New Model Armies: Re-contextualizing The Camp in Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo

Abstract

This paper examines the Amazonian army in Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo , a two-part closet play that stages divisions in England as a war between two allegorical entities, Faction and Reformation. Arguing against previous readings of the play's third armed collective as merely the female instruments of Caroline revisionism, I consider its pragmatic and pointed acknowledgment of the increasingly revolutionary role that military collectives played in the Civil Wars and Interregnum. Parliament's New Model Army was at the center of this shifting role, and was, I argue, a significant inspiration for Cavendish's female soldiers in Bell in Campo .