Renaissance and Reformation Primary Sources | Margaret Cavendish

Excerpt from The Description of the New World
Called the Blazing World (1666)

Reprinted in The Description of the New World
Called the Blazing World and Other Writings

Edited by Kate Lilley
Published in 1999

The English author and intellectual Margaret Cavendish (1623–1674), first duchess of Newcastle, wrote in the greatest variety of genres of any person of the late Renaissance period. The Renaissance was a cultural revolution that began in Italy in the mid-1300s. It was initiated by scholars called humanists who promoted the human-centered values of ancient Greece and Rome. Humanist ideals were soon influencing the arts, literature, philosophy, science, religion, and politics in Italy. During the early fifteenth century, innovations of the Italian Renaissance began spreading into the rest of Europe and reached a peak in the sixteenth century. Her works consisted of...