THE SENSES

Constance Classen

HISTORICIZING THE SENSES

The senses are not simply biological in nature, they are also shaped by culture. Perception is, in fact, profoundly affected by cultural practices and ideologies. Just as social norms influence how people dress and what they eat, social norms influence how and what people see, touch, or smell. This social dimension of perception makes the senses subject to historical change and thus to historical study.

Culture shapes senses in many ways. The very number of the senses is dictated to some extent by custom. While the senses are generally counted as five—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—their number has risen or fallen at different times according to the interests of the day. For example, in premodern Europe, speech as a supposedly natural faculty was sometimes counted as a sixth sense.

Along with being enumerated, the senses are also ranked according to cultural traditions and values. Such ranking plays a basic role in determining which sensory impressions will be deemed most important by a society and which will be filtered out or ignored. In the West sight customarily has been deemed the highest or most important of the senses, followed by hearing, smell, taste, and touch. This has meant that visual and auditory practices and information usually have been considered of much greater value than those derived from the so-called lower senses of smell, taste, and touch.

The ranking of the senses is congruent with a hierarchy of social values. According to this hierarchy, the higher senses are associated with values highly regarded by society and the lower senses with lower or even negative values. For example, the top-ranked sense of sight has traditionally been linked with the highly valued faculty of reason—intellectual vision. The lowly sense of touch, on the other hand, has been associated with mere physical sensation—the "mindless" pleasures and pains of the body.

The hierarchy of the senses has been subject to some variation in Western history. Within a religious context, hearing, as the sense through which people perceive and obey the word of God, has often been considered the highest sense. For example, in a medieval allegorical epic by Alain de Lille, the senses are depicted as five horses pulling a coach carrying Prudence to Heaven. As the swiftest horse, Sight leads the others, followed by Hearing, Smell, Taste, and Touch. When the coach proves unable to reach Heaven, however, Prudence is persuaded by Theology to unharness Hearing and ride to Heaven on him alone. Here faith—hearing—ascends to spheres where reason—sight—cannot go. Likewise, in certain contexts touch has been called the most fundamental of the senses, while even smell and taste might be given a certain priority as the senses that can most readily access the essence of a thing and thus are least easily deceived. Despite such variations, however, sight and hearing have generally been accepted as "higher" senses and smell, taste, and touch as "lower" senses.

The social values assigned to the different senses are expressed in a variety of ways. The contrast between sight as a supposedly rational sense and smell as an "intuitive" sense is evident in idioms such as "I see what you mean" and "I smell a rat." These different sensory values are also conveyed by associating visual signs (that is, writing, diagrams) with the exercise of reason and olfactory signs (that is, perfumes) with the use of intuition and emotion. The sensory values of a period are further conveyed through such means as stories, myths and religious practices, social customs, and techniques of child rearing and education, in which adults may put much effort into teaching children to understand visual signs but little effort into teaching them to find meaning in odors.

While some senses are ranked higher than others, each sensory field contains both positive and negative sensory values. For instance, although sight has a high social status, certain sights, such as dark colors, or certain uses of sight, such as for personal adornment, may have negative associations. Sensory values, furthermore, must always be understood in context, for what may be a foul sight or smell in one context may be construed as pleasant in another. The smell of urine has generally been associated with negative values. However, within the context of the royal palace of Versailles in the eighteenth century, the strong urinous odor of the grounds owing to a lack of sanitary facilities acquired some of the social prestige of the court itself. This is a good example of how sensory perception is not purely physiological in nature but is informed by cultural values.

The cultural construction of the senses affects not only how people perceive the physical world but also how they relate to each other. While on a practical level of everyday activities it is understood that all people use all of their senses, on a more symbolic plane high-status social groups are associated with the higher senses and low-status social groups with the lower senses. An instance of this comes from the work of the nineteenth-century natural historian Lorenz Oken, who postulated a sensory hierarchy of human races with the European "eye-man" at the top, followed by the Asian "ear-man," the Native American "nose-man," the Australian "tongue-man," and the African "skin-man." Oken's hierarchy of races and senses is based not on any intrinsic characteristics of the races but on their social rankings within the Western imagination.

Aside from its links with particular sensory faculties, each social group is invested with a range of sensory values. Again the more positive sensory values are associated with higher social groups and the more negative ones with groups deemed by the elite as lower on the social scale. Within the domain of smell, for example, high-status groups are customarily typed as fragrant or inodorate, while low-status groups are described as foul-smelling. These associations may be based in part on actual traits of these groups. Persons of wealth have more access to spacious, well-aired homes and costly perfumes, while poor people living in crowded, unsanitary dwellings often have to put up with foul odors. Nonetheless, such sensory social divisions are fundamentally symbolic in nature, depending not on any actual traits of the group in question (that is, unpleasant odor) for their cultural force but on social perceptions that are translated into sensory values. The English author George Orwell wrote in the 1930s, for example, that even those servants whom members of the middle and upper classes knew were quite clean seemed marked by an unappetizing odor (Orwell, 1937, p. 160).

In such cases a general feeling of repulsion based on the low social status of workers is transformed into a bad smell. Under these circumstances even the cleanest, most fragrant member of the working classes may be symbolically typed as malodorous. Conversely, malodor in members of the upper classes does not necessarily detract from their symbolic fragrance.

This sensory categorization of different groups of people enforces social boundaries and hierarchies and rules of social interaction. It signals which groups are thought to uphold the integrity of the social body and which are thought to have an injurious, corrupting effect on the social body. The scheme works well because people often have strong reactions to sensory impressions, such as fragrant or foul odors. When a group has a strong association with positive or negative sensory qualities, positive or negative social and physical reactions follow. Thus Orwell wrote that, even though the stench of the working-class body might be imaginary, it nonetheless induces a physical feeling of repulsion in members of the middle and upper classes that is scarcely possible to overcome (Orwell, 1937, p. 160).

The sensory values propagated by the dominant social group are often internalized to a greater or lesser extent by all groups within society. For example, members of the working classes will come to believe that, no matter how much they wash or what perfumes they use, they are somehow not as clean or as fragrant as members of the upper classes. Members of marginalized groups may also challenge such sensory values, however, and propose alternative schemes whereby "clean-living" workers are contrasted with the "filthy" rich.

The social history of the senses uncovers the different ways in which sensory values have worked to uphold or challenge the social order, shaping the fortunes of groups and individuals. Senses are the means by which people perceive each other and the world. By exploring the ways in which sensory perception has historically been invested with cultural values, scholars can better understand the worldviews of peoples of other eras and at the same time appreciate the social underpinnings of the contemporary sensory universe.

WORK IN THE FIELD

The history of the senses is a broad field with a great range of possible topics for investigation. A work in this field may trace the shifts in sensory values within a society over time, or it may concentrate on an indepth study of specific subjects, such as the role of hearing in sixteenth-century Anabaptism or the "language of flowers" in Victorian England. Whatever the scope of the subject matter, a sociocultural dimension is essential in a sensory history. A history of perfume, for example, does not constitute a history of the senses unless it relates perfume practices to social trends and ideologies. Similarly the investigation of the sensory worlds of past eras should not merely describe the range of sounds and smells that existed at a particular time, as evocative as that might be, but should uncover the meanings those sounds and smells had for people.

The primary difficulty for the historian of the senses is that sensory environments and the meanings with which they are invested are ephemeral. The changes may be subtle or dramatic, but the world of sensory values is one of constant flux. It is hard to know what or how people of other periods perceived and what these sensations meant to them. Ironically, the most important source for the sensory historian is the seemingly desensualized written text. Learned treatises elaborate philosophies of the senses, letters and diaries describe the sensibilities of everyday life, medical studies praise the healing powers of scents and savors, court records tell of witches condemned for casting an "evil eye," and literary works reveal the sensory priorities of their authors' classes and times. Such written sources may be supplemented by information gleaned from works of art and from items of material culture, such as clothes, furniture, and houses. Where the sources are silent or unclear, a certain amount of conjecture is necessary.

While a broad field in its possibilities for study, the history of the senses has been largely unexplored. Nonetheless, a number of seminal works have contributed to the history of the senses as a vital area of investigation. In the 1940s the cultural historian Lucien Febvre argued that sixteenth-century Europe placed less emphasis on sight and more emphasis on the other senses than did modern Europe. He wrote in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1942), "A series of fascinating studies could be done on the sensory underpinnings of thought in different periods" (Febvre, 1982, p. 436).

The work of Norbert Elias, the historian of manners, similarly if less explicitly suggests the importance of historicizing sensibilities. Stimulated by Febvre, Elias, and others, cultural historians began to tentatively explore the sensory values of different periods in their writings. Robert Mandrou wrote in 1961 that the senses of hearing, smell, taste, and touch nourished the mental world of sixteenth-century Europeans in ways alien to moderns. Also in the 1960s Michel Foucault aroused interest with his analysis of how sight has served as a medium of social control in institutions like hospitals and prisons.

Influenced by the writings of French cultural historians and by the work of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Baktin, Piero Camporesi in the 1970s produced a remarkable series of books on the role of the sensuous in the popular culture of premodernity. Camporesi's work focuses on such aspects of material culture as food and the body, with all its fluids and airs, situating each within an intricate web of folk beliefs and practices. However, as Camporesi does not usually look at sensory values separately from particular material objects, such as food or the body, or try to locate his rich source material within a broader scheme of contemporary social values, it could be said that his works offer a sensuous reading of history rather than a historical reading of the senses according to the definition presented here.

The first major exploration within the history of the senses came in 1982 with the publication of Alain Corbin's book Le miasme et la jonquille (The foul and the fragrant). In this book Corbin aimed to bring smell out of the historical closet and to demonstrate the importance of odors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French culture. Corbin argued that this period saw an intensification of scientific and public concern over the relationship between stench and disease transmission. Strong body odors and perfumes became associated with the working classes, while the elite endeavored to rid themselves of personal odors through increased practices of cleanliness. Smell as a sense declined in utility, save to report disgust. The novelty and wealth of the subject matter together with Corbin's intriguing analysis of the role of smell in contemporary social discourses made Le miasme et la jonquille a popular and influential work and helped legimitate future investigations into the history of the senses.

A number of books by Constance Classen explore the cultural construction of the senses in Western and non-Western history. Worlds of Sense (1993) investigates such topics as the decline of smell and the rise of vision in modernity and the variation in sensory values across cultures. The Color of Angels (1998) delves into the sensuous symbolism of premodern cosmologies, the association of sensory values with traditional gender roles, and the expression and redefinition of sensory norms in modern art. These studies bring out the extent to which sensory perception has been impregnated with social values in different domains of life in different periods and places. Other notable histories of the senses are Medicine and the Five Senses (1993) edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter and the literary-historical study The Smell of Books (1992) by Hans J. Rindisbacher.

A number of related fields, such as psychology, sociology and literary studies, have contributed to the development of the history of the senses. Anthropology has had the greatest influence on the history of the senses, in fact so much so that, as Corbin has suggested, the social history of the senses might otherwise be called the "historical anthropology of the senses" (Corbin, 1995, p. 181). The anthropology of the senses heightens awareness of the cultural relativity of sensory perception by bringing out the different sensory priorities of different societies. The odors denigrated in one society may be esteemed as sources and symbols of knowledge in another.

Among those who influenced the development of the anthropology of the senses are Claude Lévi-Strauss, who analysed the sensory codes of myths, and Mary Douglas, who explored how "natural symbols," such as the body, can encode a range of social norms. Another influential line of thought comes from the work of the communications theorists Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong on the relationship between a society's dominant mode of communication (for example, speech or writing) and its sensory model. The foremost exponent of the anthropology of the senses is the Canadian anthropologist David Howes, editor of The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991) and coauthor of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994).

As in other fields of social investigation, historians have employed a variety of theoretical approaches to the history of the senses. Among them are a marxist perspective and a feminist perspective. A marxist approach might consider how sensory hierarchies have supported social hierarchies and how class conflicts might be expressed in differing sensory norms. A feminist approach might explore the historical interrelationship of sensory values and gender values and how these affected the lives of women and men.

Twentieth-century feminist theory, as expounded by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, certainly professed that the senses are strongly imbued with gender values. This notion has been explored within a historical context in Sexual Visions (1989) by Ludmilla Jordanova, Vision and Difference (1988) by Griselda Pollock, and The Color of Angels.

As regards marxism, Karl Marx made the intriguing statement, "The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present" (Marx, 1972, p. 141). Marx's evident interest in sensory perception was taken up by a number of twentieth-century marxist theorists. Walter Benjamin explored how modern capitalist culture was creating a new aesthetic of perception. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno suggested that vision is associated with the upper classes due to its inherent detachment, while the mingling nature of smell makes it a sign for the "promiscuous" lower classes. Even without a marxist history of the senses, marxist theory has certainly influenced sensory historians and cultural historians in general to undertake a history "from below," from the perspectives of workers and peasants as well as the ruling classes, and to take account of the role of class interests in promulgating social and sensory ideologies.

In a way, looking at the lives of workers and peasants invites an exploration into the culture of the senses because of the traditional association in the West of the "lower" classes with the body and sensuality—the riot of the carnival, the squalor of the hovel, and the earthy rites of hearth and harvest. Similarly the move away from the study of economies, institutions, and public events to study private, everyday life, also found in cultural history, suggests a "descent" from a world of order and reason to the disorderly "underworld" of the senses. Scholars must carefully avoid giving the impression that only the world of the poor is truly sensuous or that sensory symbolism is confined to private life—the kitchen and the bedroom. Sensory values, in fact, shape the worlds of both princes and peasants and permeate the public sphere as much as the private sphere.

Historians of the senses also are cautioned not to impose a personal perceptual model on the sensory experiences of earlier societies. Twentieth-century preoccupations emphasized the importance of both visual culture and sexual culture, and historical studies of sensory life often have been limited to one or the other. An example is Peter Gay's study of Victorian life, Education of the Senses (1984), which deals with sexual behavior and attitudes rather than with the senses as such. The social history of the senses, however, should be open to the full range of sensory experiences as well as to the social relations among the various senses. Indeed it should be particularly attentive to those past expressions of sensory life—the odor of sanctity, the king's healing touch, the mythical basilisk's deadly gaze—that, while vital to the popular consciousness of their time, seem most irrevelant to the twenty-first century.

THE SENSORY WORLD OF THE RENAISSANCE

The sensory world of Renaissance Europe, while affected by the shifting sensory values of the modern age, was grounded in traditional practices and beliefs retained from the ancient and medieval periods. Sensory phenomena—colors, odors, sounds—were regarded as potent forces, agents of health or illness, bearers of planetary energy, and symbols of sacred and social order. As in the ancient and medieval periods, during the Renaissance all of the senses were accorded essential cosmological and cultural roles. Thus while sight was customarily considered the highest of the senses, it was still insufficient to convey a complete "picture" of the world. The five senses formed a set, like the four seasons or the seven deadly sins. Just as summer or summer and autumn could not by themselves signify a whole year, so sight or sight and hearing could not by themselves accurately convey the nature of the universe.

The "five senses" was, indeed, a popular literary and artistic trope during the Renaissance. A number of plays and stories depicted the senses as each perceiving the world differently and inadequately on its own. Furthermore the medieval and Renaissance predilection for allegory meant that each sensory quality of an object was examined for its symbolic import. The rose was considered an apt symbol of love not only or even primarily because of its beautiful appearance but because of its sweet odor and taste and the poignant contrast between the softness of its petals and the sharpness of its thorns.

Meaning came through all the senses during the Renaissance, and so did pleasure. The Renaissance banquet at its most sumptuous was intended to stimulate all of the senses. Dishes were designed to delight the eye as well as the palate, such as elaborately sculpted confectionaries and peacocks stuffed with spices and adorned with their own feathers. Between and sometimes during courses musicians and actors provided entertainment. The banquet hall was perfumed with rich incense, and at the end of the meal refreshing bouquets of flowers might be distributed. The peasant equivalent to this banquet of the senses was the popular feast, which similarly combined delights for all the senses, from the mouthwatering flavors of ales and pies to the toe-tapping tunes of the fiddler.

In the sacred sphere, both God and the devil were believed to order or disorder the world through a variety of sensory channels. People imagined, based on the ancient notion of the music of the spheres, that a celestial concert of angelic choirs, interrupted now and then by the devil's discordant braying, kept the planets moving along their tracks. Within the realm of smell, people thought trails of odor traveled between heaven and Earth and between Earth and hell, integrating the cosmos in a sacred interplay of scent. Sanctity manifested itself through fragrance and sin through stench. The nose-wise saint could sniff out one or the other, detecting, for example, the pristine scent of virginity or the corrupt stink of carnality.

Accounts of the odor of sanctity were abundant during the Renaissance. The Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila died in 1582, and her corpse became renowned for the fragrance it exhaled, a fragrance that lasted through several inhumations and exhumations. This fragrance was credited with various miracles of healing and added greatly to St. Teresa's reputation for exceptional holiness. A century later in France, Benoîte of Notre-Dame de Laus experienced the olfactory tug-of-war between heaven and hell in her own person. The long-suffering Benoîte reportedly was assaulted with demonic stinks and alternately was rescued by angelic perfumes until she lay in an exhausted stupor. In her most renowned act, she followed a trail of scent left by the Virgin Mary to the divinely chosen site of the future church of Notre-Dame de Laus.

Like the cosmos, the human body, a microcosmos, was ordered or disordered through a multiplicity of sensory channels. As "gateways" to the body, the senses seemed eminently suited to receive influences that could either benefit or injure the body. If poisonous foods could be taken in by the mouth, why not "poisonous" sights by the eye or "poisonous" scents by the nose? Sensory qualities were considered independent forces that served as media of health or illness.

The attribution of agency to sensory qualities made it essential to take such qualities into account when diagnosing disease. A putrid smell emanating from a patient might not simply be a symptom of a particular illness but a primary cause of the illness as well as a vehicle of infection. Likewise treatments might be directed through a variety of sensory avenues. A complaint was often classified and treated in accordance with the hot or cold, wet or dry categories of humoral theory. Thus someone deemed suffering from an excess of "cold" and "wetness" might be treated with herbs considered "hot" and "dry." Music had a range of medical uses, most importantly in treatment for mental disorders. As "air" working on "air," it realigned the disturbed spirit of the patient with the harmonious music of the spheres.

It was believed that fragrant and pungent odors both warded off the contagious odors of disease and alleviated a variety of ailments. The scent of the mandrake cured headaches and insomnia, while rose perfume cooled overheated brains. Violet scent reportedly calmed fits. The alchemical theories of the Renaissance in turn emphasized flavors as basic agents of health and illness. Paracelsus held that the four flavors in the body, sourness, sweetness, bitterness, and saltiness, produced different sorts of physical ills. These "savory" pains, however, could be treated with flavorful remedies, such as salty or sweet elixirs.

The sensory models of the body and the cosmos that underlay much of premodern thought were imbued with ideologies of gender and class. According to humoral medicine, men were positively valued as hot and dry in nature, while women were negatively valued as cold and moist. Indeed the female sex was held to have its origin in insufficiently heated or "undercooked" semen. The most perfectly heated semen always produced males. Heat was held to endow men with courage, strength, and honesty, while coldness made women timid, weak, and deceitful.

Apart from the attribution of different sensory qualities such as temperature to men and women, the senses themselves were coded by gender. Men were associated with the "higher," "spiritual" senses of hearing and especially sight, but women were connected with the "lower," "animal" senses of smell, taste, and touch. This gender division of the senses was linked to a gender division of social spheres. The supposed masculine mastery of sight and hearing was deemed to fit men for such activities as traveling, studying, and ruling (overseeing), while the female association with the proximity senses made women the guardians of the home and mistresses of the kitchen, the bedroom, and the nursery. Such gendered divisions of sensory life were invested with enormous social force and could only be transgressed with considerable difficulty. For example, female writers of the Renaissance period and after, such as Catherine des Roches in France and Margaret Cavendish in England, continually had to justify why they practiced the visual, masculine activity of writing instead of enaging in more feminine sensory pursuits, such as cooking and sewing.

Sensory ideologies of class often paralleled those of gender. Peasants and workers, like women, were allied with the body and the senses, while upper-class men were associated with the mind and reason. The "lower" classes were also customarily associated with the domains of touch, taste, and smell. They were manual laborers preoccupied with the animal necessities of life, that is, food and a warm place to sleep. Increasing contact with the inhabitants of Africa and the Americas led to the symbolic incorporation of these peoples into the European sensory and social order as well. Like the "lower" classes and the "lower" sex, the "lower" races were customarily associated with sensuality rather than reason and in particular with the "lower," "animal" senses.

While much of the sensory symbolism described above prevailed into the nineteenth century, a number of developments during the Renaissance produced significant changes in the Western sensory order. The Renaissance was an exciting period of sensory discovery, with new sights, sounds, and savors entering Europe from the New World. Strange vegetables such as tomatoes and corn appeared on Old World tables. "Native" weavings, carvings, and musical instruments and even natives themselves were displayed for the admiration of Europeans. Enthralling accounts circulated of the curious customs practiced in the newly discovered lands. This cornucopia of exotic stimuli encouraged a fascination with other possible sensory worlds that continued for several centuries. In the sixteenth century Thomas More, inspired by accounts of the Inca Empire, imagined a fragrant commonwealth in which cities were free from stench, meals were perfumed, and neighbors competed in gardening. Intrigued by the Peruvian quipu, a mnemonic device employing knotted strings of different colors, the eighteenth-century English author Horace Walpole saw possibilities for new sensory idioms, such as a language of colors in which puns were made of overlapping hues or a tactile language that could weave poems and knot rhymes.

As the entry of new goods and ideas from the New World increased the possibilities for sensory creativity and enjoyment, the Protestant Reformation, with its backlash against "heathenish" sensualism, had the contrasting effect of sobering European sensory life, particularly in northern Europe. Gaudy clothes, rich foods, and perfumes seemed to the more austere reformers to direct Christians' attention to things of the world rather than the spirit. The church, according to the Reformation ideal, was a place of sensory simplicity, purified of incense and visual displays.

The invention of printing with movable type in the fifteenth century had a profound effect on Western sensory life. The consequent mass production of books made vision an even more important sensory avenue for acquiring knowledge about the world. In religion, for example, literate Europeans relied less on such nonvisual means of accessing the divine as smelling odors of sanctity and tasting the body and blood of Christ and relied more on reading the Word of God.

The Renaissance also saw the beginnings of the desensualized mechanical model of the universe that eventually dominated Western culture. Developing a "scientific" understanding of perception that persisted through the twentieth century, René Descartes reasoned that the senses were purely physical mechanisms designed to convey information about the physical world to the mind. The growing field of quantitative analysis in turn stressed the importance of measure, number, and weight for comprehending and conveying information about the world over such nonquantifiable sensory qualities as odors and music.

Seemingly void of sensuous "coloring," the scientific paradigm of the universe in fact became permeated with visual values. This development was influenced by various factors. Sight had long been associated with the faculty of reason, and as the field of science was based on the exercise of reason, it seemed appropriate for sight to be the sense of science. The scientist did not wish to "smell out" (that is, intuit) the workings of nature or to "taste of" (that is, experience) them but to expose them to the light and see them, to understand them. The invention of "optick glasses," such as the microscope and the telescope, extended the power of sight over the other senses and emphasized the role of vision in investigating the nature of the universe. Furthermore prevalent visual models, such as maps and charts, seemed to adequately represent the world through only one sensory medium, sight. Even mathematics, the most apparently abstract of scientific endeavors, relied on visual signs.

THE SENSES IN MODERNITY

While the old, organic, and multisensory concept of the cosmos lingered in the recesses of the Western imagination, the visualization of the world became pronounced during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. As the word "Enlightenment" suggests, this period stressed the value of light and sight. This emphasis was manifested by sight's dominant role in contemporary philosophy and by the widespread attention to scientific advances in the field of optics. In keeping with the male associations of sight and reason, the rise of science was heralded as a triumph of clear-sighted masculine vision over the murky "feminine brew" of superstitions and myths that had previously dominated Western thought.

The ocular obsession of the Enlightenment influenced the domain of aesthetics as well as science and philosophy. During the Renaissance the artistic interest in naturalism and linear perspective emphasized the "realism" of visual images and turned canvases into seeming windows on the world. During the Enlightenment aesthetic attention focused on the organization of space. The eighteenth century disdained the crowded, dark, winding streets of the medieval city and dreamed of wide, bright thoroughfares with open vistas. To give an example of this changing aesthetic, in the Middle Ages the ideal garden was a walled enclosure redolent with the scents of flowers and resonant with singing birds and splashing water. In the eighteenth century the ideal garden became a park, a seemingly infinite expanse of space bounded by no walls or fences, in which odors and sounds were dispersed and the eye was free to roam, seeking the distant horizon. This shift in spatial aesthetics paralleled the changing understanding of the nature of the universe. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance imagined the universe as concentric, an enclosed space of enclosed spaces animated and ordered by a network of multisensory energies. The Enlightenment swept away those old sensory "cobwebs" and opened up the universe to infinite space, a vast visual realm of whirling planets and darting beams of light.

The nineteenth century saw a continuation and extension of most of the visualist trends of the Enlightenment. This century, for example, maintained public order through visual surveillance. These surveillance practices included increased supervision of the population through modern institutions, such as public schools and prisons, and increased monitoring of nocturnal activities made possible by improved street lighting.

Concern for public health in turn led to sanitary reform movements aimed at bringing light and fresh air into the smelly, dark homes and streets of the poor. On the economic front, the intensification of capitalist production and values begun with the industrial revolution emphasized the visual display of goods both to promote sales and as a conspicuous sign of plenty. In the nineteenth century the invention of photography established sight as the sensory repository of the past and the preeminent mediator of reality, while the arrival of electric light extended the domain of sight into the furthest corners of darkness.

One prominent social development of modernity was the rise in importance of the individual as a discrete entity with personal rights and boundaries. In terms of the social history of the senses, this meant that people had to take greater care not to trangress the sensory space of others with untoward odors, noises, or touches. As the most apparently detached of the senses, sight was often the most socially acceptable sense. This was particularly true in the context of urban centers, in which people daily came across strangers whom they could not touch or smell, to whom they could not even speak with propriety, but at whom they could look. In fact the saying "look but don't touch" became a sensory motto of the modern age.

The elevation of sight in modernity was often presented in evolutionary terms as the final stage in a sensory and social development from barbarism to civilization. Civilized people, it was held, perceived and appreciated the world primarily through their eyes. Primitive people, by contrast, were imagined to rely just as much on their noses and fingers for knowledge of the world. Charles Darwin gave this notion of a social progress from the "lower" senses to the "higher" a biological basis by suggesting in his theory of evolution that sight became evermore important to humans as they evolved from animals and learned to walk upright and take their noses off the ground. Sigmund Freud later psychologized this theory and claimed that individuals went through similar sensory stages in the transition from infancy to adulthood.

As the above indicates, in many cases the elevation of sight was accompanied by a diminution in the importance of the other senses, particularly the proximity senses. Smell, taste, and touch were divested of much of their former cosmological and physical powers and were relegated to the cultural realm of personal pleasure or displeasure. For example, instances of the odor of sanctity were characterized by prominent scientists as hallucinatory episodes or else as ill odors arising from the ravaged body of the saint. Similarly by the end of the nineteenth century the medical profession established that odors could neither cause nor cure disease, thus allotting smell virtually no role in modern medicine.

These shifts in the Western sensory order did not go uncontested. Indeed throughout Western history persons and groups challenged the dominant sensory model with alternative ways of making sense. In the later half of the nineteenth century a significant counterreaction developed to the visualist tendencies of modernity, tendencies associated with scientific materialism and industrialization. This counterreaction was centered in the artistic community, whose members sought to recreate the ideal of a multisensory cosmos through art. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, often considered the forefather of this movement, wrote forcefully that the need to understand sensory phemonena is linked in chains of correspondences due to the essential sensory unity of the cosmos. The correspondence of the senses meant that any sensory impression could and should call up corresponding sensations in other sensory modalitites. A color might remind a person of a sound, or a sound might be described in terms of a fragrance.

Inspired by this multisensory aesthetic, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists experimented with creating concerts of perfumes or serving color-coded dinners. The multisensory nature and the popularity of this aesthetic movement meant that it cut across artistic fields. In his influential book A rebours (Against nature, 1884), the French novelist J. K. Huysmans described playing "internal symphonies" by drinking a succession of liqueurs corresonding to different musical sounds and creating the impression of a flowering meadow by spraying a room with floral perfumes. The Dutch artist Jan Toorop attempted to portray the auditory and olfactory realms in his paintings by depicting sound swirling out of bells and scent rising up from flowers. The Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin aspired to engage all the senses in his compositions by including odors, tastes, touches, and colors as part of the performance.

In the twentieth century, however, the notion of a multisensory aesthetic was increasingly dismissed as a quaint, sentimental holdover from la belle époque (the beautiful age), unsuited to the brisk nature of modern life. Bold visual lines and colors seemed more in keeping with the characteristics of modernity than clinging fragrances or nostalgic harmonies. With the spread of motion pictures, sight became even more established as the sense of modernity, capable of capturing and acclaiming the rapid pace of modern life. The proliferation of enticing advertising imagery that accompanied the growth of the consumer society indicated that sight was not only the objective sense of science but also the subjective sense of desire.

While the twentieth century saw the virtual end of many earlier ideas about the senses, one sensory ideology persisted—the Western association of women, workers, and non-Europeans with the devalued lower senses. People still deemed men the masters of sight and women the guardians of taste and tact. Workers and "primitive peoples" were still imagined as inhabitants of a dark, odorous underworld of brute sensations. Hence Orwell stated in The Road to Wigan Pier, "The real secret of class distinctions in the West" can be "summed up in four frightful words . . . : The lower classes smell " (Orwell, 1937, p. 159).

As the century progressed these sensory ideologies of "otherness" came under greater attack, primarily by members of the groups negatively stereotyped. The attack proceeded along several, at times opposing, fronts. One approach resisted any apparent form of sensory ghettoization and asserted the right to equal participation in the "higher" sensory and social spheres of the dominant group. Another positively revalued some of the "lower" sensations and sensory pursuits traditionally associated with a group. Among women, for example, a number of writers and artists chose to explore and celebrate traditional feminine associations with touch, taste, and smell.

At the end of the twentieth century a range of sensory trends existed. The prevalence of visual imagery and of the visual medium of the computer suggests that sight will rule the popular Western imagination for some time to come. However, the spread of alternative medical treatments, such as aromatherapy and acupuncture, signals interests in other avenues of sensory experience. The writings of Oliver Sacks and others have attracted attention to the alternative perceptual worlds of persons with such sensory disabilities as deafness. Regardless of its direction or directions, the Western sensory model provides a rich terrain for cultural investigation.

See also other articles in this section.

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