Patrice Tran Ba Huy, ‘Odorat et histoire sociale’, Communications et langages 126 (2000), pp. 84–107. See also Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, and Annick Le Guérer, Les Pouvoirs de l’odeur. Paris: François Bourin, 1998.11 11. Robert Mandrou, Introduction à la France moderne: essai de psychologie historique, 1500–1640. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998 (1st edn 1961), pp. 76, 81.
12 12. Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. New York: William Morrow, 2007, pp. 32–9, 183–6. Italics in the original.
13 13. Ibid., esp. pp. 53, 84, and Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, tr. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage, 1986.
14 14. Herz, Scent of Desire, pp. 33, 149–51; David Le Breton, Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses, tr. Carmen Ruschiensky. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 134 (olfactory bubble), 140 (excrement and urine).
15 15. Gesualdo M. Zucco, Benoist Schaal, Mats Olsson and Ilona Croy, Applied Olfactory Cognition, foreword by Richard J. Stevenson. Frontiers Media, 2014, eBook, p. 15.
16 16. See Danielle Malmberg’s article in Pascal Lardellier (ed.), À fleur de peau: corps, odeurs et parfums. Paris: Belin, 2003.
17 17. Joël Candau, Mémoires et expériences olfactives: anthropologie d’un savoir-faire sensoriel. Paris: PUF, 2000, p. 85.
18 18. Richard L. Doty and E. Leslie Cameron, ‘Sex Differences and Reproductive Hormone Influences on Human Odor Perception’, Physiology and Behavior 97, 25 May 2009, pp. 213–28.
19 19. Herz, Scent of Desire, pp. 149–51.
20 20. Le Guérer, Pouvoirs de l’odeur, pp. 254–60.
21 21. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, pp. 249–50, quoting research by the ethnologist Yvonne Verdier on foresters in the Châtillon region of central-eastern France in the twentieth century. Modern research would certainly seek to apply Freud’s theories to female sexuality. Mauss’s theory is quoted in Lucienne A. Roubin, Le Monde des odeurs: dynamique et fonctions du champ odorant. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989, p. 237.
22 22. Herz, Scent of Desire, pp. 135–6.
23 23. Antonio R. Damasio, Le Sentiment même de soi: corps, émotion, conscience. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999, pp. 60, 83–5, 283.
24 24. Roubin, Monde des odeurs, pp. 186, 206, 210–11, 241, 257, 262, 269.
25 25. Lydie Bodiou and Véronique Mehl (eds.), Odeurs antiques. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011, pp. 80, 173, 223, 228–9, 232–3.
26 26. Lardellier, À fleur de peau, pp. 99, 137.
27 27. Jean de Renou, Le Grand dispensaire médicinal. Contenant cinq livres des institutions pharmaceutiques. Ensemble trois livres de la Matière Médicinale. Avec une pharmacopée, ou Antidotaire fort accompli, tr. Louys de Serres. Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1624, pp. 32–3. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are translated by the translator.
28 28. Jason B. Castro, Arvind Ramanathan and Chakra S. Chennubhotla, ‘Categorical Dimensions of Human Odor Descriptor Space Revealed by Non-Negative Matrix Factorization’, Plos One 18 September 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073289
29 29. ‘Les 10 catégories d’odeurs les plus répandues’, Huffington Post 20 September 2013: http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/09/20/dix-categories-odeur-les-plus-repandues_n_3960728.html
2 A pervasive stench
The good old days are a myth. The towns and villages of Europe stank terribly in days of yore. Since even the most dreadful smells were not necessarily as great a threat to health as the pollution that chokes us today, it is tempting to downplay the impact such foul stenches had on people’s lives. However, we should not overlook the fact that the noxious smells generated by a number of trades had the potential to harm the broader population. The dearth of research on this topic is not due to a lack of evidence, which is plentiful. Nor can it be attributed to our ancestors’ lack of sensitivity to such smells, as is often lazily suggested to dismiss the topic. We have long been coached into silencing our sense of smell, as required by a clean, orderly society, and we react against such disturbing olfactory phenomena. Only a few daring voices have dared touch on the unmentionable subject. ‘All smells are primordially the smell of shit’, one writes.1 This claim requires further substantiation: is the message received by an individual nose deemed good or bad? The answer really depends on the historical period. Nowadays it takes children a long while to learn to feel disgust for their own excrement. No such conditioning existed in the Renaissance. Yet in every culture, negative signals received by the brain are associated with death, warning the body of the risk of harm, while positive signals are associated with life and pleasure.
No human society is indifferent to smells. They are often thought of as tools mediating magical interactions. Various rites were thought to protect our ancestors against the foulest of smells, while sweet fragrances were used to earn the favour of the gods.2 Even before the advent of mains drainage, Europeans were perfectly aware of the terrible fug of smells that surrounded them. The Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus proved a man of his time in 1756, when he drew up a subjective list of seven categories of natural smells, the majority of which were unpleasant: aromaticos (carnation and bay leaf), fragrantes (lily, saffron and jasmine), ambrosiacos (amber or animal musk), alliaceos (garlic and asafoetida, also known as Persian ferula), hircinos or ‘goat-like’ (goat, valerian), tetros or ‘foul’ (French marigold, some solanaceous plants) and nauseos (cucurbitaceous plants).3 Bad smells could now be labelled, but not eradicated: ways had to be found to deal with them, particularly in large urban areas where the air was thick with all sorts of stenches. As seen in chapter 1, we stop noticing even the most powerful smells after about fifteen minutes of exposure. However, such offensive odours were still a major risk to public health, as noted as early as 1700 by Bernardino Ramazzini, the father of occupational medicine.
The foul air of medieval towns
It is fruitless trying to pinpoint when humans first started getting rid of their rubbish.4 Men have always tried to identify and limit such health hazards. The Middle Ages had a wide range of expressive terms for the principal causes of foul smells: shit, dung, mire, ordure, filth, muck, turds. When the air became too grim to breathe, the populace turned to the authorities to sort it out. In 1363, professors and students at the University of Paris complained to the king that the local butchers
kill their animals in their homes, and the blood and waste from the animals is thrown day and night into the Rue Sainte-Geneviève, and on several occasions the waste and blood of the animals was kept in pits and latrines in their houses until it was corrupted and rotten and then thrown into that same street day and night, until the street, Place Maubert and all the surrounding air was corrupted, foul, and reeking.
Three years later (the wheels of justice turned slowly, then as now), the Paris parliament ordered the butchers to slaughter their animals outside the city on the river before bringing them back into the capital for sale, or face fines if they refused.5
Odour
