Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories

Extract

“A great many Things have been said of Smells,” observed the late‐seventeenth‐century Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini, but “a particular and exact History of 'em is yet wanting.”1 This was still the case nearly three hundred years later when Roy Porter wrote his foreword to the English translation of Alain Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant, the work that more than any other wafted odor into modern historical consciousness. “Today's history,” Porter declared, “comes deodorized.” “How many historians,” he continued, “have given us the smell of previous societies? Researchers have been all too silent, repelled, it seems, by modern hygienic sensibilities even from contemplating the stench of the past.”2

History has not been comprehensively reodorized in the decades since Porter's comments. There have been important scholarly investigations into the cultural history of olfaction and into historical smellscapes, but those interested in the smells of the past are most likely to find them in popularizing presentations. Period scents sell historical novels: when one reviewer praised C. J. Sansom's detective stories (set in the reign of Henry VIII) for how they evoked the “smells of Tudor England,” the commendation figured prominently in their subsequent marketing.3 Trade histories now frequently contain a scene‐setting section on the odors of their subject.4 In the late 1990s, Oxford University Press published an entire series founded on the general proposition that “Of all the senses of the past, we often forget the sense of smell.”5 Helmed by a distinguished medical historian, it aimed to recapture this dimension with maximum pungency. Indeed, the Smelly Old History books for children incorporated scratch‐and‐sniff panels so that their readers could experience whiffs of medieval muckheaps, Victorian factory smoke, and Henry VIII's sweaty socks (complete with the aroma of gangrenous toe).6