Justin Begley
University of Basel, Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies, Faculty Member
- Early Modern Intellectual History, History of Science, Renaissance literature, Humanism (15th-17th c.), Renaissance Philosophy, Classical Reception Studies, and 20 moreBook History, History of Medicine, History of Classical Scholarship, Animal Studies, Intellectual History, History of Ideas, Manuscript Studies, History of Religion, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), Kenelm Digby, Margaret Cavendish, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, History of Botany, The Royal Society, Carl Linnaeus, History of the Book, and Natural philosophyedit
This book is the first transcription and extensive commentary on a fascinating but almost entirely overlooked manuscript compilation of medical recipes and letters, which is held in the University of Nottingham. Collected by the Marquess... more
This book is the first transcription and extensive commentary on a fascinating but almost entirely overlooked manuscript compilation of medical recipes and letters, which is held in the University of Nottingham. Collected by the Marquess and Marchioness of Newcastle, William and Margaret Cavendish, during the 1640s and 1650s, this manuscript features letters of advice, recipes, and sundry philosophical and medical reflections by some of the most formidable and influential physicians, philosophers, and courtly scholars of the early seventeenth century. These include “Europe’s physician” Theodore de Mayerne, the adventurer and courtier Kenelm Digby, and the natural philosopher, poet, and playwright Margaret Cavendish. While the transcription and accompanying annotations will allow a diverse array of readers to appreciate the manuscript for the first time, the introduction situates the Cavendishes’ recipe collecting habits, medical preoccupations, natural philosophical views, and politics within their social, cultural, and philosophical contexts, and draws out some of the most significant implications of this important document.
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This article focuses on a curious manuscript treatise in the British Library, Harley MS 6940, which the learned physician Samuel Bispham composed for the English patron and horseman William Cavendish (1593-1676), most likely in the... more
This article focuses on a curious manuscript treatise in the British Library, Harley MS 6940, which the learned physician Samuel Bispham composed for the English patron and horseman William Cavendish (1593-1676), most likely in the mid-1640s. Sitting somewhere between a practical medical recipe book and theoretical chymical treatise, while being peppered with traditional causal explanations and Galenic precautions, Harley MS 6940 testifies to the erosion of the entrenched dichotomy between chymical and Galenic medicine in the mid-seventeenth century. Harley MS 6940 also lays bare how a learned physician used (and taught the use of) practice to confirm and sometimes challenge his learning, offering a counterpoint to recent scholarship that underscores the learning that apothecaries used to shore up their practice. Produced at the behest of a leading Royalist who sought both to acquire techniques for distilling and fermenting herbs and to advance his knowledge of chymical conceptions of spirits, seeds, and salts, the manuscript allows us to appreciate that the chymical art animated a broader set of individuals than the historiography often implies.
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What is a non-human animal? During the early modern period, definitions ranged from an ensouled creature that exists between humans and plants on the scale of nature to a soulless but finely constructed automaton. Particularly fierce... more
What is a non-human animal? During the early modern period, definitions ranged from an ensouled creature that exists between humans and plants on the scale of nature to a soulless but finely constructed automaton. Particularly fierce disputes erupted over whether animals are rational, sensitive, or language-using, and the ascribed attributes were widely thought to have a bearing on ethical questions. Is it acceptable to hunt animals? To eat them? Kick them? Experiment on them for the amelioration of human health and knowledge? This entry delves into these issues. It begins with a brief overview of Renaissance perspectives on the status of animals and René Descartes’ attempt to upend them, then turns to Pierre Gassendi’s and Henry More’s head-on refutations of Descartes, and proceeds to the less direct responses of other major early modern philosophers including Kenelm Digby, Margaret Cavendish, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Finally, I look at debates about animal anatomy and their implications for attitudes towards consuming animals, with a focus on Gassendi and the responses to him from John Wallis and Edward Tyson, concluding with a broader overview of perspectives on animal ethics, with reference to Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke, and David Hume.
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This article explores some of the analogies that botanists in England and France developed between c. 1670-1720 to demonstrate that plants reproduce sexually. By delving into the contributions of several botanists -- including Nehemiah... more
This article explores some of the analogies that botanists in England and France developed between c. 1670-1720 to demonstrate that plants reproduce sexually. By delving into the contributions of several botanists -- including Nehemiah Grew, John Ray, Samuel Morland, and Patrick Blair -- I seek to show that plant sexuality was neither the singular discovery of Rudolf Jakob Camerarius, as practicing botanists have often supposed, nor a monolithic stance that provided an obvious taxonomical foundation. I further argue that while Carl Linnaeus eventually came to base his taxonomical system on the marital status of plants, earlier botanists, following in the footsteps of Grew, mostly analogized plants to "lower" animals. As a result, I propose that even the most flamboyant among them, Sébastien Vaillant, largely avoided the charges of immorality and irreligion that beset Linnaeus.
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The focus of this paper is a fascinating but hitherto unstudied 1742 manuscript treatise by Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705-1765) titled "Sapientiæ Problema" that contains something extremely rare in the mid-eighteenth century: a... more
The focus of this paper is a fascinating but hitherto unstudied 1742 manuscript treatise by Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705-1765) titled "Sapientiæ Problema" that contains something extremely rare in the mid-eighteenth century: a full-blown speculative cosmogony. As this article reveals, Schlichting developed a distinctive vital liquid matter in an effort to account for the generation of all natural bodies and combat the stamina-based theories that were dominant in his day. He hoped that his treatise would be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, but an accompanying abridgment by the FRS Henry Baker (1698-1774) strongly implies that Schlichting's speculative bent and desire to divulge causal explanations were unacceptable to the English-man and generally ill-suited to the intellectual climate of mid-century England.
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The phenomenon of ‘plant sleep’ – whereby vegetables rhythmically open and close their leaves or petals in daily cycles – has been a continual source of fascination for those with botanical interests, from the Portuguese physician... more
The phenomenon of ‘plant sleep’ – whereby vegetables rhythmically open and close their leaves or petals in daily cycles – has been a continual source of fascination for those with botanical interests, from the Portuguese physician Cristóbal Acosta and the Italian naturalist Prospero Alpini in the sixteenth century to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth. But it was in 1757 that the topic received its earliest systemic treatment on English shores with the prodigious author, botanist, actor, and Royal Society critic John Hill’s The Sleep of Plants, and Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant. As the present article aims to illustrate, Hill and his respondents used this remarkable behaviour, exhibited by certain plants, as a lens through which to reassess the nature of vegetables, and to address pressing questions of wider natural philosophical import, particularly the degree of continuity between the structures and functions of plants and animals and whether similar mechanisms necessarily account for related movements in different life forms. These disputes, this paper contends, also had profound methodological implications regarding the proper way to conduct experiments, the extent to which it was acceptable to extrapolate from observations, and the status of causal explanations.
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This paper traces how the seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, developed her ideas on plant life in three major publications: her 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1664 Philosophical... more
This paper traces how the seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, developed her ideas on plant life in three major publications: her 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1664 Philosophical Letters, and 1666 Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. As I seek to demonstrate, Cavendish's mostly overlooked ruminations on vegetality were indispensable to her formation of a substance theory according to which matter is endowed with life, vitality, knowledge, and, in her mature works, perceptivity. Over the course of this paper, I also suggest that her visions of matter and plant life were largely grounded in Galenic and Aristotelian insights that she extracted and adapted from a range of sources, not least from William Harvey's field-changing writings on the circulation of blood and the generation of animals. In building upon this material, Cavendish was driven to uphold the innate livelihood of plants against mechanical accounts and to champion a "natural" mode of classification that focussed on the diversity of plant attributes rather than foregrounding specific features that humans deemed valuable or significant.
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This essay explores an unstudied compendium to Margaret Cavendish’s 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions that was composed by the learned physician, plant anatomist, and secretary of the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew. Despite the... more
This essay explores an unstudied compendium to Margaret Cavendish’s 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions that was composed by the learned physician, plant anatomist, and secretary of the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew. Despite the growing body of scholarship on Cavendish, minimal attention has been dedicated to her early reception. But studying this compendium provides some fascinating insights into how one of the foremost thinkers of her day read, emended, and manipulated her ideas. I propose that Grew turned to Cavendish’s work when developing his substance theory in the years leading up to the publication of his 1682 The Anatomy of Plants, but that shifting intellectual tides led him to critique her version of material vitalism in his 1701 Cosmologia Sacra. Supported by a transcription of the compendium as an appendix, this article also sheds light on the role that early modern pedagogical techniques and memory tools played in shaping concepts of matter and mind.
Keywords: Nehemiah Grew, Margaret Cavendish, Commonplace Book; Spirits; Soul; Scala Naturae
Keywords: Nehemiah Grew, Margaret Cavendish, Commonplace Book; Spirits; Soul; Scala Naturae
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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... more
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.
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The starting point of this article is an understudied piece of critical exegesis from 1657 titled Humble Reflections Upon Some Passages of the Right Honorable the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio. An obscure Englishwoman named Susan... more
The starting point of this article is an understudied piece of critical exegesis from 1657 titled Humble Reflections Upon Some Passages of the Right Honorable the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio. An obscure Englishwoman named Susan Du Verger composed this 164-page text to refute a 3-page essay on “A Monastical life” by the prolific poet, playwright, and philosopher, Margaret Cavendish. While there is now a substantial body of work on nuns and convents, this research largely overlooks how early modern women engaged with these topics in a scholarly manner. Along with elucidating the gamut of relevant patristic and ecclesiastical histories that were available in the English and French vernaculars, Humble Reflections provides a prompt for investigating Cavendish’s ideas on ecclesiastical order, ceremonies, and toleration. I propose that Cavendish refused to grace Du Verger with a direct response because her polemic disregarded the unofficial codes of conduct—friendship, transnational community, and inter-confessional co-existence—that were supposed to maintain peace within the Republic of Letters. In conclusion, this essay displays that Cavendish was actually a great admirer of monasticism, though not so much for its role in the spread of Christianity as for its place in the development of natural philosophy.
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This article investigates a hitherto unstudied copy of De vita … Guilielmi ducis Novo-Castrensis (1668)—a Latin translation of The Life of William Cavendish (1667) by Margaret Cavendish (1623?-1673)—that Arthur Annesley (1614-1686), the... more
This article investigates a hitherto unstudied copy of De vita … Guilielmi ducis Novo-Castrensis (1668)—a Latin translation of The Life of William Cavendish (1667) by Margaret Cavendish (1623?-1673)—that Arthur Annesley (1614-1686), the First Earl of Anglesey, has heavily annotated. While Annesley owned the largest private library in seventeenth-century Britain, his copy of De vita is by far the most densely glossed of his identifiable books, with no fewer than 61 Latin and Greek annotations, not to mention numerous corrections and non-verbal markers. By studying Annesley’s careful treatment of De vita, this essay makes an intervention into the burgeoning fields of reading and library history along with neo-Latin studies. I propose that Annesley filled the margins of De vita with quotations from Latin poets, scholars, philosophers, and historians—rather than his personal views—in a bid to form a politically impartial outlook on the British Civil Wars that was attuned to broader historical or even mythological trends.
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Extract from conference paper on "Humours, Mixtures, and Corpuscles" at the Institutio Santoriana Fondazione Comel in Pisa.