Could there be a better time to publish a book aiming to restore the importance of smell — for too long overshadowed by its siblings sight and touch, argues eminent French historian Robert Muchembled — than during a global pandemic that sees many sufferers temporarily lose theirs, and come to appreciate it afresh?
Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times in fact found its catalyst in 2014’s scientific finding — now debunked — that our noses are able to detect over a trillion scents. True or not, it raised the organ’s profile. But for our author, smell-obsessed for more than 30 years, “science without consciousness of the past is but the ruin of the soul”.
With scatological relish, academic diligence, a nose for brilliantly weird factoids, and a very great fondness for lists and tallies, Muchembled’s mission is to balance the science of smell with a cultural contextualisation of its value, as it evolved from the Renaissance to the early 19th century. It’s a genre he’s well accustomed to, having written numerous books interpreting the past through the prism of subjects including the devil, violence and orgasms.
From a clear position of accepting that good and bad smells are learnt, not innate (“It takes four or five years at least for European children . . . to construct disgust at their own excrement”, he reiterates several times), he also sets out to explore Europe’s current olfactory status quo. Why don’t we, in 21st-century “civilised” society, for example, love the smell of our own defecations and farts — as Muchembled cites Montaigne and Erasmus having done?
Chapter two dives right into the muck, with stories of 16th-century Paris as a veritable urban Pyrenees of poo — each a stinky status symbol: “the size of the dung heap outside a peasant’s door was a visible sign of wealth”, and valuable currency — sold by the “night soil man” for, among other things, beauty treatments. Put simply, because the smell was everywhere, you had to live with it. But not only was this stench pervasive, it was enjoyed — the source of much humour, for everyone from Bruegel to Marguerite de Navarre, until the killjoy 17th-century moralists put a stop to Rabelaisian scatology.
Centuries of plague also stimulated a significant shift; smell became a pawn in church propaganda thanks to Catholic counter-Reformation zeal, and the sulphurous, fetid stench of the ill came to be aligned with the “putrid odour” of the devil. In parallel, “fighting fire with fire” remedies included sticking your head over a latrine, and wearing gloves and pomanders infused with bestial scents of civet, musk and ambergris.
In his examination of smell as a tool of social repression, Muchembled gets into his stride — particularly when it comes to women. He argues that the 16th and 17th centuries kept women in check by perpetuating the idea — via poems, gutter press and loose talk — that they smelled worse than men. Menstruating, post-menopausal, sexually active or ugly, every state of womanhood had its own coarsely articulated malodour, he asserts; a situation that caused women to become “convinced of their own inferiority, and ashamed of their own nature”. He makes a brilliantly convincing case for smell as stealth weapon in the subjugation of vulnerable classes.
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Muchembled’s is a vivid, intense and provocative gallop through early modern times. There’s probably too much defecation for most tastes, and while some fart jokes are laugh-out-loud, a lengthy chapter devoted to them feels like being locked in a boys’ boarding school dorm.
Stopping at the 19th century also seems to be cutting off Smell’s nose to spite its face, especially given the tantalising titbits the author offers from the present day. Too many lines of thought end too abruptly, not least the narratives around the social implications of smell, which would have had a brilliant corollary in the fragrant class divides of this year’s Oscar-winning film Parasite. Which is a shame, as there’s little here to turn your nose up at.
Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times, by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford, Polity, RRP£17.99, 260 pages
Beatrice Hodgkin is the deputy editor of How To Spend It
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