Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times

Abstract

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 states that the book explores the sudden return of smell to favor, “starting with an overview of the current state of scholarly research on this fascinating topic” (4).The book contains obligatory references to Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott’s Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York, 1994), Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (New York, 1986; orig. pub. Zurich, 1985). But it neglects numerous works by Woolgar, Harvey, Jenner, Smith, and Dugan, let alone multiple other publications by Classen, Howes, and other researchers who have framed sensory studies in past decades.1What does Muchembled offer instead? One distinct element is an economic approach. For example, he emphasizes that fecal matter became increasingly valuable as a source of economic wealth during this period, discussing numerous noxious trades, as well as the creation of markets by enterprising individuals who redefined “shit” as filthy lucre. Excrement was worth its weight in gold to farmers and dyers, who proved that sewage was big business. So too was perfumery. Muchembled trawls through inventories of early modern perfumers, itemizing hordes of odiferous oils, hair powders, and animals hides.Although much of the volume is concerned with the stench of cities, Muchembled devotes several pages to the countryside, often overlooked in sensory studies. Again, employing Elias’ scale, most urban inhabitants initially deployed disparaging descriptions of their rural cousins to demonstrate their advanced stage of civilization. Yet, as nasty as pockets of the rural landscape smelled, Muchembled asserts that they never became as disagreeable as many urban wens. In fact, those who amassed sufficient wealth quickly sought to exchange polluted towns and cities for fragrant rural retreats.By the seventeenth century, anal repression reputedly swept French society, demonizing the body’s nether regions. Most disparaged were women’s bodies, especially their oldest representatives, male aging having been viewed far more leniently. In line with increasing sensibility, people began to turn up their noses at Rabelaisian narratives, which were now regarded as indecent. Censorship increased accordingly. Flatulence, to name but one odorous emission, had its second wind in the medical literature of the eighteenth century, only to disperse again.The appearance of plague also had its impact, subjecting populations to collective trauma before 1720 and further encouraging the use of pungent prophylactics, if not a bit of early morning privy sniffing. Along with the usual sweet-smelling fumigations, Muchembled also covers the visual cues of plague, before a chapter about beauty treatments firmly shifts the narrative from smell to sight, climaxing with an impressive tranche of colored images illustrating earlier tales of defecating peasants, plague doctors, and even an idealized perfumer’s garb.At this point, stenches begin to dissipate, and Muchembled charts the emergence of floral essences during a period of peace, when military men exchanged battlefield skirmishes for sword play in the bedroom, transformations that are noticeable in a new iconography that highlighted women’s allure rather than their malodor. Excremental animal scents were extricated from perfumers’ toolboxes, replaced with delicate floral and fruity ones. The stifling savor of musk and civet made a comeback with a revitalized military culture at century’s end, but a change had occurred that would reach its apogee in scent-free modern America, about which Muchembled makes frequent anachronistic references along the way. Among his conclusions, he suggests this shift to lighter scents occurred far earlier than historians have previously claimed, though which scholars he means is not obvious from the book’s equally scent-free bibliography.