Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind

Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), led a dramatic life that brought her into contact with kings, queens, and the leading thinkers of her day. The English civil wars forced her into exile, accompanying Queen Henrietta Maria and her court to Paris. From this vantage point, she began writing voluminously, responding to the events and major intellectual movements of the mid-seventeenth century. Cavendish published twenty-three volumes in her lifetime, including plays, romances, poetry, letters, biography, and natural philosophy. In them she explored the political, scientific, and philosophical ideas of her day. While previous biographers of Cavendish have focused almost exclusively on her eccentric public behavior, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth her intellectual life. She dismisses the myth of Cavendish as an isolated and lonely thinker, arguing that the role of exile was a rhetorical stance, one that allowed Cavendish to address and even criticize her world. She, like others writing during the period after the English civil wars, focused squarely on the problem of finding the proper relationship between mind and world. This volume presents Cavendish\u27s writing self, the self she treasured above all others. While previous biographers have focused on her eccentric public behaviour, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth Margaret Cavendish\u27s intellectual life. -- Cahiers Elizabethans Battigelli\u27s superb contribution is that she presents readers with a sympathetic and sophisticated examination of Cavendish as a thinker who was wrestling with many of the same issues as the great male thinkers of the age. . . . Thanks to this study, students and scholars can no longer ignore Cavendish\u27s depth and seriousness as a writer and thinker. -- Choice Reading Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind is surely one of the most efficient ways to learn about this writer in a wonderfully thorough historical context and to prepare to read her texts in interesting ways. -- In-Between This study succeeds at recovering the intellect and social engagement of a figure who, before Battigelli\u27s book, many had excluded from the ranks of those about whom one writes an \u27intellectual biography\u27. -- Margaret Cavendish Society Newsletter This highly readable intellectual biography is something of a landmark in Margaret Cavendish studies. -- Seventeenth-Century News A definite ‘must’ for every student, scholar, or plain old fan of the seventeenth century, a book that instructs, delights, and always excites. -- South Atlantic Reviewhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1000/thumbnail.jp

To Tune Our Sorrows and Instruct the Crowd; John Dryden's Elegies in Context.

Although Dryden's verses for the dead vary greatly in external form, I suggest that they share internal topoi, tropes, and themes, elements that reveal Dryden's awareness of the funeral elegy's generic task of working through the grief of loss, often addressing difficult public issues in the process. Nahum Tate acknowledged Dryden's comm and of the genre in his own elegy for Charles II by asking him on behalf of Charles's elegists to "tune our Sorrows and instruct the Crowd," a charge Dryden committed his life's work to answering. With a critical eye to the past, and writing during a time of immense change, Dryden established a habit of responding to political and aesthetic crises by casting contemporary events against a poetic and historic tradition that allows his readers to evaluate the present in terms of the past. In doing so, Dryden allows us to consider the consequences of the political, religious, and aesthetic options of the time. This habit found its most fruitful outlet in his major elegies, a group of poems that deserve more attention than they have received. I suggest that Dryden appropriated the role of public orator. His elegies are generally less personal than ceremonial; they offer Dryden a forum in which to discuss aesthetic theory and philosophy, and from which to target political comments. By comparing Dryden's major elegies to those written by his contemporaries and by examining the personal and public contexts in which they were written and first printed, I demonstrate Dryden's refinement of the genre in order to create one that could reach a broader, more public audience than had been necessary before.Ph.D.British and Irish literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161514/1/8720245.pd

Borderline breast lesions: comparison of malignancy underestimation rates with 14-gauge core needle biopsy versus 11-gauge vacuum-assisted device.

Objective To compare malignancy underestimation rates in the case of percutaneous diagnosis of borderline breast lesions(B3) at 14-g core-needle-biopsy (CNB) and at 11-g vacuum-assisted-biopsy (VAB). Methods The histological results of 4764 image-guided breast biopsies were retrospectively reviewed. 300 B3, 151 benign papillomas, 88 radial sclerosing lesions, 46 lobular neoplasia, 15 atypical ductal hyperplasia diagnosed at ultrasound-guided 14-g CNB (76%) or stereotacticallyguided 11-g VAB (24%) were identified. On average, 5 cores were obtained with CNB and 12 with VAB. Biopsy variables were reviewed and correlated with surgical excision or follow-up (>24 months). Lesion- and device-specific underestimation rates of malignancy were calculated. Results Surgical excision was performed on 237 lesions: 178 were benign, 21 atypical, 38 cancers. The remaining 63 lesions were unchanged at follow-up. Overall malignancy underestimation rate was 12.7% at 14-g CNB and 12.5% at 11-g VAB. Based on excision histology or follow-up, lesion-specific underestimation rates were: benign papillomas: 14-g CNB 11%, 11-g VAB 0%; RSL: 14-g CNB 6%, 11-g VAB 4%; LN: 14-g CNB 40%, 11-g VAB 23%; ADH: 14-g CNB 33%; 11-g VAB 22%. Conclusion In the case of percutaneous diagnosis of B3 lesions, underestimation of malignancy occurs regardless of the biopsy method

Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers

The vast majority of the documents – visual as well as textual – on which we base our knowledge of early modern performers, were produced by men, and most concentrate squarely on male performers. Exceptionally, the 195th of the Sociable Letters of Margaret Cavendish contains a substantial description of professional performers neither written by a man, nor sidelining the contribution of women to early modern performance culture. Having noted that typical fairground performances involve: ‘Dancers on the Ropes, Tumblers, Jugglers, Private Stage-Players, Mountebanks, Monsters, and several Beasts’, Cavendish focuses on two ‘Sights and Shews’ in which female performers take centre stage. In these, Cavendish (c.1623-73), natural philosopher, poet and playwright, draws on eye-witness experiences gathered during her mid-seventeenth-century years of royalist exile, when she overcame the restrictions inhibiting those of her class and gender from joining spectators at public stages by hiring rooms for private views of her favourite acts at Antwerp’s fairgrounds. Drawing on my ongoing archival and cultural researches into performing monsters, mountebanks, quacks and itinerant commedia dell’arte troupes, my chapter analyses and contextualizes Cavendish’s description of female fairground performers which, despite its essentially literary character, contains considerable documentary value for an understanding of early modern women on stage