Holly Faith Nelson

Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union

Shakespeares Macbeth does not present a particular position on Anglo-Scottish politics that defines itself in relation to the belief system of one small political body, as is often argued, but confronts three models of the Union recorded in the pamphlet literature of the period and dramatized on the Jacobean stage. The construction of the drama as a whole—the configuration of character, form, and genre and the use of geographical space—produces a number of colliding and competing positions on the Union, reflecting the complexity of its relationship to the Court and to the marketplace.

Memory, Monuments, and Melancholic Genius in Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo

margaret cavendish’s inclination to celebrate female partici pation in martial affairs in her dramatic works has received a substantial amount of critical attention. The indulgent wish fulfil ment represented by the remarkable victories of Lady Victoria and her female army in Bell in Campo, and the astonishing battle achievements of Lady Orphant (Affectionata) in Love’s Adven tures, have unsurprisingly been the focus of that attention. While the disruption and horror of the civil war overturned gender hierarchies, allowing and even requiring women to assume tradi tionally masculine roles, few writers depict female soldiers quite as flamboyantly and unapologetically as Cavendish.1 Not until very recently have scholars turned their attention to the less startling but, we contend, no less dramatic figure of Madam Jantil, a mourning war widow in Bell in Campo, who dies of grief after designing and overseeing the erection of an elaborate monument to her husband, a casualty of war.

Conway: Dis/ability, Medicine, and Metaphysics

Although Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway are now recognized as the most significant female natural philosophers, or scientific thinkers, in seventeenth-century England, Viscountess Conway would have been troubled to find herself associated with the notorious Duchess of Newcastle. Unlike Cavendish, Conway neither sought public attention through publication nor presented herself as an authority on the old or the “New Science.” Among Conway’s correspondence, we find two letters from Henry More, the Oxford philosopher and theologian, that mock the scientific exploits of Cavendish.1 No doubt, Conway would also have scoffed at Cavendish’s attempts to style herself as a “great Philosopher” (237). Conway, unlike Cavendish, was readily inclined to cloak herself in the language of humility, often reminding More that she was not worthy of his good opinion of her. And yet, while Cavendish was making every effort to situate herself within the “gentlemanly culture” of the “New Science,” with little success, Conway managed to negotiate a place for herself within it without being perceived as a threat.2

A Good Christian, and a Good Natural Philosopher: Margaret Cavendish's Theory of the Soul(s) in the Early Enlightenment

Abstract:Margaret Cavendish has been identified as a crypto-atheist in a number of modern studies of her life and works. In her own time, Cavendish voiced serious concern that she would be accused of atheism by her contemporaries, writing in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), “pray account me not an Atheist, but believe as I do in God Almighty” when explaining that she discourses on natural philosophy, not theology. However, despite Cavendish’s attempt to distance herself from religious matters to avoid such accusations, natural philosophy and theology do converge at times in her writings, revealing an impulse shared by many early Enlightenment thinkers to establish the apposite relationship between matter and metaphysics, (proto) scientific reasoning and the Christian faith. This essay focuses on one aspect of Cavendish’s thought—her evolving treatment of the nature and operation of the soul(s)—to demonstrate that she works to produce over a fifteen-year period a flexible, if complex and inexact, theory that reveals God and nature, spirit and matter operating in conjunction. This negotiation of faith and reason in her work undergirds her claim that she seeks to be both “a good Christian, and a good Natural Philosopher” (Philosophical Letters, 210).

Upon the Rack: George Herbert, William Cowper, and the Hermeneutic of Dis/ability

In 1875, George Herbert and William Cowper were jointly memorialized on a window in St. George’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey. The placement of the portraits of “Herbert at Bemerton, and Cowper at Olney” side by side seems natural given their shared history as students at Westminster school and Cowper’s high regard for Herbert’s spiritual vision. It is true that Cowper describes Herbert’s poems as “gothic and uncouth” in Adelphi, his spiritual autobiography, espousing the standard eighteenth-century view of Herbert’s poetic style as outmoded and unpolished. However, here and elsewhere, Cowper is adamant that Herbert’s poetry is therapeutic for those on the “Brink” of “Ruin” (p. 214). Although Cowper shares the emotional volatility of John Donne – from whom his mother, Ann Donne, claimed descent – it is in the poems of Herbert that he finds a restorative agent for the suffering mind and spirit. During one of Cowper’s earliest depressive episodes, he describes suffering “day and night . . . upon the rack, lying down in horrors and rising in despair,” finding a measure of relief only in the poems of Herbert. Immersing himself in them “all day long,” he experiences “delight” in their “strain of piety” (p. 9). Though Cowper admits that the poems do not completely cure his ailment, in the act of reading them, his dis/abled mind is “much alleviated” (p. 9). Cowper returns to Herbert’s poetry later in life when he finds his brother John near death and, he fears, damnation (p. 214). When John is so ill that “his case is clearly out of the Reach of Medicine,” Cowper again succumbs to a psychological panic that only Herbert can assuage. “I go to Sleep in a Storm,” he laments, “imagining that I hear his Cries, and wake in Terror lest he should just be departing,” only to hear in his dreams the soothing voice of Herbert:

Nascent Christian Feminism in Medieval and Early-Modern Britain

It is tempting to argue for a distinct female voice in medieval and early-modern religious works by women and to read their texts in light of feminist notions of ecriture feminine or womanspeak.1 It would be unwise, however, to give credence to any simplistic account of “feminine writing” in devotional works of the period, for textual production involves a complex process of different and conflicting determinants. Gender is only one of the factors that affect the workings of the spiritual imagination. Nevertheless, many female religious writers in medieval and early-modern Britain operated within an aesthetic of opposition, writing against essentialist concepts of “woman” as a static cultural category—inherently disruptive, spiritually inadequate, physically inferior, and inclined to the bestial.2 A rhetoric of resistance that exposed gender as a social construct surfaced in their writings, challenging the exclusion of women from the discursive formations of philosophy and religion that defined and transmitted “truth.” Ironically, medieval and early-modern women most often discovered their identity and authority in the very discourse of religion that was regularly employed by the clergy and laity to render them secondary, even soul-less, beings. Though a “foundational discourse,” religion was not a monolithic language that spoke “with only one voice” (Hinds 7); medieval and earlymodern women could employ sacred discourse to promote the notion of the self as a fluid process rather than a fixed object, rereading the scripture to invest the dynamic female body and soul with spiritual and material, private and public, worth.