Cavendish, Aesthetics, and the Anti-Platonic Line

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, linked form, matter, and imagination in ways that, while lying outside of the early modern disciplinary frame of aesthetics, have important consequences for understanding early modern concepts of taste and models of value, and for understanding the role of materialism in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Cavendish takes Ovid and Lucretius as her guides in thinking about beauty and pleasure. This essay sketches an early part of anti-Platonic, often Ovidian or Lucretian, line of aesthetic thought that extends from Cavendish to Behn and throughout the eighteenth century.