Pastoral Economies: Reimagining Global Capitalism through Female Retreat in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish and Dorothy Calthorpe.

Although there has been much influential scholarship on England's global economy in the past few decades, relatively little of it has taken women's writing as a primary focus of analysis. This article contends that centering the works of early modern women can productively influence our literary and historical narratives about England's embeddedness within global capitalism and how it shifted across the seventeenth century. The article focuses primarily on the works of two royalist writers: Margaret Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure (1668) and Dorothy Calthorpe's "In commendations of a country Life it being so innocent" (1672–84) and "A Discription of the Garden of Edden" (1672–84). Both authors subtly reframe the usual expectations of country house discourse in the period to emphasize insularity and female retreat while simultaneously welcoming in the products and colonial labor practices of foreign trade. These texts thus make visible some of the gendered mechanisms by which the workings of global trade became increasingly familiar and palatable to seventeenth-century readers. In addition, this analysis shows how the process of imagining the seventeenth-century global economy and England's place within it enables these writers to establish forms of authority connected to their subject positions as white Englishwomen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]