Margaret Cavendish, Robert Hooke and C17th satire on science

The sheer novelty of many of the new scientific theories of the seventeenth-century seemed so outlandish to ordinary people that science became an easy target for satire. One such satire, which targeted the newly founded Royal Society, was A Description of a New World called the Blazing World  by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who was one of the few women to engage with science at this time. My paper will highlight Cavendish’s ridicule of Robert Hooke’s microscopy in his Micrographia. And I shall suggest some connections between Cavendish and Thomas Shadwell’s Virtuoso and Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moone.

Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York, having previously taught at Aberystwyth University. Her research focuses on the Early Modern Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy, with special interests in the Cambridge Platonists and in women in science and philosophy.  Her books include, Anne Conway, a Woman Philosopher (CUP 2004) and, most recently, British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (OUP 2015).