THE BLURB:
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.
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.
THE SCOOP: Wowzers! I picked this book up from a library display--unusual for me since I am usually blinded to all but my objectives there--brought it home, and stuck so many post-it notes in it that I had to purchase my own copy.
Her historical anecdotes are engaging, charming, and new to me (and my emphasis in graduate school was the eighteenth century!). Her argument is fascinating--that the Enlightenment prioritized seeing over the other senses and that we do, too.
THE VERDICT: Writer friends. If you're even THINKING about a book set in the 1700s or 1800s, you need this book! I love how she explores the differences in the way people in the past experienced and processed the world. Real differences, beyond no indoor plumbing and fancy manners, but differences in how they viewed museum exhibits (you need to see, touch, and probably taste them) and rotten meat (mask it with spices).
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