The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England

Notes

n o t e s Introduction • Strange, Invisible Perfumes 1. “Press Release: 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,” Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, October 4, 2004, http://nobelprize.org/medicine/ laureates/2004/press.html (cited January 5, 2011). 2. Lawrence K. Altman, “2 Americans Win Nobel for Demystifying Sense of Smell,” New York Times, October 4, 2004. 3. “Press Release: 2004 Nobel Prize.” 4. Axel and Buck use the term logic to describe their work. Buck’s work extended scientific understanding of how the nose genetically recognizes smells; Axel’s work mapped the parts of the brain employed to discriminate between them. Both have designed lectures, available online, for the general public explaining their scientific endeavors : see Richard Axel, “Scents and Sensibility: Towards a Molecular Logic of Perception,” Columbia University, New York, NY, May 13, 2004, available at http://c250.columbia.edu/ c250_events/symposia/brain_mind/brain_mind_vid_archive.html (cited January 5, 2011); Linda B. Buck, “The Logic of Smell,” Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, December 7, 2001, available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/ 2004/buck-symp.html (cited January 5, 2011). There is still debate over whether the olfactory bulb recognizes smell molecules through shape or vibration; see Rachel Hertz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 27. 5. The Ig Nobel award is a spoof of the Nobel prize, giving awards to serious, but bizarre or funny, scientific studies. The award is designed for studies that “first make people laugh, and then make people think.” See “Improbable Research: The Ig Nobel Prizes,” http://improbable.com/ig/ (cited January 5, 2011). 6. Ed Frauenheim, “Nothing Fishy about the Sweet Smell of Nobel Success,” New York Times, October 6, 2004. 7. Ibid. 8. Guatam Naik, “The Smell of Success Isn’t Always Sweet in This Line of Work: Mr. Knight Brews Up Odors of Sweaty Locker Rooms and Egyptian Mummies,” Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2004. 192 Notes to Pages 2–4 9. Axel, “Scents and Sensibility.” 10. When one smells something, genetically programmed smell receptors dispersed throughout the nose receive particular odor-molecules. In order to recognize the smell as a “rose,” the brain simultaneous processes numerous molecules. For this reason, odors are usefully thought of as “chords.” The process of identifying molecules A, B, and C as a combination that translates into the smell “rose” is termed binding. Once this occurs , it is much faster to identify the smell of “rose” versus lilac, lily, or pine scents. 11. For example, as one medical text notes, there are very few cross-cultural studies on the science of smell. “If, as is generally acknowledged, a gap exists in our understanding of olfaction, then with respect to understanding geographic, cultural, and individual differences in olfaction, the hole is a virtual chasm”; Thomas V. Getchell, Smell and Taste in Health and Disease (New York: Raven Press, 1991), 287. See also Wendy Smith and Clair Murphy, “Epidemiological Studies of Smell: Discussion and Perspectives,” in International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste, ed. Thomas E. Finger, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1170 (Boston: Blackwell, 2009), 569–73, 569. 12. Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender , Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Keith Botelho, Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Elizabeth Harvey, Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Katherine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Holly Dugan “Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38.2 (2008): 229–52; Jonathan Gil Harris “The Smell of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58.4 (2007): 465–86; Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Masten, “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.3 (2004): 367–384; Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: The History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 13. The work that has been done is very strong. For example, Alain Corbin’s landmark study of foul and fragrant smells in eighteenth-century...