In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical
historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of
smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing
existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people
have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and
engage with both their immediate environments and wider
corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey
demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses,
or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent.
Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies
develop - what cultural anthropologists have termed the
systems that utilize smells to classify people and
objects in ways that define their relations to each
other and their relative values within a particular
culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on
their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens,
whites from people of color, women from men, virgins
from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution
from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to
the global North. Around the world, Reinarz shows,
people used scents to signify individual and group
identity in a morally constructed universe where the
good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. With
chapters including ''Heavenly Scents,'' ''Fragrant
Lucre,'' and ''Odorous Others,'' Reinarz's timely survey
is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one
of our most important but least-understood senses.
Jonathan Reinarz is a professor and Director at the
History of Medicine Unit, School of Medicine, University
of Birmingham (U.K.). He is author of A History of the
Birmingham Teaching Hospitals, 1[zasłonięte]779-19. |
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