ABSTRACT
This chapter explores possible connections between Cavendish's scientific romance and Cyrano's libertine novel, Histoire comique. Susan Wiseman has also shown how a comparison with Christina of Sweden, whose libertine leanings are well known, helps situate Margaret Cavendish in a more European context, which she sees as an empowering 'libertine matrix'. For Wiseman, Christina was the figure in the Turkish carpet, so to speak, who makes intelligible women's relationship to politics in the Blazing World. Cavendish's and Cyrano's texts contain many striking thematic similarities. Both offer an uncompromising defense of heliocentrism. The Cavendishes and several members of Cyrano's circle attended many of the same social gatherings. Pierre Gassendi, the French priest who was in the process of reviving Epicureanism. Insofar as Cyrano and Cavendish refute the dualism of form/structure, or spirit/matter, they may be considered monists although Cavendish seems to hesitate as to what this implies.
