invaded the nose of the passerby. Although such critiques built on a
belief that perfumery connoted e eminacy, the more pressing point
at issue was the amount of perfume that fops and macaronis wore. It
was not necessarily the wearing of perfume, but the sheer strength of
scent that was problematic.
ANOTHER CRITICISM directed at the most pungent perfum-
ery of the early modern period was that it tended to signify
to the nose of the observer the very thing it attempted to
conceal. To wear perfume was to suggest you had something
to hide. Such criticisms are significant because they question a histo-
riographical commonplace. According to some historians, including
Alain Corbin and Constance Classen, a shift in attitudes to smell oc-
curred in the late 18th and 19th centuries. They suggest that changes
in environmental science, public health and manners combined to
produce a bourgeois quest for an odourless modernity. One of the things
that supposedly exemplified this new departure was a critique of the
masking potential of perfumery.
In the 18th century, mockery was heaped on the
wives of merchants who attempted to cover up the
odour of filthy lucre – tobacco, train oil and tar –
with the scent of lavender, amber or rose. However,
earlier, in a theatrical allegory of the senses first
performed between 1602-7, Thomas Tomkis has
one character suggest to ‘Olfactus’ that:
Of all the senses, your objects have the worst luck,
they are always jarring with their contraries, for
none can wear civet, but they are suspected of a
proper bad scent.
More significant was the conclusion drawn from
the observation: ‘He smelleth best, that doth of
nothing smell.’ This early 17th-century observa-
tion paraphrased the Roman writers Plautus (‘Awoman’s best smell is to smell of nothing’) and Martial (‘He smells not
well, whose smell is all perfume’). The Renaissance essayist Michel de
Montaigne had quoted the same authorities in his discussion of odours
and their e ects on his lively spirits. Criticisms of perfumed masking
could therefore be found long before the supposed ‘perceptual revolu-
tion’ of the late 18th century.
In his Treatise on the Diseases of Tradesmen, published in Latin in 1700
and translated into English in 1705, the Italian physician Bernadino
Ramazzini noted that while ‘a great many things have been said of
smells ... a particular and exact history of them is yet wanting’. While
Ramazzini believed strongly that this ‘large Field of History’ would
benefit from further plowing, he admitted he was not the man to do
it: both the pleasantness and intricacy of the subject required more
time and pain than he could a ord. The history of perfume suggests the
potential for historians to discover a more pleasant and intricate history
of scent, more in keeping with that which Ramazzini had described.
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