Chapter 4 - The Skeptical Fancies of Margaret Cavendish

Summary

Chapter 4 offers a new approach to Margaret Cavendish’s skepticism, focusing on rhetorical strategies of “reoccupation” – a term coined by Hans Blumenberg to understand how seventeenth-century thinkers coped with unresolved questions inherited from medieval nominalism. For Cavendish reoccupation is a way to manage doubt and uncertainty; it involves the appropriation of roles, tropes, plot devices and other textual conventions deemed inadequate or hollow. By analyzing metaphors and topoi from The Blazing World and elsewhere, the chapter shows how reoccupation operates in her work, dramatizing the resolution of crises in authority. Her rejection of Epicurean atomism and her embrace of vitalist materialism correspond to her predilection for reoccupation as a literary device and psychological stance. The chapter also examines her parodies of political theology and sovereignty, thereby offering support for Blumenberg’s arguments against Carl Schmitt. The chapter situates the Duchess of Newcastle’s self-assertion and desire for fame within larger structural patterns of secularization. The coda compares Herbert and Cavendish vis-à-vis Jacques Rancière’s comments on the English Revolution.