Noisomeness
Keith Thomas: Smells of Hell, 16 July 2020
Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times
by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford.
Polity, 216 pp., £17.99, May,978 1 5095 3677 1 Show More
by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford.
Polity, 216 pp., £17.99, May,
The Clean Body: A Modern History
by Peter Ward.
McGill-Queen’s, 313 pp., £27.99, December 2019,978 0 7735 5938 7 Show More
by Peter Ward.
McGill-Queen’s, 313 pp., £27.99, December 2019,
“... doe give most odorous smell,/but her sweet odour did them all excel.’None of this appears in Robert Muchembled’s Smells, whose lively account is much indebted to his compatriot Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant (published in an English translation in 1986) and is almost entirely confined to the history of odours in France. He makes no ... ”