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Bears in Eden, or, this is not the garden you're looking for: Margaret Cavendish, Robert Hooke and the limits of natural philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2015

IAN LAWSON
IAN LAWSON*
Affiliation:
Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Carslaw F07, Darlington, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This paper investigates Margaret Cavendish's characterization of experimental philosophers as hybrids of bears and men in her 1666 story The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. By associating experimental philosophers, in particular Robert Hooke and his microscope, with animals familiar to her readers from the sport of bear-baiting, Cavendish constructed an identity for the fellows of the Royal Society of London quite unlike that which they imagined for themselves. Recent scholarship has illustrated well how Cavendish's opposition to experimental philosophy is linked to her different natural-philosophical, political and anthropological ideas. My contribution to this literature is to examine the meanings both of bears in early modern England and of microscopes in experimental rhetoric, in order to illustrate the connection that Cavendish implies between the two. She parodied Hooke's idea that his microscope extended his limited human senses, and mocked his aim that by so doing he could produce useful knowledge. The bear-men reflect inhuman ambition and provide a caution against ignoring both the order of English society and the place of humans in nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 583 - 605
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Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2015 

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References

1 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: To which is added, the Description of a New Blazing World, 2nd edn, London, 1668, pp. 1–158, 27.

2 Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, in Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, op. cit. (1), pp. 1–392, 10.

3 Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. 165.

4 Iyengar, Sujata, ‘Royalist, romancist, racialist: rank, gender, and race in the science and fiction of Margaret Cavendish’, ELH (2002) 69, pp. 649–672CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gallagher, Catherine, ‘Embracing the absolute: the politics of the female subject in seventeenth-century England’, Genders (1988) 1, pp. 24–39Google Scholar; Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

5 Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

6 John Wilkins, Mathematical Magick. Or, The Wonders That may be performed by Mechanicall Geometry, London, 1648, pp. 115–116.

7 Francis Bacon, The Plan of the Work, in The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11: The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts (ed. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 26–47, 34.

8 For more on this epistemology of the microscope see especially Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Lüthy, Christoph, ‘Atomism, Lynceus, and the fate of seventeenth-century microscopy’, Early Science and Medicine (1996) 1, pp. 1–27CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Marian Fournier, The Fabric of Life: Microscopy in the Seventeenth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Edward Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

9 Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy in Three Books: containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical, London, 1664, C2r–v.

10 Power, op. cit. (9), C2v, p. 155. Power was inspired enough to write a poem ‘In Commendation of ye Microscope’, for which see Cowles, Thomas, ‘Dr. Henry Power's Poem on the Microscope’, Isis (1934) 21, pp. 71–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 32. This invective may well have been directed squarely at Hooke – he had expressed aerial ambitions in Micrographia, which was the main target of Cavendish's lengthy critique of the experimental philosophy. See Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, London, 1665, D1v. See also Tkaczyk, Viktoria's work on early modern flight: ‘Ready for takeoff’, Cabinet (2007) 27Google Scholar, available at http://cabinetmagazine/issues/27/tkacsyk.php, accessed 24 June 2015; Viktoria Tkaczyk, Himmels-Falten: zur Theatralität des Fliegens in der Frühen Neuzeit, Paderborn: Wilhem Fink, 2011.

12 For more on Cavendish's natural philosophy generally see Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998; Sarasohn, op. cit. (3); Steven Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Farnham: Ashgate, 2003; Peter Dear, ‘A philosophical duchess: understanding Margaret Cavendish’, in Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds.), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 125–144.

13 Keller, Eve, ‘Producing petty gods: Margaret Cavendish's critique of experimental science’, ELH (1997) 64, pp. 447–471CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 457, original emphasis.

14 Battigelli suggests that the radical invention of the narrative is an indirect rebuttal to Hooke's famous ‘sincere hand and faithful eye’; the methodical, automated empiricism of the Royal Society. If whole worlds of difference are created in the flippant and eccentric mind, how could a method of meticulous collaboration among observers produce reliable, unified knowledge? Battigelli, Anna, ‘Between the glass and the hand: the eye in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (1996) 2, pp. 25–38Google Scholar. The importance of rhetoric and imagination in Cavendish's works is well established and well discussed, since Marjorie Nicolson passed over the ‘ponderous tome’ in her Voyages to the Moon, New York: MacMillan, 1948, p. 224. See, for instance, Keller, op. cit. (13); Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Battigelli, op. cit. (12), especially Chapter 4; Bowerbank, Sylvia, ‘The spider's delight: Margaret Cavendish and the “female” imagination’, English Literary Renaissance (1984) 14, pp. 392–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kate Lilley's introduction to Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, and Other Writings, London: William Pickering, 1992.

15 Spiller, op. cit. (14), p. 168.

16 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 2.

17 See Michaelian, Kourken, ‘Margaret Cavendish's epistemology’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2009) 17, pp. 31–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Margaret Cavendish, Grounds of Natural Philosophy, London, 1668, p. 7.

19 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 4.

20 The racialist implications of Arctic-dwelling bear-people have been discussed by Line Cottegnies, ‘Utopia, millenarianism, and the Baconian programme of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World’, in Chloë Houston (ed.), New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 71–94; Malcolmson, op. cit. (5), Chapter 4; Iyengar, op. cit. (4).

21 Sujata Iyengar, op. cit. (4), discusses the possibility of male and female monarchism for Cavendish. Cavendish's feminism generally has been a point of contention, and has been discussed by, among others, Sarasohn, Lisa T., ‘A science turned upside down: feminism and the natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly (1984), 47, pp. 289–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyle, Deborah, ‘Margaret Cavendish's nonfeminist natural philosophy’, Configurations (2004), 12, pp. 195–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dear, op. cit. (12); Keller, op. cit. (13); Gallagher, op. cit. (4).

22 Margaret Cavendish, 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, London, 1664, pp. 40–41.

23 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), pp. 15–16.

24 See William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 286–287, for the parallel between her criticism of chymistry and those of earlier writers. Sarasohn, op. cit. (3), p. 167, also discusses the similarity.

25 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 29. For the corresponding observations in Hooke's work see Hooke, op. cit. (11), pp. 211, 205, 175.

26 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 30. See, for parallels, Power, op. cit. (9), A4v–B1v; Hooke, op. cit. (11), D1v.

27 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), pp. 31–32. See also her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, op. cit. (1), p. 9. Again see Hooke, op. cit. (11), pp. 100, 142, 210, 211.

28 Sarasohn, op. cit. (3), p. 165.

29 John Wilkins, A Discourse concerning a New World & Another Planet, in 2 Bookes, London, 1640, p. 86; Hooke, op. cit. (11), A2v; Power, op. cit. (9), C2v. See Hooke, op. cit. (11), A2r, for his famous phrase about adding ‘artificial Organs to the natural’. See also the frontispiece to Wilkins's Discourse concerning A New World, which sees Galileo's telescope fulfilling Kepler's wish that he had wings on which to travel through the solar system.

30 See the book's preface for Hooke's discussion of overcoming limited sense. To the extent that Micrographia can be read as a defense of the methods of the whole newly founded Royal Society see John Harwood, ‘Rhetoric and graphics in Micrographia’, in Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (eds.), Robert Hooke: New Studies, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989, pp. 119–148.

31 See for instance Schemes 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23. The parallel with the first book of telescopic observations is notable: as Spiller, op. cit. (14), p. 110, says, in Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius the telescope also ‘stretches out beyond the text [and] the reader and the viewer's sites are aligned’.

32 Maxwell Power has taken the change in drawing styles to indicate that Christopher Wren, Hooke's close friend and colleague, drew Micrographia's most iconic images. See Power, Maxwell, ‘Sir Christopher Wren and the Micrographia’, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of the Arts and Sciences (1945) 36, pp. 37–44Google Scholar. Regardless of the provenance of the images, Hooke certainly presents the book as the result of a single author, and more important here is the way the book is viewed, rather than how it was created.

33 Dennis, Michael Aaron, ‘Graphic understanding: instruments and interpretation in Robert Hooke's Micrographia’, Science in Context (1989) 3, pp. 309–364CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 341.

34 Hooke, op. cit. (11), p. 211. The presence of John Wilkins is lurking behind the Roman messenger god. In 1641 Wilkins anonymously published Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger, apparently inspired (as with his other other-worldly speculations) by Francis Godwin, whose Nuncius Inanimatus (1629) was about the transmission of messages over long distances. Hooke himself would later devise a similar telegraphy scheme of symbols to be viewed through spyglasses: see William Derham, Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke …, London, 1726, pp. 142–150.

35 Hooke, op. cit. (11), pp. 210, 178, 185.

36 Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, Baroque Science, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 43. For the argument at large, see the whole of Chapter 1. The point is especially clear in the fourth discourse of Descartes's Dioptrique. See also David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.

37 Gal and Chen-Morris, op. cit. (36), p. 42. See also their references for the epistemological unease this bequeathed subsequent philosophy, and their Chapter 3 for more on Hooke's ‘radical instrumentalization’.

38 Power, op. cit. (9), B1r.

39 Robert Hooke, A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, and How its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the making Experiments and collecting Observations, in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, containing his Cutlerian Lectures, and other Discourses, Read at the Meetings of the Illustrious Royal Society (ed. Richard Waller), 2nd edn, London, 1971 [1705], p. 8.

40 Hooke, op. cit. (39), p. 9.

41 Hooke, op. cit. (11), A2r.

42 The accession speech is reproduced in full in Stephen Wren, Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of Wrens; viz. of Mathew Bishop of Ely, Christopher Dean of Windsor, &c. but chiefly of Sir Christopher Wren …, London, 1750, pp. 200–206. The snail eyes appear on p. 205, as Wren is discussing Seneca's prophecy of the discovery of the New World, again comparing travel with optic glasses as sources of discovery.

43 René Descartes, Optics, in Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology (trans. Paul J. Olscamp), revised edn, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001, pp. 63–173, 120.

44 See Erica Fudge's work on the construction of the animal as other in early modern England: Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.

45 Fudge, op. cit. (44), p. 19, and Chapter 1 more generally.

46 From an eyewitness report from 1575 reproduced in Horace Smith and Samuel Woodworth, Festivals, Games and Amusements: Ancient and Modern, New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832, p. 108.

47 Scott-Warren, Jason, ‘When theaters were bear-gardens: or, what's at stake in the comedy of humors’, Shakespeare Quarterly (2003) 54, pp. 63–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 65. Many of the nuanced interpretations of the bear garden come from the connection between those entertainments and Tudor and Stuart theatre, and I draw heavily on Scott-Warren's work for a sense of the development of the literature in this field.

48 See E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, p. 457.

49 This is also the contention of Scott-Warren, op. cit. (47), pp. 71–74.

50 The Parable of the Bear-baiting, London, 1691.

51 See Scott-Warren, op. cit. (47). Slender's line is from The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Riverside Shakespeare (ed. G. Blakemore Evans), 2nd edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996, 1.1.140.

52 Francis Bacon, Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History, in The Works of Francis Bacon (ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath), 15 vols., Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1857–1870, vol. 8, pp. 351–371, 363; Hooke, op. cit. (11), p. 8.

53 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, New York: Berg (2001 (English trans. 2006)), p. 12.

54 Rancière, op. cit. (53), p. 1.

55 Malcolmson, op. cit. (5), p. 123.

56 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 28.

57 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), pp. 31–32.

58 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), pp. 11, 102–103.

59 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London For the Improving of Natural Knowledge, London, 1667, pp. 322–323.

60 Cavendish was far from being their only critic. For Hobbes's view see especially Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. More contemporary criticisms include Meric Casaubon, A Letter of Meric Casaubon, Cambridge, 1669; Henry Stubbe, The ‘Plus Ultra’ Reduced to a ‘non Plus’, London, 1670, p. 13.

61 Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (ed. Marjorie Nicolson and David Stuart Rhodes), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

62 Robert Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke, vol. A (ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams), London: Taylor & Francis, 1935, p. 235.

63 Nick Wilding, ‘Graphic technologies’, in Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter (eds.), Robert Hooke, Tercentennial Studies, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 123–134, 133, has briefly traced the ribbon-makers' discontent at industrially minded science to a culmination in Marx.

64 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 11.

65 From the dedication ‘To His Grace the Duke of Newcastle’, Cavendish, op. cit. (2), A3r.

66 Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 8.

67 See especially Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, London: Duckworth, 1975, especially Chapter 5; J. A. Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 1998; Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010; Harrison, op. cit. (66).

68 Picciotto, op. cit. (67), p. 34 and Chapter 1 more generally.

69 Abraham Cowley, ‘To the Royal Society’, in Sprat, op. cit. (59), B1r.

70 See Harrison, op. cit. (66), for more on the distinction between, roughly, optimistic Catholic and pessimistic Calvinist views on the Fall and their consequences for the restitution of knowledge.

71 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 2, Aphorism 52, in Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon, op. cit. (7), p. 447.

72 Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, Aphorism 93, in Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon, op. cit. (7), p. 32. See Harrison, op. cit. (66), Chapter 5.

73 Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature, in Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, op. cit. (52), vol. 6, pp. 25–76, 32.

74 Picciotto, op. cit. (67), p. 11. For a related point see Erica Fudge's discussion of a ‘paradox in Bacon's methodology’: in the maturation of the human from childlike ignorance to adult understanding, humanity is both defined by its formative, childlike state, and inadequately distinguished from animals by it. Erica Fudge, ‘Calling creatures by their true names: Bacon, the new science and the beast in man’, in Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman (eds.), At the Borders of the Human, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 91–109.

75 For example, compare the preface to Power's Experimental Philosophy, op. cit. (9), and Joseph Glanvill's Plus Ultra: Or, The Progress and Advancement of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle, London, 1668, pp. 5–6. Boyle reversed Bacon's method, and thought that knowledge of nature would come after salvation, not before. He and Hooke both expressed scepticism about the significance of Adam's names for the animals. See Harrison, op. cit. (66).

76 Hooke, op. cit. (11), A1r. For more see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, London: Allen Lane, 1983.

77 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 72.

78 Keller, op. cit. (13), p. 457.

79 Keller, op. cit. (13), p. 457.

80 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), pp. 164–165.

81 Keller, op. cit. (13), p. 457.

82 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 5.

83 Hooke, op. cit. (39), p. 9.

84 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), pp. 281–282.

85 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 164.

86 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 9. ‘Patterning out’ is a phrase she explains as ‘imitating’ (Cavendish, op. cit. (22), p. 420), and takes place during perception. Perception itself is a broad term, for ‘[t]here is a double perception in nature, the rational perception, and the sensitive’ (Cavendish, op. cit. (18), p. 9). Perception is more like coming to know something one was previously ignorant of, by rational or sensible means, and contrasts with conception, which is gaining knowledge by inferring over or remembering previously held knowledge. See Michaelian, op. cit. (17).

87 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), pp. 8–9.

88 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 11.

89 For more on Cavendish's utilitarianism see Hilda Smith, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the microscope as play’, in Judith P. Zinsser (ed.), Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005, pp. 48–70.

90 Paolo Rossi, ‘Francis Bacon's idea of science’, in Markku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Francis Bacon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 25–46, 36.

91 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), p. 63.

92 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 281.

93 Cavendish, op. cit. (2), p. 280.

94 Cavendish, op. cit. (1), pp. 36, 43.

95 See again Keller, op. cit. (13), p. 457.

96 Gallagher, op. cit. (4), p. 28. Iyengar, op. cit. (4), p. 659

97 See Sprat, op. cit. (59).

98 Iyengar, op. cit. (4), p. 651.

99 Cavendish wrote biographies of both herself and her husband: A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life, published as an addendum to Nature's Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, London, 1656; The Life of the Thrice Noble, High, and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe, London, 1667. See also Kate Lilley's introduction to her edition of The Blazing World, op. cit. (14).

100 See Picciotto, op. cit. (67), pp. 87–104, for more on the idea of ‘making progress’ and its conflict with the old cyclical calendar of festivals and yearly events.

101 Margaret Cavendish, Similizing the Sea to Meadowes, and Pastures, the Marriners to Shepheards, the Mast to a May-pole, Fishes to Beasts and Comparing Waves, & a Ship to Rebellion, in Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, London, 1653, pp. 146–148.

102 The letter is quoted at length in Picciotto, op. cit. (67), pp. 100–101.

103 William Shakespeare, Richard II, in The Riverside Shakespeare, op. cit. (51), 2.1.724.

104 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews), 11 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, vol. 8, 30 May 1667.

105 Evelyn's ballad is quoted at some length in Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 1623–1673, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957, pp. 24–26.

106 He seemed to have been so looking forward to meeting her too. In March, seeking to ‘understand her better’, he had been to see a play of hers (30 March 1667), and when she visited London next month, intrigued that ‘all she do is romantick’ (11 April 1667), he spent a good deal of time and energy trying to run into her (26 April 1667, 1 May 1667, 10 May 1667). But when he finally did, at Arundel House, she did not please him. ‘I do not like her at all’, he reported, and later called her a ‘mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’, and her husband mad to put up with her. Pepys, op. cit. (104), vol. 9, 18 March 1668.

107 Hooke Folio, Royal Society Archives MS/847, HF_064, available online at www.livesandletters.ac.uk/cell/Hooke/Hooke.html, accessed 24 June 2015.

108 Pepys, op. cit. (104), vol. 5, 1 February 1663/4. Compare the two lists: the king's in Thomas Birch, History of the Royal Society, 4 vols., London, 1756–1757, vol. 1, p. 312; the duchess's in ibid., vol. 2, p. 177.

109 See, for instance, a letter from Christopher Wren to Viscount Brounker, 30 July/9 August 1663, reproduced in Birch, op. cit. (108), vol. 1, p. 288.

110 Pepys, op. cit. (104), vol. 8, 30 May 1667.

111 For a rather different interpretation see Samuel Mintz, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle's visit to the Royal Society’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1952) 51, pp. 168–176.