Scientists, historians and artificial intelligence experts are hoping to recreate the smells of old Europe, so we can gain a better insight into the past.
From the strong smell of cigars to religious scents, the €2.8 million ($3.3 million) project called Odeuropa, will seek to recreate old aromas from between the 16th and 20th centuries in order to gain a better understanding of how the meanings and uses of different smells have changed over time.
The ambitious project, which is expected to last for three years, will begin in January.
Artificial intelligence will be used to screen historical texts in seven languages in order to pick up smells in books and on images.
Dr. William Tullett of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, who is a member of the Odeuropa team and the author of Smell in Eighteenth-Century England, told Newsweek that the purpose of the project was to change the way in which people interact with museums and heritage.
He said: "The purpose and intent behind it is to try and change the way in which people engage with heritage. At the moment, museums are fairly visual places we don't really associate smell with the experience of history and the past so we're hoping this will give people a completely new way of experiencing history.
"And also because smell is crucial to our everyday lives it's something central to our experience of the world, without it we really lose out because it's so important to our well-being and covid has illustrated that, because people who have smell loss have been unable to smell the world around them and realized what they're missing."
Dr. Tullett also said that the project hoped to understand smells within their context.
"The smell of tobacco in the 16th century was a smell that's supposed to be very exotic, it's new, it's fascinating to people," he said. "Yet by the 17th century it's completely normalized, people have got used to it so it's part of the smells of everyday sociability, it's common in alehouses but then once we got into the 19th and 20th-century people begun to have qualms about the use of tobacco in public spaces and that's resulted in public health campaigns to prevent tobacco smoking."
The project is based on machine learning and also aims to better understand the relationship between smells and the objects as well as the places they are associated with.
"We've got massive databases of historical images and massive databases of historical texts and we're taking those databases that already exist," he said. "We're using machine learning to try and identify the most common smells that seem to come from these images and documents and trying to use that machine learning to learn where those smells most frequently crop up, what kinds of places are they associated with, what kinds of people are they associated with and also what kind of objects they're associated with.
"All of that information will be really useful in trying to put together the products of this research, which is for example a historical encyclopedia of scent which will go online by the end of the project which will be the first website of its kind."
‘Living Mady Easy: Revolving hat’, a satirical print with a hat supporting a spy glass, an ear trumpet, a ciggar, a pair of glasses, and a scent box, 1830, London
A sunny afternoon in Paris. An intrepid TV presenter is making his way through the streets asking passersby to smell a bottle he has in his hand. When they smell it they react with disgust. One woman even spits on the floor as a marker of her distaste. What is in the bottle? It holds, we are told, the “pong de paris”, a composition designed to smell like an 18th-century Parisian street.
The interpretation of past scents that we are given on the television, perhaps influenced by Patrick Süskind’s pungent novel Perfume, is frequently dominated by offence.
It’s a view found not just on TV but in museums. In England, York’s Jorvik Viking Centre, Hampton Court Palace, and the Museum of Oxfordshire have all integrated smells into their exhibits.
The one smell that unites these attempts at re-odorising the past: toilets. Viking toilets, a Georgian water closet, and the highly urinous and faecal smell of a Victorian street, all included in the above examples, thread the needle of disgust from the medieval to the modern.
The consequence of such depictions is to portray the past as an odorous prelude, with foul-smelling trades and poor sanitation, to the clean and pleasant land of modernity.
Suggesting that people who are not “us” stink has a long history. It is applied to our forebears just as often as is to other countries, peoples, or cultures. It is not accident that, “Filthy Cities” – an English television program, highlighted the stink of 18th-century France – even in the 18th century the English had associated the French, their absolutist Catholic enemies, with the stink of garlic.
The toilet-training narrative is a simple and seductive story about “our” conquest of stench. But the “pong de paris” misses the point. Too busy turning the past into a circus of disgust for modern noses, it fails to ask how it smelt to those who lived there. New historical work reveals a more complex story about past scents.
A careful examination of the records of urban government, sanitation, and medicine reveal that 18th-century English city-dwellers were not particularly bothered by unsanitary scents. This was partly because people adapted to the smells around them quickly, to the extent that they failed to notice their presence.
But, thanks to 18th-century scientific studies of air and gases, many Georgians also recognised that bad smells were not as dangerous as had previously been thought. In his home laboratory, the polymath Joseph Priestley experimented on mice, while others used scientific instruments to measure the purity of the air on streets and in bedrooms. The conclusion was simple: smell was not a reliable indicator of danger.
Scientist and social reformer Edwin Chadwick famously claimed in 1846 that “all smell… is disease”. But smell had a much more complex place in miasma theory – the idea that diseases were caused by poisonous airs – than has often been assumed. In fact, by the time cholera began to work its morbid magic in the 1830s, a larger number of medical writers held that smell was not a carrier of sickness-inducing atmospheres.
Smells tend to end up in the archive, recorded in the sources historians use, for one of two reasons: either they are unusual (normally offensive) or people decide to pay special attention to them. One scent that appeared in the diaries, letters, magazines, and literature of 18th-century England, however, was tobacco smoke. The 18 century saw the rise of new anxieties about personal space. A preoccupation with politeness in public places would prove a problem for pipe smokers.
Tobacco had become popular in England during the 17th century. But, by the mid-18th century, qualms began to be raised. Women were said to abhor the smell of tobacco smoke. A satirical poem told the story of a wife who had banned her husband from smoking, only to allow its resumption – she realised that going cold turkey had made him impotent.
New sociable venues proliferated in towns and cities, with the growth of provincial theatres, assembly rooms, and pleasure gardens. In these sociable spaces, a correspondent to The Monthly Magazine noted in 1798, “smoaking [sic] was a vulgar, beastly, unfashionable, vile thing” and “would not be suffered in any genteel part of the world”. Tobacco smoking was left to alehouses, smoking clubs and private masculine spaces.
Clouds of smoke invaded people’s personal space, subjecting them to atmospheres that were not of their own choosing. Instead, fashionable 18th-century nicotine addicts turned to snuff. Despite the grunting, hawking and spitting it encouraged, snuff could be consumed without enveloping those around you in a cloud of sour smoke.
The 18th century gave birth to modern debates about smoking and public space that are still with us today. The fact that the smell of tobacco smoke stains the archives of the period, metaphorically of course, is a testament to the new ideas of personal space that were developing within it.
