Liza Blake

In the mid-seventeenth century, while in exile as a royalist during the English Civil War, Margaret Cavendish wrote a book of poems that she entitled Poems and Fancies (along with a slightly later companion volume called Philosophical Fancies). Poems and Fancies, printed in London in 1653 while she was back in England advocating for her exiled husband, covered topics as various as the atomic makeup of the world; ethics and empathy with the non-human world; the cognitive possibilities of poetic and allegorical modes; the importance of making mental room for the supernatural; and the ravages of war on a nation and on individual minds. A second, much-revised edition was printed in 1664, and this revised edition was reprinted again in 1668, five years before her death. This digital scholarly edition, produced by Liza Blake with thirteen undergraduate editorial collaborators, makes this remarkable collection of poems freely available online, fully collated, edited, and modernized. This edition has two central aims. First, it makes the poetry of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, freely available online in a scholarly edition for all to use, in teaching or for research. More importantly, it contains full textual notes noting all textual variants across the three editions. As is explained in more detail in the Textual and Editorial Introduction, Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies has a complicated textual history; between the first and second editions of the book in 1653 and 1664, respectively, she made numerous textual changes, including fixes to meter and rhyme, rewrites of lines and couplets, and in some cases, significant rearrangements of materials. This edition, based on a thorough textual and bibliographical study of her poems, offers the first fully collated edition of her poems, allowing readers to track and study those numerous changes, and to close read with those changes in mind.

Is it possible to be a posthumanist without affirming life? Must a posthuman materialism necessarily be lively? Recent contemporary new materialists— as part of their project to reclaim, among other things, the agency and activity of nonhumans—seem to suggest that, yes, a vitalist (Coole and Frost) or vibrant (Bennett) matter is necessary to think the posthuman. Coole and Frost in particular set their new, vital matter against the “dead” matter of Descartes, and imagine a matter that is not only alive but, in the case of Bennett, specifically and strategically anthropomorphized. This article will take Margaret Cavendish as a test case to think about the relationship between life, matter, and posthumanism. Cavendish is a vitalist monist and is in many ways posthuman, in the way we might understand that word today: her natural philosophy affirms that every kind of matter has some degree of life and rationality, and many of her poems think about the kind of thoughts that animals might have. But her valuable contribution to the new materialisms is the way her theories of matter cut across the life/death dichotomy: for Cavendish, death and life are simply two different physical motions of matter. Cavendish’s long digressions on death, the “materiality” of the afterlife, and the universal destructiveness of resurrection collude with her posthuman poems to create a radically different materialist ethics. By refusing to privilege life, I will argue, Cavendish actually becomes more posthuman; the concepts of motion and figure allow her to conceptualize nonhuman forms of matter without needing to translate them into a form of (human) life or (human) agency.