Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times

by Robert Muchembled, Susan Pickford (Translator)

In this book Robert Muchembled restores smell to its rightful place as one of our most important senses and examines the transformation of smells in the West from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century. He shows that in earlier centuries, the air in towns and cities was often saturated with nauseating emissions and dangerous pollution. Having little choice but to see and smell faeces and urine on a daily basis, people showed little revulsion; until the 1620s, literature and poetry delighted in excreta which now disgust us.. At the same time, medicine explained outbreaks of plague by Satan's poisonous breath corrupting the air. Amber, musk and civet came to be seen as vital bulwarks against the devil's breath: scents were worn like armour against the plague. The disappearance of the plague after 1720 and the sharp decline in fear of the devil meant there was no longer any point in using perfumes to fight the forces of evil, paving the way for the olfactory revolution of the 18th century when softer, sweeter perfumes ame into fashion, reflecting new norms of femininity and a gentler vision of nature.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, France, Nature

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Robert Muchembled is a French historian.

Né le 4 mars 1944 à Liévin (62), Robert Muchembled est agrégé d'histoire (1967), docteur de troisième cycle (1974) et docteur d'État en histoire (1985, Université de Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne, sous la direction de Pierre Goubert). Sa biographie figure dans le Who’s Who et le Who’s Who in the World.
Actuellement professeur de classe exceptionnelle à l'Université de Paris XIII, où il a été nommé en 1986, il avait successivement enseigné dans un lycée, à l'École Normale de Lille, puis à l’université de Lille III, comme assistant et maître de conférences de 1969 à 1986.

Il est l'auteur de 24 ouvrages, dont 7 en collaboration et de plus de 70 articles. Ses travaux sont traduits en 16 langues.

Il pratique l'anglais, comprend l'allemand et le néerlandais. Membre du Centre de recherches en Études Québécoises, de l'Advisory Board du N.W. Posthumus Institute (Pays-Bas), il participe chaque année à de nombreux colloques et congrès internationaux. Il a été membre en 2003-2004 de l’Institute for Advanced Study de Princeton (U.S.A.).

Ses recherches d’histoire culturelle et sociale portent sur l’Europe, notamment sur la France, Paris et sa région.

De 1999 à 2004, il a dirigé un programme de recherches international sur les transferts culturels (European Science Foundation), accueillant plus de 80 chercheurs de 20 pays, qui a produit 6 volumes de synthèse sur le thème de l’intégration culturelle européenne.

http://www.univ-paris13.fr/cresc/inde...
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M...

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This cultural history of smell focuses mostly on France from the 1500s to through the 1800s. It's a fascinating journey, starting from a time when nasty smells were given as a part of life for everyone, high and low, and were accepted with good humor. In the following era things smelled little better but bad smells became associated with evil and sexual temptation. Rather than bathing, people combatted bad smells with stronger good smells. Women were thought to smell bad and men good, even when the women were clean and the men were sweaty and filthy. Bad smells became associated with disease, particularly the plague, but not because of an understanding that bad smell was connected with microbes and uncleanliness, but because of the idea of disease carrying miasmas. The favored scents of this era were strong perfumes derived from animal products, principally musk, civet and ambergris. But then in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as high fashion worked its way down to the middle classes and a period of general social prosperity came along, there was a switch in preference to floral smells which were softer and more romantic. The book also speaks in passing of the modern era, in which we have moved to a scentless society, in which the ideal smell is the appearance of no smell at all. It was all very interesting, though I would have enjoyed more cross cultural analysis so that I could have better understood whether the path of France was representative of the rest of Europe and the extent, if at all, that similar developments took place in the rest of the world.

This is a book that my dad would have loved, so as I read it I was thinking about how much I would have enjoyed discussing it with him. He had a deeply scatalogical mind and loved talking about shit and the smell of shit. He was fond of telling me that every man's shit smells good to himself, a proposition that I learned from this book goes back at least to Montaigne, perhaps earlier. And he loved to retail folk ideas about the smells of men and women, cloaking them wherever possible under some scholarly veneer. Mr. Muchambled is my dad's secret smelly twin. I think that they would have liked each other.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the depth into which the author shows how perfumes evolved from a covering for the stench of people to an addition to attract the opposite sex. Heavy on French history yet necessary since the French essentially began the develpment of perfumes and to this day still create some of the best scents used in the world. Interesting was how initially it was primarily for men to smell "nice" and for women to cover the "stench" and "vileness" (in the medieval mind set) of their bodies. Incredibly bad times for women. After the waning of youth relegated women to the compost heaps of society and were then singled out as witches, tortured and burned at the stake as acts of protection by God against demonic forces hatched (though the eyes of Men and the Church at the time) in the souls of women.
The book is well written. Probably not for everyone. Highly academic and detail oriented; still I found it a fascinating read and would recommend it to anyone interested in the Medieval history of smells , essence, and the creation of a huge empire which we know today.

[Sheffielder · Rating 3 out of 5]

(166 pages + introduction, notes, etc) This is a scholarly study with much to recommend it. The title is, however, slightly misleading. It should perhaps say "early modern France," rather than "early modern times". Nowhere else gets much of a mention.

The research is detailed, and the information provided is fascinating in places. On the negative side, the author has a delight in listing inventories; some of the themes are a bit repetitive; and a few chunks of the book are devoted not to smell, but to beauty.

Nonetheless, a good read both for those with an interest in perfumes, and for those interested in the daily ins-and-outs of life in a major Early Modern European nation.

[Sacha · Rating 2 out of 5]

When the library doesn't have it, there's usually a reason. Still, I finished reading it. The conclusion would have been sufficient; it was a nice summary. There was a lot of focus on the smell of poop and role of such in art. Sigh. The main problem was that his first point, that kids love the smell of their own excrement and must be taught to shun it, was so suspicious that I couldn't bring myself to believe any other interesting historical tidbit.

[Mike Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unusual story of cultural smells. Mare a scholarly work than for light reading .. interesting fact that perfume developed as mask for the unkind sets of women in the 1700s.

[eight · Rating 3 out of 5]

j'ai un avis

[alexis litteken · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars**