Warring Words: Ornatus and Gender in Cavendish and Hobbes

Abstract

This essay engages with Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes by extending its insights on the importance of ornatus , which lends beauty and force to oratory, to Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy . Understanding this comedic play about women’s relationship to rhetoric, education, and the public stage requires a more capacious Renaissance humanist backdrop that includes the querelle des femmes . Cavendish’s ingenious mixing of the “hees” and the “shees” of the rhetorical tradition highlights a parallel conflict in Hobbes’s and Cavendish’s respective works over rhetoric and sociability. The Female Academy depicts a struggle between men and women that is also a struggle between peaceful and warring modes of rhetoric. Resolved through a social contract of sorts, Cavendish’s play reveals a political negotiation as the foundation of establishing credibility for women’s words.