Margaret Cavendish Reads Josuah Sylvester: Epicurus, Atheism, and Atomic Skepticism in Poems, and Fancies

Scholars have often situated the atomic ideas in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies (1653) in relation to Lucy Hutchinson’s contemporaneous manuscript translation of the Roman poet Lucretius’ epic, De rerum natura, which articulates the principles of the ancient Greek atomist Epicurus. On the whole, these works have been read as expressions of the radical, materialistic impulses of both authors. Yet whereas at least some have taken Hutchinson’s denunciation of Lucretius’ “wicked pernitious doctrines” seriously, Cavendish is widely assumed to have embraced them. This essay begins by arguing that Cavendish was never a committed atomist. It suggests, instead, that her aim in Poems, and Fancies was to give atomism a fair hearing upon reading Josuah Sylvester’s Devine Weekes and Workes (1605), which entertained other ancient natural philosophies but rejected Epicureanism out of hand. I then turn to Cavendish’s appraisal of Epicurean ethics. In contrast to Sylvester, who linked Epicureanism with debauchery, Cavendish, I argue, sided with Pierre Gassendi’s more positive depiction of Epicurean ethics as compatible with Christianity. I conclude that the views found in Poems, and Fancies were far less philosophically and theologically heterodox than is usually supposed, and, indeed, that they were in many ways more orthodox than those of Hutchinson. [J.B.]