title: Lady of Contemplation
title: On the education and Copia of Margaret Cavendish
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Spencer, E Mariah
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2024
Subjects: Cavendish
composition
copia
pedagogy
women writers
public abstract
Education
Women's Studies

description: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) lived, wrote, and published during the tumultuous decades of the mid-seventeenth century. With the lingering effects of Renaissance Humanism still guiding the curricular and pedagogical decisions made by the grammar schools and universities of England, the works of Sir Francis Bacon extended learning beyond the literature of the ancients towards inductive reasoning, experiential learning, careful observation, and experimentation. Several educational reformers—including John Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib—worked to streamline and systematize these changes through a series of publications and appeals to parliament mid-century. Such reforms, although pushed forward haltingly, resulted in a general expansion of access to education while creating and undergirding disciplinary distinctions related to knowledge creation and distribution. It was amidst these changes, that Cavendish wrote and published her many books. This dissertation examines Cavendish’s engagement with educational reforms by exploring her use of copia as both an aesthetic and a methodology. Cavendish models this linguistic copia, or verbal variety, after her own feminized (and feminist) theory regarding the complexity and abundance of Nature. She presents herself as a role model for women, while actively exploring the many potentialities that she believed ought to exist for all early modern women. This dissertation thus distills and contextualizes Cavendish’s use of copia to argue that in addition to being a prolific published author and natural philosopher, she was also an educational philosopher. As such, Cavendish offers a substantial critique of the extant patriarchal institutions of learning, while advocating for alternate paradigms that would ultimately benefit both sexes. Indeed, Cavendish breaks open the patriarchal traditions of her day and offers pedagogical and curricular alternatives that are demonstrably modern: she does this by advocating for increased access to education, differentiated instruction, scaffolding for the unlearned, and symbolic models for teaching through her texts.
description: As a secondary focus, this dissertation addresses four key pedagogical issues that arise when teaching Cavendish’s expansive corpus: her complicated reception history, her complex and often contradictory authorial persona, the interdisciplinary nature of her writing, and the tremendous size of her corpus and changing access to her many books. By improving access to, and knowledge of, Cavendish’s writing amongst non-specialists, this dissertation plays a role in addressing the persistent inequity of representation between male and female authors in the English literary canon and offers an alternative to the ill-fitting paradigm of masculine authorship commonly taught at the post-secondary level. The flow of chapters follows a logic and methodology of abundance.
description: Chapter One, “Developing a Feminist Pedagogy” makes the case for Cavendish as a feminist pedagogue who developed her own theories of the mind, while repeatedly advocating for women’s education. By contextualizing her place in the development of educational reforms in England, this chapter puts Cavendish in conversation with humanists like Desiderius Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and Roger Ascham as well as later educational reformers such as Francis Bacon, John Amos Comenius, Samuel Hartlib, and John Milton. In doing so, it argues that Cavendish explored numerous alternatives to what she considered the problematic elitism, tedium, and pointlessness of extant patriarchal models of learning.
description: Chapter Two, “Managing a Mythos” outlines Cavendish’s problematic reception, particularly as it pertains to feminist literary history. It then details the resultant myth of her madness and corrects some of the lingering misconceptions regarding Cavendish and her career. It argues that her long reception history, with the accompanying editorial distortion of her work, has resulted in a lack of critical attention to much of her corpus. In terms of teaching, this means that some of her most compelling work has gone unnoticed by traditional educators.
description: Chapter Three, “Establishing an Authorial Ethos” reveals Cavendish’s strategic use of paratextual materials to redefine female authorship, to establish her authorial ethos as a natural genius, and to present herself as a complex subject, whose books function both as pedagogical tools and her legacy. This chapter argues that her many prefaces and frontispieces are the key to understanding Cavendish’s constructed authorial persona and concludes with a brief discussion regarding Cavendish as a model of a woman’s potential fulfilled.
description: Chapter Four, “Constructing a Theory of Writing and Authorship” delves deeper into Cavendish’s paratextual materials—as well as a few literary texts—to explore the ways in which she challenges the patriarchal traditions of scholasticism, humanism, and the new science while forming her own unique compositional theory situated in creative freedom and abundance. This chapter moves beyond the work of previous scholars—several of whom address the rhetoric of Cavendish’s philosophical treatises—by incorporating a consideration of her prefaces and literary texts. In doing so, this chapter argues that we gain a more complete sense of Cavendish’s compositional style.
description: Chapter Five, “Examining a Legacy” brings the dissertation full circle by demonstrating the rich pedagogical opportunities that Cavendish’s corpus affords. It does so by detailing her surviving corpus and offering a detailed case study of a single physical codex, Natures Picture (1671). This physical book, which resides in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, contains layers of marginalia that indicate a rich history of reader engagement. By exploring this book and its early readers, this chapter reveals how such materials can be used in the classroom to underscore Cavendish’s meaningful and enduring legacy.