After summarising our findings in the preceding chapters, the Conclusion assesses the relative merits of experimental philosophy and empiricism as historiographical categories, and in the process we respond to some of our critics. We examine the historicity of both notions, their disciplinary and chronological scope, their contrast classes, namely, speculative philosophy and rationalism, and their explanatory power. Through an examination of the anti-hypotheticalism so prevalent in the early modern period and Margaret Cavendish’s published critique of experimental philosophy, we argue that experimental philosophy, together with the experimental/speculative distinction, have more explanatory power than the rationalism/empiricism distinction.

This chapter traces the emergence of experimental philosophy in England from the late 1650s in the precursor groups to the Royal Society and, in particular, in the natural philosophical method of Robert Boyle. It provides a detailed examination of the development of Boyle’s experimental philosophy and an overview of the adoption of experimental philosophy by many virtuosi in the fledgling Royal Society. From there it turns to early opposition to experimental philosophy by the likes of Meric Causabon and Margaret Cavendish, and the application of the methodology in English medicine, particularly amongst the chymical physicians. The next sections of the chapter examine the spread of experimental philosophy to the Continent and its impact on religion. The new approach to natural philosophy was said to have a positive effect on those who practise it, and its principles were soon applied in both natural religion and Christian apologetics. Finally, we turn to the questions of the shifting speculative targets of the experimental philosophers, pointing out that Descartes’ vortex theory came in for particularly harsh criticism, and the conceptual question as to who qualifies as an experimental philosopher.

“Figuring: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Imagining and Worlding,” undertakes a case study of Cavendish’s foray into a favored intellectual strategy of modernity: to imagine a world (and therefore a politics) that follows the laws of the natural world as discovered by science. The worldview of liberalism is grounded in ideas of diversity and tolerance, the possibility of an ever-expanding, cosmopolitan world.i This is the proto-liberal view that Cavendish’s proto-conservatism, vitalism, and theory of the literary imagination finds untenable. Cavendish’s conservatism is manifested explicitly in the representations of sovereign violence that seem necessary to protect worlds and implicitly in the significance of a method of “figuration” that Cavendish theorizes—and practices—as the foundation of form in the natural world, the social world, and the literary imagination. Such figuration cannot escape the violent reality of secular nationalism inherent in the notion of “worlds.”

The seventeenth-century microscopists Robert Hooke and Henry Power sought to rhetorically establish the truthfulness of the visual images produced by their instruments, but a counter-rhetoric of visuality was established by Margaret Cavendish in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). The microscopists’ belief that magnification revealed the truth of nature ran counter to Cavendish’s probabilistic belief that no individual could grasp the infinite truth of nature and sought explanations from the superficies of observed objects rather than the ‘interior figurative motions’ which Cavendish saw as the universal cause of all natural phenomena. While the microscopists emphasized the aesthetic beauty of the micro-visible world, Cavendish emphasized its monstrosity: for her the truth could only be perceived by the ‘natural’ eye observing things in their unmagnified state. Exploiting the microscopists’ complaints about the variability of their images and the defects of their instruments Cavendish redefines the microscopic image as definitively outside the ‘real’.

This chapter examines what is arguably Cavendish’s most famous publication, her proto-science fiction novel The Blazing World, from a textual bibliographical perspective, for the purpose of showing that textual bibliography and more traditional literary interpretive analysis can and should be brought together in Cavendish studies. The printed volume in which Cavendish’s novel was originally published, the 1666 collection, printed in London, includes both a treatise and the novel together. I establish a collation formula for this book, and examine the binding, signature marks, pagination, running titles, and systematic hand corrections. These textual bibliographical details demonstrate that the original intention was for Blazing World to end with what we now call Part I, and that Part II was hastily sent to the printer after Part I and the Epilogue had already been printed as a completed whole. The essay ends by showing how this bibliographical fact might change our reading of the narrative itself, and might also prompt us to ask new questions of Cavendish’s writing methods.

The Coda briefly explores how depictions of female adolescent brainwork grew more negative over the course of the seventeenth century, particularly in some medical and sexual handbooks. This loss of girls’ minds to their raging adolescent physiognomies suggests some kind of shift in popular thinking about female adolescent cognition — or, at least, in how to market it. At the same time, other writers (including some medical ones) continued to feature girls’ focused and dynamic brainwork. The Coda concludes by considering the 1687 journal entry of a Protestant Englishman who recorded his visit to an English Carmelite convent in Antwerp, where he encountered a young novice who challenged his concerns that she was being buried alive and claimed she would not wish to change places with any woman. His description of the conversation that “materially passed between us,” and of her pledge to remember and pray for him, suggests that notions of embodied and extended cognition were still in circulation, even as theories like Cartesian dualism and the mechanistic body were developing in the latter half of the century. And that English girls’ dynamic brainwork continued to be recognized and valued — if, perhaps, in more limited contexts.

Chapter Five explores the early modern phenomenon of girls “putting on” the minds of others. It argues that, when they engaged in these acts of cognitive play, girls were able to try on alternative perspectives and experiences — not necessarily male ones, but those that belonged to sexually active females: the lover, the harlot, the pregnant woman. It focuses on the girls from John Lyly’s Gallathea, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, all of whom costume their bodies and put on the minds of sexually experienced females. Their performances allow them to project themselves into these roles without actually becoming “women” in a heteronormative sense that would require their bodies to transform through penetrative intercourse, pregnancy, or birth. The girls who dress up in these plays do so under different levels of duress, but they all share an ability to use their brainwork to manipulate the Protestant girl-to-woman script they were expected to follow — to resist, revise and, in some cases, reject it.