Description

Smell is fundamental to the way in which we perceive the world around us, and yet historians have scarcely explored either the smell of the past or pervious attitudes to odors. While art historians have extant material artifacts with which to reconstruct the ‘period eye’, the very evanescence of scent means that prospective historians of smell lack any comparable sources with which to deduce what we might call the ‘period nose’. This paper suggests that one route into the otherwise problematic history of smell is through the study of perfume, the product that, more than any other, was intended to manipulate olfaction. Rather than searching for the birth of ‘modern’ perfumery, I intend here to delineate the changing meanings of perfume during the eighteenth century. Besides treating perfume as an objective physical substance, I will also show how it was a subjective phenomenon tied to contemporary understandings of air and smell. In doing so, I intend to nuance and modify Alain Corbin’s influential account of odor. The central thesis to be advanced in the paper is that, over the course of the eighteenth century, perfume underwent a partial transformation. Before 1700, perfumers touted above all else the medicinal qualities of their products. During the 1700s, however, these purported medicinal qualities changed and were partly superseded by entirely new claims to the effect that perfume was, for men and women alike, a necessary luxury.

Kirsten James is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is provisionally titled “The Science of Scent and Business of Perfume in Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century.”