Catching ‘the Genius of the Age’ : Margaret Cavendish, Historian and Witness

• Published in: Etudes epistémè Vol. 17; no. 17
• Main Author: Parageau, Sandrine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Études Épistémè 01-04-2010; Institut du Monde Anglophone
• ISSN: 1634-0450; 1634-0450
• DOI: 10.4000/episteme.662

Although Margaret Cavendish is probably better known today for her texts on natural philosophy and her plays, she was first made famous by the biography of her husband, published in London in 1667. The Life of William Cavendish, which recounts Newcastle’s actions in the Civil Wars, then appeared in a Latin translation as early as 1668. Not only is this text one of the very few « history books » published by a woman in seventeenth-century England, but it is also a contribution to the Restoration debate on historiography. The biography of William Cavendish as well as The World’s Olio (1655) – in which long passages are devoted to English history – both reveal the evolution from the Renaissance chronicle to modern practices of history writing and a new consciousness of the past. These texts also tend to show that there was no such thing as a « historical revolution », although changes were actually taking place and progressively leading to the emergence of a new historiography. Finally, these texts provide information on how women wrote history in early modern England : they reveal that only a « particular history », a recollection of the immediate past, was then allowed to them.