ABSTRACT
This essay argues that Margaret Cavendish challenged early modern culture’s dominant conception of the relationship between humans and non-humans, humans and their environment, and the inanimate nature of matter. In her poems that dramatize a dialogue among birds and between a tree and a man, Cavendish argues against the unquestioned assumption among her contemporaries that non-human beings exist for the use of man, anticipating recent findings about the intelligence and emotional capacity of birds and the sentience of trees. In other poems, Cavendish anticipates twenty-first-century understandings of humans’ destructive effect on the environment. In addition, her representation of the animation and activity of atoms shows congruence with Jane Bennett’s concept of ’vibrant matter’.
