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Margaret Cavendish has been identified as a crypto-atheist in a number of modern studies of her life and works. In her own time, Cavendish voiced serious concern that she would be accused of atheism by her contemporaries, writing in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), “pray account me not an Atheist, but believe as I do in God Almighty” when explaining that she discourses on natural philosophy, not theology. However, despite Cavendish’s attempt to distance herself from religious matters to avoid such accusations, natural philosophy and theology do converge at times in her writings, revealing an impulse shared by many early Enlightenment thinkers to establish the apposite relationship between matter and metaphysics, (proto) scientific reasoning and the Christian faith. This essay focuses on one aspect of Cavendish’s thought—her evolving treatment of the nature and operation of the soul(s)—to demonstrate that she works to produce over a fifteen-year period a flexible, if complex and inexact, theory that reveals God and nature, spirit and matter operating in conjunction. This negotiation of faith and reason in her work undergirds her claim that she seeks to be both “a good Christian, and a good Natural Philosopher” ( Philosophical Letters , 210).

O one can escape the substance of his time any more than he can jump out of his skin,” wrote Georg Hegel, leading him to conclude that bible commentaries “do not so much acquaint us with content of scripture as with the mode of thought of their age.”� Gerald L. Bruns, reflecting on Hegelian hermeneutics, observes: “It is not enough to reproduce another’s thought; it is necessary to think it as one’s own. The dead letter must be reinvested with one’s own spirit, meaning that one . . . appropriates it, not merely as a preserved artifact but as something internalized, that is, essential to one’s self-reflection and self-identity.” � The verse and prose translations of Henry Vaughan, a poet known for his “unusual reliance upon prior texts,” reveal this very historicity or cultural embeddedness of language; for in these works, Vaughan responds to the philosophy and politics of the volatile world he inhabits. � His source texts are refracted through the prism of his life context and conceptual frame. Louise Imogen Guiney discerned � Henry Vaughan’s facility in Greek suggests that he could read the Septuagint and he may, like his twin brother Thomas, have been able to read the Old Testament in Hebrew. However, the semantics and syntax of his translations indicate that he took the Autho rized Version as his primary source and model. jonathan Post, in Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton u niversity Press, 1982), and Philip West, in Henry Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans”: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2001), refer to Vaughan’s psalms as translations, likely using the term in its loosest sense, and I follow this practice here. � Georg Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, quoted in Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale u niversity Press, 1992), 151. � Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern, 150. � Thomas O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of “Silex Scintillans” (Newark: university of Delaware Press, 1981), 67.