English Women’s Entrance into Science and Philosophy

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座摘要/ Abstract 

Scholarship has increasingly been investigating the important role of Epicurean philosophy within the Renaissance intellectual milieu. The dissemination of Epicurean ideas in England was very fragmentary and it was not until the 1650s that atomism, inspired by Epicurus, became a pervasive public factor in the development of the English sciences. The Newcastle circle was particularly instrumental in rekindling Epicurean philosophy throughout Europe during the mid-seventeenth century. Scholarship, however, has overlooked how English members of the Newcastle circle such as Walter Charleton, Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish assimilated and modified Epicurean ideas, thereby contributing to significant changes in the intellectual landscape and print culture of seventeenth-century Britain. This included an increased interest by women to print their ideas about natural philosophy. Although English women had engaged with science and philosophy in manuscripts, letters and salons, their engagement rarely manifested into print. Catherine Wilson notes that women such as Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, however, became drawn to Epicurean philosophy in their published works, but the “attraction of women to Epicureanism is a topic that has been little explored and even less explained.” Indeed, scholarship, to date, has neglected the significant role that women had in introducing Epicurean atomism to Britain through print. This talk aims to address this neglected issue, as it investigates the ways that Charleton, Hobbes, and Margaret Cavendish explore a central element of Epicurean philosophy: pleasure. In doing so, these thinkers reconsider the meaning of justice, marriage and sexuality in ways that opened up different avenues for conceptualizing gender, which may have been appealing to women intellectuals. Hence, this talk will argue not only that the Newcastle circle was influential in paving the way for women’s broader participation in science and philosophy in print, but also that their exploration of Epicurean ethics held significant implications for gender.

 主讲人简介/ CV 

Lisa Walters is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her monograph entitled Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and in paperback 2017.  She is co-editor of Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and is one of the joint editors of the Restoration section of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. She has published articles on Cavendish, Shakespeare, Milton and early modern women in relation to science, philosophy, gender and political thought. Dr Walters has held academic positions in England, America, Belgium and Scotland. Recently, she was President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society.

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