Imagining Worlds and Figuring Toleration: Freedom, Diversity, and Violence in A Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World

The title of Margaret Cavendish Newcastle’s most famous work of prose fiction, A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666), suggests several things about the way I want to read its investigation into toleration and the literary imagination.¹ The title gestures to the “New World,” that destination, in the Restoration period, of pilgrims fleeing religious persecution in England, as well as the locus of indigenous pagan cultures that shadow Europe’s Protestant/Catholic sectarianism. The title also invokes seventeenth-century philosophical debates about the nature of “worlds,” which revolved around how the particularity of the material world relates to the larger