SOURCE: "A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 4, Autumn, 1984, pp. 289-307.

In this essay, Sarasohn discusses Cavendish's writings on atomistic cosmology and natural philosophy, and her development of an original speculative philosophy, which Sarasohn associates with Cavendish's feminism.

In Margaret Cavendish's play Love's Adventures, the heroine dons male clothes, saves her intended and the Republic of Venice from the Turks, and lectures the College of Cardinals on theology to universal acclaim. This literary echo of the famous "world turned upside down" topos of early modern European culture reverberates often in the work of the wife of the "arch-conservative" duke of Newcastle. It is a potent symbol. As Natalie Davis has shown [in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 1965], the reversal of male-female roles in early modern culture, during those strange times in either fiction...