"Margaret Cavendish or The Curious Reader "

International audienceThat the seventeenth century saw a gradual and partial rehabilitation of curiosity in the philosophical discourse has been convincingly demonstrated by historians Neil Kenny and Peter Harrison, among others. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon famously stressed that the pursuit of knowledge must be made morally acceptable by usefulness in order to be redeemed from the stigma of transgressive curiosity. This lay the foundation for what has been described as the seventeenth-century "culture of curiosity", which emerged in the context of experimentalism and blossomed under the influence of the Royal Society. Yet, the partial rehabilitation of curiosity was largely confined to male curiosity and the history of curiosity in the early modern period is definitely a gendered one. It has even been suggested that the changing status of curiosity led to an even stronger suspicion concerning female curiosity. Women were increasingly described as prone to curiosity, and, for those who were stubborn enough to trespass, as curiosities themselves. Curiosity was thus gradually redefined along gender lines in the course of the century. As Barbara M. Benedict notes, "as women began to encroach on the masculine arenas of politics, literature, and consumption, curiosity without method and without justification became female." (118) "Most of all," she adds, "female curiosity epitomized illegitimate cultural ambition." (Ibid.) This essay looks at the place a curious writer like Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, occupies in this paradigm. An intensely curious mind herself, Cavendish is the perfect embodiment of the spirit of the age of curiosity as described by Benedict : she published widely on a host of subjects and became herself an object of curiosity for her contemporaries, causing scandal wherever she went. But her attitude towards curiosity and curiosities in her work is in fact very complex. This essay looks at the variegated treatment of curiosity in her work. It shows that it is through a description of the vanity of collecting and accumulating curiosities that Cavendish comes to formulate what amounts to one of the first argumented critiques of the practice of scientific experiments at the Royal Society. Finally, it also shows that Cavendish has a fairly clear consciousness of the gendered nature of the debate around curiosity, and that she offers a partial rehabilitation of female curiosity