Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Josephine Roberts Award for the Best Scholarly Edition on Women and Gender in 2018

Margaret Cavendish released her Poems and Fancies during a brief reprieve from exile, and at a time when international conversations on questions regarding science, mathematics, and metaphysics significantly advanced the state of knowledge across Britain and Europe despite war and political turmoil. This volume offers the first complete modernized version of the third edition of Cavendish’s book, including prefaces and dedications, all 274 poems on nature’s various avatars, interludes and masques, and the final prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Cavendish offers views on physics, chemistry, algebraic geometry, medicine, political philosophy, ethics, psychology, and animal intelligence, as she develops her own theory of vital matter within the scope of nature’s ordering principles.

"Among its many strengths, Siegfried’s edition enriches our understanding of Cavendish’s engagement with contemporary, especially mathematical thought, as well as with ancient Epicureanism. This accomplishment alone is of enormous value to Cavendish, to intellectual history, and to early modern women’s studies. The introduction is written with sufficient clarity to render it accessible to undergraduates as well as with a sophistication guaranteed to appeal to advanced scholars. The presentation of the texts together with the notes makes the volume highly usable to students at every level of expertise. The editor’s knowledge of relevant scholarship is impressive and never tendentious. Scholarship has a tendency to bog down; this volume provides a new, refreshing take on our understanding of the early modern period."

-Reid Barbour, Roy C. Moose Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

BRANDIE R. SIEGFRIED is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University. She has published extensively on Cavendish, and during her term as Nan Grass Professor of English Literature, she co-edited a volume of essays with Professor Lisa T. Sarasohn, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Literary Studies 21.1 (2019): 1–4. Reviewed by Kevin De Ornellas.
Early Modern Women 14.1 (2019): 272–277. Reviewed by Mihoko Suzuki.
Journal of British Studies 59.1 (2020): 188–189. Reviewed by Justin Begley.
Renaissance & Reformation 42.1 (2019): 374–376. Reviewed by Jonathan Locke Hart.
Renaissance Quarterly 72.4 (2019): 1558–1560. Reviewed by Delilah Bermudez Brataas.
The Seventeenth Century August (2019). Reviewed by Lisa Walters.
The Sixteenth Century Journal 50.4 (2019): 1265–1266. Reviewed by Abel A. Alves.