A sense of the past: exploring sensory experience in the pre-modern world

Abstract

On his arrival in the Caribbean in October 1492 Christopher Columbus experienced a sensory explosion: fragrant scents, tropical fish, sweetly singing multi-coloured birds and encounters with unknown peoples whose erotic nakedness, incomprehensible language and apparent lack of social organization clashed with his perception of mankind (Fig. 1). As far as we can determine from the European sources and surviving archaeology, the indigenous islanders on their part were astounded by the sound of cannon firing, their first meeting with a chicken, speaking paper (writing), brass tacks and bells and the taste of sugar and other new foods. Much has been written on this first encounter between European and Caribbean peoples, but focusing on its sensory impact as David Abulafia does in a new book helps to explain the subsequent sordid tale of slavery, disease, ambition and greed far better than can any political or commercial history (Abulafia, 2008). Fig. 1 An encounter in the Caribbean: Columbus's letter announcing his discoveries [De insulis nuper inventis (Basel, 1494), fol. 29v]: Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, on-line edition available at http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/columbus/. Sensory history is a fairly new historical approach. The first of the three works reviewed here: Mark C. Smith's aptly titled Sensory History (2007), provides a much-needed international overview of the approach, covering the period from antiquity to the 12th century. The other two works: Hubbub (2007) by Emily Cockayne, and The Senses in Late Medieval England (2006) by Chris Woolgar, focus on England between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries. Although each book differs in style, each historian argues that sensory experience is historically and culturally contingent: people of different times and places hear, see, taste, touch and smell in distinctive ways. Each historian is influenced to some degree by anthropological arguments that sensory …