ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a counter-reading to previous sensory understandings of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666). It argues that Cavendish contributed an exceptionally novel narrative to critique the Royal Society through her reading and interpretation of New World narratives and the sensory others that existed within those travelogues. Cavendish, through applying this early ethnography to a construction of different hybrid characters, linked forms of New World metaphysics and Old World natural philosophy to challenge the inductive empiricism of the New Science of Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle. Cavendish established a space not only to critique the patriarchal Royal Society and the science of inductive experimentation, but she also fashioned a new utopian field to evaluate a narcissistic future she believed would come to fruition if the schemes of the Royal Society were applied to society. In a positive tone that took her sensory epistemology beyond reactionary sensibilities, she asserted the New World sensory other as more adept at understanding nature than a Royal Society that focused on falsely objective accumulation of Baconian axioms in laboratories instead of through the observation of natural environments.
