- Lived:
- 1623–1673 · England and exile (Colchester, Oxford, Paris, Antwerp, Welbeck)
- Tradition:
- Early modern natural philosophy; vitalist materialism and the first great critique of experimental science
- The Big Idea:
- Everything that exists is matter — but matter is not dead machinery. It moves itself, perceives, and knows, in degrees, all the way down.
- In their words:
- "I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements than live in obscure and sluggish security."
- If you remember one thing:
- The duchess mocked for centuries as "Mad Madge" was the first Englishwoman to publish natural philosophy under her own name — and her supposedly eccentric doctrines, thinking matter and the distrust of instruments among them, now read as startlingly ahead of their time.