Margaret Cavendish's Sammelbände: Bound-together volumes and joined texts in Cavendish's corpus

This is a talk about literally joined texts by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: self-designed Sammelbände or bound-together volumes in which she collected multiple copies of her works into massive collected volumes, encouraging readers to read her very different texts in light of one another.

The concept of joining is crucial to Cavendish's natural philosophical theories, and the talk will draw both on Cavendish's physics (her theory of nature) and on the physical copies of surviving Sammelbände to argue that despite the extreme generic diversity of Margaret Cavendish's corpus -- a body of work that included natural philosophy, poetry, drama, political writings, and more -- she intended her works to be joined, read in close conjunction with one another and across disciplinary boundaries.