A ‘more precise definition of the soul’ from the flights of the soul in The Blazing World and Primero sueño

Abstract

This study investigates Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and Sor Juana’s Primero sueño (First Dream) in relation to Elisabeth of Bohemia’s inquiry about the soul-body union in her correspondence with René Descartes. Elisabeth’s question was two-fold, epistemic as well as metaphysical, and the first aspect remains understudied. Her epistemic question is rendered in gendered terms, seeking a ‘more precise’ account of a female-bodied soul (like hers), allegedly more susceptible to fits of vapours and eager for philosophical meditations nonetheless. This study argues that Descartes’s letters did not adequately address Elisabeth’s epistemic question as such and proposes instead to turn to the aforementioned fictions for accounts of the female soul’s pursuit of (self-)knowledge, by way of imaginary correspondence between the three early modern women on the rational soul in a female body. © 2024 The Seventeenth Century.