The Witch and the Empress: Women in Motion in Kepler’s and Cavendish’s Fiction of Lunar New Worlds

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World belongs in the tradition of early modern, new philosophical fictions of lunar new worlds, but it also serves as a radical critique of those by male philosophers. Francis Godwin introduced a narrative of the “man” in the moon, a narrative forerunner of the “He” philosophy of the Royal Society, thus parting ways with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream) that had granted significant female agency to the character of Fiolxhilde. Allegedly the cause of witchcraft charges against Kepler’s mother, Fiolxhilde has been routinely relegated to unlettered witchcraft, but she is a wise and powerful woman in her own right, conversant with “wise spirits,” and initiator of flight or “motion” to the moon in search of celestial knowledge. Likewise, the abductee-turned Empress in The Blazing World is a “self-moving body,” speaking for not only Cavendish’s vitalistic materialist view of matter and motion but also her anti-Aristotelian and anti-mechanist affirmation of the female. In the very genre discoursing on motion of celestial bodies, Fiolxhilde and the Blazing Empress defy masculinist notions of inanimate female bodies.