ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Margaret Cavendish’s scientific utopia, The Blazing World (1666), which offers an early fictional space for female characters to demonstrate intellectual and political competence. Cavendish does this by systematically inverting the patriarchal violence of early modern England, critiquing the use of technologically advanced weaponry, and satirizing experimental philosophy, while offering an imagined alternative that includes female friendship, queer desire, intelligent animal-human hybrids, philosophical speculation, and creative worldbuilding. Ahead of its time, The Blazing World expands beyond the speculative (and fantastical) writing of More, Kepler, Bacon, and Godwin to present a multiverse in which man, woman, and nature may exist on equal footing.
