Pese a los prejuicios en contra de su participación en la vida intelectual, varias mujeres del siglo XVII intervinieron activamente en las discusiones en torno a la “Nueva Ciencia”. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) es una de las figuras más singulares entre quienes se insertan en este debate, ya que, sin ninguna educación formal en filosofía y por medio de una pluma extravagantemente prolífica, se dispuso a escribir y experimentar con una variedad de estilos literarios en una apuesta intelectual por la mezcolanza y la hibridación genérica. Por ello es importante sopesar el papel que tiene la imaginación poética para el desarrollo de su particular filosofía natural. Este artículo estudia el papel de la imaginación en el pensamiento de Margaret Cavendish, a partir del análisis de algunos fragmentos de sus obras Poems and Fancies (1653).
Despite the reticence against the participation of women in intellectual spheres, several among them engaged actively in thedebates around the New Science during the seventeenth centu-ry. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) is one of the most singular figures of her time, in that she did not receive a formal educa-tion in philosophy, and yet, by means of a prolific and extrav-agant outpour, she experimented with a diversity of literary styles and placed her bets on the generic interbreeding of texts. Although Cavendish’s works have often been studied by divid-ing the creative and literary works from the philosophical ones, reading them side by side seems crucial to understand the role that fancy and poetic imagination plays in the development of her natural philosophy. This paper examines fragments from Poems and Fancies (1653) to assess the role of fancy and imag-ination in connection to the philosophical ideas of Cavendish.