ABSTRACT
Cavendish suggests that not only human beings but the whole of creation, birds and beasts and perhaps even rocks and minerals, might acknowledge an omnipotent Creator. Cavendish's problematic and idiosyncratic ideas about religious matters are revealed in her extensive use of male and female personifications of God and Nature. The striking parallels between Cavendish's portrayal of God the Father and his servant Dame Nature on the one hand and Cavendish's autobiographical recollections of her own father and mother on the other. In ancient Greek philosophy and in all the major Western religions, thinkers tried to circumvent the paradox of an ineffable but actual divine being by describing God in negative terms. Here she implies that it is not only arrogant but impious or possibly heretical to inquire too closely into the mysteries of the Divine. Cavendish's poetic representations of God and Nature during the 1650s were similar to homely analogies she employed to clarify her scientific ideas.
