 3–44, 45–55.

73 For a useful discussion of the distinction between friendship and service see Michael Neill, ‘“He that thou knowest thine”: Friendship and Service in Hamlet’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, eds Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, vol. I: The Tragedies (London: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 319–38.

74 §28, SL, p. 39.



questions. Respect for the integrity of his words is signalled with such decorous gestures as the opening: ‘MADAM, Your Author discoursing of Imagination, saith’. After citing Hobbes she continues: ‘To which I answer, first, that he conceives Sense and Imagination to be all one.’75 She emphasizes her own difference from Hobbes, but it is only after citation that she paraphrases and supplies the distinctions and words problematically absent from his account. Thus she fulfils epistolary decorum in this three-way conversation. To fully repudiate Hobbes’ skepticism over natural sociability, she must demonstrate that difference of opinion never compromises the civil and friendly grounding of her epistolary rhetoric.

Cavendish criticizes Hobbesian mechanism because it is unsociable. In her first letter on Hobbes she cites the first principle presented in Leviathan – ‘That the cause of sense or sensitive perception is the external body or Object, which presses the Organ proper to each Sense’ – to reject it ‘according to the ground of [her] own Philosophical Opinions.’ Her alternative is ‘That all things, and therefore outward objects as well as sensitive organs, have both Sense and Reason, yet neither the objects nor the organs are the cause of them.’ She emphasizes the liberty of all particles in Nature: ‘according to my Opinion … Life and Knowledge, which I name Rational and Sensitive Matter, are in every Creature, and in all parts of every Creature, and make all perceptions in Nature, because they are the self-moving parts of Nature’.76 Cavendish argues that law, reason, and sociability are innate. As the full argument of Leviathan demonstrates, mechanism leads Hobbes to argue that as man’s passions and appetites are caused by external pressures over which he has no control, positive law is necessary. Hobbes argues that just as the motion of an object cannot be stopped without an obstruction, only contract can control man’s potential for war and guarantee peace. Cavendish opposes Hobbes’ ‘opinion … that when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still for ever; but when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion’ with her own theory of ‘self-moving matter’.77 Her conception that ‘Nature moveth not by force, but freely’ is pitted against Hobbes’ account of man’s natural propensity for war.78 She writes:

75 §6, I, PL, p. 26.76 §4, I, PL, pp. 18–19.77 §5, I, PL, p. 21.78 §5, I, PL, p. 23.


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Tis true, ‘tis the freedom in nature for one man to give another a box on the Ear, or to trip up his heels, or for one or more men to fight with each other; yet these actions are not like the actions of loving Imbraces and Kissing each other; neither are the actions one and the same, when a man strikes himself, and when he strikes another; and so likewise the action of impression, and the action of self-figuring [are] not one and the same, but different; for the action of impression is forced, and the action of self-figuring is free.79

Here Cavendish rejects Hobbesian mechanism but her argument has implications beyond natural philosophy. Her example of human beings choosing whether or not to be sociable suggests this. Her distinction between ‘the action of self-figuring’ (i.e. self-determination) and ‘the action of impression’ is pitched against Hobbes’ view that all movement is the result of impression. Cavendish emphasizes that man’s actions are governed by choice. This principle makes for ‘great Variety, and so great difference in force and liberty, objects and perceptions, sense and reason, and the like’. Cavendish implies that life in the state of nature can be nasty and brutish, and even acknowledges (later in the volume) that at times ‘war or rebellion in Nature cannot be avoided’.80 Nevertheless she argues that violent competition between men is an exercise of freedom rather than an ‘action of impression’; men are at liberty to act lovingly. Each individual’s capacity for choice, or self-figuring, is inviolable. Thus natural sociability informs her argument just as it shapes her familiar epistolary discourse. It is through the decorous match between her discourse and her argument that she refutes Hobbes’ argument and methodology.

In Philosophical Letters Cavendish claims to only concern herself with Hobbes’ treatment of topics in natural philosophy in Leviathan, such as motion, and to stop where he ‘treats of the Politicks’.81 Hutton suggests that further work to uncover Cavendish’s political views in relation to Hobbes might be fruitful, particularly considering William Cavendish’s debt to Hobbes’ political ideas.82 Although Cavendish does not discuss Hobbes’

79 §5, I, PL, pp. 23–24.80 §94, III, PL, pp. 408–09. I agree with Green and Broad that at times it is difficult to discern

Cavendish’s point of view due to her tendency to offer pro et contra arguments, but I think familiar epistolary discourse provides a more consistent overall argument than provided in her Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places (London, 1662) for example.

81 §13, I, PL, p. 47.82 Hutton, ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes’, p. 422; on William Cavendish’s debt to



political philosophy directly, she implies her position. As I have argued, Cavendish constantly experimented with generic forms, making a ‘straight’ genre reading unproductive, and she blurred disciplinary boundaries such as that between sociable and philosophical letters making a purely literary critical or philosophical reading unsatisfactory. Likewise we should be open to the possibility that her approach to the discipline of philosophy may have involved some wilful manipulation of certain proprieties such as the distinction between natural philosophy and politics. Before closing her analysis of Leviathan she attacks Hobbes’ distinction between vital and animal motions. Vital motions are involuntary actions, such as the beating of the heart, whereas animal motions are voluntary movements, such as those of the limbs. Cavendish counteracts Hobbes’ argument that voluntary motions are ‘first fancied in our minds … the Imagination is the first Internal beginning of all voluntary Motion’ because ‘it doth imply a contradiction, to call them Voluntary Motions, and yet to say they are caused and depend upon our Imagination’.83 In other words an action cannot be voluntary if it is triggered by another motion. Cavendish’s alternative to the complete absence of voluntarism in Hobbes’ scheme, is to propose that imagination, or the capacity to reason, is inherent in all self-figuring particles. She emphasizes this principle when she rescripts the opening of Leviathan in closing her discussion of Hobbes:

Nature doth not rule God, nor Man Nature, nor Politick Government Man; for the Effect cannot rule the Cause, but the Cause doth rule the Effect … The truth is, Man rules an artificial Government, and not the Government Man, just like as [sic.] a Watch-maker rules his Watch, and not the Watch the Watch-maker.84

Hobbes see Thomas P. Slaughter’s introduction to William Cavendish, Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastles’s Advice to Charles II, ed. Thomas P. Slaughter (London: Routledge, 1984); and Karen Raber, ‘“Reasonable Creatures”: William Cavendish and the Art of Dressage’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 42–66.

83 §12, I, PL, pp. 45–46.84 §13, I, PL, pp. 47–48. Compare with Hobbes: ‘Nature (the Art whereby God hath made

and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the


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Cavendish argues that Hobbes confuses the cause with the effect. She claims that politics are beyond the scope of Philosophical Letters since ‘a Woman is not imployed in State Affairs, unless an absolute Queen’. Her summary dismissal of mechanism implies, however, that a more complete rewriting of Leviathan logically follows. She has only shunned politics ‘as much as [she] can’ while reminding her readers that female rule is natural if exceptional.85

Cavendish emphasizes her concern for decorum, that she should only speak as much as fitting her sex, and that she graciously conducts herself in her disagreement with Hobbes, doing unto him as he could do unto her if he chose. It would be wrong to read her emphasis upon decorum as a feminine apology for speaking on such a serious topic. Hobbes’ public letter to Davenant about his poem Gondibert shows an overriding concern for both poetic decorum and representational decorum or judging that the poem was a true imitation of nature.86 Davenant sought to establish a new heroic mode of poetry capable of reinvigorating royalism. He stressed his good fortune in having found ‘Frends as ready as Bookes, to regulate [his] conceptions, or make them more correct, easy, and apparent.’87 Hobbes ‘regulates’ Davenant’s endeavour by judging on matters of decorum, thus ensuring the fit between nature and the poem, and the poem and society as it should be. Likewise when Cavendish stresses her respect for decorum, or the correct match of her discourse to her position and the nature of her letter, she underscores her capacity for philosophical judgement. If it is true that ‘Man rules an artificial Government’, then it is in his power to try to be more truthful to nature in modelling and ruling that government. Thus she emphasizes the importance of correctly understanding the laws that govern nature according to her oft-

Joynts, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or

STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul; as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts’” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson ([1651]1968; Harmondworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 81).

85 §13, I, PL, p. 47.86 Bruce W. Young, ‘Thomas Hobbes Versus the Poets: Form, Expression, and Metaphor in

Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, The Journal of Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 63 (1986), 151–62.

87 “The Author’s Preface”, p. 23.



repeated view that all the parts of nature possess a natural liberty to their different degrees or capacities.

Cavendish implies that the state should be modelled upon natural principles of sociability. This turn to natural law may seem self-defeating. As Constance Jordan observes of Renaissance ‘feminist’ thought, ‘there were very few ways to interpret contemporary concepts of natural law that were not prejudicial to women’.88 For Aristotle, since women are ‘incapable of developing the virtues of character’, and lack practical reasoning, they are naturally subordinate, and do not fulfil the criteria for citizenship nor can they occupy other political roles.89 Natural law was traditionally evoked to justify the supreme power of the paterfamilias but, as Jay Stevenson argues, Cavendish’s vitalism is distinct from that of her contemporaries (Conway and Baruch Spinoza). In her view the ‘rational and sensitive power’ that animates natural particles does ‘not inhere in a single hierarchical order but is fragmented and often oppositional’.90 Unlike other Renaissance advocates for women, she does not reject natural hierarchy but removes gender from it. For Cavendish sociability is gender-neutral yet hierarchical. In Sociable Letters she proclaims that ‘Wit makes a Ladder of Words, to climb to Fame’s high Tower’; in other words, natural thinkers outrank other men.91 Her argument for self-governance is not democratic; she stipulates that particles can reason, or sense, according to their ‘different degrees.’92 She scorns title seekers, yet supports natural aristocracy. She writes:

Madam, I do not Wonder, that those which are Indued and Adorned with the Bounteous Gifts of Nature, should Seek, and Endeavour to Divulge them; the truth is, it were not Fit nor Well, that those Gifts, as Courage, Judgement, Wit, and Beauty, should be Buried in Obscurity.93

88 Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 66.

89 Citation from Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, gen. ed. Edward Craig, I (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 422.

90 Jay Stevenson, ‘The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish’, SEL, 36 (1996), 527–43 (p. 523).

91 §27, SL, p. 55.92 On Cavendish’s natural hierarchy see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science,

Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 195, 199.

93 §33, SL, p. 382.


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This does have the air of personal justification since she describes her own wit, reason, and fancy as natural. Participation in poetic or philosophical dialogue should be determined by a person’s possession of the appropriate sociable skills – wit, ingenuity, and decorum – and not his or her sex or intellectual training. The model of society that would follow is a kind of oligarchical meritocracy governed by members’ friendly respect for one another and complaisance or the understanding that each member makes a contribution fitting to his or her different capacities.

The familiar letter enables Cavendish to depict reason issuing naturally from sociable exchange, and thus it is a source of a philosophy that is true to life. For Cavendish philosophy is the study of the principles that order nature; she rejects ‘Transcendency’, or philosophy that ‘will not Descend to consider, or regard the Actions and Designs of Men, no not the outward and ordinary works of Nature’.94 Her position invokes the association between letters and philosophy in the rhetoric of civil-war royalism. As royalist letter-writer James Howell acknowledged in a poem, ‘To the Knowing Reader touching Familiar Letters’, accompanying his Epistolæ Ho Elianæ: ‘Letters like Gordian Knots, do Nations tie, / Else all Commerce, and Love, ‘twixt Men would die’.95 Howell alludes to the fact that Royalist community had been sustained by secret epistolary networks but also to the more philosophical idea that letters preserved the social forms, modes of decorum, or ethos of royalist community. Royalist poet Abraham Cowley made the connection between letters and philosophy in the 1656 preface to his Poems, when he idealized the quietist retreat enforced upon royalists during the interregnum: ‘my desire has been for some years past … to forsake this world for ever, with all the vanities and Vexations of it, and to bury my self in some obscure retreat (but not without the consolation of Letters and Philosophy)’.96 Cowley surely uses the term ‘letters’ to refer broadly to written culture, but in so doing he identifies a connection that continued to reverberate in royalist political discourse after the return of Charles II.

94 §14, SL, p. 23.95 In Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Foreign; divided into Four

Books: Partly Historical, Political, Philosophical. Upon Emergent Occasions, 11th edn (London, 1754), p. 14, ll. 88–89.

96 ‘Preface to Poems’, (1656) in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, II (1650–1685) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), p. 82.



Cowley and Howell’s idealistic royalist claims for epistolary rhetoric, assume that decorous discourse has the power to shape society. Hobbes mentions letters in a similar vein. As discussed above, he emphasizes that speech separates men from brutes; it furnishes meaning and understanding; and it permits dialogue between men.97 Hobbes makes this explicit in his oft-cited description of the state of nature as:

a condition, [where] there is no place for Industry, because the Fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.98

Here Hobbes refers in shorthand to the civilizing property of language as ‘Letters.’ In the state of nature men have speech but they lack civil society, order, and governance, qualities inherent to civil modes of discourse such as letters. In his list of the civilities absent in the state of nature, letters are closely followed by society. In this causal chain the lack of culture leads to the lack of philosophy, or ‘Knowledge of the face of the Earth.’99 This in turn undermines Time, Letters, and Society.

In rejecting Hobbesian causation, Cavendish repudiates the humanist premise that language precedes understanding, arguing that there is more understanding in nature than speech. This seems a contradictory assertion for a writer to make but it was necessary since, as a woman, she was excluded from the conventional modes of intellectual speech and exchange. Rather than viewing understanding, reasoning, and community as functions of speech that manifest in letters, she posits that natural sociability, or innate reason, is prior to speech but can take shape in sociable forms of writing. The stakes are high. She is not simply renovating her reputation, or making a claim on public discourse for women, but intervening in the philosophical redefinition of society. Philosophy is not a remote academic discourse but is connected to life; it is inherently temporal. Philosophical epistolary discourse embodies that ‘fellow feeling with all men, in other

97 ‘Of Speech’, Leviathan, pp. 100–10 (p. 100).98 ‘Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning their Felicity or Misery’, Leviathan,

pp. 183–88 (p. 186).99 On the causal nature of Hobbes’ argument see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the

Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 334–36.


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words, sympathy and sociability’ of which Seneca writes. It harmonizes with life because it is an amicable form of knowledge to be shared amongst friends where friends are defined as different opinions, or self-figuring particles.

School of History and ClassicsUniversity of Tasmania100

100 I would like to thank Marion J. Campbell, Jacqueline Broad, Richard Yeo, Vanessa Smith, and C. A. J. Coady for commenting upon earlier versions of this paper.

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