ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on natural magic's practical efficacy as it is leveraged from universal cosmic insight. It looks at some of the resemblances between the work of Lady Happy's convent and Della Porta's encyclopaedia of wonder. The chapter explains the choreography of baroque courts as much as to the science of Margaret Cavendish contemporaries in England. So while Cavendish never mentions Della Porta by name, she was certainly aware of natural magic as a field of study and vocabulary. The dramatic representation of a female-controlled domestic magic in The Convent of Pleasure can be seen to constitute a visionary challenge to the quest of the Royal Society for spaces for science outside of the home. As Eileen O'Neill has noted, Cavendish opposes not merely corpuscularianism and instrumentalism in her later philosophical works, but all views of nature that reduce 'her' infinity to single models of motion or a handful of fundamental substance.
