The Early Meeting of Disciplines in Europe Speculative Fiction and the Worlds of Margaret Cavendish

This article examines Cavendish’s The Blazing World as an example of the passage from an ancient mythopoesis to an empirical episteme. While the pre-empirical mind saw everything as unknowable, and myth as connecting worlds via the supernatural, science has developed modern empirical data. Speculative fiction is the fruit of this change, with implications for the study of comparative literature as the fusion of mythopoetic and empirical paradigms opens science to society through popularization.