Cornelia Wilde Libri

'Friendship, Love, and Letters' explores a distinctive form of affectionate personal relations: Seraphic friendship. It is seraphic friendship's specific nexus of the discourse of Neo-Platonic love, the ideals of friendship, and the shared practice of religious devotion that allowed, authorized, and idealised the affectionate association between early modern women and men. As seraphic friends, men and women participated in the discourse of friendship, as well as in philosophical and religious debates. There are three couples of friends at the centre of this study: Margaret Blagge Godolphin and John Evelyn, Elizabeth Gauden and Simon Patrick, Anne Conway and Henry More. The communication between these friends is documented in their correspondences. By rewriting social codes and epistolary themes, the couples of seraphic friends negotiate historical gender inequalities while appropriating notions of Neo-Platonic metaphysics of love to the social practice of friendship. 'Friendship, Love, and Letters' focuses on the letter as a literary means of conducting and cultivating friendships and presents the poetics of seraphic friendship.

Margaret Cavendishs Texte experimentieren mit Fakt und Fiktion, überschreiten Gattungs- und Diskursgrenzen. Die phantastische Erzählung „The Blazing World“ (1666) kommentiert und vollzieht inhaltlich und in ihrer narrativen Struktur Cavendishs Naturphilosophie der „Obersvations upon Experimental Philosophy“: Während ihre Zeitgenossen mit Mikro- und Teleskop die Welt beäugen, verbindet Cavendish naturphilosophische Kontemplation und poetische Imagination in einem phantastischen Experiment.