Sensory history

Noxious airs from trash discards, irrigation canals, marketplaces, hospitals, and plazas vitiated colonial Lima’s environment. Using olfactory history, this article examines how residents reacted to their pungent environs. Early modern Iberians believed that foul smells were harmful. Fully understanding this relationship, municipal leaders subjugated the San La ́zaro district by relocating its indigenous population and moving noxious trades and institutions to the area. I argue that the concentration of miasmas in San La ́zaro represents an environmental conquest. San La ́zaro’s ethnically and socially diverse population lived with unhealthy airs that threatened their health. By contrast, central Lima enjoyed fresher airs in locations primarily occupied by Spanish vecinos (male, landowning citizens, who were allowed to participate in local politics) in and around the Plaza de Armas, the cathedral, the viceroy’s palace, and the municipal hall. The protection of central Lima’s airs reveals that environmental management corresponded to social status and political power.

Treats the motif of smell in King Lear, focusing on feminine odors and their associations with death. Suggests that "all the men in the play are affected by female bodies and smells, but this negative sniffing out of the female body is most apparent in the character of King Lear." Concludes that, after "Lear detects his feminine odor," he finally "finds the redemptive aromas of the feminine in Cordelia, but too late, contributing to both their deaths.

PhD THESIS:

(Earlier working title: "The Jesuit Relations Remastered: A Sound-Centred History of Seventeenth-Century New France")

Stealing the Turtle's Voice (2018) aims to bring the oppressed geography or "cosmography" of Turtle Island (Native North America) to the surface of the mainstream along with the sacred history of this forgotten place, submerged beneath European maps and histories for centuries. To this end, the thesis traces the development of the Western harmonic tradition and the subsequent mythical “narrative of conquest” that has dominated “the master record” of history; a narrative in which the sounds of Christian European modernity completely drowned out and destroyed the primitive “howling wilderness” of Native North America and in which the so-called “vanishing Indian” was also a silenced Indian. The thesis then seeks to listen below this “white noise” and to turn up the volume on the Algonquian-Iroquoian rhythmic tradition in order to “remaster the record.” The result is a story, not merely of conquest and destruction but of Turtle Island’s sustained sonic sovereignty and recreation via sound-based neurodecolonisation. As an aural history, the thesis draws on musicology, psychoacoustics, anthropology, linguistics, and archaeoacoustics to generate a narrative that simultaneously spans, in a material sense, from pre-contact to the present-day Powwow and, in a spiritual sense, from creation to recreation.

Ovaj esej osvetljava dva čuvena soneta koji se na specifičan način bave pitanjem čulnosti, odnosno zasnivanjem veze pesničkog jezika i čulnih fenomena. I jedan i drugi zauzimaju povlašćeno interpretativno mesto kada je poezija navedenih pesnika u pitanju, budući da je njihovo stvarlaštvo najčešće tumačeno upravo na osnovu iskaza datih u ovim sonetima. Kada je Bodler u pitanju „Saglasja“ navodno izražavaju specifičnu veru u dubinsko jedinstvo čoveka i prirode, kome se može pristupiti putem niza čulnih signifikacija koje međusobno odjekuju jedna u drugoj, dokazujući da je dato jedinstvo stvarno. Remboov sonet „Samoglasnici“ sa druge strane teško može da se uklopi u ovakvu viziju sveta, iako se to često pokušava, budući da centralno mesto u njemu zauzima upravo razlika a ne jedinstvo. Remboov se sonet u tom smislu čita kao produžetak, ali istovremeno i razaranje Bodlerove poetičke pretpostavke.

This essay outlines where the history of animals is now, and suggests where it and the historiographical issues
raised by the inclusion of animals in a study of the past might go in the future. The essay traces shifts in the idea
that animals recorded in textual documentation are always and only human representations, looks at the potential
for animals to be historical agents and at the questions of animal agency and the possibility of recovering an
animal’s point of view in historical work using the findings of animal welfare science. It also engages with the nature
of the documents available to historians of animals, and uses some contemporary theoretical work—particularly
that of Vinciane Despret—to think about new ways of engaging with the intraspecific and interspecific encounters
of animals and humans in history.

In the North American fur trade, food and clothing were among the most frequently exchanged material, serving both as necessities of life and expressions of identity. Not only were materials exchanged but new fashions and tastes developed among fur traders and First Nations across North America from the 1600s to the early 1800s. This article examines these two realms of material culture through the link of sensory history, suggesting that they were central to the experiences of the fur trade and indicate patterns of cultural exchange and reciprocity. Dress and diet were key signposts of identity and markers of difference, yet patterns of material exchanges during the expansion of the North American fur trade produced hybrid styles in both clothing and food that were geographically widespread. Examining material culture through a sensory history approach reveals new understandings of the adaptations that shaped the fur trade.

Promotor: Barbara Baert. Dit proefschrift kwam tot stand binnen het kader van Ornamenta sacra. Iconologische studie van het liturgische erfgoed uit de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400-1700), een Brain-Belspo project tussen UCL, KU Leuven en KIK-IRPA Brussel.

The 1900 World's Fair was the beginning of a new phase in the organization of international exhibitions. The Paris fair saw the culmination of a process that progressively transformed exhibitions from specialist fairs for the presentation of industrial innovations before a professional audience into recreational spaces for the amusement of much wider sectors of the population. This metamorphosis crystallized in the proliferation of technologically sophisticated attractions, such as the Théâtroscope, the Cinématophone, or the Panorama du Tour du Monde, aimed at seducing the spectator through the stimulation of the senses. These attractions included the ship-shaped Maréorama, which simulated a half an hour long trip along the Mediterranean with different illusions directed at all five senses simultaneously. In this article I shall make use of abundant documentary evidence to propose a reading of the Maréorama and its significant sensorial component. To this end, I shall reconstruct the functional operation of the attraction in detail, pointing out how it differs from similar devices built in the same period in the tradition of panoramatic objects. I shall also incorporate the perspective of its creator, the painter Hugo d'Alési, through the expectations he had of the attraction and its reception by the media. In a wider context, the article aims to clarify the role of the Maréorama in our understanding of the part played by the senses in the experience of modernity.

This chapter argues that the sensory, corporeal, and spatial practices of desert ascetics transmuted into a technique of Christian imperialism in the later Roman Empire. It is divided into two sections: ‘Fortress of the Ascetic Body’ and ‘Spatial Practice of the Ascetic Body’. The first section surveys ways in which the Christian body vanquished its classical counterpart through sensory, material, and spatial techniques. The second part of the chapter applies the corporeal theory established in the first section to build the architecture of the ascetic body, a new direction for scholarship in the field. The essay concludes by suggesting methods through which the material, sensory, and architectural world of late ancient asceticism travelled across the Alps to the monasteries of the early medieval North, where the ideal of the desert became part of the everyday experience of monks.

Waarom durfden de Antwerpenaren op zomerdagen hun kathedraal niet in?
Beschermde wierook echt tegen de pest?
En wat waren de drie vrouwen van plan die afgehakte vingers onder het altaar verstopten?

Wendy Wauters laat je 16de-eeuws Antwerpen ontdekken op geheel unieke wijze, met name door de ogen, oren en neus van de mensen van toen. Het kloppende hart van de stad was de kathedraal, waar diepgelovige parochianen het pad kruisten met koekenbakkers, hondenslagers en veehandelaars. Niet meteen wat je van een religieuze ruimte verwacht? Wacht tot je leest over het gekmakende heen-en-weer-geloop bij de tientallen zijaltaren, terwijl de lijkgeur uit de grafputten opsteeg.

Dit boek is een duizelingwekkende zintuiglijke ervaring en biedt een totaal nieuwe kijk op de gloriejaren van Antwerpen. Het laatste hoofdstuk sleurt je zelfs mee naar 20 augustus 1566, die fatale zomerdag waarop ook de Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal ten prooi viel aan de Beeldenstorm.
https://www.lannoo.be/nl/de-geuren-van-de-kathedraal

Approaching tobacco from the perspective of users, producers, and objectors, Smoking under the Tsars provides an unparalleled view of Russia’s early adoption of smoking. Tricia Starks introduces us to the addictive, nicotine-soaked Russian version of the cigarette—the
papirosa—and the sensory, medical, social, cultural, and gendered
consequences of this unique style of tobacco use.

Kriegslärm und seine Wirkungen auf die ‚Akteure‘ sind für die Antike ein noch ungenutzter Betrachtungsgegenstand. „Sensory History“ darf als innovativer Beitrag zur Geschichtswissenschaft insgesamt gelten. Schlachtbeschreibungen thematisieren Sinneseindrücke aller Art: Die Geräusche des Krieges gehören zu den lautesten, die sich in der Menschheitsgeschichte finden lassen, der Kampf war eine multisensorische Angelegenheit mit Geschrei und Musik. Im Beitrag soll die Aufmerksamkeit auf diese Phänomene und ihre literarische Verarbeitung gelegt werden. Was bedeuteten Geräusche und Eindrücke des Krieges für die Beteiligten? Die in der Antike verbreitete Auffassung, dass „in jeder Schlacht zuerst die Augen erliegen würden“ (Tac. Germ. 43,5), ist zu relativieren! Die Kakophonie der Schlacht blieb nicht ohne Wirkung: sie bedeutete terror und konnte Menschen paralysieren!

engagement with recent evidence from arguably the most famous Roman sacred grove, that of Diana at Nemi where pilgrims hung offerings from branches and from where the now infamous myth of the rex Nemorensis and the so-called “golden bough” originates. This is perhaps a consequence of Hunt’s emphasis on the power of trees in the imagination, rather than in lived experience. There is also a tendency at times to over-emphasize the significance of observations derived from one tree or one case study, and to extend these uncritically to “the Roman imagination,” “Roman thinking,” “Roman thinkers,” and “the Roman world” when it is not always clear that this wider application is sustainable. Despite this, however, the book demands to be read by anyone serious about “reviving Roman religion.”

Lange vor der Einrichtung von Umweltzonen war die Luft ein Gegenstand städtischer Politik. Meist ging es um die Bekämpfung von Gerüchen, die als gefährlich oder unangenehm empfunden wurden. Solche Verunreinigungen konnte man riechen, nicht aber das Element Luft, das nach der Lehre von den vier Elementen nicht unvermischt auf der Erde vorhanden war. Dennoch prägte die Vorstellung von der Geruchlosigkeit reiner Luft langfristig die Erwartungen und das Handeln der Menschen. Der Aufsatz spürt dieser Kontinuität über den Wandel der Wahrnehmungsgewohnheiten und des Sprechens über Gerüche hinweg nach.

In this article the problem of perception is highlighted from a philosophical, physiological and psychological point of view. The essay (second update) is followed by a list of publications, journals and websites about perception. The author would be delighted to receive comments. He can be contacted at j[underscore]kuijper[at]online[dot]nl.

This study examines sonic legislation that was increasingly enacted in and around women's institutions (convents, charity homes, and reform houses) in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Florence. Monitoring the sounds cloistered women made and heard was considered key to reform, the maintenance of social status, and the advancement of bodily/spiritual purity. Efforts to regulate urban sounds were rooted in the belief that sound was a physical force that acted on the body and soul with direct health implications. Sound, silence, and noise were formative agents. Yet sonic regulation was difficult to apply in any absolute sense, as Florentines on both sides of the cloister crafted dynamic urban soundscapes composed of multiple registers. Examining the links between sound, gender, health, and space, this paper reveals how preoccupations with noise and silence had profound implications in the early modern city.

In this essay I will deal with the way in which the sensible is structured in “The Love Poem of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, one of his seminal early poems. The proposed approach is interdisciplinary, based on the conceptions of the history of the senses, as well as the works of Jacques Rancière, and his conception of the distribution of the sensible. In the first step I will examine the relationship of different fields of sensory experience in an attempt to identify the main sensory complexes. I will then proceed to interpret the sensory interactions presented in the poem, taking place between the speaker and his unnamed interlocutor, his social group, and the perceived universe, through which he offers a basis for a construction of the specific understanding of the sensible. Finally I will interpret the implications, both metaphysical and poetical, of this understanding, in an attempt to show how Eliot’s early poetry, and the said poem in particular, forms in reaction to the processes of the upcoming modernity.
Keywords: essence, appearance, senses, modernity, poetry

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Sinnes- und Emotionsgeschichte der atomaren Bedrohung im Kalten Krieg. Das Augenmerk der Literatur galt bislang visuellen Repräsentationen von Feuerbällen, Atompilzen und Ruinen von Städten, die staatlicherseits zur emotionalen Kontrolle der Bevölkerung instrumentalisiert wurden. Allzu schnell wird bei diesem Fokus auf zirkulierende Bilder der Bombe jedoch vergessen, dass das nukleare Zeitalter auch reale Bauten hervorgebracht hat, die nicht nur den Sehsinn, sondern das gesamte körperliche Sensorium der Menschen qua materiellem Schutz gegen Nuklearwaffen miteinbezog. Anhand wissenschaftlicher Studien zum Leben in Atomschutzräumen in der Schweiz zeigt der Beitrag, dass im „radikalen Zeitalter“ durchaus alle Sinne einem staatlichen Zugriff unterworfen waren. Übergeordnete Zielsetzung der in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren durchgeführten Laborstudien war es, die Denk- und Gefühlswelten der Schweizer durch die Modulierung der sensorischen Umweltstressoren im Bunker zu steuern. Emotionale und multisensorische Geographien waren im Kalten Krieg aufs engste miteinander verwoben. Der schweizerische Staat verschrieb sich einer sensory politics, die eine auf das Sehen ebenso wie die haptischen, olfaktorischen und akustischen Wahrnehmung zielende Regulierung der Sinne umfasste, um dozile Bürger und eine schweizerische „bomb-proof society“ herzustellen.
***
Cette contribution traite de l’histoire des sens et des émotions dans le cadre de la menace nucléaire durant la Guerre Froide. Pour la plupart des gens, la menace de «la Bombe» qui structurait l’antagonisme systémique entre les blocs était très difficile à appréhender de manière sensorielle. La littérature à ce sujet se focalisait presque exclusivement sur des images et des films représentant des champignons atomiques, des boules de feu ou encore des villes en ruines, autant d’images qui étaient instrumentalisées de manière répétée par l’Etat à des fins de contrôle émotionnel des populations. Cette focalisation sur la dimension visuelle de la Bombe contribuait le plus souvent à faire oublier que le conflit Est­Ouest avait suscité la construction de structures dont le but était justement d’offrir une protection matérielle et sensorielle la plus large possible contre la bombe atomique: les fallout shelters ou bunkers anti-atomiques. En se basant sur des études scientifiques analysant les conditions de vie dans les bunkers en Suisse, cette contribution souligne que tous les sens étaient soumis durant la Guerre Froide au regard inquisiteur de l’Etat. En effet, les expériences de laboratoire menées durant les années 1960 et 1970 visaient principalement à orienter les univers sensoriels et cognitifs des Suissesses et des Suisses par le biais d’une modulation des expériences haptiques, olfactives et visuelles à l’intérieur des bunkers. L’Etat fédéral développait ainsi de véritables sensory politics dont le but était de produire des citoyen·ne·s dociles et, autant que possible, une bomb­proof society.

This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also—and inseparably—asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so frequently goes without comment in historical (as in other humanities) scholarship. Using work from historiography, sensory history, social history, anthropology, and contemporary animal science, the article proposes that introducing animals as actors and not just as objects into historical work will not only broaden and deepen what we might know about the past, it will also challenge some assumptions as to what the focus of our discipline might be.

U ovom se eseju analizira način na koji se simbolički poredak upisuje u polje čulnosti u drami Maska Miloša Crnjanskog. Pristup je interdiscipinaran i zasniva se na koncepcijama istorije čulnosti i psihoanalitičkoj teoriji Žaka Lakana. Kroz analizu komada identifikuju se dva suprotstavljena režima čulnosti, od kojih prvi, kao režim povlašćenih, zastupa lik generalice, a drugi, kao sumatraistički režim, lik Branka Radičevića. Posebno značajna za analizu je ambivalentna pozicija generalice, koja istovremeno predstavlja subverzivnu i stabilizujuću silu unutar poretka. Razrešenju komada, romantičnom susretu generalice i Čezarea, pristupa se istovremeno sa pozicija „imaginarnog“, u kome je savršena zajednica moguća, i „realnog“, u kome je ona puka obmana. Na ovaj se način imaginarno/umetnost pokazuje kao jedno od osnovnih oruđa poretka. Drama se u skladu sa time razumeva kao kritika ideologije, njeno razotkrivanje i potkopavanje.

In early ninth century, the mid-Tang poet Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779 – 831) wrote the following verses, describing the change of smellscape in the Tang capitals with the arrival of the cultural other: ‘Ever since foreign horsemen began raising dust and dirt,/ Fur and fleece, rank and rancid, have filled Xian and Luo.’ Tang poets were vocal when they were moaning about offensive smells of foreign people and places. And they were not the only ones. Similar accounts can be found in anecdotes and medical treatises from the medieval period.

This talk explores the rationale behind the proliferation of such discourse of the so-called ‘barbarian odour’ in medieval China. Through a close examination of olfactory representations of the cultural other, I argue that these were cultural perceptions shaped by both concerns about cultural boundaries and a long tradition of associating odours with moral values. By looking at this particular olfactory motif, I aim to demonstrate how the olfactory reveals about the medieval Chinese perceptions and imagination about the surrounding world.

For courting couples in Georgian England, sensory interaction with objects from perfume bottles to portrait miniatures constituted an indispensable part of falling in love. Such objects acquired meaning through inscribed messages, their design and material properties, and the ways in which they were given, received and used by lovers. By examining rituals of gazing at, touching and smelling love tokens, this paper aims to reveal how sensory interaction with gifts worked to produce, focus and intensify romantic emotions during periods of separation between lovers.

The paper combines extant objects such as stay busks and eye miniatures with textual representations of gifts in letters and novels, and visual depictions in paintings and prints, in order to recreate fully the emotional and material dimensions of exchange. Exploring the emotional meanings of love tokens reveals that gifts did more than simply chart progress towards the altar. Such tokens introduced new ways of behaving for courting couples, as lovers touched, smelled and kissed items from letters to locks of hair to allow the tactile distance between them to be bridged.

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.” In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.

Verkehrsnöte Rhythmus, Taktungund Störungen des Essener Straßenbahnverkehrswährend des ErstenW eltkriegs English abstract: Verkehrsnot-Traffic Emergency.R hythm, Scheduling and Disturbances in Tramway Traffic in Essen During WWI. Mobilityand urban traffic are polyrhythmic constellations which redefine the conditions of time and space in cities. ReferringtotramwaysinEssen,amajor industrial city in the Ruhr district before and duringt he First World War, the article sounds out the relations of traffic, vehicles, consumers and urban space. Technicalrhythms of mobilitypoint to the power relations thatmake social space. The term 'Verkehrsnot' refers to the manner in which spacei st emporallys tructured, clocked and organized by repetition and interruption. The analysis of rhythms supports the attempt to lay open the social and technical conditions of communication. Einleitung