Research Catalog

Title

Scent : the mysterious and essential powers of smell / Annick Le Guérer ; translated from the French by Richard Miller.

Author

Le Guérer, Annick

Publication

New York : Turtle Bay Books, a division of Random House, 1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Miller, Richard, 1931-2010

Description

ix, 260 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• "All my genius resides in my nostrils," claimed Friedrich Nietzsche. Now comes a splendid new voice to bear him out - Annick Le Guerer. In this enchanting, erudite, and highly readable exploration of all things olfactory, she investigates the uses and properties of scent through the ages in relation to magic, myth, religion, sex, discrimination, philosophy, and medicine. From the perfumed rituals of ancient religions to the saintly "odor of sanctity"; from the aromatic.
• Cures of the Middle Ages to the black market for spiceladen mummies; from Proust's tea-dipped madeleine to our contemporary "odorphobia," Le Guerer explains and documents the mysterious and essential powers of smell: to attract or repel; call up deep memory; induce lust, love, hunger, even trance. Recalling by turns Patrick Suskind's Perfume and Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses, Scent is an enchanting melange of storytelling and scholarship, a sensual.
• Journey across boundaries of time and culture that touches on universal myths and intimate desires.

Uniform Title

Pouvoirs de l'odeur. English

Alternative Title

Pouvoirs de l'odeur.

Subject

• Odors > History
• Odors > Social aspects
• Smell > History
• Odors
• Smell
• Odorants
• Smell
• Social Conditions > history
• odors
• smell (sense)

Genre/Form

History.

Note

• Translation of: Les pouvoirs de l'odeur.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-247) and index.

Contents

pt. 1. From Perfumed Panther to German Bromidrosis: The Powers of Smell to Repel and Attract. 1. Smell and Capture. Odor, Magic, Possession, and Protection. Odor and Seduction. Smell, Hunting, and Fishing. The Myth of the Perfumed Panther. 2. Smell and Discrimination. Smell and Recognition of the Other. Smell and Rejection of the Other -- pt. 2. The Stench of Pestilence. 1. The Deadly Powers of Smell. The Origins of Plague. Hotbeds of Infection. A Stench from Hell. 2. The Curative Powers of Smell. The Hippocratic Fires and Theriac (Venice Treacle). The Spice Age. Disinfecting by Cannon Fire. The Disappearance of Mummy. Concern Among the Scent Experts -- pt. 3. Blood and Incense: A Search for the Source of Perfume's Power. 1. Blood, Incense, and the Sacred. Ritual Practices. The Odor of Sanctity. 2. Life Principles: Blood and Incense. Blood, Symbol of Life. The Similarity between Sap and Blood. The Blood/Scent Cycle -- pt. 4. The Philosophical Nose. 1. The Ambivalent Status of the Sense of Smell and Odors in Greco-Latin Philosophy. 2. The Influence of Christianity in the Devaluation of the Sense of Smell and Odors. 3. Montaigne and Odors. 4. The Alliance of Rationalism and Christian Thought in Depreciating the Sense of Smell and Odors in the Seventeenth Century. 5. Rehabilitation of the Sense of Smell in the Age of Enlightenment. 6. Kant and Hegel: An Antisocial and Unaesthetic Sense. 7. Two Philosophers With "Nose": Feuerbach and Nietzsche. 8. Freud and Marcuse: The "Organic Sublimation" and "Surrepression of the Sense of Smell. 9. From Philosophy to Poetry: Fourier, Bachelard, and Proust.

ISBN

• 0394585267
• 9780394585260

LCCN

91051049

OCLC

• ocm25634430
• 25634430
• SCSB-1968424

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library