Variety in Criticism and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Chapter 5 considers how “variety” and “miscellany” became valued in Enlightenment philosophy, eighteenth-century music history, and more specifically, early music criticism between 1700 and 1720, showing that the response to musical miscellany in performance transformed into a lasting cultural appreciation of miscellany in music and the other arts. This final chapter illustrates how the appreciation for variety as an aesthetic facilitated a re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism as Britain transformed under social, economic, and political pressures.