“Bake'd in the Oven of Applause”: The blazon and the body in Margaret Cavendish's Fancies

Abstract

In Poems, and Fancies (1653), Cavendish uses the lavishly idealizing language of Petrarchan love poetry in humorously gruesome recipes. Extravagant, luxurious images are shown to itemize and prepare their subject for consumption like a recipe. It is argued that Cavendish's poems manifest the influence of mid seventeenth-century Cavalier poets such as Herrick and Lovelace. In her corporeal but anti-erotic poems, Cavendish plays with the Cavaliers’ imagery, pushing it to breaking point. It is also argued that Cavendish's startling fusion of food and scientific images does not represent a desire to domesticate science. Instead, Cavendish uses scientific vocabulary and a vitalist natural philosophy to create an alternative poetic representation of the female body to that of Renaissance blasonneurs. It is suggested that Cavendish's poems, as much as her explicitly philosophical prose, demonstrate an innovative and interdisciplinary appropriation of scientific thought.