Scented candles… claim to smell of old library or the works of William Shakespeare…
Heritage smells
Even those who have never ploughed through Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past will know that the French author’s multi-volume reminiscences were sparked by the taste and smell of madeleine cake crumbs combined with lime-flower tea. Proust wrote that, when consuming these, ‘an exquisite pleasure invaded my senses… this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence… I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?’. He then describes the memories evoked by the madeleine crumbs as being like the Japanese paper pellets that unfurl to form beautiful flowers when dropped in water.
Proust should surely be the patron of the several projects that are under way to give smells a greater prominence in our understanding of the past. Inger Leemans, Professor of Cultural History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, argues that we have neglected the role of smell as a cultural phenomenon. She leads the Odeuropa ‘olfactory heritage’ project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe science programme, which has created an online encyclopaedia (https://odeuropa.eu) that uses ‘smell experiences’ as an entry point.
