In England during the period between the 1670s and the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. This book traces that transformation. The role of smell in creating medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell’s emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odours a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them. From paint and perfume to onions and farts, this book highlights the smells that were good for eighteenth-century writers to think with. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, the book demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell’s asocial-sociability, its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society. To trace this shift, the book also breaks new methodological ground. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England makes the case for new ways of thinking about the history of the senses, experience, and the body. Understanding the way past peoples perceived their world involves tracing processes of habituation, sensitization, and attention. These processes help explain which odours entered the archive and why they did so. They force us to recognise that the past was, for those who lived there, not just a place of unmitigated stench

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We present a benchmark in six European languages containing manually annotated information about olfactory situations and events following a FrameNet-like approach. The documents selection covers ten domains of interest to cultural historians in the olfactory domain and includes texts published between 1620 to 1920, allowing a diachronic analysis of smell descriptions. With this work, we aim to foster the development of olfactory information extraction approaches as well as the analysis of changes in smell descriptions over time.

‘What if researchers interested in ‘the past’ used their noses? This open access book makes the case for a more imaginatively interdisciplinary approach to sensory heritage and history, arguing that we can and should engage our noses as a research tool for articulating the past.’ Assessing how both we and our ancestors approach, understand and conceptualise smell, Tullett shows how archives can be ‘re-odorized’ to uncover narratives that are only implicit in or obscured by the historical record. From perfume libraries to organic compounds emitted by historical objects, this book acts as a guide for employing our olfactory senses when researching and studying history in order to understand and communicate the past more fully. Employing ‘olfactory figures’ examples, Smell and the Past shows how historical narratives and arguments can be found through a structured olfactory experience, and demonstrates how our understanding of the past and its relationship with the present is enriched by opening our minds and using our noses. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program project ODEUROPA under grant agreement number 101004469.’