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.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, has been known mostly by her nickname, “Mad Madge,” and by association: first as a member of the royal court of Queen Henrietta Maria and, later, as the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. Although connected to the royalist circle and in touch (through her husband's patronage) with some of the leading intellectuals of her period, including Hobbes and Descartes, among others, Cavendish's political perspectives cannot be neatly encapsulated by these associations. As the two texts in this volume indicate, Cavendish's writings maneuver a slippery path between adherence to customary notions of power, politics and gender relations and openly irreverent critique of many of the institutions and practices central to early modern society. The result is a writing style and political approach that is distinctively her own. At first glance, Cavendish can seem frustratingly contradictory; however, James's introduction and detailed annotations draw out the logic and coherence in Cavendish's political thought, identifying its unique insights and originality.

Although stylistically very different, The Blazing World and Divers Orations engage many of the same themes: the problems of political and religious disorder, the travails of civil war, the nature of sovereignty, and the possibility of lasting peace, among others. Strikingly, The Blazing World begins with the kidnapping of a woman by a foreign merchant; while the merchant is punished by death on the open seas for his wrongdoing, the woman is rewarded for her trouble with a fantastical journey through several worlds to the city of Paradise. At her arrival, she is made the Empress of the Blazing World and embarks on an intellectual journey to acquaint herself with the latest developments in philosophy, science and politics. Woven throughout the text are Cavendish's characteristic autobiographical references to her own experiences of the Civil War and to the Duke of Newcastle's post-Civil War plight of financial ruin and diminished political status. The Duchess herself makes an appearance in the text as the Empress's most sensible scribe and counselor; sought for her advice as to the most lasting and best kind of government, the Duchess replies, “to have but one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, so that all the world might be as one united family” (87).

Here, as elsewhere, Cavendish demonstrates her sympathy with the political views of her husband and his intellectual circle, but does not merely replicate them. Indeed, she informs us that the most learned men (among them Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes) are often inflexibly wedded to their own opinion and convinced of their rightness, character traits she later includes among the causes of civil war. No surprise, then, that Cavendish's The Blazing World is an exploration of feminine power, drawing on images of Elizabeth I's regal authority implicitly to critique the absence of women in political and intellectual life, to destabilize traditional notions of gender hierarchy, as well as to make a case for unifying the English nation.

In Divers Orations Cavendish expands her creative and political skills into the genre of the oration. Deriving topics and rhetorical conventions from classical sources, Cavendish also takes certain liberties with the genre, using her orations, James points out, to air “a variety of political and social views without espousing any of them” (xxii). Although her own opinion on any of the given topics remains somewhat elusive, her hallmark in Divers Orations is the powerfully descriptive and often very dark language she reserves to discuss topics of importance to her. Two subjects receive especially graphic treatment: the manly sacrifice made by soldiers in war and the question of how that sacrifice is remembered; and the traditional feminine roles in marriage and motherhood. While most of the orations are relatively benign in tone and subject matter, notable exceptions include “A Soldiers Funeral Oration,” in which she describes death's hunger for the dead soldier's body, his “most nourishing food” (227), as well as “A Young Virgins Funeral Oration,” in which death is found to be a cold bedfellow but a better husband than any other, for there will be “no whoring, gaming, drinking, quarrelling nor prodigal spending in the grave” (218).

Cavendish is similarly bleak when considering the prospects for lasting peace. Balanced with her Hobbesian faith that political order can be achieved under absolute rule is her concern that “men will never be satisfied with any government, so as we shall never live in a settled peace in this world, nor never dwell peaceably but in the grave” (281). Any notion that Cavendish merely defers to royalist and patriarchalist perspectives is fundamentally undermined by the language and analogies she employs.

With increased scholarly attention now focused on women political thinkers such as Christine De Pizan, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others, Political Writings invites us to consider Margaret Cavendish, too, as a vibrant and engaging political writer as well as a vital participant in the larger conversation in early modern political thought. This volume provides a good foundation for understanding the political thought of Margaret Cavendish, one that historians of political thought ought to build upon further.