Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell by Jonathan Reinarz (review)

Reinarz’s Past Scents aims to offer a “comprehensive and coherent introduction to the history of smell” (1), a subject usually defined by its ephemerality, diffusiveness, and visceral impact rather than its cultural or historical significance. Its challenge to the traditional history of olfaction more than hits the mark, presenting not only a rich overview of the cultural history of olfaction but also a compelling synthesis of historiographical approaches to this topic and a sharp summary of the state of the field. Reinarz draws extensively from recent work while also expanding its purview to include the insights of anthropologists, literary scholars, classicists, art historians, and sociologists, as well as insights from the history of medicine. The strength of the book lies in its interdisciplinary and transtemporal approach; that Reinarz can achieve such breadth without sacrificing the variances inherent in this topic is a real achievement. The result is a comprehensive, coherent, and accessible introduction to the subject that deserves a wide audience.

Aligning himself with the argument that the senses are cultural phenomena, Reinarz organizes the book into six chapters that explore the social ramifications of past definitions of the science of smell. To ask who or what smelled in the past, as Reinarz says, is never a neutral question: As the famous nineteenth-century perfumer Edward Rimmel put it, “The history of perfume, in some manner, is the history of civilization” (1). Reinarz’s book seizes on the associative links embedded in such a claim in order to undo its logic. To understand the subject and objects of smell in the past is to grapple with the cultural history of “civilizations,” including those that have been explicitly excluded from such constructions. Among other things, Reinarz traces the use of scents in shaping cultural meanings of religion, luxury, race, gender, class, and a growing sense of urban spheres.

After a useful overview of various medical theories of olfaction in the introduction, the first chapter examines smell’s role in religion, focusing on the fourth century c.e. (when early Christians first embraced ancient links between fragrance and worshipping the divine); the second chapter, about “fragrant lucre” and the perfume trade, delves more deeply into how liturgical practices inspired a burgeoning perfume trade in medieval and early modern Europe. Chapter 2 surveys how scent ingredients emerged as lucrative objects of exchange, in part because of a growing belief in their medicinal efficacy. How one smelled was linked to one’s health.

The next three chapters demonstrate, however, that medicinal constructions of bodily smell often provided a ready rationale for social exclusion under the aegis of public health. Reinarz offers three cogent case studies about (1) the role of smell in constructing a “foul” and “fragrant” other; (2) the role of olfaction in shaping histories of racial difference (in medieval Europe as well as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America) and gender (vis-à-vis trenchant and misogynist constructions of the smell of women’s bodies in both European medical histories and gendered histories of the production and consumption of perfume); and (3) the role of class (in charting the rise of deodorization as a marker during the nineteenth century). In the final chapter, Reinarz shifts gears, examining the spatial ramifications of such olfactory histories on urban life. The smells of the city reflect its changing composition, as well as the structural challenges that it faced due to population density. For this reason, scholars are now using smells to construct new kinds of “maps” of urban space, pushing against a teleology of civilization aligned with deodorization.

This book suggests that engagement with the cultural work of smell both in the past and in the present can be richly rewarding. Reinarz’s timely survey of historical perspectives on smell will (hopefully) inspire further research that will move us beyond simple binaries of fragrant/foul and self/other toward more redolent possibilities.