Abstract

Critical responses to Cavendish tend to emphasize her “oppositional” and “unsystematic” approaches to natural philosophy. This article argues that Cavendish was not only more systematic than critics have suggested, but also that her approach to understanding the natural world anticipated some of the central questions of the anthropocene age. This article reads Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) alongside Bruno Latour’s recent writing on the anthropocene to recover Cavendish as an important contributor to modern notions of the anthropocene.

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