About this item
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. 11 illustrations
About the Author
I'm a history instructor, freelance writer and photographer, interior design aficionada, and lover of all things quirky. My work has appeared regularly on ApartmentTherapy. com and in several Chicago-area publications, and my photographs have appeared in Good Housekeeping. I have also worked at a library, an academic journal, and a tractor dealership. It was, ironically, the latter that most encouraged my love of books, since my free time afforded ample opportunity to read. A country girl by birth but a city girl by heart, I moved to southern California for college. My education introduced me to James Joyce, Gerhard Richter, and the Marquis de Sade, and it was perhaps the subconscious influence of the latter that convinced me to spend the next seven years of my life as a graduate student. At the University of Chicago, where I earned my M.A. and Ph. D., I turned my attention to history, a field that I like to describe as "fiction with facts. " My academic specialties are France, history of sexuality, the eighteenth century, the history of science and medicine, and the history of the senses, but after spending several years in France for research, it might be more accurate to say that my specialties are pastries, cheese, and wine.
