ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the relationship between gender and class in the conduct of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century. Both elements of social identity related interactively in the shaping of natural-philosophical knowledge and of the kind of person seen as best suited for creating it; neither can be adequately understood on its own. However, the textual materials that demonstrate this point serve their function by representing literary forms and techniques: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, argued in her book Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) against the experimental philosophy promulgated by the newly-founded Royal Society, especially in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of the previous year, and she proceeded, in effect, by ridiculing Hooke’s experimental project as deviating fatally from the literary genre suitable for natural philosophy. In the course of her critique, Cavendish also engaged with the art/nature distinction, using overtly gendered language in a way that tended to negate any impression that she regarded her own gender as anything other than a disqualification from speaking philosophically. Instead, Cavendish’s nobility served as her trump card, whereby she could employ her conservative social/ political sympathies to the advantage of her scholarly credentials-the latter attaching to her claims to be an author rather than an experimenter.
