The Sensational Past
How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch—as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today.
Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing “flea”-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense.
As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time.
The Sensational Past focuses on the ways in which small, peculiar, and seemingly unimportant facts open up new ways of thinking about the past. You will explore the sensory worlds of the Enlightenment, learning how people in the past used their senses, understood their bodies, and experienced the rapidly shifting world around them.
In this smart and witty work, Purnell reminds us of the value of daily life and the power of the smallest aspects of existence using culinary history, fashion, medicine, music, and many other aspects of Enlightenment life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Purnell, visiting assistant professor of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology, thoroughly yet lightheartedly explores the sensory theories of Europe's 18th-century intelligentsia and how these ideas influenced culture, lived experience, and scientific endeavors of the time. Purnell finds an emblematic juxtaposition of concern and cruelty in the ways in which Enlightenment philosophes analyzed the senses, noting such examples as the Marquis de Sade's fascination with intense pain, the founding of the first schools for the blind, and the use of a "cat piano" to help relieve depression. She also delves into the ways the physical senses could lead to increased social differences, as with gastronomes advocating both a "love of food" and a "form of elitism." The use of color in clothing and furnishings accentuated class distinction, and smells as from perfumed soaps or their lack could help reinforce social status. Purnell shows that many modern attitudes were formed during the Enlightenment, including theories of "physical perfectibility" and a much-theorized reliance on visual communication and metaphor. As Purnell enlightens readers on the origin of the word "restaurant" or the medical reasons to "blow smoke up one's ass," she reveals the many subtle ways we make sense of our world.
