Nature’s Cabinets Unlocked: Cognition, Cabinets, and Philosophy in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies

Abstract

This chapter examines the extended conceit of nature’s cabinets in Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century English verse miscellany, Poems and Fancies. Using it to tease out the connections between mind, body, chamber, and world, Cavendish not only illustrates how spatial poetics could enable natural philosophical inquiry, but also how they provide a metaphor for her to understand the workings of her own mind. The chapter shows how persistently the imagination is envisaged in architectural terms. It demonstrates how models of the mind drawn from classical memory arts both informed and were modified in seventeenth-century thought, and also considers Cavendish’s work as an early exploration of the phenomenological imagination.