Renaissance and Reformation Biographies | Margaret Cavendish Biography

1624
Colchester, England
1674
Nottinghamshire, England

Writer and intellectual

"And although I have neither the power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own."

Margaret Cavendish as quoted in Blazing World edited by Kate Lilley.

The English author and intellectual Margaret Cavendish, first duchess of Newcastle, wrote in the greatest variety of genres of any women, or even men, of the late Renaissance period. Initiated by humanist scholars, the Renaissance was a movement that promoted the revival of the human-centered literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome as well as new translations of biblical texts (Hebrew holy...