Until about twenty-five years ago, the standard assessment of Margaret Cavendish’s philosophical work was typified by Virginia Woolf’s remarks: “It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that was to oust all others. The results were not altogether happy.”1 Recent studies have been more sympathetic. The current consensus is that Cavendish’s writings were, in fact, informed by the work of her contemporaries, and that she was critiquing the newly popular mechanistic philosophy of nature.2