Libertas philosophandi and Cloistered Women in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure

Abstract

This essay explores Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1668) as a vindication of the liberty of mind for early modern women for its own sake, a distinguishing feature from other ‘female academy’ proposals or fictions including those of much later dates. The notion of cloistered female communities was abhorred in Protestant England for their associations with Catholic monasticism and female celibacy, while few missed old nunneries except as a place to conveniently lock away “their withered daughters.” Thus proposals of female academies, including Mary Astell’s, routinely faced mockery and censure and relied on the ultimate defense of educating “better Christians.” The Convent of Pleasure is unique in imagining a female society devoted to natural knowledge per se as subject of such knowledge production, at the historical juncture when natural philosophy was being enclosed within all-male spaces such as the Royal Society and its Baconian model Salomon’s House. Lady Happy, founder and Prioress of the Convent, proclaims unapologetically that hers is a “Cloister ... of freedom,” and “not for the gods sake, but for opinion’s sake.” Lady Happy’s Convent stands in elaborate contrast to Salomon’s House, whose “Art” is to “deceive” and coerce nature, and she differentiates her “Wit” from “your Wit” that “measures” and “weighs,” as at the Royal Society. The Convent besieged with intrusive men outside is reminiscent of Bacon’s mandate in Novum Organum for the “true sons of the sciences” to penetrate into nature’s “inner rooms,” but Cavendish subverts this setting to reconfigure the cloistered women as the self-knowing subject, not the object of male gaze and knowledge. One Prince indeed manages to infiltrate, disguised as Princess, but Lady Happy and this Prince/ss’s marriage at the end does not simply signal the Convent’s closure but serves to rebuke the monastic, misogynous, and anti-liberal society of male philosophers.