With mounting interest in Margaret Cavendish's wide-reaching literary output, Brandie Siegfried's edition of Poems and Fancies is timely. The glossing of obscure terms and phrases and the clarification of tricky syntax should assist students as they work through these poems. Siegfried also helpfully includes deleted segments from the 1653 edition in an appendix, and she traces, in the footnotes, the emendations and additions that Cavendish made when preparing her 1664 redaction and eventually the 1668 version that is Siegfried's copy text. Taken together, these give the lie to an erstwhile presupposition that Cavendish was a hasty and inattentive writer.

The chief scholarly aim of the edition—with its fifty-four-page introduction and explicatory citations—is to illuminate Cavendish's sources. To this end, Siegfried makes a robust case for Cavendish having read Henry Billingsley's 1570 English translation of Euclid's Elements, with John Dee's extended preface. Her proposition that she consulted the pop-up illustrations in this book when framing the four variously shaped atoms that make up the elements in Poems and Fancies is particularly tantalizing. Dwelling on mathematics, Siegfried also situates Cavendish in relation to “the newly emerging math of algebraic geometry” (2) that she associates with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Yet, while it is mentioned in passing that Cavendish was tutored in the early 1650s by her brother-in-law Charles Cavendish, Siegfried's neglect of manuscript evidence led her to overlook the fact that Margaret Cavendish's acquaintance with geometrical developments almost certainly stemmed from these lessons, and especially from Charles's engagement with Thomas Harriot, whose papers he was then transcribing. The combination of mathematical and atomic concerns in Poems and Fancies that the edition ascribes to an ingenious blend of Euclid and Lucretius in fact resonates most with Harriot's mixed mathematics.

Notwithstanding this missed opportunity, Poems and Fancies presents a distinct editorial challenge due to both the limited evidence for Cavendish's early education and the fact that, in writing a book of poetry, she does not cite her sources, as she did in later philosophical tomes. In a welcome attempt to push back against pronouncements in earlier scholarship that Cavendish lacked learning, Siegfried nonetheless enumerates, at intervals in the introduction, authors whom Cavendish apparently consulted before 1653. After reading that she ploughed through “Raleigh, Hakluyt, and Purchase” along with “Euclid, Aristotle, Lucretius, Dee, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and many others” (7), we are told that clearly “discernable literary influences include such luminaries as Lucretius, Homer, Hesiod, Plutarch, Vergil, Thucydides, Ovid, Boethius, Boccaccio, Spenser, Shakespeare, Raleigh, Sidney, Jonson, Fletcher, Wroth, Donne, Drayton, Milton, and many others” (18). Siegfried's edition, as a whole, helps to cement the growing scholarly consensus that Cavendish read contemporary philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, modern poets such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and translations of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid.

But Siegfried's bold claims of influence are not always persuasive. Of the above, Hesiod, Thucydides, Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt, and “Purchase” (presumably Samuel Purchas) do not feature again in the edition, and Galileo only crops up in a footnote declaring that Cavendish's “poems on sunspots, light, ice, and tides” are “clearly indebted” to him (23n79). In this instance, it would be beneficial to know, at the very least, which of Cavendish's ruminations on these topics are unambiguously Galilean, and how she might have encountered his theories. Hearing echoes between authors can be a useful departure point, but it does not prove an intellectual debt. Occasionally, references are even more ambiguous. It is alleged, for example, that “Cavendish would have had access to Torricelli's theory [of air temperature] via references in various science texts in English,” though no specific titles are provided (111n270). Elsewhere, we learn that the ideas of Parmenides and Empedocles were “available to Cavendish primarily by way of various editions of Plato” (78n134). It is far from self-evident, however, that Plato's dialogues offer a transparent window into the thought of these pre-Socratics, and, to the best of my knowledge, the only extant English translation of a Platonic dialogue was Edmund Spenser's Axiochus (1592). While it is not impossible that Cavendish read Plato in Latin, the glossed line from her opening poem states that Nature “with the four elements built the world's ball.” This conceit was pedestrian, yet if a source is required the obvious place to turn would be George Sandys's 1632 English rendition of Metamorphoses, which Cavendish praised prior to composing Poems and Fancies (The World's Olio [1655], 12), and which vividly depicts in Book 1 how the earth was formed out of the four elements and rendered into a sphere.

The footnotes in general could have also used some editorial finessing. The names of Latin works, for instance, are often anglicized without notice, which can give a false sense that Cavendish operated within a predominantly English world. Modern editions are also commonly cited without the original publication dates that would help readers to determine which books Cavendish could have, in principle, consulted. In addition to imprecise citations, the edition contains several inaccuracies. A rare contemporary poet named in Poems and Fancies is John Donne. The problem is that Cavendish's allusion is to “Come, Fates; I feare you not.” Although attributed to Donne in the Old Editions (1613–1669), this poem has since been credited to John Roe. By declaring that Cavendish cited Donne, Siegfried therefore replicates her misattribution (121n313). According to Siegfried, Cavendish also claimed “to have read only a few pages of Leviathan” (32n99), but she actually professed to have only perused “a little book called De Cive” (Philosophical and Physical Opinion [1655], B3v.). For an edition that dwells on Cavendish's supposed borrowings from Leviathan, this conflation does not instill confidence in the reader. Less significant are the periodic typographical errors and erratic naming conventions (e.g., “Vergil” and “Virgil”), and, though the transcription is solid, the modernization of spelling, punctuation, and even syntax inevitably obscures the characteristic irregularity of the original.

All things told, this reasonably affordable volume offers a gateway into Cavendish's poetry, and Siegfried's provocations will hopefully inspire further attempts to get to grips with Cavendish's source material in order to ultimately shape a fuller picture of her intellectual world.