The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630-1660 by Nicholas McDowell (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.3, 2005 781 allegedly purposeful and controlled. She is involved in an 'encyclopedie, comprehen? sive literary project' whose purpose is to pursue 'a conscious and deliberate explo? ration ofthe various forms and genres available to her at the time' (p. 9), and to engage in 'experiments in genre' (p. 196) to develop original hybrid forms which are more appropriate for her purposes, which include challenging traditional constructions of both gender and genre. Sara Mendelson's intriguing piece sees Cavendish's plays demolishing the line between fiction and life-writing, arguing that they combine thinly disguised autobiography with 'dreamlike inversions of Cavendish's own life experi? ences', which Mendelson calls 'anti-autobiography' (p. 201). Gisele Venet argues that her 'entirely new creative approaches' require an 'aesthetic of fragmentation' as a way of breaking away from conventions and of staging new attitudes towards others or a new convention of the self (p. 213). It is easier to assert purposeful irony than to prove it,however, and some essays seem to imply a particular insight into Cavendish's intentions which is not always borne out by the evidence. The collection's Cavendish is purposeful rather than incoherent. Moreover, far from being ignorant, she is well-read, and is engaged in a critical debate with other authors and scientists. Thus James Fitzmaurice convincingly reads The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle as a purposefully hybrid form which combines narrative, scrapbook, household accounts, and maxims, and as a critique of Plutarch; Lisa T. Sarasohn reads the Philosophical Letters as a critique of Descartes, Hobbes, and other contemporary scientists; and Sarah Hutton goes so far as to read the Description of a New World Called the Blazing World as a wholesale 'satire on contemporary science' (p. 161) modelled on Lucian of Samosata. This collection of eleven 'international and interdisciplinary' (p. 8) essays, many by established Cavendish scholars, began as a series of conference papers, and attempts to cover the whole range of Cavendish's writing, from scientific and philosophical writings to life-writings, poetry, prose fiction, and plays. It attempts 'to locate her within literary conventions as a "complete author"', an enterprise 'never before attempted ' (p. 10). It is more coherent than many essay collections, but at the price of some repetition. Moreover, Cavendish sometimes seems to inspire in her critics contradictions resembling those attributed to her. Line Cottegnies's essay sees her both as a postmodern subject deconstructing the unitary self and as celebrating the myth of the stable self, and as both critiquing memory and fearing oblivion. While there is much here that will interest academies working on Cavendish, it is not likely to find a wider audience. University of Manchester Jacqueline Pearson The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630-1660. By Nicholas McDowell. (Oxford English Monographs) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. x + 2i9pp. ?45. ISBN 0-19-926051-6. The rather tired generalities and predictable collocations of the title of this study do not in the least prepare the reader for its challenging and exciting contents. This is no bland general overview of Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, et al. rehearsing the familiar connections between masterless men, mechanic preachers, the gift of free grace, and social insubordination. On the contrary,its business is to 'revise our understanding of radicalism in the English revolution' by challenging the 'starkly adversarial' relation? ship between 'radical belief and elite culture' presented both by seventeenth-century radicals themselves and by their twentieth-century champions (p. 1). Nicholas Mc? Dowell disputes both the socially underprivileged origins of seventeenth-century radicalism and its dependence upon oral and untutored cultural and literary habits of expression. 782 Reviews That a heterodox lower-class culture, ignorant of the intellectual heritage of the Renaissance, found its voice during the 1640s and 1650s was, of course, Christo? pher Hill's recurrent theme, and this view still constitutes the prevailing scholarly orthodoxy. Hill argued that this grass-roots movement did not suddenly appear from nowhere: it had been a feature of English life at least since Wyclif and the Lollards, and probably for longer. What brought it into view was the revolutionary fervour of the 1640s, coupled with the power...