Prologue: A Short History of the History of the Senses as a Field of Study, from Montreal to Mar del Plata
Note: This essay figures as the prologue to the book Un mundo de sensaciones: siglos VIII al XVII, edited by Gerardo Rodríguez, published in December 2023 by Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (República Argentina) and accessible (in open access format) at giemmardelplata.org/archivos/librosyactas/
David Howes
Centre for Sensory Studies
Concordia University, Montreal
Beginnings
The history of the senses as a field of research has its own history. The Annales School historian Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) is commonly regarded as the founder of this field. His reputation is based on a little section called “Underdevelopment of Sight” in his magnum opus, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais ([1942] 1982). There he proclaimed that: “The sixteenth century did not see first: it heard and smelled, it sniffed the air and caught sounds,” and went on to suggest that “A series of fascinating studies could be done of the sensory underpinnings of thought in different periods” (Febvre 1982: 432, 436).
Without denying Febvre’s paternity {1}, there is nevertheless another equally august historian whose pedigree warrants scrutiny – namely, the medievalist Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), author of “The Task of Cultural History” ([1929] 2014). Huizinga was the founder of cultural history as a field of study. There is an intimate connection between cultural history and the history of the senses that is not so widely known. It centres on the fact that in his magnum opus, The Autumn of the Middle Ages ([1919] 1996), Huizinga sought to convey not merely the “historical experience” but the “historical sensation” of the late medieval period. He was inspired to do so by his engagement with the Dutch literary genre known as Sensitivism, which promoted a sensitive and sensuous approach to writing. In Huizinga’s writing the senses of the past are rekindled.
Frank Ankersmit (2018) has done the academy a great service by probing and documenting how Huizinga “moved outside himself” and “made contact with history” – specifically, the late Burgundian Moyen Age – and sought to intimate this in his writing. Huizinga’s overture to the medieval sensorium is summed up by Ankersmit (2018: 24) as follows: “Historical experience pulls the faces of past and present together in a short but ecstatic kiss.” (Huizinga called this Ahnung, or “inkling”, and at other times ekstasis.) Ankersmit goes on to discuss how Huizinga’s oeuvre was grounded in a particular way of sensing in addition to his distinctive style of writing. He alludes to the differences between seeing and hearing to help enucleate the gist of Huizinga’s phenomenology of historical sensation: “as we know from music, the world of sounds may sometimes give us an understanding of the condition humaine that we can never expect from the world of visual forms” (25). The historian, when responding to “the past’s call,” therefore wants to navigate this “foreign country” by hearing as well as by seeing.
Whatever its precise origins, the field of sensory history is currently booming and thoroughly international. In France there is Alain Corbin, the premier “historien du sensible” (Corbin and Heuré 2000, Corbin 2005). In Canada there is Constance Classen, who founded the field of the cultural history of the senses, and is also a founding member of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. (Classen’s introduction to the field of sensory history in the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia of European Social History (Classen 2001) is a must-read for historians interested in the senses). In the US there is Mark M. Smith, who has developed the notion of “sensory history” (Smith 2009, 2021). And, in Argentina, there is the work of the Grupo Investigación y Estudios Medievales (GIEM) based at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, co-directed by Gerardo Rodríguez, a force in his own right. I shall have more to say regarding the highly dynamic work of Rodríguez and his team towards the end of this prologue, where I survey recent trends in the institutionalization of the history of the senses and sensory studies generally.
Constance Classen’s work is noteworthy not only because it set the stage for the current field of the history of the senses, but also because of its broad reach across historical fields. In 1993, she published two key works: Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures and Inca Cosmology and the Human Body. Worlds of Sense, with its brilliant investigations into the social life of the senses in diverse periods and places, opened our eyes to the value of taking a cultural and historical approach to the study of sense experience. Inca Cosmology provided a detailed study of how one society – that of the South American Inca – employed strategies based on models of the body and the senses to order society and the cosmos, and how the Spanish invasion was experienced within the context of this Indigenous sensory order. Classen went on to consider such important topics as women’s historical sensory experience and the senses in the histories of religion and art in such insightful works as The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (1998,) The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (2012), and The Museum of the Senses (2017) These varied works make it clear that a sensory approach can enrich every historical field and at the same time can provide a window into alternative social perspectives often ignored in mainstream histories. By accessing the sensuous ground of historical experience, the history of the senses reverses this trend and brings us in touch with the vital and intimate reality of the past.
The recent six-volume Cultural History of the Senses (CHS) set, edited by Classen (2014), breaks new ground by offering a domain-based approach to the history of the senses. This is in contrast to the unimodal histories that predominated during the first phase of the sensory turn, such as the numerous cultural histories of vision (Jay 1993; Levin 1993), hearing (Burnett et al. 1991, Johnson 1996), etc.. Each of the six volumes in the CHS (beginning with Antiquity and the Middle Ages, continuing with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and terminating with the nineteenth century or “Age of Empire” and the twentieth century or “Modern Age”) is divided into nine chapters or “domains”: the social life of the senses, urban sensations, the marketplace, religion, philosophy and science, medicine, literature, art, and media (as “extensions” of the senses). This domain-based approach foregrounds the shifting relationships among the modalities, rather than treating them severally, or one-at-a-time. Thanks to this arrangement, various patterns of sensory discrimination and interaction become discernible, both within and across each of the domains grouped by period, and across the periods. For example, it becomes apparent that the cultural importance of vision has increased throughout western history, aided by the invention of such technologies as the printing press, the microscope and the camera. Smell, by contrast, has declined in importance, with its premodern role as a sign of sanctity or sin and as a medium of health or vector of disease being discarded in modernity. The pleasures of the senses, in turn, have been celebrated or suppressed by different groups in different periods of history, and have ended up being commodified by practices of marketing in contemporary consumer capitalism. Of particular note, beginning in the late nineteenth century, there commenced a shift in the visibility and audibility of marginalized groups as collective struggles for representation and social equality intensified. These are just some of the many fascinating insights into the shifting balance and/or modulation of the senses and the impacts of new techniques and technologies of perception offered by the volumes in the Cultural History of the Senses set.
In her book The Deepest Sense, Classen brings out how conventional histories reduce the past to a mere play of shadows by their disembodied and de-sensualized character. I quote from the Introduction:
If a history could be written of touch, what would it embrace? Hot fire and cold wind, smooth silk and rough wool, spinning wheels and threshing flails, relics and frolics and the healing touch of a king? A world of meaning can lie within the simplest gesture, a kiss, or the touch of a hand. If such a history could be written, why hasn’t it? Touch lies at the heart of our experience of ourselves and the world yet it often remains unspoken and, even more so, unhistoricized. Indeed, in many historical accounts the past is so disembodied that it appears little more than a shadow play, a procession of ghosts who surely never felt the pinch of a shoe nor the cut of a sword. This omission of tactile experience is noticeable not only in the field of history, but across the humanities and social sciences. It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds (Classen 2012: xi)
Diffusion and Institutionalization
The history of the senses emerged as a distinct subfield of history during the last two decades of the twentieth century, spurred by the work of Corbin and Classen, as discussed above. The anthropology of the senses, for its part, took on definition during the same period, spurred by the work of Paul Stoller (1989) and the contributors to The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Howes 1991; see further Classen 1997). This turn within the disciplines of history and anthropology, as well as geography (Rodaway 1994), commonly referred to as “the sensory turn,” would subsequently spread to numerous other humanities and social science disciplines, including geography, sociology, architecture, art history, museology, religion, classics, and even archaeology. (Archaeologists have increasingly taken to seeking to excavate or ‘reconstruct’ past sensoria along with digging up artifacts in recent years: see Skeetes and Day 2020). The confluence of all these disciplines in turn laid the foundation for the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of “sensory studies” – first announced by the editors of The Senses and Society in their introduction to the inaugural issue of that journal (Bull et al. 2006). In The Sensory Studies Manifesto (Howes 2022), I sought to trace the genealogy of all these developments by discipline (history of the senses, anthropology of the senses, sensory geography, and so forth), and pointed to how the field of sensory studies can also be divided along sensory lines: for example, there is visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste cultures, and so forth – all intensely interdisciplinary fields of research in their own right.
The progress of “the sensory turn” has not been uniform. There have been reactionaries and hold-outs. For example, Tim Ingold set the revolution back by close to 15 years with his critique of the anthropology of the senses in The Perception of the Environment (2000). The most notable hold-out is the whole discipline of psychology. Psychologists have long resisted the idea of the socialization of the senses and privatized or interiorized them instead. So too is the idea of the enculturation of the senses foreign to mainstream psychologists, such as J.J. Gibson, author of The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (see Howes 2023a).{2} Gibson’s approach to the senses is pre-cultural to the same extent Ingold’s approach is post-social, which is why both of their approaches fall wide of the mark.
Over the years, academics working on the senses in culture and society from different disciplinary perspectives have come together to form centres for research and interchange. In 1988, I co-founded the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (or CONSERT) which transformed into a research centre, the Centre for Sensory Studies, in 2010.{3}. It is in this capacity, as an institution-builder, that I first came to know Gerardo Rodríguez, about 15 years ago. The trajectories of our respective research institutes have been evolving in tandem ever since, and may be considered a model for the institutionalization of sensory history,{4} and the wider field of sensory studies {5}. Let me highlight some of the points of convergence.
The Centre is composed of faculty from a wide array of departments, including sociology and anthropology, history, communications, marketing, art history, design and computation arts It supports graduate training{6} and networking,{7} and otherwise hosts The Senses and Society journal,{8} an annual virtual lecture series on such themes as atmospheres, sentience, sensation and – coming up in the Winter of 2024 – “making sense of algorithms,” as well as a biennial conference series called “Uncommon Senses.”{9} There is also a book series associated with the Centre,{10} and it maintains eight different websites (most notably Sensory Studies since 2006 and just recently Explorations in Sensory Design, which launched in May 2023).{11}
The Grupo Investigación y Estudios Medievales (GIEM) based at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, {12} began as a research group with a specific focus on reconstructing past soundscapes and a particular interest in the medieval sensorium. It has since expanded to include all of the senses and incorporate numerous other humanities and social science disciplines within its remit.{13} In addition to offering graduate training and networking via the Red Iberoamericana de Estudios Sensoriales, {14} and staging conferences, the GIEM is responsible for promoting a range of novel initiatives, such as Sensonario (an on-line dictionary of key terms in sensory studies),{15} an e-book series,{16} Cuadernos Medievales,{17} musical concerts (which bring the sounds of the past back within hearing) and even historical videogames.{18} The latter initiative is a particularly novel and indeed revolutionary intervention in sensory pedagogy, or the digital education of the senses (see further Harris 2020).
Thanks to the work of the CSS in Montreal and GIEM in Mar del Plata, North America and South America are advancing in unison to spread the word about sensory history. As a result, the history of the senses has moved from the margins of cultural history to its core, as the great intellectual historian Martin Jay (2011) points out in his introduction to a special issue of the American Historical Review on sensory historiography. In this way, Huizinga’s aspirations for the field of cultural history (his “inkling”) were fulfilled.
This essay is entitled “A Short History of the Senses” so, to be true to my word, I must keep it short. But before closing, let me flag some of the contributions to this volume that I found particularly thought-provoking.
There is Martin Ríos Saloma’s chapter on sensorial aspects of the war against the Mohammedans during the 13th-15th centuries. Like Mark Smith in The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War(2015), Ríos Saloma presents a breakdown by sense of how the wars impacted and were registered by the observers. Not surprisingly, visual and auditory reports predominate, which can be explained by the fact that the authors were eye-witnesses to the events concerned, according to Ríos Saloma. Issues of witnessing, or the evidence of the senses, are also addressed in Federico Asiss Gonzaález’s chapter on Don Juan Manuel’s Libro de las tres razones (14th century). The “visu et auditum model” is shown to have played a key role with respect to the validation of alternative historical facts.
Clara Bejarano Pellicer’s chapter on Ana of Austria’s entrance to Seville in 1570 is literally spectacular, since illumination (fireworks, midnight processions with candles) formed an integral aspect of such public festivals. As she writes:
In this type of festivity, the impact of the senses was especially cultivated through a nocturnal show which spared no expense. The artifice of light became a powerful language as it lit up the lavish and colourful costumes of the participants in the masked parade. Wrapped in the shadows of the night, the protagonists of this aesthetic display attracted all eyes without fail. The objective was to astonish the public through the brightness that the light of the candles shed on the decorative details and vibrant colours of the flamboyant finery. This visual splurge of chiaroscuro and dazzle was balanced and flattered by the richly textured and polyphonic music that set the rhythm of the parade. Five instrumentalists produced different tones with their versatile instruments on the rhythmic base of the percussion of the drummers. The minstrels represented a complex and urban Renaissance aesthetic, which was adopted by the municipal authorities and which carried the sacred and noble associations of its previous use for cathedral and ducal festivities. The essential ingredients of the parade (light and music) filled the square of San Francisco with illumination and ambient music to delight the senses of the public.
Finally, there are two chapters, by Santiago Foti and María José Ortúzar Escudero respectively, that touch on the sense of touch in the Middle Ages. These two authors are very sensitive to how the tactile practices and experiences of this period, as well as the conceptualization of touch in the medical and philosophical literature, were at variance with modern understandings.
Foti’s chapter, centring on the medieval poem Whaltarius, which uses “haptic thinking” in an attempt to recover the haptic sense in all its breadth, invites comparison with Classen’s work. The chapter by Ortúzar Escudero on the reception of translations of the works of Aristotle, Avicena and Albertus Magnus is also fascinating. We read of how the conventional hierarchy of the senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch – in that order) was challenged by the author of Premnon physicon (translated between 1052 and 1056), who positioned vision and touch at the apex on account of their similarities, followed by hearing, smell and taste; and of how there was an extensive debate over whether touch was one sense or many due to the multiplicity of sensations that fall within its ken: hot and cold, wet and dry, etc. Interestingly, taste was considered to be “a mode of touch” following Aristotle, so not a discrete sense at all. This will strike the modern reader as odd, since far more salient to us is the connection or overlap between taste and smell, both being chemical senses (J.J. Gibson (1966) even characterizes taste and smell as a single “perceptual system. Come to think of it: How should touch-taste-smell be carved up?).
Equally startling to the modern reader is Ortúzar Escudero’s discussion of the relationship between the senses and the Elements. According to Aristotle, Water was the element (or medium) of sight because the eye contains water, Air was the medium of hearing, Fire the element of smell, and Earth the medium of both taste and touch. Here we have the assimilation of taste to touch again. Why? Because it enabled the conception of the senses being five in number to be squared with the conception of the elements of the cosmos being four. That’s why. The cosmic order demanded it. At a deeper level, this conceptual finagling (the reduction from five to four) points to the way the senses were conceived of in cosmological terms, not just anatomical terms; that is, the senses were not mere “receptor organs” (as we moderns assume), rather they were mediators: the senses went out and mingled with the world (e.g. the extramission theory of vision) via their mediums, they did not just “receive” impressions. Perception was a two-way street.
The history of how, in post-medieval times, the senses came to be localized in discrete bodily organs – the eye, the ear, the nose, etc., and were thereby stripped of their cosmological vocation – which is to say, the story of how the senses came unhinged from the elements and also from each other (e.g. the disappearance of Aristotelian notion of ”the common sense” from the perceptual apparatus as we moderns know it) is one of the great mysteries of the history of western psychology. Ortúzar Escudero’s chapter brings this mystery into sharp relief {19}. Imagine how productive a conversation between modern psychologists and medievalists centring on this topic (this mysterious gap) could be! Just such a conversation was staged at Monte Veritá in April 2023 in the context of “The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives” organized by the Chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern, Annette Kern-Stähler {20}. Hopefully it will prove to be the first of many, so we can get to the bottom of the issue of how the senses came unhinged.
Notes
{1} It bears noting that no historian has bothered to go back and check Febvre’s sources, but a pair of anthropologists did (Leavitt and Hart 1990) and they have exposed some serious misrepresentations in Febvre’s account of the life of the senses in sixteenth century France (see Leavitt and Hart 1990). This rather undermines Febvre’s authority as a founder.
{2} “The Senses” conference organized by Annette Kern-Stähler held at Monte Veritá in April 2023 (to be discussed in note 4) sought to problematize this ostrich-like posture (i.e. the psychologist with head in the sand)
{3} The Centre for Sensory Studies homepage is at centreforsensorystudies.org/
{4} This model has recently been emulated by the Senses and Sensations Research Group at Bristol University (sensesandsensations.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/) founded in 2022. It is complemented by a number of other more established research units, such as the Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotions and Sensory Studies (emotionsandsenses.wordpress.com/tag/amsterdam-centre-for-cross-disciplinary-emotions-and-senses-studies/), the Groupe de recherches Cultures sensibles at the University of Liège (web.philo.ulg.ac.be/culturessensibles/), and the team that has formed around the Chair of Medieval English Studies held by Annette Kern-Stähler at the University of Bern (www.ens.unibe.ch/about_us/staff/prof_dr_kern_staehler_annette/index_eng.html). This past April, Kern-Stähler staged a conference called “The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives” at Monte Veritá in Switzerland, which brought medieval constructions of the sensorium into conversation with modern perceptual psychology, neuroscience, and analytic philosophy. For a review see Howes 2023b.
{5} The Sensory Studies website is accessible at www.sensorystudies.org/
{6} See the 2021-2022 CSS Annual Report ( centreforsensorystudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Annual-Report-2022-CSS.pdf) at p. 19.
{7} See the Sensory Studies Research Directory (www.sensorystudies.org/research-directory/) with its 650+ members.
{8} The Senses and Society is a Routledge journal which publishes three times a year. See www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rfss20
{9} The fourth Uncommon Senses conference took place in May 2023 (see centreforsensorystudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/UCS-IV-Book-of-Abstracts.pdf)
and Uncommon Senses V is scheduled for May 2025, both in-person and on-line.
{11} The Sensory Studies website (2006) can be accessed at www.sensorystudies.org/ and Explorations in Sensory Design (2023) is at www.sensorydesign.ca/ .
{12} The GIEM homepage is at giemmardelplata.org/institucional/
{13} It is of historical interest to note that the GIEM trajectory (from sound to sense – all of the senses) parallels that of the International Ambiances Network (www.ambiances.net/?lang=en) launched in 2008. The latter evolved out of the Centre de Recherche sur l’Espace Sonore et l’environnement urbain or CRESSON (aau.archi.fr/cresson/) at the University of Grenoble, which was founded in 1979.
{14} See giemmardelplata.org/historia-de-los-sentidos-proyectos-del-giem/rides/
{15} See giemmardelplata.org/historia-de-los-sentidos-proyectos-del-giem/sensonario/
{16} See giemmardelplata.org/en/archivos/librosyactas/
{17} See giemmardelplata.org/cuadernos-medievales/
{18} See giemmardelplata.org/historia-y-videojuegos/
{19} This issue has been explored in Sensorial Investigations (Howes 2023a) but remains an open question. There are lots of other mysteries that Ortúzar Escudero’s chapter brings to our attention, such as what is the connection between touch, skin and cognition? Or, whatever happened to the interior senses of medieval psychology (e.g. memory, imagination, the common sense, etc.)? Answer: these sensory faculties came to be reclassified as cognitive capacities.
20. See above, note 4.
Acknowledgments
I begin by acknowledging that my place of work, Concordia University, Montreal/Tiohtiá:ke, is located on the unceded traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka First Nation. I am deeply grateful to the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et culture for their financial support of my research, going on 35 years.
I am indebted to Jogada Verrips, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (now retired) for bringing Huizinga’s work to my attention.
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