Abstract

This paper traces how the seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, developed her ideas on plant life in three major publications: her 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1664 Philosophical Letters, and 1666 Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. As I seek to demonstrate, Cavendish’s mostly overlooked ruminations on vegetality were indispensable to her formation of a substance theory according to which all matter is endowed with life, vitality, knowledge, and, in her mature works, perceptivity. Over the course of this paper, I also suggest that her visions of matter and plant life were largely grounded in Galenic and Aristotelian insights that she extracted and adapted from a range of sources, not least from William Harvey’s field-changing writings on the circulation of blood and the generation of animals. In building upon this material, Cavendish was driven to uphold the innate livelihood of plants against mechanical accounts and to champion a “natural” mode of classification that focussed on the diversity of plant attributes rather than foregrounding specific features that humans deemed valuable or significant.