One of Margaret Cavendish’s most engaging and accessible texts, Sociable Letters (1662), is an epistolary exploration of a variety of topics relevant to the seventeenth-century reader, from women’s friendship and marriage to politics and civil war. While she shows her familiarity with royalist perspectives throughout, in the frequently quoted Letter #16, Cavendish enters civil war and Engagement debates about the proper derivation of a subject’s obligation and offers a powerful argument about women’s political status and their relationship to the state. If women do not take oaths, she reasons, then they must be neither citizens nor subjects of the Commonwealth. This chapter examines Cavendish’s strategic focus on oath-taking as a signifier of proper citizenship. In suggesting that women may not be bound to the state, Cavendish set herself apart from royalism, and from members of her own circle, including her husband and Thomas Hobbes. Her “no-citizen-no subject” argument belongs in the long history of women’s political writing, offering a perspective on women and the state that resonates with the later writings of Abigail Adams and the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

In a recent essay on women writers and the early-modern British political tradition, Hilda Smith identifies the ‘perpetual state of schizophrenia’ that arises from working at the intersection of women's intellectual history and British political thought in the early-modern era. There is little agreement between these fields of inquiry on approaches, significant texts or accepted interpretations. Emblematic of this scholarly schizophrenia is the literature surrounding the dichotomy of public and private and its proper use and interpretation. If we are to achieve some synthesis of this disparate literature toward a more nuanced understanding of public and private, we need to generate further conversation among feminist political theorists, historians of political thought and gender historians.

The meanings of public and private – including their gendered character – are contested in at least three scholarly conversations about early-modern Britain. First, beginning in the 1970s, feminist political theorists drew attention to the gendered power relations inscribed on the traditional division between the two spheres. Second, historians of social and political thought have examined male early-modern theorists and their ideas of the private in context and primarily in connection to politics, religion and economic relations. And third, early-modern gender historians have enhanced and refined our perspectives on the fluidity of public and private life for women and men in this period. Within these three literatures, there has not been, however, sustained investigation of how the private might look different, and be experienced differently, from the perspective of women thinkers.

Introduction

There are numerous diseases associated with pulmonary eosinophilia. They represent a heterogeneous group of diseases that, except for the presence of eosinophils, sometimes bear little clinical relationship to one another. The most common disease associated with eosinophilia is asthma, and the pathologist's role in the diagnosis is non-existent, except when there are complications. The most common diffuse disease associated with eosinophilia is chronic eosinophilic pneumonia, which may or may not be associated with asthma. These and other less common diseases are discussed in this chapter. Pulmonary Langerhans' cell histiocytosis (formerly known as eosinophilic granuloma) and hypersensitivity pneumonitis (extrinsic allergic alveolitis, which is rarely associated with tissue eosinophilia) are discussed in Chapters 34 and 12, respectively.

Introduction

Asthma is one of the commonest respiratory disorders and is characterized by airway hyperresponsiveness and inflammation. Over the past few decades, the prevalence of asthma has increased and affects as many as 300 million persons worldwide.