Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was an English writer and philosopher, best known for her work The Blazing World. She has also been called the first modern novelist. Cavendish was born in England at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. Her family was Catholic, but she was raised Protestant
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Cavendish studied theology at King's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge she became interested in the new science being developed by Robert Boyle. She believed that she could combine Boyle's chemistry with theology, and the result would be the "new philosophy", which would combine all the sciences into "one great science." She wrote a series of articles for The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that were published between 1666 and 1669 under the title "A Description of a New World." These articles described her ideas about chemistry and physics, as well as her ideas about how these sciences could be used for good.
Cavendish was influenced by Boyle's ideas on casuistry, or ethical reasoning based on experiment, which allowed one to follow what seemed to be good logic even if one's conclusions contradicted what other people thought was good logic. To Cavendish, science was not merely a scientific study of mechanics, but a way to study God's creation. She created her own cosmological system called "The Blazing World" where God created everything in six days, including stars that burned forever.
Later, she described this world as being made of fire that surrounds us all, so there is no absolute distinction between heaven and earth because it is all one big burning sphere.