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ABSTRACT: Published as the companion piece to Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), Margaret Cavendish's fantastical travelogue Blazing World (1666) dramatizes and interrogates many of the ideas that the author put forth in her philosophical writing. Cavendish might have chosen the travel genre as the companion piece to her treatise on natural philosophy for a variety of reasons. One primary motivation, this essay argues, is that travel has intriguing thematic and epistemological links to her organic-materialist theory of the universe. Indeed, travel is built into Cavendish's ontology: motion is a precondition for being and knowing. With this in mind, Blazing World's engagement with the voyage genre becomes particularly important. At the same time, Blazing World is more resolutely experimental than Observations in that it investigates the possible loopholes and ambiguities of her materialist theory of nature. Cavendish is fascinated by how material bodies compose ideas, and how ideas take material form, and it is some of her recurring questions about the materiality and mobility of thought that she explores in Blazing World.
"Thus those two female souls travelled together as lightly as two thoughts into the Duchess her native World; and which is remarkable, in a moment viewed all the parts of it, and all the actions of all the Creatures therein."1
Appearing in one of the most strikingly "fantastical" sections of Margaret Cavendish's The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), the quotation above describes an intergalactic soul travel that, while overtly playful, raises many of the epistemological questions that fascinated Cavendish in both her fiction and her philosophical and scientific writing.2 Here, the minds of the Empress and the Duchess travel so effortlessly and so quickly that they access a kind of panoptic vision that allows them to view instantaneously every part of the world and every creature in it. Notably, it is their spectacular motion that enables this magisterial perspective. We see this type show-stopping transit in other parts of Blazing World as well-for instance, in one of many examples, when the Empress suddenly drops through the ocean and the core of the planet to return to the Blazing World near the end of the text. Taken in the context of Cavendish's materialist philosophy of nature outlined in parts...