ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that lice and fleas could function as a kind of double entendre, which implicated experimental philosophers as sexual voyeurs, or even sexual predators. In Margaret Cavendish's satirical romance, The New Blazing World, she imagined a new world inhabited by beast-men, whom her main character, the Empress of the Blazing World, organizes into scientific societies which precisely parody the Royal Society. Their attack on the human body mimicked the disintegration of the body politic during civil war, a state of affairs Cavendish and her contemporaries had just witnessed. Consequently, the experimenters who investigated these animals could be tainted by their association with them and viewed as potential revolutionaries, or at least, sympathizers, in an assault on the newly restored monarchy. The chapter explores that in the bi-weekly Adventurer, a dreaming louse gives a sermon to the man's head he now inhabits in order to demonstrate that "life is in a state of perpetual peril and inquietude".
