Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times

In the last decade or two, so much has been written about the history of the senses that anyone working in this field might easily struggle to keep up with the deluge of sensory scholarship. This volume, like previous studies of smell, opens with reference to Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process (Basel, 1939), which is appropriate not least because Elias himself looked to the court of Louis XIV and its restrictions on excessive or indecent reactions in the presence of others to exemplify the broad civilizing process. Muchembled employs this framework to explore and explain significant shifts in how smells were expressed and repressed, if not reviled, according to the vagaries of plague, misogyny, or even religious conflict in early modern French society. Employing the binary nature of scent to map smells (almost too) neatly onto changing societal views shaped by urbanization, outbreaks of disease, warfare, and peace, Muchembled provocatively...