Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell

Introduction

introduction Picking up the Scent Smell is a cultural phenomenon. Members of past societies relied on smell to understand and engage with both their immediate environment and a wider world of meanings. Thus, “The study of the cultural history of smell” has been described by leading sensory studies scholars Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott as “an investigation into the essence of human culture.”1 Other writers have similarly declared the evolution of the olfactory imagination and the other four sensory realms to be a grand story. According to German political economist Karl Marx, who was no stranger to such sweeping subjects, it is “a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.”2 For similar reasons, Eugene Rimmel (1820–1887), the nineteenth-century perfumer, declared that “the history of perfume is, in some manner, that of civilization.”3 The senses are saturated with meaning and history. So, too, are its individual chapters. The history of perfume, along with its floral constituents, has been described by the Annales historian Alain Corbin to be “as informative as the history of coal,”4 if not always occurring in equally rich seams. This volume is an attempt to mine notable seams and outcrops and present them as a comprehensive and coherent introduction to the history of smell. It is ambitious in the sense that it takes a very broad perspective, touching the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods, in six themed chapters, with as much sensitivity to peculiarities of each time period as a historian of nineteenth-century England is capable. While the first chapters concentrate predominantly on the earliest chronological periods, successive sections focus on the modern period, essentially concluding with a discussion of smell in the modern city. Although there is some reiteration between cs 2 . introdUCtion sections, such as those on religion and gender, the individual themes were chosen to best represent the existing literature in this particular field of sensory history. Where there is potential overlap, efforts have been made to minimize duplication and direct readers to other relevant sections. The majority of the book’s composite chapters have attempted to integrate findings from the most influential historical studies of olfaction, while others comprise a patchwork of research representing disparate theoretical perspectives, not all of which can be developed to their full extent. At times I have drawn in new material in order to more effectively span existing lacunae in an emerging research agenda. Inevitably, discontinuities remain, but hopefully these will only stimulate further studies by indicating as clearly as possible where further research is needed. Although this is a historical text, it does not focus on the work of historians alone. The most influential literature on the senses in recent years has emanated from the keyboards of anthropologists. Often studies of smell in various Global South societies commence by noting a devaluation of olfactory experience as peculiar to the Global North and its intellectual traditions.5 Lack of attention to olfaction as a cultural experience is not apparent in every society. In the West, however, its decline is said to have impoverished our ability to understand the heavily textured vocabulary through which other cultures express the nature and meaning of order and relations in their communities , as well as their wider place in the cosmos. Our “impressions of the external world,” the German sexologist Iwan Bloch opined in the early twentieth century, “no longer reach us through the nose but through the eye and ear.”6 The field of history, therefore, appears decidedly devoid of scent— that is, until fairly recently, when a number of inspiring works have managed to fix some attention on this particular sense and ensure its presence in the historical literature. The early to mid-1980s are now regarded as a “watershed moment for smell.”7 Two key publications appeared within a few years of each other and served to inspire a wave of scent-related research. The first and perhaps most influential was the renowned Annales School historian Alain Corbin’s Le miasma et le jonquille, which broke the “olfactory silence” of historians when it was originally published in 1982.8 This now classic study demonstrated the profound influence of odors upon everyday life in France during a significant period of social, political, and cultural change. Although wide ranging in its themes, Corbin’s work emphasized the way in which the accumulation of urban waste, for instance, appeared to threaten the social order of postrevolutionary France. A...