The scholarly context: turning towards the material and the sensory

Over the last thirty years or so an increasing amount of historical work has focused on the senses and the emotions, mirroring a general turn towards the senses across the arts, humanities and social sciences.⁷ In history this trend has emerged – largely but not exclusively – from a concern with the linguistic turn’s focus on discourse.⁸ Instead of a world full of texts, historians have begun to argue for a return to ‘lived experience’ – a tendency apparent not just in histories of feeling but in studies of material culture.⁹

This shift is mirrored in our pedagogic practice as well. In particular, material culture of all sorts has become increasingly integral to the way many of us teach, whether through direct engagement with material stuff or through the more mediated access to objects provided by the museum display or the photographic image. The popularity of resources such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, the Old Bailey Online and the digitised Burney Newspapers has put increased pressure on eighteenth-century-ists to also give access to – or at least emphasise the importance of – the material text when discussing primary material with students.

In recent years we have also seen the emphasis on the consumption, materiality and production of stuff in eighteenth-century history grow stronger than ever. We have far more knowledge of how shopping was negotiated than when a ‘consumer revolution’ was first identified in the 1980s. How things were made, how processes of production contributed to the meanings of things and how bodies, spaces and objects acted on each other have all been the focus of work in the last twenty years. So, in this context, it should make sense to integrate materiality further into our teaching and, in doing so, make room for the senses through which the material world was mediated.

There are, of course, other reasons for us to interrogate and deploy the senses in our learning that go beyond shifts in historical practice, teaching and scholarship. Increasing criticism has been mounted against scholarship that separates the senses into discrete learning styles.¹⁰ Using the sense of smell in a teaching and museums context has been shown to aid the retention of memories and experience, diversify access and promote the well-being of learners.¹¹ We are only just beginning to get to grips with how the senses might be deployed critically in the classroom. But the work that does exist suggests that there are additional benefits to be derived from a multi-sensory pedagogic practice.

However, here we have to recognise that there is an ongoing debate within sensory history about how we – as teachers and researchers – should use our senses (or not, as the case may be). On the one hand, we have scholars who believe that we can, with varying degrees of accuracy, conjure precisely what it was like to hear, smell or taste the past.¹² On the other hand, we have individuals who are profoundly sceptical of any attempt to recreate the feelings of other periods or peoples.¹³ According to this latter perspective, the very idea that the senses are historical militates against any attempt for us to engage sensorially with the past in the present. Both our own sensory habits, built up through twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms of education and experience, and the changed sense-scapes in which we exist mean that we can never come close to recapturing what it was like to experience the sensory past.

There are scholars who have walked the valley between these two opposing hills. One set contains those interested in physical space: for example, trying to figure out how far George Whitefield’s preaching voice might have reached in a crowded street.¹⁴ Rather than claiming to reconstruct how the past felt, these are attempts to reconstruct the affordances for smells and sounds offered by material environments. But another, middling, tendency has been to pay closer attention to sensing as a learnt, acquired, practice that is developed over time. The best recent work on the senses in eighteenth-century studies has done this.¹⁵ From texts and material culture we can attempt to read back to these sensory practices.

Crucially, this work does not necessarily claim that we can reconstruct how the past ‘felt’.¹⁶ In fact, by attending to habits acquired over time, this scholarship highlights a roadblock on the path to ‘feeling’ the past – our own learned sensory habits as teachers and those of our students.¹⁷ Our inability to unlearn the sensory baggage we have acquired in our own lives means that the type of embodiment thus produced will never be in complete sensorial simpatico with the past.¹⁸ But this is not just a lament. We can turn this awareness of complexity to our advantage. What the senses can do in the classroom is teach us about how people in the past learnt to perceive their worlds. Many of the fields of knowledge that historians are interested in, from medicine and food to engineering and knitting, have relied on forms of sensory education and continue to do so in the present.¹⁹ In doing so we can explore both the distancing differences and intimate similarities between our own sensory worlds and those of the past.

Sensing in practice

So let us consider some examples of how this might work in practice. Several examples I will now discuss come from a module for final-year undergraduate students on ‘Food in Early Modern Society’, which examined food – principally in Britain – from 1500 to 1800. The second seminar, after an introductory week on methodology and interdisciplinary approaches to food, took the students on a journey through understandings of food and taste in medicine across the period covered by the module. It centred principally on dietetics – first the humoralism dominant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and indeed still apparent long into the eighteenth century – and secondly the rise of iatromechanical dietetics associated with figures such as William Cheyne in the eighteenth century.²⁰ In preparation students were asked to read some extracts from a range of works on regimen and some letters from doctors to their eighteenth-century patients.

After a lecture in which we introduced the key changes in the relationship between medicine and food, the seminar aimed to do two things. Firstly, I wanted students to understand how early modern individuals used their senses to understand the potential effects of foods on their bodies. I wanted students to get how heat, cold, moisture and dryness could be detected in foods; how links were formed between sensory impressions and qualities. I wanted them to understand the kind of broader analogical reasoning that could be found in eighteenth-century culture; the idea that roast beef makes one stubborn, strong, bloody and blunt.²¹ Secondly, I wanted them to understand what it meant to be ‘your own’ doctor in the early modern period – and how this related to the more diffuse distribution of expertise about the body – including diet – that we find in the era before medical ‘professionalisation’ and the clinic.²² At the end of the seminar students needed to go away with a feeling for how the senses were trained to recognise what was good or bad for you. They also needed to understand how, for fashionable eighteenth-century physicians, the exertion of authority over a patient’s diet was often a matter of trying to educate them in and out of their senses. More broadly, I wanted students to understand how this might be similar – or different – to our current sensorial relationship with food.

To do this, the seminar focused around tasting a range of foods and drinks. Cheese, bread, cold meats, fresh herbs, spices, vegetables, fruits, milk, wine and some other food and drinks were set out on a table. Students were given some descriptions of different constitutions – largely based around humoral ones taken from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. They were encouraged to identify how they would describe their own constitution by reference to these. Once they had done this, they were asked to fill a plate with items they felt would be ‘good’ for them and explain why – particularly referring to the smell, taste, appearance and feel of the foods.

The students were then encouraged to make a second plate. This time they were given an early eighteenth-century ‘identity’. These identities contained a number of things – occupations, the place where they lived, gender, nationality and so on. The students then had to explain – based on their reading, the lecture and discussion thus far in the seminar – why they had put together the second plate and how it matched up to their given identities. Finally, the students were asked how these plates might have differed if their doctor was William Cheyne and he was applying his own principles of regimen to them. Students were paired up – one had to take on the role of the patient, the other had to embody Cheyne. The Cheynes were then tasked with making their iatromechanical theories seem common sense by reference to the qualities of the food arrayed on the table.

This series of tasks offered students the opportunity to effectively put seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical thought into practice. Firstly, it denaturalised their own senses by getting them to approach their own relationship to food through a different perceptual schema. As experiments with contemporary sensory panels have shown, we might describe the same material that was used by early modern medical practitioners in very different ways today – drawing on a rich vocabulary of sensory comparison that invokes other scents or tastes that would have been unfamiliar to a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century individual.²³ The session gave students the opportunity to explore that experiential gap.

Secondly, in learning how to sense like an early modern gentleman, gentlewoman or physician, students were exploring how connections could be created between regimen texts, doctors’ advice and the evidence of the senses, and how they could then articulate those connections. In other words, they were learning about how people learnt to sense – rather than directly re-enacting past experiences or re-embodying the feelings of past actors. Finally, by developing an eighteenth-century sensory identity for the second plate, only to be confronted with Cheyne’s prescriptions for the final plate of the seminar, students were introduced to a key problematic in eighteenth-century dietetics – in a world where the patient’s senses and embodied instincts were taken seriously, how did physicians make claims to medical authority and how could they use the exterior qualities of foods to make claims about their interior bodily effects?²⁴ To do this effectively, students had to work from the perspective of eighteenth-century sensory dispositions – patients of different types as well as physicians.

Perhaps the most pleasing part of this was that the students closed the circle I was creating in the seminar before I had to – they began to reflect on the distinctions between early modern ideas about food and the body and our contemporary fascination with invisible chemical constituents such as calories – they were interrogating contemporary notions that they might otherwise accept as ‘common sense’.²⁵ By inhabiting a different sensory perspective, the students learnt something about their own day-to-day sensory practices. They thereby learn about the distance that separated their own senses from those of past subjects.

These activities also opened a conversation about the role of race, colonialism and imperialism in the maintenance of eighteenth-century sensory practices. Western academic traditions of knowledge production have, since the seventeenth century, ‘conceived of the senses as necessary evils, indispensable but treacherous vehicles to be sorted out or unmasked’.²⁶ The same period that saw the emergence of new fields of knowledge and, latterly, academic disciplines in the West also saw attempts to match hierarchies of the senses to racial and cultural hierarchies. From Aristotle to the present, philosophers, medics and cultural critics have placed the senses into hierarchies – ordering them in terms of their utility, objectivity and stability. In the era of European expansion and settler colonialism these were mapped onto racialised hierarchies. This dismissal of certain ways of knowing the world – especially those beyond hearing and seeing – has been described as a form of ‘epistemicide’. As Andrew Kettler’s work has shown, Europeans in North America consistently emphasised the sagacious sensitivity possessed by indigenous noses. On the peripheries of empire, French Jesuits and Anglo-American naturalists both used their noses and the olfactory knowledge of Native Americans to seek out sustenance and saleable commodities. Yet in the European metropole this olfactory knowledge was de-emphasised in visual tabulations of botanical knowledge or treated with a degree of suspicion.²⁷

Teaching through the senses offers an opportunity re-engage with the sensory habits that have been lost to practices of epistemicide or self-congratulatory histories of European ‘improvement’ of indigenous practices. One of the sample foods we smelled in our class was therefore chocolate. As historians have shown, the idea that Europeans adapted the scent and taste of chocolate to their own sensibilities, replacing spices with sugar, is largely untrue. Europeans in fact sought to recreate the indigenous experience of chocolate consumption, along with vanilla, pepper and foamy froth.²⁸ Students drew out the contemporary smell and taste profile of the average bar of milk chocolate consumed in contemporary Europe, with its soft, milky, rich and slightly cloying scent. This was then compared with a reproduction of early modern drinking chocolate, which included the spices that Europeans had in fact eagerly added in a recreation of the original indigenous drink. This led to an exploration of how Europeans often co-opted indigenous olfactory and culinary practices, altering their own palates to reflect the new consumables that they were importing. Rather than presumptions about how Europeans ‘improved’ the smell and taste of chocolate, students left the class with a sense of the hidden archives of indigenous sensing embedded in early modernity’s new consumables.

Learning about how we learn to perceive – stepping outside our senses – is a crucial, perhaps radical, pedagogical tool. Early innovators in sensory studies often taught their students how to feel – for example, Raymond Murray Schafer, inventor of the term ‘soundscape’, who taught his students through a regime of ‘ear cleaning’ that privileged the sounds of nature over modern noise.²⁹ However, we want to teach students to sense critically, picking apart such normative sensory claims, rather than sense correctly according to a pre-ordained standard of ‘good’ or ‘natural’ sensory stimuli. Instead of teaching students how to feel, or how the past felt, we can teach them how people learnt to feel. This resonates with eighteenth-century pedagogic practice, which placed great emphasis on the senses.³⁰ In museums and collections knowledge was often consumed (quite literally in the case of specimens in the Royal Society and Ashmolean) through the senses.³¹

But these teaching methods also develop the capacity of students to lend a far more critical eye, ear, nose, tongue and touch to the world around them today. They are not discovering how people learnt to feel but they are developing their own ability to critique and understand their own subjectivities. They are learning about how they have learnt to feel and what they have learnt to feel. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s discussion of Geneviève Teil’s ethnography of perfumery trainees, we might describe this as a process of ‘articulation’. In the course of training with kits of scents, perfumers are said to ‘gain’ or ‘become’ a nose. In the same way, encouraging our students to learn about the past through scent causes them to gain access to the senses of the past and greater understanding of their own senses. As Latour goes on to suggest, ‘the more contrasts you add, the more differences and mediations you become sensible to’.³²

We can see this process of articulation – in which both students’ own sensory habits and those of past actors emerge into view – in a second example from the module on early modern histories of food. Trying to get students to understand the different conditions in which food was bought and sold in the eighteenth century, I gave my students a guide to sensory ethnography. This equipped them with a guide on observation as an ethnographic method for understanding both sensory atmospheres and the modes of sensing that occur within them.³³ I then provided my students with a range of source materials that were also to be read in preparation for that week’s seminar. These sources were a set of excerpts on shopping from eighteenth-century housekeeping manuals, which often focused on ways of assessing quality and freshness.³⁴ When it came to the seminar, we spent the first half performing a sensory ethnography of Anglia Ruskin University’s canteen. We then discussed the key aspects of the canteen that the students had noticed: the way the food was displayed; how people were expected to interact with the space; the acoustics of the room; and even the relationship between the smellscape and soundscape of the canteen and rooms around it.

I then asked the students to apply the same ethnographic methods that they had read about to the historical texts they had been asked to read. In particular, I asked them to consider how useful these sources were as a guide to the sensory experience of shopping in the eighteenth century. In discussing this question, the students explored what these sources might have missed and what other materials we might need to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about the sensory experience of buying and consuming. But this also opened out into a far more interesting and important discussion about what sensory information does or does not make its way into our historical sources. We asked: how does sensing get converted into text – and how might that have differed in the eighteenth century? By moving from contemporary ethnography using their own senses to the eighteenth-century source material, the students were better equipped to think through these questions and about how sensory dispositions and habits might filter what does or does not make it into texts. But we also discussed the way in which these books were themselves used as tools for articulating eighteenth-century servants’ or housewives’ relationship to the sense-scape of shopping.

This led to a discussion about the kinds of tacit knowledge that could not be written down but only acquired through practical, hands-on experience. One of the great benefits of deploying sensory pedagogy is that by enlivening sources and putting them into action, we acquire a better knowledge of the gaps in knowledge or technique that had to be filled in by the user of a text. Recipe books and household manuals are a great eighteenth-century case study, but the same applies to more modern audio-visual sources. For example, in a course on modern American media at Stanford, Kristen Haring asked her students to watch Julia Child’s highly popular 1960s and 1970s cookery show The French Chef before asking them to recreate the recipes in a kitchen using their notes. In doing so, the students were able to understand the ways in which Child and the televisual medium made cooking accessible for 1960s Americans.³⁵

A final example of how this articulation might work in practice comes from my module on sound and technology in the West from the 1500s to the present. One session focused on the relationship between time and sound. A wide-ranging historiography has examined the shifting relationship between the senses and time-telling. While noting that this was undoubtedly a halting and uneven process, even the most revisionist work admits that a shift in time-telling emerged in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as domestic, public and personal timepieces proliferated. An older regime of time in which sound had been absolutely central – with the twinkling bells and clock-born chimes – was slowly joined by an emphasis on the visual elements of time-keeping introduced by clocks and their hands.³⁶

I wanted students to critically engage with the debate over this transformation in time-telling. Was there really a shift from acoustic to visual ways of marking time in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to what extent is that shift still with us today? In order to broach that question, I encouraged my students, once again, to pursue a form of ethnography. I required each student to produce a sound diary, noting down the sounds around them during the course of a normal day. In putting together this diary I wanted my students to explore the extent to which their daily rhythms were indexed against sounds. After a lecture, which examined the relationship between time and sound in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we then compared their diaries with what they had learnt about the early modern period. While the key point I wanted the students to understand was that there was a limit to the sense in which vision ‘replaced’ sound as a mode of time-telling, the ensuing discussion actually brought out a series of other themes: students contrasted the private modes of time-telling embedded in contemporary phones, computers or clocks with the very public or civic time sounded by chimes or bells; they noted the contemporary proliferation of devices that told time such as microwaves, radios and TVs and this opened out into a discussion of other eighteenth-century time-telling tools aside from watches or clocks that included candles or the time it took to say a paternoster. In other words, the diary had helped students to articulate both past and contemporary relationships to time and had encouraged them to recognise the multiple times embedded in different visual, acoustic and material cues.

Conclusion

Using examples in which I deployed smell, taste and sound in the classroom, this chapter has argued that encouraging students to use their senses performs three interlinked roles. Firstly, it denaturalises the senses of students, forcing them to recognise that their own ways of perceiving are the product of both their particular social and cultural contexts and a series of historical changes that have taken place since the eighteenth century. Secondly, students are encouraged to sense differently – to try and understand the particular ways of sensing unique to the eighteenth-century subjects they are reading about and thereby adding material context to texts. Thirdly, and finally, students develop a more critical appreciation of their own sensory subjectivities. The process of learning through the senses, rather than just about the senses, is a route by which students learn to articulate their sensory subject position in relation to both contemporary and past worlds.

This sensory self-awareness should extend to how we treat pedagogical spaces. Sensory history has recently begun to make its influence felt in the history of education, where scholars have paid attention to the sense-scapes of schooling.³⁷ Our classrooms are not the only spaces that both we and students use where specific sensory habits have been encouraged. The relative hush and absence of odours in libraries has a history. Rules about the proper habitus expected of patrons have often been used to exclude people from library spaces.³⁸ The same can be said of museums and galleries. Despite a renaissance of interest in multi-sensory curation, many of the museums that we use in teaching still expect students to embody a nineteenth-century ‘look and don’t touch’ engagement with their spaces rather than a seventeenth-century sensory economy in which all the senses (including eating) were deployed.³⁹ We do not learn in a sensory vacuum and we ought to engage our students more with the sensory history of the spaces in which they learn.

As humanities scholars, our role is not just to provide content or skills but also to create individuals who are able to critically engage with the worlds around them. Art history and visual culture have, for the past few decades, noted the importance of training students to look, notice, attend and judge through the eye. One of the oft-noted justifications for this mission is that most people living in the UK, Europe and North America live in a highly mediatised world in which we interact with and consume visual media almost constantly. However, taste, smell and hearing are no less important. The vast amounts of sensory labour and design that go into our daily lives, from the smell of petrol and the taste of food to the sound of phones or the feel of the fabrics we wear, deserve critical attention. As in the case of visual culture, a humanities (and eighteenth-century studies) that engages all the senses of students will help students to avoid merely skimming the sensory surface in their future lives and careers. It will help to create graduates attuned to the complexity of the sensory world that surrounds and enfolds us, but which we frequently take for granted due to ‘common-sense’ habituation.

Notes

1. 1  Matthew Beare, The Sensorium (Exeter: Sam Farley, 1710), p. 10.

2. 2  See, for example, the introduction and special issue, Manushag N. Powell and Rivka Swenson, ‘Subject Theory and the Sensational Subject’, The Eighteenth Century, 54 no. 2 (2013), 147–51.

3. 3  For a recent overview, see William Tullett, ‘State of the Field: Sensory History’, History, 106 no. 373 (2021), 804–20; for an attempt to plot the future of the field, see Mark Smith, A Sensory History Manifesto (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021).

4. 4  For example, in the form of syrup, see William Buchan, Domestic Medicine (London: A. Strahan and & T. Cadell, 1790), p. 694.

5. 5  Alex Rhys-Taylor, Food and Multiculture: A Sensory Ethnography of East London (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 41–56.

6. 6  Niall Atkinson, ‘Thinking through Noise, Building toward Silence: Creating a Sound Mind and Sound Architecture in the Premodern City’, Grey Room, 60 (2015), 10–35.

7. 7  Although claims of a ‘sensual’ or sensory ‘revolution’ seem overdone, it is a notable outpouring of work. See Michael Bull et al., ‘Introducing Sensory Studies’, The Senses and Society, 1 no. 1 (2006), 5–7.

8. 8  Carolyn Birdsall et al., ‘Forum: The Senses’, German History, 32 no. 2 (2014), 256–73.

9. 9  See the telling references to experience in Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (eds), New Directions in Social and Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

10. 10  C. Morris, ‘Making Sense of Education: Sensory Ethnography and Visual Impairment’, Ethnography and Education, 12 no. 1 (2016), 1–16; F. Coffield et al., Learning Styles and Pedagogy in Post-16 Learning: A Systematic and Critical Review (London: Learning and Research Skills Council, 2004).

11. 11  On memory, see J. P. Aggleton and L. Waskett, ‘The Ability of Odours to Serve as State-Dependent Cues for Real-World Memories: Can Viking Smells Aid the Recall of Viking Experiences?’, British Journal of Psychology, 90 no. 1 (1999), 1–7; on access, see ‘Pilchards Pits and Postcards’ Heritage Lottery Fund, 2015, www.sensorytrust.org.uk/projects/pilchards-pits-postcards.html (accessed 17 April 2023); on well-being, see Helen Chatterjee and Guy Noble, Museums, Health and Well-Being (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 84, 86.

12. 12  Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 12–13.

13. 13  Mark Smith, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History’, Journal of Social History, 40 no. 4 (2007), 841–58.

14. 14  Braxton Boren, ‘Whitfield’s Voice’ in George Whitefield: Life, Context and Legacy, ed. D. Jones and G. Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 167–89.

15. 15  For example, see Serena Dyer, ‘Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England’, History Compass, 12 no. 9 (2014), 694–703; Mark Jenner, ‘Tasting Lichfield, Touching China: Sir John Floyer’s Senses’, The Historical Journal, 53 no. 3 (2010), 647–70.

16. 16  For other ways in which researchers and students can use their senses, see William Tullett, Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

17. 17  The fact that when are in a classroom we are bodies in a physical space seems to have escaped the literature on history pedagogy (outside of work on object-based learning).

18. 18  Mark Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 2–4; Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 10.

19. 19  For examples, see Anna Harris, A Sensory Education (London: Routledge, 2020); Karin Bjisterveld, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

20. 20  The core content was the sort of material discussed in the first three chapters of David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine, and Society, 1450–1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

21. 21  For the longer history of these ideas, see Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

22. 22  See the essays in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

23. 23  Nils-Otto Ahnfelt, Hjalmar Fors and Karin Wendin, ‘Historical Continuity or Different Sensory Worlds? What We Can Learn about the Sensory Characteristics of Early Modern Pharmaceuticals by Taking Them to a Trained Sensory Panel’, Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte, 43 no. 3 (2020), 412–29.

24. 24  For example, see Steven Shapin, ‘Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77 no. 2 (2003), 263–397.

25. 25  A transition described in Steven Shapin, ‘ “You Are What You Eat”: Historical Changes in Ideas about Food and Identity’, Historical Research, 87 no. 237 (2014), 390–91.

26. 26  Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 166.

27. 27  Andrew Kettler, ‘ “Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-century North America’, Journal of American Studies, 50 no. 4 (2016), 827–52; Andrew Kettler, ‘Delightful a Fragrance: Native American Olfactory Aesthetics within the Eighteenth-Century Anglo American Botanical Community’ in Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America, ed. Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 223–54.

28. 28  Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, The American Historical Review, 111 no. 3 (2006), 660–91.

29. 29  Raymond Murray Schafer, Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course (London: Clark & Cruickshank, 1989); for a critique of Schafer’s ‘aesthetic moralism’, see Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

30. 30  Susan C. Lawrence, ‘Educating the Senses: Students, Teachers and Medical Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century London’ in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 153–78; Silvy Chakkalakal, ‘The Child of the Senses: Education and the Concept of Experience in the Eighteenth Century’, The Senses and Society, 41 no. 2 (2019), 148–72.

31. 31  Constance Classen, ‘Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum’, Journal of Social History, 40 no. 4 (2007), 896–914.

32. 32  Bruno Latour, ‘How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies’, Body & Society, 10 nos. 2–3 (2004), 211; for the research on which Latour bases his remarks, see Geneviève Teil, ‘Devenir expert aromaticien: Y a-t-il une place pour le goût dans les goûts alimentaires?’, Revue de sociologie du travail, 4 no. 98 (1998), 503–22.

33. 33  Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (London: Sage, 2015).

34. 34  For an example, see the material covered in William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 43–7.

35. 35  Erin Springsteen, ‘Stanford Humanities Students Cook Up Julia Child’s Recipes, Study History’, Stanford News, 8 April 2016, https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/08/kitchen-french-chef-040616 (accessed 17 April 2023).

36. 36  The best work in this area comes from Nigel Thrift and Paul Glennie, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

37. 37  Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, ‘The Hearing School: An Exploration of Sound and Listening in the Modern School’, International Journal of the History of Education, 47 no. 3 (2011), 323–40; Geert Thyssen, ‘Odorous Childhoods and Scented Worlds of Learning: A Sensory History of Health and Outdoor Education Initiatives in Western Europe (1900s–1960s)’, The Senses and Society, 14 no. 2 (2019), 173–93.

38. 38  Shannon Mattern, ‘Resonant Texts: Sounds of the Contemporary American Public Library’, The Senses & Society, 2 no. 3 (2007), 277–302; Nat Lazakis, ‘ “It Is a Non-Negotiable Order”: Public Libraries’ Body Odor Bans and the Ableist Politics of Purity’, Journal of Radical Librarianship, 6 (2020), 24–52.

39. 39  Classen, ‘Museum Manners’.

References

• Aggleton, J. P. and Waskett, L., ‘The Ability of Odours to Serve as State-Dependent Cues for Real-World Memories: Can Viking Smells Aid the Recall of Viking Experiences?’, British Journal of Psychology, 90 no. 1 (1999), 1–7.
• Ahnfelt, Nils-Otto, Fors, Hjalmar and Wendin, Karin, ‘Historical Continuity or Different Sensory Worlds? What We Can Learn about the Sensory Characteristics of Early Modern Pharmaceuticals by Taking Them to a Trained Sensory Panel’, Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte, 43 no. 3 (2020), 412–29.
• Albala, Ken, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
• Atkinson, Niall, ‘Thinking through Noise, Building toward Silence: Creating a Sound Mind and Sound Architecture in the Premodern City’, Grey Room, 60 (2015), 10–35.
• Beare, Matthew, The Sensorium (Exeter: Sam Farley, 1710).
• Birdsall, Carolyn et al., ‘Forum: The Senses’, German History, 32 no. 2 (2014), 256–73.
• Bjisterveld, Karin, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
• Boren, Braxton, ‘Whitfield’s Voice’ in George Whitefield: Life, Context and Legacy, ed. D. Jones and G. Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 167–89.
• Buchan, William, Domestic Medicine (London: A. Strahan and & T. Cadell, 1790).
• Bull, Michael et al., ‘Introducing Sensory Studies’, The Senses and Society, 1 no. 1 (2006), 5–7.
• Burke, Catherine and Grosvenor, Ian, ‘The Hearing School: an Exploration of Sound and Listening in the Modern School’, International Journal of the History of Education, 47 no. 3 (2011), 323–40.
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