Political Writings

Extract

Political Writings, Margaret Cavendish (Susan James, ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xxxix, 298.

The publication of Margaret Cavendish's Political Writings is part of a recent effort to make Cavendish's seventeenth-century works more accessible to students and scholars alike. Political Writings is a particularly significant addition to this effort in that it contains two of Cavendish's most explicitly political texts, A Description of a New World called the Blazing World (1666), Cavendish's best-known endeavour in utopian fiction, along with the first modern edition of Orations of Divers Sorts (1662). Combined with a concise introduction by the volume's editor, philosopher Susan James, who expertly navigates Cavendish's many influences and references—ancient and modern—the book effectively puts Cavendish on the map as a political thinker. Although the most published Englishwoman of her period, and now the subject of a veritable growth industry in the fields of early modern literary and gender history, Margaret Cavendish has received virtually no attention in the field of political thought. With her inclusion in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, there is hope that Cavendish will now be treated and analyzed, not just as the prolific writer of drama, poetry and natural philosophy that she was, but as an incisive thinker who engaged with, and published on, the most vital political questions facing Civil War and Restoration England.