Given how much of human experience involves touch and feel, it’s odd that those senses have been overlooked by most historians. As Constance Classen writes in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, published last month by the University of Illinois Press, touch “remains unspoken and, even more so, unhistoricized.”
Her book, the second in the press’s Studies in Sensory History series, explores how touch has shaped life and events from the Middle Ages through modernity. In the past 20 years, sensory history has increasingly established itself, she writes, marking a shift away from a view, strongest in the 19th century, that denigrated touch as a primitive, irrational “lower sense,” a “crude and uncivilized mode of perception.”
That way of construing history ignores the “social and religious centrality” of touch in the Middle Ages, argues Classen, an independent scholar based in Montreal.
Consider the phenomenon of “tactile” cosmology, which held that “the primordial qualities of the universe” were forces of hot, cold, moist, and dry; those are tactile phenomena, rather than, say, visual or olfactory. For medieval cosmologists, the scientists of their day, Classen writes, touch was “the only sense open to the fundamental nature of reality.”
Another key to the importance of touch, she says, was the medieval notion that sacred immanences from God functioned like heat: when touched, the sacred warmed and blessed the believer. Cataclysmic events, however, could confuse this theology. When pandemics struck, Europeans shifted quickly from desiring sacred touch to fearing the heat of fever and scourging eruptions of the body that accompanied the seemingly inescapable plague.
Classen is a veteran at telling sensory histories, with a deft touch. Her previous books include Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (Routledge, 1993) and Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994, with David Howes and Anthony Synnott). She is general editor of the Berg Cultural History of the Senses series, whose six volumes, prepared by some 60 scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, are scheduled to appear in 2014.
A major appeal of Classen’s new book is her account of the Industrial Revolution. Workers became cogs, less masters of the machinery than its servants. But before that could happen, Classen suggests, expectations of the human body had to change. In the late 16th century, for example, the military “drill” emerged to mold fighting bodies by breaking down and reshaping the way the soldiers responded to their commanders. This practice seeped into prisons, schools, and much later even the Salvation Army, whose adherents drilled, too.
Drills regimented bodies, Classen says, and made way for a time when bodies were called on to serve the machines. Along the way, other institutions emerged to complement the shift toward industrialization. The department store, for example, was a place where shoppers could fondle and select mass-produced goods. But at more highbrow institutions, like museums, touching was increasingly frowned upon.
“For too long,” says Willis G. Regier, the University of Illinois Press’s director and acquiring editor of the Studies in Sensory History series, “history has been pretty much embedded in noetics—notions of ideas—or simple relations of power.” The sensory-history approach “makes history more experiential, and we believe the books are going to make that emphatic.”
He adds, “I would expect that we will find this particular slant on history to be more broadly adapted by every university press that’s paying attention.”
The first title in the series was Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age, by Greg Goodale, published last year. It explores the rhetorical role of sound in film, radio, and cartoons—the way sound has been used to convey anxiety about the pressures of modern life.
Mark M. Smith, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina who is the series’ general editor, is one of the most prominent figures in the study of sensory history. “I don’t think of sensory history as a field,” he says, “but as a habit of historical inquiry, one that transcends discrete fields of inquiry and discipline.”
He says that several more books are under contract or out for review. Unlike many series “that are tentative at first,” he says, “this has really taken hold.”
Smith himself is at work on a sensory history of the American Civil War. He aims not only to give the war texture but also to detail a “sort of decivilization process.” For example, his treatment of the Battle of Gettysburg focuses on smell: “Folks were walking into a very modern war, ... yet the principle signature of Gettysburg was the overwhelming, medieval stench of death on an unprecedented scale in the baking hot summer of July 1863.”
Scholars are finding that sensory details are more commonly found in historical documents than might be thought. Excavating such details, Smith says, “makes history more interesting—more voluptuous, if you will—but more accurate, too.”
He has written a history of the sensory approach, of its roots in mid-20th-century France in the work of the Annales School, whose members emphasized the social rather than political and diplomatic dimensions of history, and in cultural anthropology.
What’s needed now is more scholars with a sensory “frame of mind,” Smith says. “Writing the history of the senses isn’t, in fact, more difficult than writing non-sensory history. It’s just that we haven’t been looking for the evidence. And it’s not hard to find, even in seemingly dry official public documents.”
He welcomes manuscripts like Classen’s: “I want something that is transgressive and goes throughout time and space and brings things together—that is a bit audacious and daring.” Taking on such scope, he says, “you’re going to be wrong on lots of things, but you’re also going to be opening up conversations and not foreclosing them.”
