A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity ed. by Jerry Toner (review)

Cultural history has been undergoing a major sensory turn over the last twenty years. Scholars like David Howes, Mark M. Smith, and Constance Classen have led the vanguard, rethinking standard narratives of western (as indeed non-western) history through a sensory lens. Although the field is diverse — existing at the interface subjects like history, sociology, anthropology, aesthetics, and material cultural studies (to name but a few) — this new disciplinary coalition crystallizes around a common mantra: that "the ways we use our senses, and the ways we create and understand the sensory world, are shaped by culture" (David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society, London, 2014, 1; cf. e.g. sensorystudies.org and centreforsensorystudies.org).

Constance Classen is also the driving force behind the book under review. What we have here, to quote from her general editor's preface, is the first volume within an "authoritative six-volume series investigating sensory values and experiences throughout Western history and presenting a vital new way of understanding the past" (xi). Although the chronological parameters have been dropped from its title, the volume was evidently conceived to deal with the period from 500 bce–500 ce. Subsequent volumes have dealt with the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, Age of Empire, and Modern Age.

In what is fast becoming a trademark of Bloomsbury series in cultural history, each guest-edited volume follows the same internal structure (xi):

Experts examine important aspects of sensory culture under nine major headings: social life, urban sensations, the marketplace, religion, philosophy and science, medicine, literature, art, and media. A single volume can be read to obtain a thorough knowledge of the life of the senses in a given period, or one of the nine themes can be followed through history by reading the relevant chapters of all six volumes, providing a thematic understanding of changes and developments over the long term.

This organization of chapters across the series was no doubt aimed to foster dialogue between specialists. In my view, however, such predetermined categories risk collapsing the very specificities that individual volumes were designed to explore.

Jerry Toner's volume on antiquity, with its impressive cast of specialists, reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of the series at large. Toner's introduction, "Sensing the Ancient Past," sets the general tone, arguing that "any attempt to understand the beliefs of these [ancient] societies, how they operated in practice, and how they developed, must necessarily involve a detailed analysis of the ways in which the senses permeated their world" (21). The phrasing is symptomatic of an approach throughout the book. Rather than tackle cultural categorizations — instead of analyzing the challenges and opportunities of different sensory perspectives on the past — there is a tendency to rely on graphic evocations. So it is, for example, that Toner makes no attempt to engage with a wider sensory or material turn (witness the sparse notes at 227–228). Instead, he homes in on isolated vignettes — as with his discussion of the Roman games (12–16), cited as evidence of how the Emperor Augustus "turned to the senses to help him achieve… social reconciliation" (12). There follows a graphic evocation of the arena ("burning incense and smoke," "spectacles… full of special effects," "games [that] were incredibly noisy" and "full of colour" 13–14), but the argument that the games therefore "showed spectators… how utterly their lives were in the hands of the emperor" (16), still less that "a new sensory orthodoxy" was established (17), hardly follows. Nor is it clear what any of this contributes — intellectually, critically, analytically — to "a Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity."

In its almost exclusive focus on Roman imperial sources, Toner's introduction flags another structural challenge besides: for how can a volume like this do justice to the geographical, chronological, and cultural diversity of antiquity as shorthand category? Following in Toner's...