ABSTRACT
Perusing a section titled ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ included in the anonymous 1698 miscellany Wits Cabinet, the reader is advised that ‘to dream to eat Books, is good to Schoolmasters, and all that make profit by them, and which are studious for Eloquence; to others it is sudden death.’ Whilst the thoroughness of Cavendish’s commitment to the alimentary analogy is unusual, her linking of literary styles and genres with particular dishes and flavours reflects a pervasive early modern interest, with roots in the classical tradition, in imbrications of the literary and the edible. Use of the language of taste to describe processes of readerly and editorial discrimination, extraction and collation abounds in early modern commonplace culture; a few examples may stand as representative. Southwell’s suggestion that ink has humoral properties coterminous with those of the human body, and that physiological and poetical composition are consequently also contiguous, is apparent in early modern commonplace culture more generally.
