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    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

    by Carolyn Purnell

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      ISBN-13: 9780393249361
    • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
    • Publication date: 02/07/2017
    • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
    • Format: eBook
    • Pages: 288
    • File size: 12 MB
    • Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

    Carolyn Purnell received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is a history instructor, an interior design writer, and a lover of bizarre facts. This is her first book.

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    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.

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    Publishers Weekly
    ★ 12/19/2016
    Purnell, visiting assistant professor of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology, thoroughly yet lightheartedly explores the sensory theories of Europe’s 18th-century intelligentsia and how these ideas influenced culture, lived experience, and scientific endeavors of the time. Purnell finds an emblematic juxtaposition of concern and cruelty in the ways in which Enlightenment philosophes analyzed the senses, noting such examples as the Marquis de Sade’s fascination with intense pain, the founding of the first schools for the blind, and the use of a “cat piano” to help relieve depression. She also delves into the ways the physical senses could lead to increased social differences, as with gastronomes advocating both a “love of food” and a “form of elitism.” The use of color in clothing and furnishings accentuated class distinction, and smells—as from perfumed soaps or their lack—could help reinforce social status. Purnell shows that many modern attitudes were formed during the Enlightenment, including theories of “physical perfectibility” and a much-theorized reliance on visual communication and metaphor. As Purnell enlightens readers on the origin of the word “restaurant” or the medical reasons to “blow smoke up one’s ass,” she reveals the many subtle ways we make sense of our world. (Feb.)
    Publisher’s Weekly
    [The Sensational Past] thoroughly yet lightheartedly explores the sensory theories of Europe’s 18th-century intelligentsia and how these ideas influence culture, lived experience, and scientific endeavors. . . . As Purnell enlightens readers on the origin of the word ‘restaurant’ or the medical reasons to ‘blow smoke up one’s ass,’ she reveals the many subtle ways we make sense of our world.”
    Booklist
    A fun, historical page-turner filled with one awesome vignette after another on the curious social behavior of the day, Purnell’s book will enchant its audience.
    Gary Kates
    No other history of the Enlightenment is quite like this one! Brilliant insights about the past are juxtaposed with wry comments about how we think today. By finding compelling human-interest stories involving real people, Purnell produces a book that is at once entertaining, erudite, and original.
    Peter S. Onuf
    Carolyn Purnell’s insightful survey of the ways Enlightenment thinkers made sense of their world offers exciting new perspectives on how we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch our own. As entertaining as it enlightening, The Sensational Past is a dazzling debut by a talented young historian.”
    From the Publisher
    Carolyn Purnell’s insightful survey of the ways Enlightenment thinkers made sense of their world offers exciting new perspectives on how we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch our own. As entertaining as it enlightening, The Sensational Past is a dazzling debut by a talented young historian.”
    Library Journal
    01/01/2017
    Historian Purnell aims to show how in the 18th and 19th centuries "people experienced their senses in daily life." Given their understanding of "sensibility," she writes, they "trusted that every decision, sensation, purchase, touch, sight, scent, taste, and experience had the power to transform the mind, body, and personality." This book ranges well beyond the Enlightenment. Its chapters span the "pitch-black markets" of nighttime Paris; Valentin Haüy's school for the blind; Benjamin Franklin's pill that, by changing the scent of the "great Quantity of Wind" that was "produced in the Bowels of human Creatures" might, says Purnell, "make flatulence the sweet-smelling life of the party"; Emanuel Swedenborg's theory about the sixth sense, sex; a 16th-century piano made with live cats; and, William Buckland's effort to eat "his way straight through the whole of animal creation" in Victorian Britain. VERDICT With its episodic approach and a propensity for synthesis, this book is largely intended for general readers. It is also a highly entertaining account that achieves the author's stated goal: "If you learn a little or laugh a little, then I consider my job to be done."—Mark Spencer, Brock Univ., St. Catharines, Ont.
    Kirkus Reviews
    ★ 2016-11-23
    In her first book, Purnell gets our nerve endings tingling with an exploration of the interplay of mind and body as seen through the lens of the Enlightenment.The author, a history instructor and "lover of bizarre facts," presents 10 episodic chapters plumbing the effects of 18th-century ideas and technologies on human culture. Of particular interest are her considerations of the philosophes, polyglots whose studies were not confined to formulating esoteric principles but rather practical applications, girded by the Enlightenment's belief in human perfectibility. For Purnell's purposes, the 18th century is defined as the period from 1690 to 1830, a time when societies were fascinated with every aspect of the senses, often ascribing to us more than the five basic ones recognized today. Purnell demonstrates how Enlightenment thinkers, building on new theories of the brain and nervous system, began with the premise that all we have of knowledge derives from the uses of our senses and then avidly pursued an understanding of their relationships to each other. The author presents the senses as a complex weave, and her book, a fine companion to Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses (1990), is by turns thoughtful, quirky, and richly—sometimes excessively—detailed. It can be surprisingly moving, as in the chapter chronicling the rise of philanthropic societies, which created a dramatic shift in the way the handicapped were viewed, reflecting the Enlightenment's impulse to engage all citizens in society. Purnell effectively scrutinizes modern perceptions of the Enlightenment as a time wholly dominated by reason and the scientific method. She also examines the dark side of the era's theories of physical perfectibility while reacquainting readers with Enlightenment thinkers both famous and forgotten. If not all of her arguments are convincing, they remain succinctly rendered: "The senses not only allowed access to pleasure, but they also lifted Nature's veil, allowing humans to understand the deeper patterns of the world." A lively and edifying narrative with lessons for today.

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